Our Colorado adventure – Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum

The morning after the Grand Junction workshop we hit the road again, this time heading for Golden, Colorado and the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum.

It was an enjoyable stop. I admit I was a bit surprised by its small size. I had previously been to the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky so I must have imagined it would be similar. Instead, the Rocky Mountain Quilt Museum is in a small store front space. I don’t know why, but I also associate “museum” with “antique,” which certainly isn’t always the case.

The current exhibit was “Stars! A Study of 19th Century Star Quilts” by the American Quilt Study Group. The quilters who wanted to participate each chose an existing antique quilt. They studied it, and then made a quilt copied from or inspired by that quilt. It was interesting to look at the original photo and search for similarities in the new quilt. Some were obvious, while others were very interpretive. For instance, the quilt above, “Louise’s Stars” by Nancy Ostman, was based on the antique quilt on the left, which was made around 1840 to 1857. You can see how she updated the traditional central medallion composition with a more contemporary asymmetrical layout.

At the same time there was a small exhibit of star-related art quilts called “Out of This World: Contemporary Star Quilts.” This quilt, “Galactic Tango,” by Gail Garber caught my eye.

One block away from the museum was Golden Quilt Company, a nice little quilt fabric store with a 20% off sale. That’s when sweet hubby decided he needed some fat quarters so he could make his own fused portrait quilt. He’s been in my class enough times, so he knows the process. I look forward to seeing what he makes!

After our time in Golden and Denver, it was time to head north for Fort Collins. We settled into our hotel for the night and were just falling asleep and we were startled awake by a loud “Bang, bang, bang!,” followed by pounding feet. DH heard someone calling, “Help me!,” so he threw on some clothes and headed out into the hallway. He saw a shoe and a cell phone on the floor. He continued downstairs to the front desk to find out what was happening. The man who was in the room next to us was sitting there, beaten up and bleeding. After quite a bit of confusion, we ended up finding out that he wasn’t exactly an innocent victim. In fact, he fled when the police were called.

We went back to sleep and were woken about an hour later with a call saying they were evacuating the entire floor of the hotel. The swat team came and about 40 officers secured the entire hotel while all of the guests had to stay in a conference room. There were questions and rumors of a possible hostage situation. For a while, they were talking about transporting us to another hotel, but we wouldn’t be able to get anything out of our room first and they had no idea when we would be allowed to. I wasn’t thrilled about that possibility since everything for my morning workshop was in our room!

Thankfully, once the police had finally investigated all possible scenarios and we were allowed to return to our rooms at about 1:30 AM. Five hours of sleep after all that excitement should be enough, right?