To Bassett and back

It's no secret that on most days I will always prefer to stay home and work on one of my many projects.But when I do travel I try to get the most out of it. This trip was a short 3-day one but Mom and I drove over 700 miles and checked a lot of boxes.

This is the brother that took the Cathedral Window quilt and I discovered that he and Karen have made parts of the house into displays of handmade things, mostly from me and Mom. These cross stitch pieces were in my bedroom and I had completely forgotten about them. Based on the dates I made one my senior year in college, one the year after then I dumped the other 2 kits on my Mom and she finished them in 1985 and 1986. They hung in the foyer of her house for years. I didn't even know that Tim had them but I'm glad someone does and likes them well enough to hang.

We arrived Sunday and almost immediately left for a small reunion with some people I grew up with. Bassett wasn't the best place in the world to grow up from the perspective of opportunity and exposure to the outside world, but our little neighborhood of 6 houses was ideal. There were 10 kids in 3 families and we all grew up together. I lived there from age 3 to 17. Five of us plus our surviving parents got together for the first time in about 40 years. Most of us are now grandparents! It was really wonderful to connect again.

This is the Google Maps photo of the house that I grew up in. It looks much worse now and and it's the best house in the neighborhood! It's sad to see that our happy little neighborhood is now virtually a slum. I don't remember it being so tiny and have no idea how 6 people lived here without killing each other.

The real purpose of our trip was to go to Replacements to sell some china. I'm in one of my purging modes again and decided to move out some china that we haven't used in 20 years. If you'e never heard of Replacements you should check it out. It's a fascinating business and it is HUGE. The warehouse is at least as big as 2 football fields. They carry every china pattern ever made.

While in North Carolina I couldn't resist a trip to Warm Glass in Clemmons and I also couldn't resist buying some special pieces of glass!  This is one of them. I don't order these over the web because you can never be sure what your piece will look like. At the shop I could pick the section that I wanted. Great customer service there too!

We ended Monday with a visit to Mom's sister and Sunday we drove to Roanoke to visit my uncle (Dad's brother) and had a wonderful meet up with one of my blog friends, Kristen Farwig. I've said this before but you really can get to know people on the internet. Kristen and I have corresponded for a long time and I knew we would get along and we did! Now I have 2 people to visit in Roanoke which makes it more likely that I'll visit again.

After a trip back to Martinsville to retrieve Mom's Iphone, we headed home. That was a lot of driving for me for 3 days and I'm pretty exhausted for anything except laundry today.

If you have made it this far I feel like you deserve more photos so I want to share my brother's basement to prove that we are related. Like me, he has the entire basement of his house for his hobbies but his is much neater. Here he exhibits the fruits of one of his hobbies.....axes and hatchets. 
I am not kidding.
He like buying old axe blades and refitting them with new handles. Take a look. There are no duplicates in these photos!

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I love the added touch of the arrows on the deer antlers. Clearly we embrace and hone our persnickety gene in this family. There's a pretty big freaky factor to this room but I felt strangely at home.