Campbell House-St. Louis, MO

As promised, here are the pictures I took of the inside of the Campbell House in St. Louis. I was fascinated with the story behind this house. The people that lived in this house, had thirteen children. They were very wealthy and had running water in their house. The water came from the river(is it the Missouri ?) and as a result, 10 of their 13 children died from either lead poisoning from the pipes or from the river. At the time, none of this would have been know...so they never really knew why their children were dyeing. The three remaining boys lived in the house after the death of their parents and NEVER changed anything. They loved their mother so much that they didn't want anything changed. This house is one of the few houses that has all of it's original furniture. One of the boys died 2 years after his parents and of the remaining 2, one of them had a bipolar disorder of some kind. Apparently they now know that it was due to the lead in the water that their mother drank while pregnant. Of course, he lived the longest and the house was willed to I think Harvard when he died. There was a lawsuit, because people in St. Louis wanted to preserve this house and when the furniture was auctioned off they all came...bought the furniture and put it back in the house. The house is restored to perfection! The museum has a website if you google it and want to read more about.

See you later,

Val

Victorian Fancyworks Sampler Update

Many of you know that last year when Miss Carole came to Wichita to teach, she designed a brand new sampler just for us. If you look at one of my older posts, you will see the earlier stages of my sampler. It is now about 90 per cent done and I am for the most part happy with it. It is certainly not without errors but that's okay...very hard for a perfectionist like me to say! I don't know...I might redo the snowflakes, they are much bigger than Miss Carole designed them to be..I just don't know what happened there.

Now to explain many of the reasons that I have not posted for awhile. Early August I went to St. Louis on vacation. I will post later some pictures of a FANTASTIC Victorian house I went through. It always seems that crazy quilters also like to visit Victorian houses. They allowed pictures, so I will post at a later time.

Now for something that was more exciting than my vacation, was an unexpected trip to Colorado this last weekend. Okay, for one thing, it was more exciting than vacation because being the mother of 4 boys the trip was essentially a BOY TRIP and I had one little meltdown about it and that is why I insisted on the above mentioned Victorian House. This last weekend I found out that Christine Dabbs was teaching in Loveland Colorado and I was not going to go but with the generous urging of two of my friends and a very generous offer of one friend to babysit, off I went. It was absolutely wonderful and I felt that God guided me through the whole trip and I knew that he wanted me there. Here is a picture of her holding one of her UFO's, she says will never be finished. Her work is fantastic, awesome...whatelse can I say.

Okay, now for the unexpected bonus of the trip. The entire Hoffman Challenge entries were displayed and as I turned a corner...there was Betty Pillsbury's Peacock Wallhanging right there is front of me! So only did I get to see all of Christine's Dabbs many crazy quilts.. there is Betty's Wallhanging. It was wonderful. The reason I got so much done on my fancywork sampler is because I had alot of downtime and NO CHILDREN. I missed them but boy did I get alot done.

Well that's all for now,

Val