Field trip to Picture This Plus!

Remember field trip day at school? The anticipation, carpooling or riding the bus, visiting something fun, and getting out of school!

Earlier this week we took a mini field trip to nearby Abilene, Kansas - the home of Picture This Plus and beautiful, hand-dyed fabrics. They are partnering with us on our Things Unseen Mystery Sampler project, and dyeing hundred of yards of beautiful fabric for you.

***A quick side note: I meant to get this post up earlier, but I had a little computer virus that prevented me from seeing my own blog - believe it! I was clueless about what was going on, but finally got it resolved with my computer guru, and I'm back in the blog groove. SO frustrating!

PTP operates out of the basement of a beautiful old building in downtown Abilene. You can see a cool pic of the building in early days over the stairway. Abilene is a smallish town with a rich history as a rowdy Kansas cowtown. It's also the birthplace of President Eisenhower, and his Presidential Museum is there.

In the basement at PTP a hard-working group of ladies craft some really beautiful hand-dyed fabrics. Check out those giant rolls of linen behind the drying racks. We're talking hundreds/thousands of yards of fabric waiting to be transformed.

Here's a rainbow of some beautiful PTP fabric to feed your fabric envy.

The colorful, overdyed magic begins in the cozy little dye room in the corner. 

Yes, an old-fashioned sink and a nearby washer and dryer are involved in the process!

Above are piles of fabric waiting their turn in the dye room, and their transformation into Wren linen and Aida - our chosen fabrics for the Things Unseen Mystery Sampler. PTP is dyeing 2 counts of linen, as well as 2 counts of Aida for this project - something for everyone.

After it's dyed, washed and dried, the fabric will be cut into pre-cut pieces, just the right size for our mystery sampler. Every piece of fabric is ironed (yes!!!), serged (below)...

...folded, labeled and packaged for our customers. 

Now we have giant boxes - one for each fabric type and size - in our office and we're busy packing Things Unseen Mystery Sampler orders. 

This is our big weekend...the culmination of many months of work, lots of blog posts, newsletters and sneak peeks, and pre-orders from needlework shops...before we ship Part 1 to shops on Monday, Nov. 3. It seems pretty fitting that we're buried in a mystery project on Halloween!

Happy Mystery Weekend!