Last week a Sherri and I attended our first Cecilia's Samplers Retreat in Branson, MO. It was great! The theme was a Fall Fiesta. We drove up a day early because Branson is like 12 hours away from us and detoured big time through Nashville, TN and visited The Stitchin' Post Nashville. I didn't get any pictures, but it was a very good store. Then onward to Cecilia's Samplers. Below is the outside of the store, very unassuming for what's inside, which is just a stitcher's heaven!
Outside of Cecilia's
This is one shows a side wall of the Weeks and Crescent Color threads and looks towards the front of the store where you have fabric and lots of lovely accessories.
Ignore me! Look at the glorious wall of threads, this is the other wall of threads, this one Gentle Art and Carrie's Creation and Kreinik. I was picking out thread for one of the million projects I have! LOL
A little peek at their Halloween section, they have lots of wonderful models all around the store.
Here is Sherri perusing the fabric. They have a wonderful fabric selection and will cut fabric to your specifications, not just in the standard cuts, Even better, they will serge the fabric for you. The fabric section is a little tight when lot's of ladies are trying to get in there and choose fabric ;-)
Here is Sherri again making yet another purchase, we are so bad! You see a little more of the store.
This picture is looking down again from the fabric section. All in all, a great store. It was definitely a family affair for the owners and they were all so nice. The retreat check in started on Thursday afternoon at 2:30 pm and the conference/stitching room was open until 11 pm every night and open again at 8 am. The first night we had pizza, drinks and dessert provided by Cecilia's, the pizza was fabulous! When I go again, I will be saving myself for that-LOL All retreat activities were done between 6-8 pm every night, which left you free to stitch, shop at the store, see a show (lots of those there) or eat. We received gift cards for our meals and the breakfast was at the hotel if you were interested or you could eat where you wanted! The great thing the store did was do a raffle to raise money for The Wounded Warriors, the raffle was for a 250 dollar gift card to the store. I am sad to say, I didn't win. The store matched the donations from their two retreats and all in all raised over 2,000 dollars for The Wounded Warriors. On top of that, we received gifts and everyone won a door prize of which some had some gift certificates added for the store.
Now for one of the best parts of retreat, and that was meeting Chelle from Totally Toadlily. Chelle and I first connected when I started blogging in 2006 or 2007. I never expected to meet her, we had always spoken via email and the we found each other on Facebook. Here we are below. Chelle, it was great to meet you and I hope we will get to see each other again! I also made some new stitching friends well. It was a great trip!
