Visiting The Golden Gese Quilt Shop

One of the best kept secrets in Concord is The Golden Gese Quilt Shop owned by Nancy Gesen (hence the unusual spelling in the shop's name). The quaint little building on 22 Liberty Street is kinda near the Concord High School and has quite a history of it's own. It was originally the stables of the Concord Fire Department. Later, it was bought by a family who ran an abattoire (slaughterhouse) and butcher shop. Now it is clean and modernized but it retains that country charm of well-worn and much treasured older buildings.

On November 5th, I enjoyed myself at The Golden Gese's sponsored workshop put on by one of their employees named Charlene. It was Bonnie's Patches & Pinwheels that you have been reading about as I have posted on making the 16-patches and pinwheel blocks. I like to do the final layout of completed blocks on the nice clean asphalt of my own driveway, but today was just a tad too breezy for that!

It being that Charlene works on Mondays, I called the shop (603 228-5540) and was immediately encouraged to come right over to do my layout on the big table in the workroom at no additional charge.

Laying out a quilt, even on a table rather than the ground, is still a lot of physical effort. By the time that I got this big beauty arranged, I had broken into a full sweat and needed a shower! LOL!

The gal in the photo was from the upstairs sit and sew group who came down to see the layout and was admiring it.
Charlene was very helpful, making certain that nothing was turned the wrong way. After it was laid out and photographed, I took little slips of paper, numbered from 1 through 15, and pinned them to the first leftmost block all the way down the columns. So there were 15 columns down.
Next, I picked up all of Row 1, taking great care to always place the first block on top of the next one as I went all the way across the 13 blocks of that particular row. When that row was done, I set it aside and continued working on picking up the next Row until I had them all picked up into stacks that were labeled with the slip of paper right on top. I put Row 15 into the bottom of my green deep basket and placed 14 on top of it next, and so forth. I think it took me about half an hour to place all the blocks on the table, and then another half an hour to carefully pick them all up.
Soon, I had a quilt-in-a-basket!