The Amherst Museum Quilt Guild

Travel is both the upside, and downside of my job. While I'm a homebody at heart, it's such a pleasure to visit new places. Since moving into our old house I've become a little bit of a history buff. (With a background in the sciences you can trust me when I say I have a lot of history yet to learn.)

Last week I had the honor of teaching for the Amherst Museum guild, for their annual seminar. It was a terrific experience, and I do hope they invite me back in a couple of years. The organizers were a terrific group of ladies, and they treated us totally top drawer.

Minutes after picking me up at the airport, my host, Mary Ellen, took me straight to Charlie the Butcher's for a Buffalo institution: the beef on weck. OMG! It was the best roast beef sandwich I've ever had. The beef was moist and tender. The roll, called kimmelweck (weck for short), is sort of like a Kaiser roll sprinkled with pretzel salt and caraway seeds. I wasn't quite as liberal with the horseradish as my native hosts, but it added just the right kick.

After a short rest in my hotel room we headed out to see the sites. It was extra fun because the other national teacher at the seminar was Anita Grossman-Solomon, who lived in the Buffalo area as a child. What a delight to see the city through her eyes.

We were headed towards the falls. I haven't been to Niagra Falls since I was a kid, and honestly didn't remember much about them, other than being cold and wet. It was an incredible thing to stand near the falls, to see the beautiful, powerful water roaring to the river bed far below. I realized in the grand scheme of things, my little lifetime is just a blip on Mother Nature's radar. These falls have been here for eons, and will continue to be here for eons more. Water to fill these falls will continue to cycle through the ecosystem, just as it always has.

Given the chance these mighty falls will wear away everything in its path. Though we may build bridges to cross and boats to explore, without constant vigilance nature will reclaim its own. I caught just the tail end of a rainbow over the American Falls.

And this was just the first afternoon in upstate New York!

The students were all wonderful! We had such a good time, didn't we ladies? This is my favorite class to teach, Hand Applique by Machine, using the Simply Roses quilt for our project.

Our hosts continued to feed us very well the rest of the week. We had a fantastic caterer for the lunches. I was worried that I'd lose a lot of ground on my diet, but somehow I still managed to lose weight. I'm thinking I need to stay on the Buffalo diet for a while longer. Thanks, ladies!