Suzanne McNeil's yearly visit and Zentangling on gourds

Suzanne comes to California every year for the Craft and Hobby (CHA) trade show. We had participated at these shows for years (maybe 20). We met her at one of them several years ago and have been friends ever since. She has a book publishing business (Design Originals) much like ours used to be. She's still going strong while we've gone off in other directions. We don't have to do trade shows anymore which is both good and bad. We don't miss all the hard work but we do miss seeing all our old friends and customers.
The first day Suzanne was here she went to the Welburn Gourd Farm, one of her favorite places. She bought a lot of gourds. She gave one each to Nancy and I and showed us how to Zentangle them. First we painted them with acrylic paint ( you can also use gesso). Then we tangled with a Micron pen. The ink goes on perfectly. Suzanne and I got most of ours done, but Nancy isn't as addicted to Zentangling as we are and didn't get very far.

Suzanne catches us up on all the news and gossip from the CHA show and we always do a little sightseeing with her while she's here. This year we stayed close to Fallbrook and went to the Pala Indian Reservation. There's not much there except a big casino (which we didn't go to) and a small mission with a museum and gift shop. When we got to the mission it was closed even though I had called ahead to make sure it was open.

There's an interesting mission cemetery with both ancient and new graves. 

It wasn't a very pretty or well-kept cemetery but the graves seemed very well-loved and well-visited.

The next day we went to the wonderful quilt show at the Oceanside Art Museum (Quilt Visions).

 Just one of the beautiful quilts.

Then we went into one of the other galleries in the museum ( Imogene Cunningham's photographs) and while taking pictures we noticed our own "shadow pictures". So we had fun making shadows to post on "Shadow Shot Sunday" .

 After that we went to the farmers market that they have every Thursday right outside the museum.

 The library, which is in the same block as the museum, was having a book sale so we ended the fun day by buying more books to fill both of our overstocked home libraries.

We had a great time and hated to see Suzanne go.