Wisconsin weekend

As I said yesterday, we went to Wisconsin for the weekend. Really just one night, but it’s amazing how rejuvenating even a 24-hour mini-trip can be. Little local weekend adventures are some of my favorite things to do.

We went up with two of our friends to the Milwaukee Public Museum to see their Mummies of the World exhibit.

I knit in the car on the way up. In the picture below I’m wearing a vintage yellow acrylic cardigan and peter pan collar blouse, both of which are relatively recent Etsy purchases. The sunglasses are prescription, a deadstock Italian pair of frames from the 1960s that had one temple really stuck when I took the plunge and bought them anyway. I brought them to my optician, who specializes in dealing with vintage eyewear, hoping he could work a little magic. He wasn’t sure if he could fix the one temple but he did, so I was ecstatic when he showed me he could now easily open and close both temples successfully. He said he used to have a sign that read “Optician / Magician”. And how.

In the car, I started Miss Laverty’s Motoring Hood from Vintage Gifts to Knit, which is a completely adorable hooded scarf. My love of prints extends to plaid coats, and the coat I’m wearing in the first picture is my heaviest Pendleton (which sadly is still not warm enough for most winter days… I made an exception for this trip). I love it dearly but don’t seem to have an appropriate scarf or mitten set to wear with it, so I’m working on that. You can buy the individual pattern here.

It was a really amazing exhibit. It did a good job of presenting a lot of artifacts (mummies and other items from all over the world except North America, I noted) without an overwhelming amount of reading, while still providing enough detail to really capture your interest. I just love museums but sometimes it can get a bit overwhelming when there’s paragraph after paragraph on all the walls in an exhibit. But this exhibit was nicely done and we all thoroughly enjoyed it. (Even if the morbid side of us kept talking about mummies crawling out from under the hotel beds for the remainder of the day. I never said we were mature!)

The rest of the museum was mostly what I’d call a “dead zoo”. Large scale dioramas of stuffed animals and fake people, miniature dioramas created from the 1920s through the 1940s (I couldn’t find dates for the larger pieces). The type of exhibits that probably haven’t changed in decades, can be a little creepy, and are as odd and slightly off-putting as they are intriguing and wonderful in their weirdness.

I almost had to rescue Mel from an animal on the hunt.

And naturally, I found the only three balls of yarn in the entire museum.

After the museum we drove to our hotel in Kenosha to relax for awhile, before heading back out to Rendezvous Tiki Bar. Yes, a tiki bar in Wisconsin! It was fun. Great decor, really friendly staff and serious attention to detail in the drinks, which were made right in front of us. We bemoaned the fact that this place isn’t closer to us!

We noticed their tiki collection overlapped ours by two mugs.

I had a Ruby’s Fruit Salad. Cute name, tasty drink. (Yikes, my braids sure looked messy!)

Overall it was a lovely weekend, all wrapped up in 24 hours.

Now, I’m going to sit down to cut out fabric pieces for my blouse, my project for the rest of my day off. Even thought bunnies and lemons got a few votes, looks like most people were leaning towards birdies for this one, and I tend to agree. So birds, it is! And those of you who voted all of the above… I expect ALL will eventually become blouses at some point, fear not. 🙂