Our first stop was Dillsboro, North Carolina. The town described by their website Visit Dillsboro "Dillsboro has been a tourist town since the late 19th century when the railroad first brought visitors to the “land of the sky” to escape the summer heat. More than a century later, Dillsboro has changed very little — a small country village with pristine white houses, rustic old shops, galleries, restaurants and quaint country inns. The founder, Thomas Dills’ home still stands, as do many of the shops that first opened their doors in the 1800s."
This town and its proximity in the mountains is beautiful. The train stopped running here just this past summer, but the town has much more to offer than just the train ride. The downtown is packed and I mean packed full of wonderful shops featuring arts and crafts. We spent some time downtown poking around in them, but the real reason Dillsboro was on our list of stops was a specific shop, Maggie J's. As I have pointed out in just about every post, Janet is a jewelry Artist with work featured in several North Carolina galleries and even one in Tennessee, as well as her sites on ETSY, Mineralogy and Metalology. Maggie J's is one of her favorite shops on ETSY and she "covets" almost all of the pieces of jewelry posted on her site. Well it turns out that Maggie J has a shop in Dillsboro, North Carolina. It is located in a small group of buildings kind of tucked away just past the bridge, up on the hill on the left, as you are heading in the direction of Franklin. Her Gallery is located in Riverwood Shops. Its a cute little cottage tucked back behind an old farmhouse that is now converted into a restaurant. Janet nearly jumped out of the car before I could put it in park, she said, "Oh my, I am soooo excited" and then she was gone. I did, however catch up to her just before we entered the shop. We entered and were greeted by a scarf wearing dog, Collie/Shepherd type if I remember correctly, and very friendly. The shop was small with a counter that split the room between an obvious work area and a nice display area filled with wonderful metal creations. I could see in Jan's eyes she was focused on both. She has a bit of a "problem" with tools. She wants to buy them all. Maggie J had a wonderful selection of presses, rollers, chrome wiggly bar things, stamps, hammers, files, and on and on. After a knowing glance , knowing she wanted more tools for her own workshop, we started to browse around and the young lady behind the counter asked if she could help us. It took Janet quite awhile to narrow her selections to what she could reasonably afford to spend. She wanted it all. After the most interesting conversation with Maggie J about her background and her extensive experience as metal artist. She was quite humble, we had to squeeze it out of her, but she is well schooled in all facets of metal work.
After Janet's purchases we were on our way to the next stop on our vacation tour, Franklin.
(Yaaay, Tartan's Museum)
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