Showing posts with label vacation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vacation. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Our Girl's Weekend

My sister and I left Oklahoma for Texas on Thursday and got back home Monday night.  That left us Friday, Saturday and Sunday for lots of crafty stuff.  I found a great rental to use for our retreat.  



 

The dining room table was big enough for 3 sewing machines. Just mine and my sister's are set up in the photo.  We were able to use the center island for cutting and pressing.  It was a very user friendly set up.  

Grad Girl had stuff going on for most of Friday, so she wasn't able to take off as she'd planned. But she joined us by early evening with a new to her sewing machine. 




It's a Singer Start.  It's pretty basic, but that's pretty much what she wanted, basic.  Grad Girl had never wound a bobbin or threaded a machine.  We started with those basics.  Learning to control the speed with the foot pedal was probably the hardest thing for her to get used to.  That's a practice makes perfect thing.  

She really wanted to make a pin cushion. I have a pattern that I really wanted to make, Meadow Mist Design's Cathedral Window Pincushions. So we went to Joann's bought some fabric and made a couple of pin cushions. 




This probably wasn't the easiest pattern to start Grad Girl off with, but she really enjoyed it and liked the challenge. Learning to top stitch while trying to master the foot pedal was challenging, but she got better as we went along.  Neither pin cushion is perfect, but that's OK, we had a blast making them. I had once thought to make a quilt using Cathedral Window blocks. Making one block may be enough to fulfill that need.   

I found a rental that allowed cats, so Queenie came to spend the weekend with us.  



 

She's not had the chance to be a sewing room kitty and decided that anything hanging off the ironing board was a toy.  She especially liked my yellow measuring tape when I was measuring borders for String Lights.  

I delivered Grad Girl's  quilt and she got a photo of both her Shadow Demons. 




Both Grad Girl and Queenie tested out the "nap on the couch" worthiness of the quilt. I think it passed that test.  

That was our girl's weekend. It was a lot of fun and we decided we definitely need to do another one in the next year or two.  Linking up with Monday Design Wall (just a little late). 

Sunday, October 15, 2023

Stitching Stuff: Weeks 38, 39 and 40


I really didn't mean to miss two weeks of stitching stuff posts.  I had connectivity issues just before we left on vacation. Then we had a pretty busy vacation in Oregon and I just never had time to sit down to write a post. We flew on Sunday and spent Monday driving the Columbia River Gorge.  One of our stops was at Bridal Veil Falls. 




We also stopped at Wahkeena Falls, but that one doesn't photograph very well.  From Wahkeena, we hiked over to Multnomah Falls. 



 

The falls and the associated hikes were all beautiful.  It was a bit cool and misty, but that makes for very saturated greens in the photos.  Just as we got to the car after the hike back from Multnomah falls, it started raining hard. We drove the rest of the way to Bend in the rain. 

We've been to Crater Lake before, but we stopped on the way to someplace else. This time we stayed for the day to hike several of the trails. 



 

The little island in the lake is known as the Shipwreck.  The water is really that deep, deep blue.  If it weren't for the rims, the sky would blend right into the water. If you've never been, it is definitely worth even a quick visit.  

Later in the week we ventured into Smith Rock state park. 



 

There is a hiking path down the gorge that runs from that first peak on the left to around the dark peak on the right, then back up to the top of the gorge rim. We didn't take the whole trail, as we were running low on water. It was over 80 F this day, so we went through a lot of water.  This park is mostly known to climbers. There were groups of climbers all over those peaks, but you can't really seem them in this photo. 

The first part of the trip had lots of hiking.  The day before we flew home, we had lunch with Barbara (of Cat Patches fame) and her guy, Mike.  (Barbara posted this photo last week just after our visit).



Barbara and I started our blogs just a few months apart back in 2010.  I found her Foto Finish Saturday linky party early that December and have followed her since.  It was a very fun lunch and nice to finally meet someone from blogland.  I forgot to ask about the kitties and Barbara said she meant to ask My Guy about his bread baking.    

So that's what I've been doing the last few weeks. Consequently my stitching time suffered quite a bit last week. 

  • 15 minute days/week 38 = 6/7 days
  • 15 minute days/Sept = 29/31 days
  • 15 minute days/week 39 = 2/7 days
  • 15 minute days/week 40 = 4/7 days
  • 15 minute days/Oct = 6/14 days
  • 15 minute days 2023 = 241/287 days
  • Success rate = 83.97%
My stitching time is still more than 75%, so far so good on that goal even with the vacation down time.  How did you do at finding time to stitch the last 3 weeks?  


1. Julie in GA
2. maggie f
3. Karen
4. Frédérique
5. DonnaleeQ
6. Quilting Gail
7. Shasta @ High Road Quilter
8. Andrée

Powered by... Mister Linky's Magical Widgets.

Monday, October 4, 2021

A Slow Stitching Week

It's been a very nice week. We took off most of last week and took a trip to Eureka Springs, AR.  It's a touristy town, but a very laid back one.  We rented a little cottage not far from down town and pretty much just hung out. We walked a lot, ate a lot, read a lot, and I stitched a bit.  The cottage had a wonderful front porch.




It was well sheltered from the rain. Since it rained a lot, we did spend a lot of time out here or in the cottage.  I worked on my long term travel project, the Butterfly medallion.

 



I just need to finish the back stitch around the lower part of the wing and I'll be halfway finished with this butterfly. 

I'm taking today off so I can kinda get caught up on laundry and a few chores before heading back into the office tomorrow.  I'm also hoping to get in a solid afternoon of stitching time. Why waste a whole vacation day on not fun stuff?  

Linking up with Monday Design Wall  and Monday Making this week. 

Sunday, October 11, 2020

Stitching Stuff: Week 41 of 2020

 We spent this last week hiking and just hanging out together.  We both had vacation that needed to be used, so we rented a cottage in Eureka Springs, Arkansas and socially distanced somewhere else for a few days. That may seem risky, but at least Eureka Springs has mandatory mask rules. We don't have that here at home.  I took plenty of hand stitching to work on while we were away. It wasn't hard to find at least 15 minutes to make a bit of progress on that front.  How did you do at finding at least 15 minutes of stitching time each day? You can link up and share at the bottom of this post. 


  • 15 minute days/week = 7/7 days
  • 15 minute days/October = 10/10 days
  • 15 minute days/2020 = 254/284 days
  • Success rate = 89.44%

It's been a pretty good year on the stitching front. With all the social distancing, it's been a lot easier to work in some sewing time most days. The hand stitching this week was on the binding for Storm at Sea. 


Stitching on the binding will continue today.  I've only turned 2 corners so far. SAS is a big quilt, 96" X 112", so it's going to take a few more days to get that binding all stitched down.  Linking up with Kathy's Quilts for Slow Stitching Sunday.  

It was beautiful weather for hiking, the leaves are just starting to turn.


We hiked around Lake Leatherwood just outside of Eureka Springs. Even with the leaves changing there are still a few blooming things growing along the trail. 


And a few butterflies are still flitting about gathering up the last of the nectar. 


This Pearl Crescent was taking a rest before moving on to the next set of asters.  

So we had an excellent week of being outdoors, hanging out on the back porch to read or stitch and ordering take out from some of our favorite restaurants in the area.  How did your week go on the stitchy front?  


1. Julie in GA
2. Meloney
3. Sherrie
4. karen
5. Shasta @ High Road
6. Chrisknits
7. katie z.
8. DawnyK
9. Amanda
10. Loulee (Manxgirl)
11. Quilting Gail

Powered by... Mister Linky's Magical Widgets.

Monday, June 3, 2019

Design Wall Updates

The typical Monday design wall post is a bit late today.  There just wasn't time this morning to write one. I was busy sitting on suitcases to zip them up so we could catch our flight home. We spent a long weekend looking at scenery like this.  


That's definitely not the view from our dining room window.  We spent an extra long weekend in Colorado hiking, riding trains, 


checking out the old silver mines, 


and the odd optical illusion.


We had a lot of fun. But I'm glad to be home.  Most of my week was spent on hand stitching in the evenings when we were chilling from all the other fun stuff. But before we left for the airport last Wednesday afternoon, I did manage to get all the blocks of the Storm at Sea quilt sewn together.

 Storm at Sea
Paper Piecing Class by Carrie Randell (Quilter's Hideaway)

I've even made start on the pieced border, but there's not much to show on that as yet. 

With all the SAS blocks sewn together, that project could come off the big design wall and the completed blocks from the Daisy Chain Mystery quilt went up.

Daisy Chain Mystery
2019 Little Bunny Quilts Mystery
by Alison of Honey, Bunny & Doll Designs

I'm really happy how the fabric choices worked out. Now to get this sewn into a flimsy so I can link up with Alison's final linky party.  There are some really fun versions already posted there.  

I'm belatedly linking up with Monday Making and the Monday Design Wall.  

Monday, May 28, 2018

Butterflies and Angels: Vacation 2018

Wishing everyone in the United States a safe and reflective Memorial Day.  We drove home yesterday, in part to avoid the end of the holiday weekend traffic and so we'd have one day to recuperate from vacation before heading back to work.  We had a fun vacation, though it was shorter than usual.  The Scientist in Training is heading back for summer school this year and My Guy has business trips in the works, so we didn't have a big window for scheduling things this year.   

Most of my stitching time this week was spent on one of my long term travel projects, the butterfly medallion panel.  I spent most of the week working on butterfly number 3 (out of 9 on the panel).


I keep planning to work on this while we are home, but I never remember to pull it out of it's case (hence all the folds and wrinkles).  

Since we got home early Sunday afternoon, I was able to get a good start on the laundry, then go spend the evening in my sewing room.  All the rows of the Christmas Angels quilt are now sewn together. 


Getting this to the finished flimsy stage is my OMG for May.  The plan is to spend most of today in the sewing room.  My Guy is off on a 70 mile bike ride and the SIT has plans with friends.  So I'll have the house to myself for most of the morning.  Hopefully I can get the center all sewn together, finish the pieced border, plus add the two strip borders before the end of May.  

That's all the quilty stuff for this post, so you can stop here if that's what you stopped by to see.  You can read on if you are interested in seeing a few vacation photos.  

Due to the changing dates of My Guy's business trips we opted for a close to home vacation this year.  We spent some time in Missouri Wine Country to start. 


A little wine is always a great way to start vacation. Stone Hill is one of our favorite wineries and we can highly recommend both the wines and their Vintage Restaurant. It's a must visit any time we are in the area. 

We spent the rest of our vacation in the St. Louis area.  Doing the expected things, like visiting the Botanical Gardens. 


Yes, I have lots and lots of pictures of beautiful flowers, but I really loved these leaves.  They look like someone tried to paint them green.  

My Guy and I are both from Missouri.  We were chagrined to realize a few years ago that the SIT had never seen the Gateway Arch.  It's such an iconic part of the state, we really felt it was remiss of us that we'd never taken her.  So we did that this trip. 


Now she's been there, been up in it, so that's checked off the list.  

We also visited the St. Louis Art Museum, but I don't have any photos from that visit.  It's not hard to guess our next activity from the below photo. 


I was amazed to find out the St. Louis Zoo is free if all you want to do is see the animals.  We had a wonderful time, it really is a great place to spend a morning. Schools in the St. Louis area had classes until Friday.  The zoo was really, really busy the morning we went.  I can't imagine what it will be like this next week.  


Our last outing was a place called The City Museum.  


Yes, that's a school bus hanging out from the 10th floor of the museum.  SIT said the listing for the museum said it was a place containing interactive displays of art.  It really was a cross between an art museum and an amusement park.  We had a lot of fun, but we were all a little sore that night from crawling around the caves and other exhibits.  If you have older kids (tweens and teens) this is a great place for them to burn off any extra energy.  

In between all the site seeing we ate a lot of great food (mostly, there were a couple of questionable meals), My Guy rode his bike on the Katy Trail in the mornings while the SIT and I shopped in Old Town St. Charles. It worked for all of us.  Now to finish off all the accumulated laundry and spend some much needed R&R time in the sewing room.    

Linking up with:
Monday Making
Monday Design Wall  

Saturday, July 15, 2017

A Vacation Photo Essay

Disclosure:  No quilts or quilting topics are discussed in this post. I just wanted to share some of our vacation photos.  

Locations:  
  Seattle, WA
  Fidalgo Island, WA
  Vancouver, BC
  Deception Pass Park, WA

The view from the Seattle Space Needle (really!).



From the Chihuly Garden and Glass Exhibition





From the VanDusen Botanical Garden in Vancouver, B.C. (I have more than 100 photos from here, but I'll just share my favorite)




From the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, B.C. 

Traces of Words: Art and Calligraphy from Asia Exhibit, beautiful images projected on the walls

 
1980's Fighting Shield from Papua, New Guinea

Deception Pass Park







My favorite photo from the trip:


Two peas in a pod.  They had a great time with all the hiking. 

The last picture is My Guy's.  He's a very active nature photographer, with many of his photographs of the local wild life appearing in our company's calendar each year.  This is the one shot he was really hoping to get this trip.  


Nailed it didn't he?  

Have a wonderful weekend.  I'm off to go sew for bit now so there will be something quilty to talk about on the blog tomorrow.   

Sunday, July 9, 2017

Stash Stuff and Slow Stitching for Week 27 of 2017

It's been a fast week.  Not because work has been busy, but because we've been on vacation this week.  It's true, time does fly when you are having fun.  Not to rub it in, but this has been the view from where we've been staying all week.


   
After the madness of June, getting a week to kick back and have fun was a much needed battery recharge. 

Not much happening in the sewing room, but I did bring some embroidery work with me. 



I've made quite a bit of progress since the last time these butterflies made an appearance on the blog.  

No fabric usage to report this week, but I did do my bit for the local quilt shop and bought a few fun pieces to take home.



Drama Teen liked the sea creatures and I thought the stripe would make a fun binding for one of my Rainbow Scrap Challenge quilts (should I ever finish one!).  There's also a set of blue fat quarters to use for this year's RSC blocks.  As much as I like blue, I don't have much in the scrappy portion of my stash, so these fat quarters will get put to good use later this month.  I also fell in love with the display version of the Gigi's Thimble pattern, it would be great for some of those big prints at home that I don't quite know what to do with.  And a quilting book to read on the plane ride home.  I was very restrained on the fabric purchases, they had some really cute fabrics.  It's a good thing space in the luggage is a limited.  

So on that note, here's the damage to the stash. 

Used last week:  0 yards
Used year to date:  38.79 yards
Added year to date:  219.05 yards
Net added year to date:  180.26 yards

I'm dreading getting back into the work groove next week.  Good thing I'll have some sewing room time to help ease the transition. 

Linking up with quiltpaintcreate for the weekly stash report and Slow Stitching Sunday over at Kathy's Quilts.

Saturday, August 6, 2016

Where Was I?

It was a short week for me.  Even so, it feels really good that the weekend is here now.  I mentioned last week that between work, Internet issues and family stuff that there just wasn't much to post.  The source of my Internet issues was my computer, but it was aggravated by the fact that I was trying to connect to the hotel wireless.  The family stuff going on was our summer vacation, which is why I was trying to connect via the hotel wireless.  The computer never would connect via the hotel.  Thankfully the Internet was stable and connectable at the house we rented for the last half of vacation.  I was able to do a little posting and a lot of catching up on everyone's blogs last weekend.  

We got home on Wednesday, but I didn't make it back to sewing room till Thursday.  After being gone for 10 days, plus being sidelined due to the long hours at work the week before we left, I had to spend a few minutes figuring out where I was on everything. This month's one monthly goal is to get Zombies in Paris to the finished flimsy stage.  I found those blocks, plus the parts and pieces for three other projects that were laying around the sewing machine.



So the plan for this afternoon is to make a bit of progress on these four projects.  

That's it for the quilty content for this post. I took a ton of photos during our vacation and decided to share just a few.  So continue on if you want to check out a few scenes from the Upper Peninsula and northern shores of Michigan. 



We started out in Traverse City, which is close to Sleeping Bear Dunes.  We spent our first morning climbing and hiking in all that sand.  From there we drove up the coast to Mackinaw City. 




Our hotel room there looked over Lake Huron, which was peaceful and gorgeous at sunrise.  

You can't go to Mackinaw City without taking the ferry over to Mackinac Island.  The Round Island Light house marks the entrance to the docks.  




We rented bikes and rode around the island.  But our favorite spot ended up being a coffee shop looking out over all the sailing boats. 



After the detour to Mackinac Island, we took a day trip up to Tahquamenon Falls in the Upper Peninsula.  


   

The golden yellow water is due to the high level of tannins that come from the surrounding vegetation.  The water really sparkled in the sun.  After our day trip, we headed back towards Traverse City, but spent a few days in Charlevoix.  We spent one day hiking along the Lake Michigan shoreline.  I've not been able to identify these pretty wildflowers, but they were everywhere. 



Our last day in Charlevoix we headed to Boyne City for a kayaking trip down the Boyne River. 



This was the calm part of the trip, it was a lot more exciting upstream of here.  Let's just say that we spent some of the trip hanging on to the kayak rather than riding it in.  The end wasn't completely without excitement.  In order to reach the dock, we had to go under the bridge where the flowers are sitting.  It looked like this:


We had to lie down in the kayak to get through that.  But it was pretty smooth sailing after that.  

Our last day in Michigan found us back in Traverse City where we had the most distinct feeling we were being watched.  



It was a very relaxing vacation.  The Great Lakes are beautiful, the food was really good (I have enough pictures for post just on the food) and the people were really friendly.  We had a great time.  But now it's time to get moving on back to school stuff for DT and on finishing up a few things before a big project deadline on Thursday.  I'm already ready for next year's vacation!