This was Funny

Here is a funny sign we saw on our trip. I think it may have been in Spokane but it's all a blurr at this point. Unfortuntately the store was closed so we couldn't find out whether the sign was accurate or not.
I made it to the studio today but didn't get anything done. It seems that driving and riding are more tiring than I thought. It is also probable that you never get as good a sleep in a hotel as at home. We live in the country so our nights are absolutely quiet. Most motels are near the highway so it's never quiet. We were also very anxious to get back to homemade bread. All in all, we are glad to be home even though it was a great trip.

Our Trip

We're back!
If you look very closely in the bottom of the picture you can see me standing under one of the California Giant Redwoods. Sooo amazing!
We flew to San Diego, picked up Robin's car and headed North the same day. We had spent quite a bit of time in San Diego during the winter so we decided to skip it this time and start home. We drove right along the coast on Hwy 1 and for someone who lives 3000 miles from the nearest ocean, it was wonderful to be right on the edge of the Pacific. We spent a couple of days checking out galeries in Carmel, California and then headed on up the coast. We went inland to Eugene Oregon when we finally got tired of the twisting, turning roads. We were far from tired of the scenery but with so many miles ahead of us we thought we'd better hit the four lane highway for a bit. We went North all the way to Seattle but didn't spend time there as planned because all the hotels in the city were booked. We went across the top of Washington, Montana and North Dakota and headed North again at Vally City ND. We were gone ten days and saw some amazing scenery and met some great friendly people. We are still glad to be home though.



Finally made it to Haight Ashbury, only 40 years too late!

Internet Woes

We have been having internet probelms (I accidentally typed "internot" and that about says it all) for about a month. We keep calling the satelite people and they walk us through the same rigamarole each time. Finally , we convinced them to send someone out to look at the physical setup and they found a pinched cable on our roof. Why did it take them a month to send someone??? I'm guessing they didn't want to spend the money. The funny thing was that the tech guy was my student in Grade Three. Good thing I was nice to him back then! Lol.
We are leaving tonight for San Diego to drive our son's car back home. We will be gone for a week or ten days so I will not likely be posting anything until we get back.


Meanwhile here are a couple of possible layouts for the log cabin quilt



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More Quliting

Here is my Wonky Log Cabin in a different arrangement. I am not sure which one I will do. There are so many ways to arrange a log cabin block. I plan on making lots more blocks. It is so amazing to get this many blocks done and there is hardly a dent in the pile of scraps. The best part about this block is that it uses up so many odd sized pieces and they end up looking great instead of going into the garbage.



Summer has done a lot of work on her quilt. Now she is ready to sew on the dark pink border and then she has one more border to do. Then comes the big decision of how to quilt it. There will have to be some quilting in the white spaces and I think she wants to do it by machine. She is thinking of stippling but that might be quite a challenge on something so big for her first time. A challenge has never stopped our Summer yet though.



The last picture is Free getting a rotary cutting lesson from summer.

Summer's Quilt Update

We had company last night but Summer went out to the studio alone and did quite a lot of work on her quilt. It is looking pretty good up on the design wall.





In the meantime I have started a wonky Log Cabin. I just love using up scraps.

Summer's New Quilt

Summer has started a new quilt. She made her own design on graph paper and we are translating it to cloth. She has the four corner squares partly done and it is looking very good so far. The first photo is her design in her sketch book and below that is what she has done so far. I must say that I am quite impressed, but of course I am her Grandma.

Irish Chain

I have finished piecing my Irish Chain. It was hard to decide on the borders but thought it needed two of them to bring it to a size I liked. It is now about a twin bed size. I think I might hand quilt this one so I can do something quite fancy in the white squares. I like to have a quilt on my big quilting frame and I just took the Double Wedding Ring off.



I had Free working on my computer yesterday. In the photo Robin has the screw driver but in actual fact Free did most of the work. I just happened to snap the picture at the wrong time. He took out a lot of components that are no longer being used and tweaked it so that it is much faster. Sky and Free are total techies and know a ton about computers. They are thinking of starting a computer repair company and calling themselves Techno Sherpas. We call them Sherpas when they are lugging computers around to set them up in a different spot. They have done a lot of that since they have been staying here.

More Bags

Due to some internet issues and lots of family activities, I haven't had the opportunity to do much blogging lately. I did, however, find time to make a couple more bags.




This first one is done with blocks from the Flower Boxes quilt that I cut wrong. I tried some fancy quilting on one side and the other is just stitched in the ditch.

And the one below has more of the strip pieced fabric and this time I remembered the piping.

Flower Boxes

I have the binding sewn on the most recent scrap quilt. I decided to call it Flower Boxes because the fabric is flowered. I have to hand sew the binding down. I made the binding out of lengths of the fabrics used on the front of the quilt. I didn't have enough of any one piece. I'll see how I like it once it is all sewn down.
This was a very easy pattren to put together and I really like the way it looks now that it is done. It is all scrap fabric from the burgundy one I did, except for the dark blue around the edges. That one was given to me and the backing I bought for a dollar a yard at a craft sale, where they were selling left over craft supplies. It's nice to make something from left-overs and have it turn out that you actually like it.

When I'm not Quilting...

I often bake bread. These are just out of the oven. They are multi grain. There are probably ten or twelve kinds of grain and potatoes in them. I have been baking my own bread for years and we are so spoiled that we can hardly eat store bought bread any more.

Or we help Summer celebrate her 13th birthday with a home made chocolate cake.