Category: Beautiful Oregon

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Twelve Kits and a Mess of Paper

My budget has been submitted! It was due on Friday, but a last minute critical thing we had to handle took up my entire day on Thursday so I got an extension on getting this wrapped up. It feels good to have it done and I’m looking forward to working on something else.

I stepped away from work today right at 5;00, hurried and grabbed a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and headed out to play pickleball. I played from 6:00 – 9:00… and there were few enough people there that I played the entire three hours. I’m really happy to say that I’m getting better and better! It was really a fun night.

By the time I got home it was around 9:30 and I was tired and it was raining. Big surprise there. So my boys didn’t get an evening walk. But they settled in nicely and have been snoozing since then.

I hit my sewing room for a few minutes to cut some KFC fabric strips for the centers of my next twelve Wensleydale quilt blocks.

Oh, yum!

I cut enough for twelve more blocks and combined two fabrics for each block.

Then I pulled out the indigo batiks I cut the other night and put together a dozen kits for the next set of blocks.

After three hours of pickleball, that’s all I had energy for. So I headed for the sofa. And sitting on my coffee table were the 18 blocks that still needed the paper removed. So I sat down in front of the TV, pulled up a pickleball tournament on YouTube and cracked away.

I got the paper removed from ten of these blocks and iced my foot at the same time.

This felt like a good accomplish this evening. I don’t have much to give after all my physical activity.

I just love looking at the back of the blocks.

I have a little more spring to report. The flowering pear trees in my back yard are in full bloom and they are beautiful.

I have these trees all over my yard.

More blooming things are showing up around the neighborhood. The magnolias are looking good!

Those blooms are as big as my hand!

My lawn is finally greening up. I don’t think my front lawn has ever looked this good.

Bender met a new friend on our afternoon walk today.

This never happens.

Oh my god… I’m so tired! G’night!

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Almost Finished, but Messed Up Instead

I felt really confident that I would finish this Scrappy KFC trip quilt top this evening. I had a quilt guild Zoom meeting and pinned and sewed the final three rows of blocks while I listened.

I would have completed this tonight except that I sewed two of the rows together wrong, which meant that they wouldn’t work with the rows they were supposed to be next to. Rather than pick them apart I was just able to move the top row to the bottom of the incorrectly sewed two rows and it will all work.

See that single row across the middle? That was supposed to be the top row.

I think it will be fine to sew it together this way. But I will turn that top section of two around the other way to see how it looks before I sew it all together.

I walked into my sewing room at one point in the evening when part of this was sitting on my cutting table and it was just so pretty!

It’s definitely prettier close up when you can see the variation within each fabric.

I decided it was better to put this aside and wait to finish it, rather than plug on and make more mistakes. I should be able to finish this up tomorrow night and then put the Ice Storm blocks up on the design wall.

Here’s my boys from our afternoon walk today. They were very excellent posers… even Rico!

And such a beautiful sky tonight as the sun was going down.

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New KFC Fabrics Delivered Today!

My big news for the day is that my package of new Kaffe Fassett Collective fabrics that I ordered from Glorious Color came via Fed Ex this morning. It was a pretty big package!

Here’s what was in there: 23 half-yard cuts, 2 one-yard cuts, one two-yard cut, and a 2 1/2 yard piece of wide backing.

Oddly enough, the pieces I’m most excited about are the two white pieces and the black and white sharks teeth.

The wide backing will be used for the blue KFC sixteen patch quilt that I finished recently. It will be the first time I’ve ever used a wide backing.

This blue millefiori is really gorgeous! The design is a little big bigger than on the regular quilting fabric and the colors seem just a little more vibrant. The wide backing also has a more silky texture.

That’s the regular fabric on top and the wide back on the bottom. GAH! It’s so gorgeous!

And, of course, I had to take a good look at all of it! There’s a quilt in these pinks and reds! That feathers is so amazing!

And these greens… seriously!!! No wonder this is my favorite color!

And a little more eye candy…

And this white moss flower below is so gorgeous! I see a lot of this in my future!

I took a couple days off work this week to recover from our radio fundraising drive. On Tuesday we got up early and hit the road for the coast. Low tide was at about 8:30. I had hoped to be on the road at 7 am, but it was 7:30 by the time we pulled away from home.

We were on the beach all by ourselves at 9 am. We headed north from Arcadia Beach onto Cannon Beach. We walked about a mile onto Cannon Beach.

If you look at that big rock immediately behind these boys, you might see a little bump on the top.

It took me a little time to figure out what it was, and boy, was I surprised!

A bald eagle!!!! And it was huge! It’s not terribly common for me to see eagles at the beach!

Then we turned around and headed back toward the south and back onto Arcadia Beach — the beach we usually visit on our day trips.

It’s about 1.5 miles from the beach access to the southern point. When we got to the end, I turned around and looked back north from where we had just come and saw something on the beach. At first I thought it was a really big dog. And then I realized it was a deer!

He was on the beach were we had just walked not more than five minutes before.

And our wildlife excitement wasn’t over. As I headed back north I noticed something in the surf. At first I thought it was a rock, but it was bobbing in the water and moving north. . . a sea lion! It’s not uncommon to see sea lions on the Oregon coast, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen any on this beach.

I walked over six miles on the beach. I’m guessing the dogs must have run at least 15 miles!

Before I headed home I stopped in at a little quilt store in Cannon Beach that I really like. They have a really nice selection of fabrics and the staff is really friendly. I bought a few black and white fabrics there!

I’m happy to report that my black and white kick is continuing! Here’s an order I got in the mail this week from Quilt Expressions in Boise.

I still have two more packages of black and white fabrics that are on their way to me. It’s becoming a ridiculous amount of black and white fabric.

I’m slowly completing the final blocks for my Ice Storm quilt. I have 8 blocks in progress, with an additional 8 blocks that haven’t been started yet. Then I can get it up on the design wall.

I have sewn together one row of my scrappy KFC trip quilt. It’s a little slower process since the seams aren’t pressed in a way that makes them nest easily. So I have to repress some of the seams, and carefully match other seams that just won’t nest.

Luckily , there are only seven rows so it shouldn’t take too long. I’d like to finish the Ice Storm blocks this weekend and make some good headway on assembling the scrappy trip quilt.