Friday, May 23, 2014

Memorial Day Weekend UFO Progress

There's nothing like a sunny Spring day to lighten your spirits.  That, and taking a day off work.

I can finally report some progress on my UFO list! I dropped off two quilts this morning to be longarm quilted. The two quilts were my Chunky Churndash bedspread and Bittersweet Beauty. In a few weeks I will be binding, labeling and calling 'em done!

This afternoon I started FMQ on the Red Cross quilt. Royal Flush is waiting to go next.

I also pulled out the Colorado Sunshine (Floribunda) blocks to count and confirm how many more I need to finish. Okay, and also to get a better picture for this blog.  22 more blocks to go if I want to make this 8 x 9.

I plan to add a medium green inner border between the Jacob's Ladder blocks and the checkerboard border.  Debra at 52quilts.com used a dark green which seemed to give definition to the design (see below), but I want to soften it a bit. What do you think?



On an even lighter note, I am looking forward to flying this weekend. Did you read about my destination bucket list?  I am considering the San Juan Islands in Washington state. Funny story. A telemarketer called to sell vacation packages and I tried to be clever by smugly telling her that my vacations must be at places I can fly myself. Before I could hang up, she immediately dropped her script and started telling me about the islands around Seattle where she once lived. Evidently she has friends who fly. We ended up talking quite a bit. Hopefully she didn't get in trouble with her telemarketing firm.

So what are your plans for Memorial Day weekend? Sewing? Traveling? Both?

Monday, May 12, 2014

Slow going

The weather has been so beautiful lately, beckoning me to enjoy the sunshine and spring flowers. And that means little progress on my projects.  

I gave the brown and blue tote bag to my mother for Mother's Day. I finished two more rows of Blueberry Hill / Jamestown Landing.  I sewed 8 blocks for Celtic Solstice. Slow and steady wins the race, right?  The best thing is that I resisted the urge to embark on a new quilting project, opting for quickie bags to get my fix. So while my list of projects did not diminish, it didn't get any longer. I'll take that as success.

In the meantime, I keep finding lots of different places I want to fly. Here's my wish list:
1. Bar Harbor / Acadia National Park in Maine  
2. Creve Coeur Airport in St. Louis, Missouri (will go there this summer!)
3. Oklahoma to visit my family (planning to go this summer)
4. Corning, New York area to visit the Glenn Curtiss Museum (Curtiss is the real aviation genius)
5. Kitty Hawk, North Carolina (been there, but want to return with my family)
6. Ozarks in Arkansas (again, been there but want to return with family)
7. Lake Tahoe (original goal for when I get my instrument rating)

Do you have any other suggestions for fly-in vacation spots?  I've been to Williamsburg many times, so need to visit other places. Remember I live on the east coast, so Lake Tahoe is quite a hike. It would be really cool to fly to Alaska (yeah, I intended the joke). Last summer during our trip to Kentucky, I met a guy who flew all the way from Alaska in his Cessna 170. That's a LONG haul!