Saturday, September 27, 2014

Stitch & Chatter Quilt Retreat at the Beach

This week I was blessed to be able to join our Stitch & Chatter group at Cannon Beach for a 4 day/3 night retreat.  This was all thanks to David and my big girls for taking care of everything at home!!!  We had such a fun time and accomplished much!  For some, the accomplishment was sewing; for others it was resting:)

We stay at the Cannon Beach Christian Conference Center.  The building we use is ocean front.  There is a conference room we use for all of our sewing.  The rest of the building is just like a motel.  When we are there, it is only our group using the whole building.  It's very nice to just be able to leave everything at night without picking it all up.  For brunch they provide our meal.  We go to the dining room for this.  At supper we're on our own, whether we go out with the group or by ourself.

Our snack and drink center.

Along with all of our work and visiting, we had our times of singing every day.  Janine did most of our piano playing.


Betty played and sang a couple nights for those of us who stayed up later.

We had a lot of fun teasing these two.  Sure glad they and Don were able to make it with their wives.  Here they are helping out Judi.

I sewed next to Charity, so we got a bunch of extra visiting in.  I also roomed with her . . . sooo fun:)

She made this beautiful quilt while we were there.  She wasn't able to put all of the rows together because she ran out of some of her fabric.  After that she made another quilt top.

Phyllis was busy finishing up a quilt.


Marie made this beautiful baby quilt . . . a lot of extra work since it was a mix of minky, chenille and flannel.

Janine made several different kinds of bags.  She wanted to do small projects to be able to get them all done!

Here she is with 4 of them . . . I think she made at least 7.

Jerrie-Lynn always has difficult projects she's working on.  (Hiding in the back of the picture is Joyce, working on saving her photos.)

First she colored and then started to embroider this block.  I think I heard something about this being a couple year project, working on it off and on.  She's got a lot more patience than me!

 Joan was working on a couple different quilts.  I didn't get any pictures of her first one.

Jan finished up this "guestbook" quilt she was making for her granddaughter who just got married this summer, before she started another quilt.

Judy was working on this quilt.  She had higher hopes, but got more than halfway done with it.  She was only able to stay 2 nights.

Emma had a couple different projects.  This was a cute little baby quilt that I didn't get a better picture of.

And she finished this gorgeous quilt!

Check out her quilting around the flowers . . . AMAZING!!!

This is Betty's second quilt top she worked on.

Judi shared her friendship quilt from a few years ago.  Members of our group each made a block from Judi's fabrics.

It looks like I didn't get a picture of Marcella, but here is part of a lovely quilt she put together.

The "Mattson" and "Holmgren" girls.  Kathy and Elaine came to spend some time with Phyllis.

I got both of the projects done that I'd hoped to.  This first one is my baby boy quilt.  I have it all pinned and ready to quilt, but I wanted to do that at home.  It has gray minky on the back.

 This little farm one is for one of our godchildren.  Very fun and easy to put together . . . the cutting probably took much longer than the sewing!


And last but not least, our beautiful Pacific Ocean.  The weather was mostly nice during the day.  It rained at night and right when we were supposed to be leaving.  There were sooo many birds right out our windows.


 


 Looking forward to and hoping I get to go again next year:)

Monday, September 8, 2014

New School Year

This year we have 7 children in school.  I'm very happy to have a year off from kindergarten!!

Tara is a Junior at BGHS.

Christopher is a Freshman at BGHS.

Clint (8th) and Clayton (6th) go to Amboy.  Forrest (4th), Bronwyn (2nd) and Hunter (1st) go to Yacolt.


We pray they have a good year!



Thursday, August 7, 2014

Life . . . over the last 2 months

Life has been busy and I haven't taken any time to blog for a long time.  I'll share a few (or LOTS of) pictures with you here, to catch you up on what we've been doing.

In June, Aimee graduated as the Salutatorian of her class of over 500 students.


Christopher graduated from 8th grade.

My two babies both in bed with me one morning:)

A quilt I made for one of our godsons.  I bought the pattern and most of the fabric in NH on our vacation last fall.


Rachel's 19th birthday.

The boys got to help Jay with the sauna foundation.

A quilt for Dad from my quilt group that I quilted.

David and I were blessed to be able to take a bus tour trip to California with 38 other adults from our church (from congregations across the nation and Canada).  We were the babies of the group:)  We had a wonderful 7 days of fun and fellowship along with seeing many things we'd never seen and going further south into California than we'd ever been.  We also celebrated our 21st anniversary while we were gone.  Us on our anniversary . . . we went to Alcatraz Island that day.

Our whole tour group.

Us at the Reagan Library . . . ready to board Air Force One.

A bobcat at the corner of the sauna foundation the morning after we got back . . . just hanging out watching for his breakfast.

This year was the earliest we ever went huckleberry picking . . . and a first for picking huckleberries before we'd gotten our blueberries!!  We had a beautiful evening and got about 5 quarts of berries.  They weren't too great and we plan to try somewhere else in another week or so.

Mt. Adams

My sweetie with Mt. Hood in the background.

Walking up the trail.  We just ended up looking here . . . berries weren't ready.



Tanner turned 18 months on Sunday.

Aimee's 18th birthday was Monday.

David's GF version of white chocolate raspberry cheesecake:)

Rick did the groundwork plumbing for our sauna on Tuesday.

A quilt I just quilted for my quilt group.

And a baby blanket for a new little one.

We got our peaches Tuesday night.  They're as delicious as always.  Ten boxes of  peaches.

All laid out to ripen down the basement.  (all of them aren't in the picture)  I like ripening them downstairs because they ripen slowly and I don't have to do them all at one time.  They're also out of reach of the little kids.

Yesterday Aimee and I had to go to Portland, so I decided to make a little trip to Fabric Depot at the same time.  I bought this wonderful little stack of fabric to make a baby boy quilt out of.  I'm so excited to work with it, but it's being saved for my beach trip at the end of September.  Those little eyes peaking from the bottom are from some adorable little foxes, going on the border of the quilt, and the gray minky is for the back.

Today we got gravel for fill in the sauna to get ready for concrete.  David had a conveyor truck bring the gravel and it was pretty awesome watching it.  The guy could drive the truck and move the conveyor belt around by remote control.  As you can tell, this was pretty exciting for the whole family:)






That's been our life over the last couple months:)  Hope you enjoyed seeing it!!