Door County

 After spending a week in Oshkosh, WI at Air Venture we went up to Door County in that little finger part of Wisconsin for four nights. We had never been there before, what a unique little place. We camped near Egg Harbor and did day trips from there, it never took long to go from village to village. Peninsula State Park was the first place we investigated and would love to have more time there and do a bit of hiking if my hip wasn't hurting.  Each day we went to a new place and stopped at a few different lookout spots along the way. So many marina's with lots of boats.

This is a restaurant in one of the Villages, it has a grass roof and there were live goats up there eating away!!  Everywhere we went in Door County the flowers were just gorgeous.

 

Isn't this a beautiful church.

A board walk we took just before the rain shower came through. 

People were jumping off the rocks into this deep pool.

The shoreline was just beautiful.  

And at the end of a long day of exploring we had to have a cherry treat since Door County is famous for it's cherries. As you can see we gobbled it right up;)

I didn't bother to get the sewing machine out for just a few days and we were so busy during the day I only had a couple hours in the evening so I did some hand embroidery. 

Linking up with these great linky parties where one always gets inspired!

Sew and Tell Monday

Design Wall Monday

Monday Musings

Embroidered Pumpkin Wagon

 I believe this pumpkin wagon block was embroidered last fall and then I ran out of time(aka-ignored it).  It has been sitting in a basket this whole time just waiting to be finished up.  This past week I worked on it in spurts, after finishing the checkerboards I couldn't decide how I wanted to finish it.  I texted Wendy at Piecefulthoughts.com/ with a photo of some samples of finishes and asked for her thoughts.  We agreed just putting on a green border would finish it nicely.  I am very happy with how it looks!  

Since I was working with scraps for practically this whole wall hanging I didn't have more of the inner green.  But thanks to a fabric acquisition on Friday, more on that in a moment, I had a green that was of the same coloring.  

I really enjoyed hand embroidering this little pumpkin wagon in the evenings while watching TV.  The embroidery pattern designer is Primitive Stitches. 

I hand sewed on three little leaf buttons after it was all quilted.  Some people worry about quilting over hand embroidery. Really there is no problems with it, I used a glide cream to match the background fabric and did a simple cross hatch. 

In the interest of using more scraps I pieced the back of this 21"x21" project.  I tend to add a split sleeve on these small projects so you only have to put on nail or pin in your wall in order to hang it. 

One could use it as a table topper if you wanted!  I will be linking with August Table Scraps Challenge where embroidery and orange were the requirements.  And since I used scraps I am linking with Oh Scrap!

Now about the fabric acquisition from Friday, a quilter who happened to be a nurse passed away from Covid last year, so sad.  Her friends and neighbors put on an estate sale with all of her belongings. I didn't know her but I heard the basement was just full of fabric and they had a presale for her friends before opening it up to the public. Well there was still plenty of fabric to pick from when I got there.  Here is my haul, charm packs $4 each,  Fqs $1, and yardage was $4.  All of the yardage I got except for one has metallic gold accents, my customers love that in the runners.  And the rulers were $3 each.  There was tons of books there on everything from sewing, embroidery to quilting. I didn't need any of those. But it's times like this that makes one really think of your stash...and then I go buy more, HA!

A closeup of the yardage, so yummy!!!!  I used some of it already!  You'll see the results this week;)

Weekly Goals

We meet again on this Tuesday to check out our goals for the coming week and see if we met last week's goals.

On my list last week- along with the photos of what I accomplished this week. 

• Start a new embroidery project ✅

I found this cute hand embroidery pattern in the Primitive Stitches Etsy shop.  A few evenings of stitchin' this week and it is all stitched.  Now I have to decide what I want to do with it from here. 

• Start a new pair of socks ✅

I am using two different yarns in an effort to use up leftovers.  One skein is a variegated green and the other variegated blue. So far I am changing colors every 10 rows for the leg. I thought it would be ugly when I started and now I kinda like the uniqueness of it!  I don't remember the name of the yarn but they are the same kind. 

• Patriotic Welcome wall hanging ✅

Almost the same as the previous one I made, but this one uses a different white fabric. You can find my pattern in my pattern Etsy shop. 

• An applique stars patriotic table runner ✅  

You can see a post on this finish HERE.

And on Saturday I finished this table runner using three Morning Star blocks from the Accuquilt Morning Star BOB(block on board).  This wasn't on my to do list but I had time and had the blocks already started. It didn't take long to add the borders and get it quilted and bound. 

Goals for this week are:

• Make a Cherry table runner
• Make a cupcake table runner
• Knit more on the sock
• Work on a UFO cross stitch project
• Use a mini charm pack in a table runner
• Work on my One Monthly Goal-time is running out for the month and I have done nothing on it.

This is a healthy list so I better get a move on!!   Linking up with Linda at Texas Quilt Gal for To Do Tuesday.

Some hand stitching

In my spare time I have been enjoying some hand embroidery.  I used to do a lot of it, mostly fall and snowmen and made them into pillows.  So when I saw Melissa at Pinker n Punkin Quilting was stitching these adorable snowmen blocks I jumped on the snowmen bandwagon!  

And three more, they are a pretty quick stitch. At first I did one in an evening. Then I stretched it out into two evenings. I wasn't in a hurry. 

And then I ran out of embroidery thread and I had to find a printer to print out a few more.  I finally got the thread and found a printer to use at the library.  So now I have one more done.  Eeek that is a horrible photo, the lighting was not very good!  They are all stitched on a very white fabric called Prairie cloth I think, I don't have the bolt handy to check. But it is a nice heavy cotton, I love the feel of it.  I used a FriXion pen to trace the pattern to the fabric. Then I can gently press with a hot iron to make any lines disappear when I am done.  Speaking of done, I have no idea yet of the setting for these cuties. Might be one quilt or it might be two or even three wall hangings.

I have always preferred to use a thin batting behind my fabric while I stitch and then I don't hoop my piece. It just feels comfortable to me.  There is one more in progress now and then I need to find more of that batting in order to finish up the twelve blocks.  So that is what has been hanging out on my design wall, what's on yours?  

Oh by the way, Happy Valentines to all my quilty peeps!!! 

Linking with Design Wall Monday and Monday Making. 

Snowman collector

These hand embroidered blocks were started a long time ago.  They were not documented so I really don't remember, but I'd guess three years ago.  Hand embroidery is something I really love, but it needs to be a simple stitch nothing fancy.  These were in a 2009 Quiltmaker magazine but not started right away.  My local quilting friend made hers more like the pattern which had several different colors of thread used, along with many colors of fabric.  I wanted mine to be all red thread and have a redwork look.

So in the fashion of trying to clear out more UFO's I pulled this one off the self thinking I needed to embroider the last block.  But to my surprise they were all stitched!  This made me so happy that I quickly trimmed the embroidered blocks to size and put them up on the design wall.

Since I wanted more of a redwork look I had been stumbling with picking fabrics.  I just couldn't quite visualize what I wanted.  And then it hit me yesterday that I needed to make it look more like my snowman table runners, using the red and gray fabrics.   It was the light bulb moment!  I have quite a bit of gray strings and pieces in a bag, all leftovers from the runners.  So out they came and the auditioning began. 

Something else I changed was not following the instructions exactly for the size of sashings throughout the wall hanging.  It was such a fun afternoon of designing this wall hanging.  And I absolutely love the results.  This one is for me:)  Not sure how I want to quilt it so it will be a while before tackling that.  What a great way to end the year, with my snowman collector UFO.  It was so appropriate to work on this one yesterday while watching the snow fall outside.  

Now I am itching to stitch again!  But that might be a while yet as I am still knitting on my sock every once in a while. Won't you join Julie at The Crafty Quilter for her December UFO & WIP linkup.  She hosts one every month. 

Wishing you all a happy New Year!  I am looking forward to seeing what the new year brings in quilting blogland!!

Linking with Midweek Makers, December UFO & WIP