Halloween #2 and more vacay photos

Let's start with the quilting since this is mainly a quilting blog. However this was pieced while on vacay:) It's definitely time to get Halloween items listed in my Etsy shop so I am on a roll.  The center of this is one of six panels on this piece of fabric. Each piece is approximately 9" square and is from Henry Glass. 

I was so focused on this wall hanging that I forgot to take in progress shots. But when you look at the photos you can see I left the original orange fabric around the panel.  The little green faux piping is where I started doing my own thing with the borders. Including another faux piping border in black and white stripes before the final ghost fabric border.

And before long Halloween #2 was all done and it waited to be quilted when I got home.  

Lots of stitch in the ditch (SID) occurred and then some fun U turn quilting in the polka dot white triangles. Cross hatching on the diagonal on the panel square itself. Piano key spaced at 1.5" on the outer border.

Before long it was all quilted, bound, and listed in my shop.  And onto Halloween #3, I'll save that for another post;)

So this leg of the vacay was all about the ATV trails in the Lakewood, WI area. We had a week there. Here is a sampling of one of the trails we took. This one had very sandy trails and hubby was having lots of fun driving on this one. Lots of curves too!  Along this trail we started seeing wild black berries. But most of them were green yet.

But on the next trail in a different county they were ripe!!  We might have eaten a few and we might have brought home a few for the freezer. 

You never know what the trails are going to be like until you are on them. A few bridges to cross on this one. I have to say the weather sure cooperated with us and we were surprised that there were not many bugs. 

Linking up with Monday Musings, Design Wall Monday  Sew and Tell Monday., and This and That Monday.

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More Fun Was Had

The fun continued after visiting our son and DIL we went on to a lake to have fun with our daughter and family. Some relaxing, some boating, some fishing, some just hanging out. This was the view from their cabin, we were in our camper in a not so inviting spot so we hung out at their area(while they were there) more.

Look at all the pelicans hanging out on this point. 

After they all had to return home to go back to work hubby and I spent time in our ATV on the trails. 

Aren't these trees cool!

The main reason we went on these trails was to look for Juneberries as we had seen them last year. And indeed we found them and they were all over the place!!!  They are so yummy. We ate a bunch and then got serious picking so we could bring home and make jam at a later date, we froze them for now.  As we were picking them we looked down and wow, there were wild blueberries too!!  Yep some of them came home with us too, I will make muffins with those.

And we went back another day and picked more!

And we had time to pick some wild raspberries too, once again everywhere you looked there were bunches of them. And even more Juneberries made it into our bucket:) I think we have a gallon and a half. 

Since this is a quilting blog here is one of the panels I bought this past week. Isn't that a cute haunted house?  I think it will be fun to customize it into a sweet wall hanging.  But I think I will work on the other one first since it is several smaller haunted houses. So stay tuned, it might be a couple weeks;)

Have a fabulous weekend!

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Fun times

 It was a great weekend visiting our son and daughter-in-law. 

And the beautiful rose garden.

I even got to stop at a quilt shop! I found 2 Halloween panels and 1 patriotic one, I'll have fun creating fun wall hangings with those. The Halloween ones need to be worked on soon for this fall. I didn't snap a photo of those yet, maybe for the next post.  My posts might be a little sparse for the next month as I enjoy some summer activities;)  My apologies in advance that visiting blogs might be sparse too for a little bit. 

Here's hoping that your summer is going well.

The great outdoors and quilting

 Hello my quilty peeps!  I hope you have had a wonderful week, I sure did.  We have been out camping, ATVing, visiting our son and daughter in law, meeting up with our daughter, son in law, and grandkids to go boating and fishing.  What fun we had and memories made. 

The ATV trail is an old railroad bed.  We even managed to get a flat tire, the first in 5400 miles that we have put on our ATV.  Hubby had a repair kit and pump so he got the tire plugged and we headed back to camp that day.  We weren't sure if we could trust the plug and didn't want to be stranded out in the forest a long ways from camp. 

 

Lots of mud puddles, some you could go around, but most you had to go through.  And the bugs were horrible, lots of spray and then still wear jeans and long sleeves.

We also picked Juneberries, YUM!  Just enough to fill our tummies;)

Even though it was warm out, we had a nice time sitting around the campfire and catching up.

           

And then there was boating/fishing.  

Remember I mentioned we needed to go refrigerator shopping a few weeks ago.  Well we found one we liked, it was a little bigger so hubby had to move out the cabinet board that ran to the floor by an inch.  They could have delivered it sooner but we were on vacay so it arrived yesterday afternoon. 

Before we left for vacay I pieced/quilted and bound this fun sunflower wall hanging. I stitched down the sleeve this morning.  The sunflower was a part of a panel that I trimmed and started adding borders with the black around the sunflower and then green/gold checkerboards. After adding a black sashing spacer of black four pinwheels were added and more black to frame it followed by a pretty green border. I'll be getting that listed in my Etsy shop soon.  

Linking up with Finished or Not Friday

Vacation + Fantastic News!

If you thought my blog was quiet his past week it was because we were vacationing up at Itasca State Park in the NW part of MN.  My DH and I visited/stayed there twice some thirty five + years ago. We have wanted to go back for a long time.  We stayed at Douglas Lodge cabins when we were there before, this time we had our camper and stayed at Bear Paw Campground-a very nice place right next to Lake Itasca.

However, we wanted to go back to the Douglas Lodge area to see it again, it has changed a lot over the years. We thought we would immediately recognize the cabins we had stayed in, nope, didn't happen.



We did enjoy our time there so much last week, camping, kayaking, biking, hiking, and just driving around.  While kayaking one day near the headwaters of the Mississippi we saw a bald eagle.

DH walking over the Headwaters of the Mississippi. The left is Lake Itasca and the right the Head of the Mississippi.  We waded a ways downstream, even though it was a bit cold.






















These guys were plentiful all week long!  I couldn't resist, just look at his color!














This pair of Trumpeter swans were on nearby Mary Lake.




While kayaking on Ozawindib lake we spotted the largest turtle swimming that I have ever seen(except for sea turtles).  I thought it was a big rock in the shallows and then it moved right toward me,  he had to be the granddaddy!  At about 18" across, big old wrinkly neck and head.  Of course it all happened to fast for a picture.

While taking a hike we ran across several of these precious lady slipper. I have never seen one in person before, so pretty!

 The wilderness drive through Itasca State Park.  A much needed vacation for both of us. And now back to work on Monday morning. 

But first my fantastic news...I sold my first Etsy product-a quilt!!  So we left last Sunday for vaca and we get to camp that evening and I decided to see if the campground WIFI would actually work and I was pleasantly surprised it did!  So I am reading my email and I see Etsy sent me a congrats on my first sale!!  I was so excited that I could barely tell DH what happened, all I could get out was OMG, OMG!  Then I really wanted to do a happy dance, but thought the other campers might have thought I was a bit nutty, LOL  So I did an internal dance that lasted for hours! 

My dilemma was that I didn't have the quilt with me to ship, so after I remembered my Etsy password I sent my customer a note and hoped it would actually send(I've had problems in the past with that). So I fretted about it until I heard back from her and she was so kind and understanding and said no worries, enjoy my vaca and send when I got home.  What a sweetheart. And she only lives an hour from me. Thanks Darci!  So today off it went. This is the one she bought.

It has spurred me on and this week I am going to try to get a couple more listings out there. I need some beautiful sunny, windless days to do a photo shoot. 

I also visited a couple quilt shops up north, I will tell you about them in another post later this week.

Linking with Main Crush Monday, Monday Making, and Linky Tuesday.