One Stitch at a Time

It's been busy here. I had to make the three hour drive to Spokane so my Bernina could get in a maintenance. It's one of those trips that is usually planned around someone flying in or out of the airport, but this time it was all about the sewing machine.

Applique for Hey Grandma!

And because they do it first come, first serve, I was too late to get on the list for the next planned maintenance. Won't be getting my machine back until the first week of September now. Ughh  Oh well, this guy does a fantastic job and I had gotten fairly disillusioned with the {much closer} maintenance service available in our area. Good thing I have a reliable backup! And also, the next trip over to Spokane will include some serious school shopping. Our closest big city shopping apparently doesn't have the appropriate stores needed for, oh yeah, attaining the coolest shoes? My girls were more worried about other girls showing up in the same exact clothing. Not my son. No, he is much more concerned about the shoes.

In the meantime, there's been a little bit of applique done on the Hey Grandma! blocks. I had the leaves all drawn out on the back of the fabric and was scared they were gonna be too small. It looked pretty discouraging at first try. Luckily I hadn't cut out more than two so it was easy enough to cut them larger than the drawn lines {I never draw my applique pieces so tight there isn't a little bit of wiggle room}. You wouldn't think it would be a substantial difference, but even an extra 1/8" of an inch gives enough to fully cover the width of the stems. So relieved I didn't have to ditch this fabric and go find another. This was exactly what I wanted in terms of color and print!

Hand Quilting for Flock of Geese

There has also been a bit of hand quilting done on the Flock of Geese quilt. Simple Kantha-like stitching through the flying geese blocks and an overlapping circle design in the wide sashing strips. So far I'm just doing an echo around the birds, but may come back and do more there. We'll see. It's been very relaxing overall. Just a meditative stitch, stitch, stitch and the occasional dilemma over specific thread color!

Signs of summer...

My husband is a contractor/carpenter/fix-it-guy and earlier this year he fixed a door for a customer. Didn't feel like he wanted to charge for such a simple repair and of course the man insisted. After some wrangling, they decided he would be paid in peaches later when the customers peach trees had ripened. Yay! We had to go pick them ourselves, but whatever. That is NOT a problem for us! I've been elbow deep in peach juice though, getting them prepared for the freezer. We do so love frozen peaches, peach pie, cobbler and of course, peach smoothies. Yum......