Meet Meg

And now....introducing....Meg!  Our new puppy.  We just adopted her from the SPCA yesterday.

She's nine months old, and is a Corgi/Spaniel mix, about 25 pounds.  Not sure how much bigger she'll get.  At this point she's enjoying hanging out, sniffing out her new place, getting used to riding in the car on our windy roads and not being stuck in the very noisy chaotic animal shelter.  I've never had such a young dog before, so any and all puppy training tips are welcome.
It is so wonderful having a dog in the house once again.  The cats unfortunately do not agree. Too bad for them though, she's here to stay. Lucky for them I have a big enough lap.

Windmills Stacked

The windmills are getting stacked up! Friend Jaye has been so industrious with cutting them out for me.  And so far I've cut a big zero so far for her.  So that's my project this week.  Now that this stack of new fabrics finally got washed I've got a lot to cut.  And the question still remains what solid color scheme I'm going to use for this quilt.  The first test block I did was a hand-dyed yellow, but I don't want to do a mostly yellow quilt, so more colors will be involved.  I'm thinking it will probably shades of clear-ish colors in my hand-dyes and then I'll group them together by color progression.  

A New Modern Group

 Last week I visited a new quilt group that meets in my area, well, they were new to me at least.  They were celebrating their 1st year anniversary.  South Bay Area Modern Quilt Guild which meets at SueDee's Quilting Knitting and More in Scottt's Valley.  A very nice group of people, with lots of enthusiasm for the "modern quilting" style that's going on these days.  They were so nice that I went home with a piece of the above fabric out of a freebie bag of someone's scraps that was getting passed around.  What a good introduction to the group, here have some free fabric.  I think it will be nice to have a non-art-quilt focused group to be a part of, since I like to make functional quilts also, so I plan to attend the meeting next month.

And Sue Dee's had just moved locations a few doors down and had a $1 a yard table.  Woohoo, Backing Fabric!  I love getting fabric like this, so it's easy to use it up and not get precious about it.  Especially for wall quilts, the busier and weirder the print gets, it's all fine by me.  If it's a backing for a bed or couch quilt, then I pay more attention to the backing fabric of course, because it's going to get seen and touched all the time.

A Day at the Lake

More summer road trip pictures for you.  I should have put this one at the beginning of the first post.  Here are Zach, me, and Alex along with the Happy Honda which took us all the way across the country and back.  This was moments before we piled in the car and took off on our adventure.  I was wondering if it was a good idea up until the second we actually departed, and then it was all pretty awesome after that.

Driving out of Wendover, Utah across the absolutely straightest road I've ever been on. If it wasn't for the wind, I would not have needed to steer, for about an hour.  Right straight across the salt flats.  Salt as far as you can see to either side of the road. It was beautiful, empty, and it truly looks unlike anyplace you've ever seen.

 Finally there was a change from all the endless salt, some beautiful sparkling blue clear and very very salty water.

Antelope Island State Park in the Great Salt Lake, it was a long walk across the beach to get to the water.

 And then there was a whole lot of wading through calf high water, about a half mile. We finally reached a sand bar and we were finally in the water.  We spent a lot of time just floating in the very salty water.  Even if you don't know how to float you absolutely can thanks to the density of the water.  Five times saltier than the ocean.  Thank goodness they had showers so we could rinse off, because the salt water had dried to a salt crust by the time we got back to the car.  My skin felt very soft afterwards though!

And bonus surprise wildlife, a pronghorn antelope standing by the side of the road on the island.  It just stood there looking at us for the longest time and then it finally walked off.  There is a herd of buffalo also but we only saw two of them really far away.  Way more buffalo to come in the upcoming Yellowstone pictures...

Postponed Stitching

Wanted to do some hand-stitching on this piece that I've been working on for five years.  But remembered that I had to stop last time because I'd run out of the hand-dyed multicolored embroidery floss. I hate it when that happens!  So instead of  getting any new stitching done, I ordered some more of the same colorways in the right size of floss from artfabrik.  It really is beautiful stuff, it stitches so nicely, and I love how it sits so strong on the top of the fabric.  Back to work finishing this once I receive the floss in the mail, this piece has a deadline now as I've decided to give it to someone for their upcoming birthday in November.  After 5 years it has probably been long forgotten so it will be a good surprise for them.

Adding To The ATC Collection

Adding to my ATC collection,  these are from a CQFA meeting a few months ago, I just neglected to share pictures of them until now.    

Bron

Jan

Jaye

Maureen

Nancy

Trudi

These are all great additions to my growing collection which almost doesn't fit in the binder I have them stored in baseball trading card plastic sleeves.

A Visit to SaltLand

This summer I drove across country with my kids.  Neither of them has their driver's licenses, so it was all me.  On our first day we drove from California all the way to Wendover, Utah, which is just over the border from Nevada.  It was a really long day of driving, but we had fun walking around on the salt flats once we got there.

Windy, hot, flat, and salt as far as you can see.

 Alex tried to make a "Salt Angel"

 Looks more like a Salt Frowny Face to me.

 Piles of salt everywhere on the edge of town.

It looks like snow doesn't it?  But those are the brine pools used in making potash.The blue water was so pretty, only salt and water, nothing else could live in there I'd imagine.

 And boy was it ever SOFT.  Like if you dumped all the salt you have in your house water conditioner...

Wendover Will, cigarette and all. I really dislike casinos, so much cigarette smoke to deal with, just not used to it.  And that's pretty much the only thing in Wendover, except for the salt flats.