Winter Storms are here!

And the ocean is H*U*G*E!  We saw waves coming over Rainbow Rock a few times yesterday - and that is over 100 feet above the water level!  It's hard to decide where to look - so many sea stacks, so much ocean!!  Tee-hee!

DH is healing, walking over 2 miles a day - 20 minutes at a time.  We're both struggling a little with a healthy diet.  I'm not an adventurist cook!  And that is an understatement!  Rick and I used to tag team groceries and meals.  I've been on my own and I don't like it!!  Grocery shopping 2=3 times a week is NOT my idea of a good time!  But, life will get back to normal, or a new usual soon.

I can't believe I have left the Year's Review til now - but here we go!

There was a new addition last June!  Miss E made her appearance!

The boys came to the beach two times.  With their parents and their first "Camp Nana/Papa".  I love this tidepool picture!! Brothers do come in handy!!

                             

But it wasn't all fun and games - the Chetco Bar Fire roared down the mountains and we were evacuated!  Luckily for us, the wind changed at just the right moment to send it back on itself. 

 

The BigKids' Camp Nana/Papa was great fun and ended with a cousins sleep-over where they got to meet Miss E! We also got to share the Eclipse Event with with them!

Let's move onto Projects!!!

A&J's crew is designing their own stuffies - so besides my usual animal repair work, I learned to manufacture animals to very exacting supervision!! Here's our Saber-toothed tiger and some Anti-Hero who's name I can't remember!

I was active in MailArt fabric postcards.  I was in seven exchanges, creating over 30 postcards.

Valentine's Day fun with rubber stamps, "Love" stamps and my fancy machine embroidery stitches!

 Lighthouses.  Done by CY's method. Crayons and markers for details. Black lines are added by machine!

Quotes!  I had so much fun designing this card. Tracing a couch and then stitching in details.  Finding just the right font!  I may have been  my favorite!!

My favorite selvedges card.  I made a bunch of these - and I'm using them for the Birthday Fabric Post Card exchange in 2018!  Who wouldn't be cheered up by these!  And I draw a birthday cake on the other side!  Fun!

I used Riel's selvedge Mummies for my Halloween cards!  Love them!

Patti and I both have Italian penpals through The Quilt Show's Intl Miniature Exchange.  We turned the leftover lighthouses into Christmas cards!  I never heard whether my Penpal got hers - Rats!

My favorite postcard was the one I entered in the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show's Make a Card contest.  My little heart was picked to be framed and sold in their auction!  It was beautifully finished.  AND it sold for the maximum bid just the second day of the Silent Auction!  $250!!  Way above my budget to buy it back!

 

Favorite quilt projects were:

QOV mystery quilt.  We had several of these in the QOV presentation we held at the quilt show in May!  It was the first time we presented and it was so moving.  I ended up being the MC - and I was so nervous.  It was well attended, ran out of chairs twice!!  All those people ... too late to back out now!  So I simply focused on the front rows where the veterans were seated and talked to them.  We presented 17 quilts and it was so-o awesome!

L wanted some things in her etsy shop, we decided on baby quilts.  So I made/finished six of them.  Also gathered antique tops to "release into the wild!"

I found "Kelsey's quilt" on Pinterest.  Yep, I'm still addicted!  It uses charm squares, I love this one.

  

Girlie By the Numbers.  Great fun to put all sorts of squares and shapes together.  By cutting only certain sizes, they generally all fit together without much angst!

Baby Rainbow - one of my favorites.  Just love the colors and the scrappiness!  AND that it's asymmetrical!

Beach Baby was a design I came up with after making "Pies and Tarts"  I thought the circles looked like beach balls!  What do you think??

It's a Jungle out there! was an idea after seeing a fellow Stashbusters' baby quilt setting.  I saw lots of possibilities with this one.  I was on the lookout for some of my favorite kid prints!  The sharks! The monkeys!

Baby Checkerboard - another idea from Pinterest.  I look at the picture, Try to figure out what size blocks I need to make it the size I want.  Then follow their design.

This one turned out too small, so I had to add checkerboards too - trying to keep the pattern in sync was picky!!


The antique tops sold, but the baby quilts have just aged!  So - don't have to try that again!  I loved some of them and was counting my chickens before they hatched!!  Oh, well.

My favorite quilt I made was "Shhhh, It's low volume"  A quilt I started at Finishing School (I get the irony!) and entered into the Newport show.  I love it - it's on my side of the bed as I type!!

 

Last weekend a Brookings quilting friend and I went down to Napa for #CraftNapa.  What fun!  It was DH's first solo weekend and I'm not sure who was more excited about it!!  It rained the first 5 hours of the trip :( so we consoled ourselves with  lunch at Schat's Bakery in Ukiah.  We may have even bought some of their Chocolate Chip Cookies for the rest of our road trip! But not enough!!!  Never enough! For some reason I picture a LOT of trips now planned to go through Ukiah around noon!

But more about that later!!  And perhaps some links to the stories behind these pictures??  We'll see.  Definitely some "Book Talk" too!