Retreat Part 1

This is our retreat house.  It's a gorgeous place that spoils us for anything or anywhere else. The two story is the original farmhouse and the wing is a new addition of four bedrooms. We each have our own bedroom and bath. And we wouldn't have it any other way anymore.  
 

This is the work shed.  I'm standing on the porch of the house so it's not a major journey.  We love it because it's self-contained and no one has to clean up for any other activity. We spread out and work.

This is the inside. Everyone gets a full 8 foot table.  If you squint and look to the back of the room in the far left corner, that's my space.  I need the light from the window for hand stitching and gratefully, don't need a table space.  There is a refrigerator for our drinks and a design wall and air/heat and great lighting and it works.

But for me, it's also the setting. The weather was picture perfect but the nights were cool enough that we had morning mist. 

We very much miss our original innkeepers but the people who took over are the niece, her husband  and nephew of the originals so we don't feel like we're abandoned to retirement nor is there a lack of hospitality.  The new owners are bringing their own to the table, literally.  This past summer they put in a larger veggie garden and a very nice flower garden because niece loves vases of cut flowers throughout the inn.  Gorgeous stuff.

I told the niece this was the photo of the day for me. Inside the deer fence at the edge of the flower patch was this chair. It looked like in a quiet moment you could find her just sitting and enjoying her flowers.  

We had spectacular sunsets but how many of those do you want to see? Notice the chairs there at the edge of the lake looking out at this site.

And this was the morning I left.  Full moon lit by the morning sun with the mist rising over the lake. Honestly, this place gives definition to the word "retreat." 

More tomorrow!

 

You Say It's Your Birthday

 

It's been awhile since I've visited blogland but with good reason.  I must start, though with our Adelaide's family birthday party yesterday. 

Many of the cousins are not here for one reason or another but in my humble opinion these are the ones most important in my heart.  How awful is that to say?  These are the ones that belong to PH and me and they were all there.

Adelaide wanted her young man to meet her favorite cousin so here they all are, enjoying the greenhouse and lunch.  It was a beautiful day for a beautiful young lady.

Tomorrow I start with our quilt retreat of last weekend.

One More Time

 PH and I just returned from our annual trip to the Upper Peninsula.  It's a work trip for him and I'm along for comic relief. We discovered when we returned the rental car that we had driven 2,145 miles in 9 days.  The worst of it is the going up and coming back.  In between there are more stops in small towns and those little towns are far apart.  We aren't sure, every year we say "this one is our last" but we keep doing it.  Each year, we treat the trip like it's our last and visit our greatest hits, discover new places and say goodbye as we cross the Mackinac Bridge going home.  You never know.

As we started packing up the car I said we would never be able to backpack through Europe. Not the way I pack.  The good thing about driving is I can take everything.  Flying is more of a challenge.

These hexies have been everywhere and the project is growing in size.  As I take the paper piece out of the back of the hexie, I drop them into the cup and just choose with no rhyme or reason.  The only thing I try to stay away from is two reds or two navy blues next to each other.  This keeps my eyes on the project and the scenery and eliminates my tendency to back seat drive.

The population in the Upper Peninsula can very very sparse. That's why many move up there. They almost shudder when they think of living down state in a city.  

We decided Fitzgerald's restaurant in Eagle River is our favorite in the whole state. The food is wonderful, the gin and tonics are too pretty to drink.  But the view! Notice the vase sitting on the window sill and Lake Superior on the other side of that picnic table. Every time we go I ask how the building survives the November storms (on Lake Superior November is a fierce month.) The lake is RIGHT THERE.  But they say it's never an issue.  Huh.

One thing I've wanted to see in all the years we've been going on this trip....well, two things....I've wanted to see a real Moose and a bear.  It's never happened.  But this is evidence those bears are there and they know what's inside a cooler!

There is a dear little bookshop in Copper Harbor - the farthest north you can go and be on mainland Michigan - and every year I take my birthday money with me to shop in Grandpa's Barn.  The owner knows me by now, I trust her judgement and recommendations and walk out with a pile every time. 

The bottom two books I found in two Little Free Libraries along the way. Father Brown I took with me from home.   I'm not in to going to every gifty shop we see, but I can't pass by a bookstore.  This one I save up my money for.

Our last night, our last sunset. 

The Fix

 I hand quilt.  How many times in 30 years have I cut a thread?  A million?  How many times have I 'slipped' and nicked the appliqued piece?  None, until day before yesterday.  Why couldn't the nick have happened before the whole quilt was layered and basted? 

After giving some thought to what I was going to do and even if I was going to send it out to be machine quilted, I started by outlining each petal.  Then...nick.  No excuses other than I was tired.  So. Stare at it for a day and think what would be involved to fix it.  It wasn't more than a couple of threads but you can't feed a washing machine a weak spot. (The quilting looks kind of clunky here but it isn't in person.)

A bee!  Bees love sunflowers as much as Adelaide does!  I like bees!  I have some fabric with nice bees on it!  Applique a bee over the nick!  It worked.

My reading days at school are over.  The teacher whose class I read to for years retired and rather than find another teacher, she said she wants to do what I did with her grandchildren's classrooms - follow them through as they progress through the building.  Good for her! It was a good ride but it was time to move on to something new.

Before covid my daughter had a program at the museum for tots.  Once a month young moms could bring the littles for a crafty morning. Daughter had in the back of her mind to reinstate that.  I had put the notion in her head of including an appropriate to history story to school groups that come.  We put the two different thoughts together and came up with reinstating the tots craft morning with a story or two.  I told her I'd run it.  

We will start in October.  October is pumpkin time (do you remember our conversations last fall about the difference between what you call a pumpkin and what we call a pumpkin?)  Since our craft morning will be in the very beginning of the month and the holidays are at the end of the month and these littles don't have a sense of time yet I decided to go with pumpkins but not Halloween. 

These are the books I chose and the craft.  Two books, one craft, coloring the pumpkin (which won't have staples) and making a stick puppet.  But you can't do the beloved rhyme Five Little Pumpkins without finger puppets so I made some and got a little carried away.  They are primitive, but so are pumpkins that are carved by a 3 year old.   We are reinstating a program that was stopped six years ago so till word gets out there may be one child or ten. Plenty of pumpkin finger puppets to hand out.

Once I get the flow of working with 2-4 year olds under my belt I will have a better idea of what crafty thing works. I am not even considering this will go smoothly. But all kids like a story and choosing which ones to read will be the hard part.  There are too many good ones and not enough time.

Ginger

 

This time of year absolutely everything is flavored pumpkin.  There isn't a choice, it's everywhere.  We had this discussion last year so I won't repeat myself here.

While I enjoy a piece of pumpkin bread or a muffin I don't love it enough to have it flavor everything in my life. I don't even like pumpkin pie.

What I do start thinking of this time of year is gingerbread.  Those deep, rich, sticky flavors of gingerbread are my thing.

Ginger is very hot - like peppery hot - and if you use a lot of it in something you can set your tongue to tingling. But I always say, "if you can't taste it, why eat it?"

I bought this book.  Luckily the people I know, know me well and gift me with gift cards to bookstores so I can shop and indulge myself when I see something I want.  Usually if I buy a cookbook I have to look at it in the store to make sure there's more than one or two things inside I'd be interested in. Then when I bring it home I read it carefully.  This book had lots of goodies. 

The first thing I made was this.  It's stem ginger and even though I made it, I still don't know what it is or how to use it but the house sure smells good.

The recipe was confusing only in the size to cut the ginger.  I ended up chopping it into small pieces while the sugar syrup was cooking down.  One of the recipes called for using two ginger balls but there was no talk of balls in the recipe.   I'm not worried.  I improvise more than I follow directions.

It will be interesting to see what comes of this.  And yes, she has recipes in the book using it. 

And isn't this pretty?  Peaches are a luxury this year.  A late hard frost took all of the peach crop in our area so if you want them you have to search farther afield and pay dearly for them. Well, it isn't summer without a peach and I made this crisp to take to friends for a fun day.

Three Tables

 

It took three tables pushed together to get this completely flat for basting.  Actually, that was a nice surprise.  In the past I put PH's puzzle table and the dining room table together but I really, really needed this quilt completely on a surface, no fiddling with "almost."  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the accent table next to the window.  I put it in place and it was exactly the right height, size and boy was I happy.

I really needed this taut, lined up, and still.  

I figured out by chance that I could cut just an inch or so off the sides of the back fabric and it would fit exactly the dotted fabric on the front for size.  So I measured and measured and waited a few days so I could look at it, circle in, wait for the attack. 

Finally, I cut the yellow over size for overhang on the edges.  And this is where it needed to work. I wanted to match corner seams on both front and back, run my fingers along the seams and pin to match. I pinned and pinned but didn't have enough safety pins because my stash of safety pins for basting are holding three other quilts in the que.

    Then I thread basted.   And it's ready.

The Back

 Next stage: the back.  Adelaide chose this beauty from my stash.  It's been hiding in there for years. I always loved it too much to cut into it so it works here for sure. And it gets to stay whole.

Problems. There isn't quite enough.  I don't have a designated sewing room/studio to lay out a quilt. I don't get down on my knees anymore...not if I want to get back up...so the floor as a working space doesn't work. If I lay it out on a bed it never lays flat enough to get a good measure if a good measure is what I need. When I was working I used the tables in the library. When I stitched with a small group in town I could arrive early and use those tables. So I commandeer the not-big-enough dining room table and PH puts his true Patient Husband hat on and doesn't complain.

The thing is, this back needs a border to extend the edges to fit. This is where the panic sets in. This is why I buy way more than I will need. I know me and I know I will fudge this somehow so I need extra in house.  I need to cut enough so the borders are even all around but if you look closely the sides don't need as much as the ends.

So it sits. Waiting. Someday I'll be brave and get the thing cut. Maybe this weekend.

Those of you who have a whole room with actual room to do your stuff?  Lucky you!