Sunday Stitching.

My favorite place to be in the quilt making process...time to hand sew the binding!!!

This is "River Rocks." It is from the technique our Breakfast Club did from the YouTube video called 10 Minute Block

It is the first quilt for me to get quilted in eight months...you know...that little diversion in Paris this winter kept me from my midarm. I asked myself several times while quilting this one, "Will I ever get past the bumbling stage?" I'm sure the long stretches between my machine quilting events are the real problem so hopefully I am going to overcome that obstacle now. 

This time I ran into a new problem...getting my bobbin to wind. Midway through the quilting I ran out of bobbin thread. When the new cone came in the mail I promptly tried to wind a bobbin and failed...the thread would almost immediately slip out of the tension disc. 

ARGH!!!

I took a break and several hours later my mind came up with the one thing I had done differently this time...I had forgotten to put the little white netting cover over the thread cone. That made all the difference. Such a little thing..but it was important. Hopefully the first quilting session of the season has the bugs in my memory worked out...at least a few of them.

While waiting for the bobbin thread to arrive I finished the Eldorado Canyon quilt I bought from a kit at Hancocks of Paducah. I love this quilt! The designer is Chris Hoover of Whirligig Designs. She used a Tonga Treat Strip pack called Bluegrass for her fabric color palette. I learned so much from this kit. I would never have used a "background" with so much color and large sized stamped motifs thinking it would  muddy the look...but not so. There are actually two background fabrics and the bear paw blocks with the sharp points are sew with a more traditional tone-on-tone background.

My husband has been home for the month of July. We were invited by friends to fly-in for dinner at their lake side cabin. Here's our Cessna 206 float plane at the cabin dock.

The main cabin. This lake is only accessible by float plane during the summer months. (In the winter...maybe by skis on the plane once the lake is frozen.) It is a convenient 30-minute flight from Anchorage. Pretty nice cabin! And the weather was very cooperative for our grilled steaks on the deck.

We stayed in their guest cabin. Cute! The outhouse is in the woods behind the cabin...just follow the little trail to the right of the tree. I suppose I should have taken a picture of it...oops...next time. They assured me no bears or signs of bears had been spotted this summer...good to know since I didn't want any surprises when I got up at 4 a.m. to trek to the outhouse.

The main cabin has running water from the lake for showering and there is a filter under the kitchen sink for drinking water. They also have a biodegradable toilet in the main cabin. Our little cabin had a queen and twin bed with a wood stove. Thankfully, we had mild temperatures and didn't need to fire up the wood stove.  

So fun to be back to our Alaska neighborhood.