A Trip West

We headed all the way west, to visit family, last week. So let me bore you with some holiday snaps.

Before we left, I was looking for something and found a UFO that needed very little work to finish, so I finished it up.

It is a scarf, in pompom yarn and given that it is 29C today, I guess it is going into the Christmas box. I wonder who will want a lovely soft scarf.

I also made 6 lip balm holders to take along as hostess gifts.

I managed to get a picture of 4, two had already been claimed.

The weather in Victoria was lovely, so we spent as much time as we could outdoors.

I tend to take pictures of things I don't see here. Ocean, mountains, lighthouse.

The highest point of Fort Rodd Hill. The fort was in use from the 1800's until the end of WWII. This is the Belmont Battery.

We went geocaching at Esquimalt Lagoon, but didn't find anything. I think our middle Canada mindset kept saying that no one would put a cache there because it would be destroyed in the spring floods. Of course, it is the ocean, so no spring floods, just tide.

I was invited to visit a private bonsai garden. This is a bonsai dogwood tree.

An azalea with flowers much bigger than we see them here. This one blooms in two colours, and it isn't grafted.

This azalea was tiered like a wedding cake, and also two coloured.

I was sworn to secrecy on the location of the garden, but it isn't really a problem because someone else drove, and I have no idea where I was.

This was the concierge at our hotel, an amiable fellow, named John. Not good on advice on where to eat, though.

This is the dock at Butcharts Gardens. I brought back lots of pictures of ocean and mountains.

This pretty much encapsulates Butcharts Gardens. From the bottom up, you can see the Italian Gardens, The Rose Gardens, and the tops of the trees in the Sunken gardens, with a view of the trees going up the mountain. The gardens are built in an old cement quarry.

Because we travelled back on June 22, we got to see the Midnight Sun. This picture is out the window of the plane at about 23:30 Eastern time.

The sun can still be seen to the north. Of course, we didn't get to see an Northern Lights because it was still bright.

Fortunate Finds

A few weeks ago, in my ongoing sewing room cleanup, I found a quilt top that had been resting for quite some time (I suspect it might be 10 years). If memory serves, I was originally overwhelmed by the size of the quilt, then, when I next looked at it, I thought it looked too Christmas-y to put all that work into.

This time, I took a careful look at the top. The green borders had not been sewn on, merely pinned and there was more fabric in the box. My original plan would have made the quilt huge. After I removed the green borders, and added just red borders, it is much improved in my mind.

It is now about double bed sized. It has very nice red borders.

Doesn't look Christmas-y at all. It actually looks kind of like my backyard trees.

Lots of red and cream with some green leaves.

In a piece of good luck, I was at the quilt shop where I got the fabrics for this in the first place. Another store in the building had had a flood from a burst pipe, which caused the quilt shop to go through their storage area, looking for things that had gotten wet. They found some older fabric, that they dropped on the sale rack.  I found a bolt of the floral print.

There was a little over a metre on the bolt, so I took the whole thing. I now have binding for my new quilt, as well as extra fabric for doing something with the borders I removed. I have a plan!

Oh, and I figured out a way around the overwhelming size. I am sending it to be quilted on a long arm. Turns out you don't have to do every thing yourself. I just need to make the backing and it will be off to be quilted.