Tuesday, March 7, 2017

Stimpson Reserve trail run

I haven't ran on the Stimpson Reserve trails when there was snow on the ground before, it was soo pretty and NO I'm not tired of the snow. I do get tired of dark and rainy days..... but never of the snow.
We live in the county and our running options out the front door are just paved roads not so much fun, so my husband and I decided to run in the Stimpson Reserve for today's run. We weren't sure just how much snow we would encounter there especially on the upper areas. Turns out there wasn't any on the trail but enough around to help me feel like we were running in a winter wonderland.




We decided to run twice around Geneva pond, to give us a little more mileage.
Yes!  Our Spartan race training has begun again in earnest 😀. 
We will both be doing Saturday's Seattle Super in April. My husband will be doing the full weekend with the Sprint on Sunday. This is the first year there is a Sprint at this location. The Sprint is called the Seattle "Emerald City " open and is the first race of the season for the 2017 Spartan U.S. Championships series. It will be filmed by NBC and should have a full roster of pro and elite Spartan racers, this would be a good one to go and watch or just wait till it airs on T.V. later in the year 😉.
Garmin stats -
total miles - 5
minimum altitude - 552 feet
maximum altitude - 886 feet
total ascent - 781 feet
total descent - 751 feet



Monday, March 6, 2017

Mon Oeuvre ~ en provence Mystery Quilt progress 13

"Oeuvre" (the works of a painter, composer, or author regarded collectively: "the complete oeuvre of Mozart" a work of art, music, or literature: "an early oeuvre" ORIGIN late 19th cent.: French, literally ‘work.’ - Oxford Dictionary.)

The last time I blogged about my Mystery Quilt Progress, I was trying to decide how to quilt it - should I hand sew or machine stitch it?? 
In the past more often than not quilts were tied every so many inches with thread or yarn, but now quilts are generally quilted either by machine or hand-stitched with a pattern or design throughout it's surface.
 Here's an example of some Long arm work I found on this blog site.

I don't have a Long arm machine and I don't want to pay to have the quilting done, so I decided to machine stitch it myself on my own sewing machine. I did simple diagonal lines across the entire quilt.
The last two weeks I've been quilting the layers together. Here's the finished "quilted" pictures.
Top

Back

Then it was on to cutting the binding fabric and connecting all of the strips together so that they could be sewn to the top of the quilt. I had enough of the yellow from the quilt fabric so it became my binding 💛.



I'm glad I conquered my fear of doing binding. I did my quilt sample with a local quilt shop class and everything was covered in our weekly classes except the binding. The instructor said we were on our own and could finish it without the class. She did say that she would be available if we had any questions, but it took me almost a year to summon up the courage to try, then I found out that it wasn't hard at all. I scoured through many books and YouTube videos before I started though.
You can see that project HERE, but now back to "this" quilt. I got the binding all sewn to the top, I pinned some of the binding together to see how I liked it and to check out my mitered corners. So far so good. Only hand stitching the binding to the back of the quilt is left to be done.