Rayen

In my Fabscrap orders I received a bunch of flannel swatches. I don't usually use flannel, but I like the cozy way it feels. After removing the sticky tape from the back, I decided to make them into throw pillows for the sofa in my home office (much needed as the puppies chewed up all my old pillows.) I sewed them into big nine-patch blocks, and covered the seams with some dark blue seam binding hand stitched with silver holographic Sulky, to give each a primitive wintery feel. For the backing I used a big piece of sturdy navy suiting material. These turned out nice, I think. Add a purchased holiday pillow, and they work great as Christmas decor, too.

Hurricane Nicole didn't cause as much tree damage as Ian did, but there was a lot of little stuff to pick up -- one of the downsides to having a lot of trees around us. At sunset on the day after the storm the sky began to turn beautiful colors. I didn't mind the work involved in cleaning up. Everyone has to deal with some kind of recurring weather extreme where they live -- snow, tornadoes, wind spreading wildfires -- and (aside from the years I spent in the military) hurricanes have always been part of my life. I'd much rather spend a day picking up tree debris than six months shovelling snow, or run to a storm cellar during a tornado, or evacuate in the face of a wildfire. Actually we have wildfires here, too, and one year we almost had to run from one. Anyway, it's not that hurricanes are less destructive. Sometimes, as with mini-tornado that hit us during Irma, they can be terrifying. But more often than not they are just a day or two of wind an...

Hurricane Nicole dumped a lot of rain on us, and the winds were similar to Ian, but of shorter duration. We've got a lot of tree debris to pick up in the yard, but otherwise we got through okay.

Our corn bounced back beautifully after being flattened by Hurricane Ian, and we now have ears budding. My guy is hand-polinating them, so hopefully we can have them around Thanksgiving. We've grown and eaten up all the radishes from the seeds a dear friend sent, and they were delicious. The new pole beans are doing well, too. Our salad (left) and pickling (right) cucumbers have done super well. We'll be able to start harvesting the salad cucumbers next week, I think. The pickling cucumbers are a little slower, but they've started sprouting, too. I hope to make some homemade pickles for Thanksgiving as well. I'm so excited to have home-grown food for the holidays. :)

I discovered a hole in the patchwork of my Happiness quilt only after I'd hand-quilting three-quarters of the project. This was probably caused by my scissors catching a corner of the fabric as I was piecing it and snipping threads. I sewed over it with matching thread at first, but that looked awful. I then considered patching it with a piece of matching fabric, but it was in an awkward spot (bottom right corner of the top left pale peach patch.) My solution was to place a wee iron-on embroidered bird patch over the hole. I added two more of the same in other spots on the quilt so it would look like I meant to do it, too. It might not be the kind of solution every quilter likes, but the hole won't tear now, and the birds look cool to me.

A few weeks back my guy and I were bringing in the groceries when two F-16 jet fighters flew over our house. As in literally right over the house . Because we're on the flight path of a cargo airport we happen to see big planes all the time, but these jets were a first. Since I was pretty sure our corner of the country hadn't gone to war, I went online, did a little digging and found out the Thunderbirds were performing in an air show in our region the next day. We decided to drive to where they were performing to see if we could catch them on film. I've watched them perform many times over the years and it never fails to thrill me to watch the precision flying. My guy really loves aircraft of all kinds so it was a real treat for him, too. So many kids were watching on the side of the road with us, and cheered and waved. I hope these pilots never stop inspiring people with their amazing shows.

We have a new storm heading our way, and once again we're in the crosshairs. I hope it won't be as ugly as Ian was. Should we lose power and broadband, I've got a bunch of posts queued up to publish in my absence. I'll let you know how we fare on the other side of the storm. Sending out hope and love to everyone in the path.