Lyon Mountain

Dad, Damon and I climbed Lyon Mountain this past weekend. It was pretty cool (in the 40s) when we started, but you warm up quick going up a mountain. We took the new trail. It took us about five hours and on the way back down there was hail and some light rain. As it was a holiday weekend there were lots of people, dogs and a parrot on the mountain. As you can see from this view from the top of Chazy Lake it was pretty cloudy and hazy.

A productive run of quilting and finishing

Since I set up the quilting room to accommodate machine quilting on my domestic sewing machine I have officially quilted and finished five quilts. Three were community service quilts - two were previously posted on the blog - the tree and star quilt and the multi-color disappearing 9-patch. I also volunteered to quilt a top that was donated to the guild's community service committee - that was a crib sized Cat in the Hat quilt that I also finished.
Also finished two personal UFOs. The first was the House quilt and finally this one which is from the Sparkle Plenty pattern that I bought down at the City Quilter a couple of years ago. The original pattern is for a square quilt, but I added an extra row of blocks to the top and bottom to make it rectangular.
I have to say that quilting and finishing (including putting on the binding) of 5 quilts in roughly 2 months is pretty extraordinary for me. Especially if you consider that late August and all of September is crazy busy at work for me. This puts my UFO list back into single digits - yeah! So I have broken down the machine quilting set up and as soon as the Christmas presents are shipped off next week I will be back to working on other earlier-stage UFOs and using up some scraps.
  

Fall has fallen

 The first picture is one of the maples in the front of the yard from this past weekend. And the second picture is the ground beneath that tree just a couple of days latter. The weather has been very warm and very dry so I am wondering if that is contributing to the leaves changing and dropping so rapidly. It is now officially leaf season - break out the rakes and the leaf blower!  Of course this is only the first tree (it always loses its leave first) we still have three more to go - and that's just the maples.