Back to school and Door County

This has been a long but good week. 

First I will show a little of my Labor Day weekend. My honey and I went to Door County which is the thumb peninsula of Wisconsin sticking into Lake Michigan.  It has several cute communities of little shops, bays with lots of boats, and unique eating places. ( no fast food chains). And we love it because of the water and will wade in it, sit by it to watch sunsets, walk the rock or sandy beaches, and listen to the waves roll and  splash. We love going on Labor Day as there is a Maritime festival with lots of music and even fireworks at night. We have gone for several years. It was cool but very restful and relaxing. 

I wish my camera phone took better pictures, because the colors were gorgeous. 

We tried a selfie.  It just shows how many laugh lines we both possess. And I earned every one of those.  But you can see the piers and some of the boats behind us.

The drive takes a couple hours from Milwaukee to get there.  I usually do some handwork as we travel the freeways. This time, I took all the beautiful pineapple blocks I have from an exchange a few years ago.  ( next UFO project). And as we drove I very carefully removed all those lovely shreds of paper in the stitching on the back. Ha ha! At least it was easy to see against the black.

Here is the wonderful tool I used. I had searched two quilt shows for something like this. A friend had one that was just a breeze to help remove those itty bitty corners and spots.  So I bought it from Amazon.  Really.

This will be my layout. I think I will use a 3/4 inch lattice of the black.  I currently have 28 of these 6 and 1/4 inch blocks.  "Why such an odd measurement on the block?" you ask.  Well, it is because the pattern which was master copied for all the exchanges was supposed to have 1/4 around all sides. But it was short 1/8 on one side. So I carefully trimmed them to a perfect square 6 and 1/8 on each side. 

Tuesday was our first day back to school. And to tell you the truth, I had not been looking forward to it. After the end of last year, I was a bit frayed.  

But...I have a new position to supervise students needing a little TLC and push to get their work done during their study hall. I have organized folders to keep track of their work and help set goals.  It has gone very well, so far. Hooray for a new year!

In the evenings, I have only felt like sitting after being active all day.  Very different from my sedentary life over the summer. And I have been slowing inching down these branches with my embroidery. This all that is left to complete on this panel.  

I leave you with another sunset picture.  Hope all is well with you and your projects.