Autumn Days

I LOVE autumn. Love -- Love -- Love it! We did the pumpkin patch at Alternberg's last weekend, a yearly tradition. Lydia is holding the perfect pumpkin she found for her cousin Laurel.

The pumpkin on the left was designed by Lydia. We baked the pumpkin seeds and Lydia thought they were nummy.

We also took some time to walk around in the woods last weekend at Standing Rocks Park. I love the smell of the damp leaves. We were scoping out the bike trails for when Ken and I get our new mountain bikes.

It was nice to get Scout and Zoe out for a walk too. Scout turned 12 on October 5! (Scout is the black/silver/white Siberian Husky and Zoe is a Samoyed.)


I stayed up til midnight last night working on my cards for the card swap this month. The theme was "masculine". They are due tomorrow and of course I didn't start them til last night. :-) I am really liking this card swap group I am doing. It gets my hands busy with my card supplies and the cool thing is I get 5 different cards back for inspiration. It never hurts to have extra cards on hand either.
I mentioned recently that I wanted to take a beginning quilting class. Well, I started this past Tuesday! In the class I will be learning how to make a quilted wallhanging. It is a sampler quilt, 40.5" x 40.5". We are using the book "Start Quilting with Alex Anderson". The class runs til the week before Christmas. This is what I came home with after the class...

The instructor told me to choose the border fabric first and then use that to pull out three shades of two colors from that piece, as well as four neutrals. I chose this fabric as my border...
I pulled out green from that and chose these three greens...
...and these three purples...
For my four neutrals, I pulled out the gold color...
In the first class I learned how to make a nine-patch block.
I also learned how to make a rail fence block and I made three of them.
Unfortunately(!!) after I was done with these four blocks, I learned they were not 6.5". I sewed my seams a hair to big so I need to rip apart all four blocks and sew them again! I also have to do five more nine-patch blocks and five more rail fence blocks before the next class on the 30th! I am looking forward to it all though. I used a Bernina 240 something or other in the class and sewing on it was like cutting butter. I am hoping to get back on the same machine this Saturday for a few hours to work on my homework.