Off to Bemidji

Oy, it's been a while. Oops. Nothing exciting to report anyway although here are some pics I've taken recently. The first are some taken from the Guthrie when I impersonated a tourist with my friend Margaux who was visiting from DC. The pic of the bridges shows the new 35W bridge although it's been open about 9 months now I believe.
The first pic is the top of the handquilted sampler I'm doing. I still need to lay it out with the batting so I can actually quilt it which will take quite a while. The second quilt is the baby project I did for a friend of mine. That one was a lot quicker because I do the cheater method of knotting it rather than actually quilting it. The fabric is all from Crafty Planet in NE Mpls which is a great store. I've got some more fabric from there for my next project and I've got two other tops pretty much done that I need to lay out and knot sometime soon. One is another baby project but the second one is 64x64, my first big project.

Since I'm still feeling the effects of this economy (am unemployed) I've decided to spend all of next week in Bemidji. It's a long time for me in a small town so we'll see how that goes. I actually plan on being there the next three weekends in a row which is a bit daunting. This weekend is my grandma's 80th birthday party, the following weekend is the 4th and the weekend after that is a cousin's wedding. Too much Bemidji...

One Half Marathon Down, Countless to go...

Since I last wrote I finished my first half marathon for my longest run ever. For non-runners, a half marathon is about 13.1 miles and my previous longest was about 12.5. It was in Stillwater on May 24 and it went really well. I've been fighting some knee injuries so I took it easy and a friend was willing to be slow with me and we both completed our first halves in just under 3 hours. Not a very good time but our goal was to finish and improving that time can be left to races in the future. I definitely want to do another one sometime. The weather was great and even though it was Stillwater, the hills weren't awful. At least I didn't think so but others were complaining about them. Stillwater is a hilly city though so I was prepared mentally and my friend and I decided to schedule our walk breaks around them as well so that helped a lot.

I raised almost $750 for the St. Bernard Project so that was also a great incentive to push through everything and complete the run. They use every penny they get very wisely and generously give so much to the residents of SBP that I was happy to be able to help them out in whichever small way I could.

I've been pretty lazy on the quilting. I have the whole front put together but need to add the borders and then do the actual quilting. I did a small machine project though and now I'm really not energized to do any more by hand. Eventually. I'm pretty excited by the success I've had with the machine project so I'm hoping to repeat that soon. I'll post pictures of those soon.

Oh and Twins- I'm now at .500 with 2 wins and 2 losses when I've been in attendance. I guess I can go again because that's better than their overall record although it is worse than their home record so maybe I should go sparingly...