September

I spent all the time I could at camp in September because I don't get hardly any time to do that during the summer because of quilt show. After Labor Day, most folks have closed up camp and gone home for the winter, so it is peaceful and quiet but still warm enough to be out on the water. 

We have been experiencing drought conditions all summer long, and it is not much improved this fall. Two summers ago, the water was up over this top step and over the dock and stayed that way through part of August. This summer, the water has receded quite a bit. 

Normally, all this sand is covered with water, with just a narrow beach up by that house.

 

The water level has been so low for so long that the grasses have gotten a foothold. 

Neither my granddaughter nor I go swimming, but we do like to go wading every summer, and I was amazed how far out we were able to walk. There is even another sandbar behind me in the picture. 

You can see we were a long ways out from the beach when I took this picture, and the water was still not even mid calf. I wondered if we could have walked all the way across the shallow end of the lake, but my granddaughter decided she wanted to go back. 

 

I bought a kayak for my (ex) daughter-in-law several years ago but had never kayaked myself. The kids brought their kayaks up, and we keep a couple under the deck during the summer, so I whipped up my courage and decided to give it a try. My kayak was a wider one, so no worries about flipping it over and not being able to extract myself from the kayak. 

We decided to paddle straight across the lake, which was a lot further than it looked; but we made it. I actually had a blast, and paddling wasn't as tiring as I thought it would be. I paddled a canoe years ago, and that was a lot more draining for me. 

I choose a project to work on at camp every summer. I leave my small sewing machine up there and have everything set up in one of the dormers so I can just walk up and start sewing. A few years ago it was the 21-Year Pineapple Project, which took a couple of summers to finish. This year, it was these Cherry Crunch string units, pattern from Bonnie Hunter. I need hundreds of these units, and I'm up to 330 so far. I figure I'm close enough to the end that I might work on it this winter at home. 

These are all string blocks of course, and I've even incorporated a few selvages here and there. I don't know why it didn't occur to me before to do that. I think it adds a lot of interest.  

 

My granddaughter is old enough now to use a sewing machine. She made a pillow at her friend's house, so she's used a machine before. Although she has not expressed any interest in making a quilt, I did ask her if she would make a Cherry Crunch unit that I could include in my quilt, and she was happy to oblige. 

She feels quite confident behind the machine and knows exactly what to do. Her block is the one with the little fox at the top in the photo above. 

 

I worked on some of these blocks too for Bonnie Hunter's Shattered pattern. These are so fun to make!

This unit is one of my favorites so far, which also incorporates part of a selvage. 

I also made this string block, which will eventually become diamonds for another neutral strings quilt. I have no immediate plans to work on it, just had to make one to get it out of my system, lol.