A wonderful time was had by all

We had a great weekend at the beach with our kids. The weather cooperated beautifully! This large beach house belongs to our daughter-in-law's family. It was built just north of the little town of Long Beach, Washington by her maternal grandfather in 1980. This is the view of the Pacific ocean from the living room, eating area and master bedroom. Their property goes all the way to the beach so they don't have to worry about anyone building in front of them. Unfortunately what looks like a stream on the left side of the picture is the path to the beach, so we didn't get to walk to the beach. That's about the only thing we didn't get to do. The water was so deep it had a riffle like a lake - there has been a LOT of rain in the last three months! We played lots and lots of games - all our families have always been very big on games. Here you see the bunch getting ready to play dominoes. Our daughter and son-in-law are on the left, son and daughter-in-law and Chewbacca the dog in the center and my DH Fred on the right. We also played Boggle, 31, Phase 10 dice, Mille Bournes, Sequence, Whoonu, plus the video game Monkey Bowling. We also played both ping pong and pool. After a dinner last night of pizza we watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Even though we couldn't walk to the beach we still got some exercise. Yesterday morning we three ladies took the dog for a walk into town. We got our coffee for the morning, then Chelsea, Rebecca and Chewie walked to boardwalk while I visited the quilt store. I think I was very good - just one small sack full went home with me, in spite of the fact that they were having a fat quarter sale. Ninety-nine cent fat quarters are very hard to resist, but I bought only 8. I bought 5 yards of cheddar to go with a scrap quilt - maybe the strings - plus a half yard of a civil war fabric that particularly appealed to me. I bought a packet of 6" squares of the new Moda collection called Poetry. That gives me the pleasure of ownership at a very low price, and the pieces are plenty big enough for scrap quilts. Here is a picture of the haul. The round trip was a little over 3 miles, so that was a very nice walk on such a beautiful morning.

I did get one pattern also - a red and white ABC redwork pattern. Remember my collection of red and white fabrics? This might be just the ticket for using some of them. Unfortunately you can't see all the cute embroidery pictures in this scan, but you can see how they all fit in the center of the neat quilt blocks. They are color-book like drawings of things from childhood representing all the letters of the alphabet. This one will be fun to do, as I enjoy simple embroidery very much. But believe it or not, I have no plain white cotton broadcloth in my stash! I'll have to buy some white fabric in order to do this.Better call it quits and get back to catching up on laundry. After all, I have only 2 days to pack for my quilt retreat!