Perdido Key 2017

Nothing on my design wall today...

I haven't been sewing much lately because I was here for two weeks.

Just got back from a nice vacation to Perdido Key, on the Gulf coast at the Florida/Alabama state line. We've been going down there since 1983 and never tire of going back.

This is the condo we stay at now. For the first 20 years or so when we went down there we stayed at a beach house that's just out of the frame to the right, but it's now a private home. So we stay at The Mariner and this feels like "our" beach.

We had delightful weather most of the time we were there; got sprinkled on a little one day, and it was so windy a couple of days that our legs got sand-blasted as we walked on the beach, but for the most part it was sunny and pleasant the whole time.

Some days it was very calm, no surf. The sea oats and dune vegetation are pretty dense this year after a few sparse years.

Later in our visit the wind kicked up, the surf was pretty rough and the red flags were out.

I took along some sewing, some mindless HSTs to work on for a donation quilt, but I actually did very little.

Here's my sewing set-up at the condo. And check out that view from my porch!

Thanks to a visit to A&E Fabrics in Pensacola, I was able to find sashing fabric for my Solstice Challenge blocks. I had already searched my local fabric stores and actually bought something, but the olive green color flared brownish in home light. I was relieved to find something at A&E that would work.

All in all, a great vacation. I ate seafood and good unhealthy Southern cooking to my heart's content and came back a couple pounds heavier, but it was so good, and now I'll go back to eating sensibly.

We were scheduled to leave for home on Saturday 10/7, but Hurricane Nate was heading toward the Gulf coast and was forecast to make landfall near Mobile around midnight Saturday. The leading bands of wind and rain would have made our drive miserable across Alabama and Mississippi. It's a tough 12-1/2 hour drive from door to door with minimal breaks anyway, so we decided to bail out Friday afternoon. Good call. We had good weather on the first half of the drive home Friday and just a few sprinkles when we got into Arkansas on Saturday. We got home Saturday afternoon, and after two weeks away, it felt good to be home again.

So even though I didn't accomplish much in sewing or quilting, I did move two projects forward, the Solstice project and some HSTs.

Linking up with Small Quilts and Doll Quilts, Em's Scrapbag, and Love Laugh Quilt.