Spinning Stars

This is one of my oldest handwork projects (there are still a couple more though!)

I started this after seeing a picture of a Spinning Star quilt in the class roster for Road To CA. I didn't take the class since something else was scheduled at the same time that I wanted to take more. But I copied out the picture for inspiration. 

It's gotten quite wrinkled over the years!

When I got to Retreat that year, one of the other ladies just happened to be working on a Spinning Star quilt...I found out where she got the template for the block, printed out the pattern and made a cutting template from template plastic when I got home. 

The idea that the Spinning Star could be seen as a flower with green leaves around it appealed to me. So, I gathered up some scraps and commended cutting. I found out really quickly the template only goes ONE direction to nest properly. I have a bunch of miss-cuts in my scrap bags,

This was in one of my Go bags for years. I only worked on it when I was out of the house until just recently when I decided it was time to finish 'er up!

It been backed with green fleece and bagged out and is waiting it's turn to be quilted. Not sure if it will get hand quilted or if I will do it by machine - probably by machine - the fleece backing is kind of odd to needle. Thinking of adding some French knots to the center of the flowers.

In hindsight, I probably should have gone with ONE green fabric for the leaves. But, I kinda like how the miscellaneous greens look too. The whole table mat is all scraps from my scrap bags.

Snowball Fights and Javalina in Tucson

What you say...where the heck did you get snowballs in Tucson? 

Well, let me tell you how!

We went to Tucson for a face-to-face Team Meeting for planning our next 13 weeks of work. There were probably around 100 of us from the applications development and support team. We also had some of the team on Zoom.

We stayed in a resort (pretty fancy!) 

The hill with cactus across from the resort

 My balcony

Had some lovely meals there too - I had swordfish one night and it was superb! Appetizer was figs stuffed with blue cheese - those were yummy! 

The leader of the Team Meeting said she always wanted to have a snowball fight in Tucson  -  she found you can purchase faux snowballs! They are made of some sort of cottony material and don't hurt when thrown. She had a bowl of snowballs on each table and we had great fun tossing them around.

We had a great meeting, got lots of tasks created in the planning software.

One night when we went back to the resort and pulled into the underground garage,  the driver of the car suddenly exclaimed 'PIG!' Sure enough, there was not only one javalina (the kind of wild pig that is common in Tucson), there was a WHOLE troop of them!

I told the front desk as I went up to my room - javalina can be dangerous if confronted.

South Padre Island

 Aggh.. it has been a long time since I posted anything, yet again. Sorry!

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I started work at an aerospace company in 1985, right before I graduated from USC (Master of Liberal Arts) and worked there for nearly 10 years, until the programming department was outsourced. I worked for the company that got the outsource contract for another 27 years, supporting the same customer. I finally had the chance to become 'A Real Girl' when the customer decided to employ me directly! I switched jobs on my birthday this last year and one of the things that came with the job was 50 hours of vacation. Now at this company you have to use your vacation before the end of the year - if you have time left at the end of the year, you can only save up to 40 hours and those have to be used by March of the next year. So what to do with my 50 hours?

We decided to investigate the southwest part of Texas (we have explored the northeast, the southeast and central so far). Plane flight to Austin the day after Thanksgiving and then we started our exploring. One of the things that was highest on our list was visiting Starbase in the very tippy bottom of the state.  We made it down there just before sunset and decided we liked the area a lot. 

One of the Starships

Sunset at Starbase

South Padre Island is near  to Starbase as the crow flies, but to get to it from Starbase means a 35 mile journey. We were looking for someplace to spend the night and decided we wanted to be near the water. We found a hotel with beach access and headed there.

View from our room on the fourth floor - you can just make out the water. The guy at the front desk said they USED to have full beach view, until the building in the back was put up.

Walkway to the beach

 Port Isabel Lighthouse

 From Port Isabel, you take the Queen Isabella Bridge. You can just make out Starbase (it was foggy a lot!)

We liked it so much that we spent most of the rest of our vacation days on South Padre, though we did take jaunts out to the surrounding area. It was fairly hot compared to the beach! We liked Los Fresnos and Harlingen. We explored Brownsville and Edinburg, but they are a bit noisy!

There was an amusement area. Tucked into a corner was this amazing sandcastle display.

I spent some time sewing up the Winding Ways blocks from my Go bag. I actually finished all 9 of the blocks and sewed them into a top. (It's going to be a table mat)

We went down to the beach every day, sometimes more than once a day.

View of the Gulf of Mexico.

Collected lots of sea shells.

I can identify most of them - there are several cockle shells, several oysters (the outsides of several look like they are rocks, but turn them over and you see they are really oysters), a partial mussel shell, a partial whelk shell, a baby's ear, a blue-edged scallop, a sundial, a clam shell, a lettered olive, a bonnet shell - could be a white scotch bonnet which the identification pages say is pretty rare, and a half-naked pen shell. 

There is a wee orangish cockle shell on the bottom right that has a hole - evidently Moon snails like to latch onto other mollusks and liquify the owner for their dinner.  

My favorite is the lettered olive - it has such an interesting surface - very polished and smooth. The pen shell is the most delicate - it traveled home inside the large oyster shell at the top. 

I need to find a way to display them. Probably need to get a shadow box.

And we made it back to Starbase before we left. Amazingly we got there just as the road was closing for the movement of the launch vehicle - the rocket part that will lift the Starship into space, back to its hanger. The guard was so excited!  We pulled over on a side road and got out just as it was passing by. It's HUGE!

Video of the launch vehicle being moved - not sure if this will work in the published version of this post - I can't get it to run in the preview. We shall see!

We went back up to Austin the day before our flight home so we would be 'in the area' and not have to rush to the airport. (We learned that lesson when we went to central Texas a few years ago..it was quite the wild ride and we were so frazzled when we got on the plane) We took a drive north of Austin to see more of the Hill Country. Since it was Fall, there were lots of gorgeous trees.

We want to go back to South Padre!