Camelama

Airplanes, mountains, sunshine.

Ah, bliss!  Machinery that flies, gorgeous snow-covered mountains, and a day of warm sunshine.

With family in town last week, we spent the day at McChord Air Force Base. My parents volunteer for the Flight Museum on base, and they have a great collection of planes that have been stationed at McChord, along with a lovely little museum and the hanger where planes are worked on. 

I have always loved the "face" of an airplane, or the profile.  It's amazing how easily you find yourself  anthropomorphizing an airplane!

This is a PB-something, I forgot which! It's being restored by volunteers, and then will be painted by the Air Force and placed up on the display hillside (pictures of the hill and planes follow).

 

Fabric finds

So, i admit it, I'm a fabric freak. I love it! All kinds of fabrics. Cotton, linen, silk, even wack-tastic oilcloth and fake fur.  I can make so many different fantastic things just from the remnant bin at the fabric store!

Thus when I came across a fat quarter swap, I just HAD to participate.  Here's my haul:

And then, cruising a local thrift shop, i found these. First is a chicken wire print, from 2003:

 

This is a print from the 1970s by a Finnish designer. Vintage! (Altoid tin for scale of print). I *love* this, I can't wait to start making things out of it.

Twilight Criterium, 2010

This past weekend Ballard hosted the Twilight Criterium.  This is a series of bike races on city streets. For this one, they blocked off all the streets around one block in Old Town Ballard. Races went from 3pm to 9ish. I stopped by and caught the Women's Cat 1-2 races at about 5pm.

 

I won!

I entered Sew Mama Sew's Giveaway Day - any blog participating in the event hosts a giveaway, and you can enter as many as you like.  And I won TWO giveaways!

First, there's this incredible little zipper pouch ... made of selvedges!!  To think, all these years, I've been throwing these away!!

Mother's Day, 2010

I popped down to the parents' house over Mother's Day weekend, and we got out in the gorgeous weather and visited one of our favorite spots, the Brownspoint Lighthouse. 

 

There's also the lighthouse keeper's cottage, newsly refurbished, and a museum in the lifeboat house.

I liked the little triangle windows in the eaves here.

Looking past the lifeboat house, up the shoreline

 

The lifeboat rails heading into the water, looking north up the Sound.

One last shot of the cottage and small garden surrounding it.

Syttende Mai - Norwegian Constitution Day, May 17

My neighborhood, Ballard, has a long tradition of celebrating Norwegian Constitution Day. Along with events, meals, dances, lectures, etc, we have - A PARADE!  Always held on May 17th, the city shuts down major streets to run the parade. Typically it's a work day and I hadn't been able to attend, but one good thing about underemployment is I get to go to a PARADE!  This is the oldest Syttende Mai parade outside of Norway, and the biggest one outside too!

First were the motorcycle cops doing synchronized driving tricks...

 

Everyone was getting in the spirit, even if you didn't have Norwegian in your background.

Catch up part 3!

Of course, more cat pictures:

 

 

 

I did a One Tiny Scientific Thing craft swap, and got this incredible little field journal from my wonderful partner "loves2experiment".

 

 

Catch up part 2!

On May 1st, my pal Denise and I were in a neat little rally up in the north part of WA state.

We pulled over once to make sure we had our bearings correct, and ran into some curious folks...

   

We ended up at a lovely house, that used to be a b&b. The new owners are planning a lot of work on the grounds, but I thought it was beautiful even now!

Catch up!

Ok, let's go - about a month of stuff to talk about.

Crafty!

For a Frugality craft swap, I made a tote with ties as handles and a waterbottle holder out of ties, good ways to use up the ties the men in your life don't want any more!

 

I've been doing a lot of reading, though it does get difficult sometimes:

 

Lots of cat time:

 

I enjoyed the early Spring we had, before Mayvuary and Junovember struck:

 

More in the next post, this is getting photo-heavy....