Rainy Day Project

We had two days of rain, Friday and Saturday, and that meant I had some creative time on my hands. I've been thinking about Nora's upcoming wedding shower and then the wedding itself and decided to make a banner we could use to add to the decorations.  Her attendants' dresses are purple so I made this string of pennants spelling out her name and her fiancé's name.  Here it is draped over our couch:

And a close up to show the background fabric and details:

Everything is fused, except for the stitched hanging "string."  The white is actually a fine corduroy so it, along with the fusing, gives the pennants some body.  

I think it looks quite festive!

Belated 4th of July posting...

I travel with my iPad and my iPhone and usually that is all the technology I need.  And I used to be able to post to this blog using my iPad... but I forgot how.  (I suppose this could be due to aging, but I prefer to think that I used to have an app for that and don't have it any longer.)  So this post had to wait until I was home and my photos were downloaded to my MacBook.

We started out with a beautiful, sunny morning, and Russ ran in the Goose Rocks 5K.

For such a small community, there were 900+ participants in this race and they came from all over the US and Canada.  I'm thinking 4th of July weekend is a prime reunion weekend and likely all the huge beach houses in the area were full of generations of family and friends.  There was a nice, old-fashioned community spirit there and it was fun to cheer everyone on.

By mid afternoon, the clouds had overtaken the sun, but we decided to take the twins for a walk in Biddeford Pool, one of our favorite loops through some affluent beach properties along the rockier beach that adjoins a nice, long, sandy beach that we frequent.

Here is a view of the rocks protruding into the ocean and the growth of beach roses that borders the road.

The beach roses are beautiful this time of year and if you click the top photo, you can see the mist condensing on the petals, as it was not raining yet when I took these photos.

Many houses were dressed for the holiday, with buntings and flags, like this modest cottage facing the ocean.

I liked the year-round take on stars and stripes displayed on this porch:

It was foggy or misty over the ocean, so the visibility was very poor.  I think they refer to this phenomenon as "sea smoke."

You can just barely see a usually very imposing building that we think is some sort of convent or religious retreat.  

I was amused by this sign:

That's often my philosophy this time of year.  Summer is too short to spend too much time weeding!

It was raining pretty hard by the end of our walk and continued til well after midnight.  So any local fireworks had to be postponed.  That made for a rather nontraditional 4th of July for us.