Windmills, Strings, and Grocery Chains

Welcome to Treadlestitches!  How are your projects coming along?

Our vacation in Vienna, Austria, was wonderful (a few photos below) but as always I'm glad to come back to my quiet regular life.   That includes quilting, of course!

I made this little Windmill quilt before we left, from a pattern shared at our quilt group by our Block of the Month leader Nancy Queen of Scraps.  It's an easy pattern using 2.5 in. x 4.5 in. rectangles in light and dark to make 8 in. finished blocks.

The border is an aqua print (last month's Rainbow Scrap Challenge color!) printed with colorful and probably fanciful poison dart frogs.  I bought several frog print remnants at a yard sale last year, no idea what the lady was making with it.

What about this wild print on the back?  It was also a second hand purchase, this time at the big museum sale I'm always talking about.  I get a big chunk of the fabric I use for kid quilts from that sale every year.

There are even a few orange blocks in the little quilt for this month's RSC color.

I really love orange!  Pulling out the big chunks of orange scraps is as far as I've gotten on August's color, but I'm looking forward to getting started.

Meanwhile, I've got some of last month's aqua blocks to finish up, like these string blocks.  I'll probably make some more since I have lots of strings to use up.

Oops!  Two of last month's grocery chain strips are pretty short.  I make them by sewing small scraps on receipts from the grocery store.  We were stocked up pretty well in July plus I bought veggies from the farmer's market, and then we were out of town, so I didn't buy as much.

Here's a little orange, from a garden in Vienna.  All these lovely flowers were surrounding a fountain near the natural history museum.

So that's the segue into a few vacation photos! 

We stayed in the city center of Vienna, near St. Stephen's Cathedral, which was begun around 1160 a.d.  The roof tiles are hexagons, which as a quilter I enjoyed very much. 

This is the view outside our hotel window.  The architecture in this part of Vienna is just stunning.  Even ordinary shops or offices might have statues and gargoyles if they're in an old building.  I admit to doing a lot of gaping and pointing.

We did most of our sightseeing in museums.  I'll add a few other pictures in later posts.

Isn't this adorable?  These mosaic designs were made by children with the help of the Kiwanis Club of Vienna.  We happened upon this in Stadt Park, the main city park.  All four sides of this column are covered with the mosaics.  It makes me think of how important all kinds of artistic expression are to all of us humans, young and old and in between.

Look what I found in our park here in Wisconsin!  I took this photo of the boys before we left.  We've been having fun outside in the good weather.  Can't wait to see them again on Monday!

Good luck with orange this month if you are participating in the RSC!  I hope all your projects are going smoothly.  And if not, put them in time out and do something fun!  Have a great week!

Thanks for reading,

Sylvia@Treadlestitches

Linking up with:

Alycia at Finished or Not Finished Friday

Angela at So Scrappy