Busy Summer

Somehow this summer has gone flying by!  I don't know how it got to be September already!

I've been working on multiple projects... both inside and outside... that have been consuming a lot of time.  My running has also picked up during the summer and I'm running 45 minutes two days a week with a longer (~1.5 hr) run on the weekends.  I've gotten more fit, which I'm happy about.  I haven't quite broken the 30 minute barrier on a 5k, but I chalk up the last one to running when it was 77 degrees and 95% humidity.  Yuck!

Here's a few of the various projects that are on-going....

1. This is a quilt called Heat Wave by Judy Laquidara.  Its been stalled a bit due to working on other projects, but its in good shape.  I have to make a large pieced border yet in a snail's tail pattern, but I've made those blocks before and know how to get them to come out right.



2. The reason #1 is stalled.... a friend at work had a second child earlier this summer, so I've been working on a pair of quilts (one for child #1 and one for the new child).  Sadly, I'm WAY behind on this and I'm still not done with either quilt.  The baby was born in June, but the way I see it (or rationalize it) is that they won't need the blankets until it gets cold anyway.  :)




#3. In late May/early June, we went on a vacation to Myrtle Beach.  It was absolutely gorgeous and we had perfect weather.  The first photo is from the first morning there.  We had a tropical storm that was heading out from the prior day (hence the clouds), but the rest of the week was perfect.




#4.  I've gotten my groove back with needlepoint.  This is where it was earlier in the summer and the second photo is from the past few days.  I'm finally on to page 4... of 20+ pages.  A ways to go yet....




#5.  With the great weather we've had this summer, there's been a lot of work being done outside.  First and foremost is the stone wall that my husband has been building.  He picks out the rocks... I help him cement them all into place.  This is only one half of the wall.  There will be an arbor on the left of the picture before the second half of the wall starts up again.




All in all, its been a good summer.  It went by quickly, but hopefully we will still have several weeks of good weather before the true cold starts to set in.

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Vacation

Last week, my husband and I both took the entire week off from work.  We didn't really have any plans to go anywhere, but we both needed to just not be at work.  Sometimes it isn't about going somewhere on vacation, but just being able to relax.

I always feel like when I travel on vacation that I need a secondary vacation to make up for the energy spent traveling somewhere.  It was really nice to just be home and relax.  We did make the most of our time and got a fair amount done around the house/yard.

When we purchased our piano a few months ago, we decided to convert our formal dining room into the room with the piano.  This ended up meaning that we had to change the table in our eat-in kitchen area to be one with leaves in it so we could seat everyone for large families dinners.  I don't have a picture of the new table yet, but it was delivered last week while we were home.

In addition to the new table, we then had to find some comfy chairs to put in the room with the piano.  We both hate furniture shopping.  Most of the time you don't find anything you like and you end up frustrated and feeling hassled by the sales folks at the stores.  This time, we did find some chairs!



This chair was at the 3rd furniture store we went to (over 2 weekends), but we fell in love with it.  Its comfortable to sit in and looks very nice.  One of the best parts.. its actually a recliner!  It looks like any normal chair (even from the back), but that square section on the front...that's the foot rest.  They will be perfect in the room with the piano and will let one of us sit and relax while the other plays.

Besides a bunch of yard work being done last week, we also spent some time at my in-laws where they live on a lake.  We went up twice and enjoyed swimming and kayaking.


Finally since I haven't shown many garden pictures this year.... The catchfly is flowering and is a very pretty orange-red color.


My orange coneflowers are also finally blooming.  They seem to be happy this year, which is good considering we thought we were going to have to replace them since they just didn't do it last year.



I hope you all are enjoying your summer and those of you in the south aren't wilting from the heat too much yet.  I did get a small amount of quilting done on vacation, but not enough to even consider taking pictures.  Hopefully I'll get my mojo back soon and will start making progress on a few things.

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Paris - Remainder of Day 1 and Day 2

Our trip to Paris was relatively short.  The first two days were really spent on the outskirts of Paris and we didn't do any "touristy" things.  My posts here and here describe and show photos of the Louvre, which was the only museum we went to that allowed pictures.

After the Louvre, we went to the Musee D'Orsay.  Its just across the Seine from the Louvre and it has a ton of impressionist paintings as well as some more modern paintings.  Unfortunately, they did not allow photos.  If you are ever in Paris though, I recommend going to the museum.  We really enjoyed the impressionist paintings which were on the top floor.  Even if they move things around, I would recommend going to the top floor first while you're feeling strong.  Its much easier to go down the stairs after getting all the way to the top. :-)

After the Musee D'Orsay, we decided to make a quick trip over to Notre Dame.  We didn't really want to go investigate the catacombs or anything like that, but I wanted to get some pictures of the cathedral and actually go inside. 

I never realized it before, but Notre Dame is actually on its own island in the middle of the Seine.  For some reason I always thought it was in the middle of the city proper.  Here's a view walking up to the cathedral.  They were getting ready to celebrate its anniversary... 850 years... so there was some platforms and other stuff that somewhat blocked the photos.



After you get up top of the platforms, there were some wooden bleachers (the sturdy kind) and you could see the entire cathedral front.  Again, its amazing that some of the details in the exterior of the cathedral have lasted all these years.


Those dark windows were stained glass windows.  From the inside they were stunning!  It didn't feel right to take pictures inside a functional cathedral though, so I don't have any inside photos.




Of course, as we left Notre Dame, it started to rain.  We had good rain coats, so we weren't too worried about it.... until it started to REALLY come down.  We took shelter under a shop's awning (as did lots of other folks) and waited until the worst of the storm passed.  We're glad we did since it was hailing and had sideways rain during the storm.  We still ended up with wet sneakers and pants (from the knees down) when we got back to the hotel.

Thankfully we were able to dry things out in the bathroom and we used the hair dryer to dry out our sneakers.  We ended up going back out a while later for dinner, which was a minor adventure.

There were police blocking off a bunch of roads in the area, which we had no idea why.  We ended up having to take a long walk to get to the restaurant and while we were eating, you could see various different police vehicles driving by, stopping, gathering things, driving off again, etc.  When we left the restaurant, we went the short way back to our hotel and the police let us through this time.  We were fortunate that we left the restaurant when we did.... there was a demonstration on-going for pro-gay marriage.  Just as we cross the main road near our hotel, the demonstration started moving and blocked the roadway from where we had eaten to where our hotel was.  We just missed getting completely blocked from getting back to our hotel.

A little side tangent here.... the food in Paris... it was amazing.  There were crepes and gelato everywhere.  Some really great stuff.  We ended up having duck one night, which was really good.  The only bad thing we had.... foie gras.  We watch cooking shows and everyone raves about it, so we thought... we're in the one place that it should be good, so we tried it.  We just barely were able to eat it.  We didn't want to be rude to the chef, so we made sure between the two of us to eat the whole thing.  It was a bit rough though.

So our last full day in Paris we went to one final museum which we missed when we were visiting the Louvre.  Its called Musee L'Orangie (or something like that).  Its in the far corner of the gardens in front of the Louvre.  The best part was that this particular museum has two rooms of huge (and I mean huge, panorama) paintings from Monet's Waterlilies series.  They were beautiful.  It makes me want to make one out of needlepoint! ;-)

After viewing the paintings, we made the long walk over to the Eiffel tower (about 2 miles).  It was actually nice because we weren't in the tourist areas and we were just walking through the streets of Paris.  There were no pick pocketers, there were no rude tourists, just Parisians going about their business.  We really enjoyed the walk.




At the end of the gardens near the Louvre is an Egyptian obelisk.  It was pretty impressive, even from a distance.


And here we are at the base of the Eiffel Tower.  Its somewhat "ugly", but still impressive in its size.


There were elevators you could take to the top of the tower, or you could walk up the stairs.  We opted for neither because the wait to just get to the base of the tower....4 hours.  Yuck!


So we took our pictures, can say we were there and then we walked back to the hotel.


We thought about going to the Arc de Triomphe, but it was another 1.5 miles away from the hotel, which would have meant a 4 mile hike back to the hotel.  We were glad to just take a nice relaxing stroll back to the hotel after seeing the tower.  Again, it was through the less touristy areas of Paris and it was a nice walk.  We were able to get more of a feel for what the city really is like for people who live there.

Overall, we had a great time in Paris.  Being "country folk", we were glad to come back home to our 16 acres in upstate NY.  After 2 days, we were pretty much on sensory overload due to the constant crush of people and things going on.  City-life just isn't us.

We did enjoy it though and I would probably do it again if it meant we could go out into the French country-side a bit more.  I think that's the part of France that the two of us would really enjoy.

I would have to say if anyone is thinking of visiting there, whatever you do... do not drive anywhere in the city.  The traffic is absolutely insane.  The people on motorcycles basically do not follow any rules of the road and make their own lanes whenever they feel like it.  They zip in and around traffic at all speeds and its very unnerving... even as a passenger! 

I hope to get back to more quilting related posts now that I've pretty much covered our quick trip to Paris.  I'm slowly getting back into the swing of things here, so I'm sure I'll have something quilty to post soon. :-)

In the meantime....

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Paris - Visiting The Louvre Part II

Here is part 2 of visiting the Louvre in Paris last week.  I obviously could not take pictures of everything, but here's a sampling of the paintings we saw.




In walking through some of the rooms on the upper floors, I realized there were some good views of the rest of the city.  Through one particular window, I had a really great view of the Eiffel Tower.


The picture below happens to be a Rembrant.  The museum had a lot of works from Rembrant in a handful of rooms.


There were also some amazing sculptures from Mesopotamia.  This one just struck me with the detail in it.  To think that someone (probably a slave) carved this all by hand with small tools is just amazing.


Look at the detail in that beard!  And the chevrons in the "leaves" on the chest plate...


This one was with the Greek artifacts.  It was pretty interesting and you could clearly see the effects of the environment on the stone.


In the Egyptian areas, they only had partial pieces of some of the artifacts, but the museum folks were able to provide sketches of the missing pieces so you could get an idea of what the whole thing would have looked like thousands of years ago.




We couldn't pass up a picture of Rama-sees. :-)


This next area of paintings were some more Rembrants and were near the Mona Lisa.  This painting was absolutely huge.  The people in the painting were actually larger than life-sized!




I ended up not getting a picture of the Mona Lisa, but we did see it.  In that particular room, there was an area to direct the crowd toward the painting and then away from it, and it was just a huge mass of people shoved together.  Since pick-pockets are a huge problem in the museum, we decided that we did not want to put ourselves in the middle of the huge throng of people.  That was just asking for trouble!

After leaving the Louvre, we took a walk through the gardens right next to the museum.  The flowers and trees really weren't in bloom yet since it had been a cold winter, but it was still nice to walk through.


If you look closely, there are some annuals (hyacinths, daffodils, etc.) blooming.




Looking back at the Louvre from outside the gardens.


We then crossed over the Seine, which by the way, is a lot choppier and dirtier than I would have originally expected.  After I thought about it though, it is a major river through a major city, so its not really unexpected that its dirty.




After crossing the Seine, we went to the Musee D'Orsay.  There are a ton of great impressionist paintings in there, but they did not allow photography.  We spent probably 2 hours walking through that museum.

We also took a walk over to Notre Dame, but I'll share those pictures as well as our trip to the Eiffel Tower in the next post.

We did a lot of walking in the 2 days that we were in central Paris.  Based on Google Maps, we walked about 10 miles each day.  It was beautiful while we were there though.  There were a few sprinkles here and there and one afternoon there was a 20 minute downpour, but other than that, the weather was very nice.  A bit on the cool side, but not bad for those of us used to the cold northeast!


Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Paris - Visiting The Louvre Part I

The first full day in the center of Paris was spent mostly walking through The Louvre museum.  You could spend years walking through that place and not really see everything in there.  It truly is an amazing collection of artifacts, paintings and sculptures.

I forgot to take a picture of the famous glass pyramid when walking in, but was able to get a shot as we left.  See all those people... when we first got to the museum at 10am, there was only about 20 people in line/milling about.  As the day wore on, the lines got longer and longer to get in.


One of the first areas we went to after entering was the Roman sculptures.  There were absolutely fabulous.  To think that people made these detailed sculptures without the tools that we have today.  All the sculptures in the pictures below that are in the "atrium" were actually all outdoors at one point in time.  They've now been enclosed in this glass atrium to ensure they don't degrade any more from the elements.





After getting past the main courtyard, we found a ton more sculptures.  The detail on this cape as absolutely stunning!




I don't recall what this next one was from, but the intricacy of it was unbelievable!  The whole thing stood probably about 8 feet tall, but the small details inside were easily less than a 1/4".


Here's a close-up:




There was also this beautiful archway with very detailed carving in it.


After going through most of the sculptures (which I took photos of about 1%), we made a brief tour through Napoleon's quarters.  We weren't really that interested in it, but we were trying to find out way through the buildings to the next area we wanted to see.  I didn't take a lot of photos of Napoleon's quarters (living spaces), but the few that I did take were pretty breath-taking.


The ornate details in the ceilings, walls, and the chandelier were incredible.  In one room they had it setup for a dining room that could probably seat 50 people.  The wood table was absolutely stunning!


The gold details on the doors and walls was very impressive.  One could probably say that they should peel off that gold and help fund the economy, but it would be heart-breaking to ruin these treasures that have been around for so many centuries.


The next post that I do will show the paintings that we saw in the next areas of the museum.  I didn't want to make the posts too long with the pictures, so I'm trying to break it up a bit and put it into manageable sizes.

Enjoy!

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations