Part of my vacation was spent over in Redmond in central Oregon. I went to see my child's godmother because she was my friend first.
She has a friend who works for the forest service (ret.) who guided us to this long easy hike up Lookout Mountain in the Ochoco Mountains (Crook County) just out of Prineville. He and a crew had just finished clearing the trails here. Starting at the mine buildings, one climbs via a roadbed trail to the summit at 6926 feet.
Serious water pipes help sedimentatize the gold and/or mercury.
Looking roughly northeast.
Our trail led through July lupine wildflower meadows. Bella helped us stay on trail by resting often.
Some people took the easy way. Daylong trail rides around Lookout and Round Mountains.
Old Species: Gnarly Pine
Crimson Columbine
Mule Deer
Scarlet Gilia
Taking it slow, we finally reached a 360' view at the tip-top of Lookout Mountain
Haze on the Cascade mountains.
Far left on the horizon would be the Three Sisters, Mt. Washington, Three-Fingered Jack, and over to the right, Mt. Jefferson. I get this hazy problem in the airplane a lot. I can see the mountains but my camera cannot distinguish them. A small forest fire was burning Thursday just north of Redmond and some of that is lingering.
Looking south.
Now who did that?
This is the snow shelter. Lookout Mountain is a year-round-use area with cross-country skiers utilizing the trail.
Upper meadow with sagebrush and either Balsam or sunflowers.
Since the temps in the Bend/Redmond valley were hovering just above 90', it was exceedingly nice to be about 10+ degrees cooler. An excellent breeze played at the top to cool you off after climbing. I drank roughly 48 oz. of water on this hike to stay hydrated.
Sea Anemones close up when you lightly touch them.
Before Keiko the whale and the ($15.00 admission) Newport Aquarium, there was the (free!) Marine Hatfield Center. When we were kids, we lived in Newport during the summer months. My parents were both school teachers so summers were spent traveling or staying at the beach. We would hop in the car and head down Hwy 18 driving through the Van Duzer corridor and depending on the trip spend our time in Lincoln City or Newport. We had a great-uncle who lived in Newport who made Strawberry-Rhubarb Wine which is the only way I tolerate Rhubarb. Other relatives called Newport home as well. We kids knew if we were well-behaved we could finish with the relatives and hit the beach. First one to sight the ocean was a game we never tired of.
One of the highlights was the Marine Center at the end of the breath-taking Yaquina Bay Bridge. We kids could touch sea anemones -quickly!, sea cucumbers & starfish. The giant octopus creeped us out with the help of an older sister & brother. And it was always free. The Hatfield Marine Science Center is closely aligned with OSU and one of my son's friends has a job down there this summer.
Sole hiding in the gravel/sand
Wow - they have a science cam. On when they are giving presentations, you can ask questions - live! The OctoCam doesn't appear to be working but our friend is aboard the R/V Wecoma on a three-day research trip.
Hatfield Marine Science Center - still here, still free, still cool.
Two flights in two days. A very good start to a week of vacation. Today's destination was McKinnon's Airport just north of Sandy.
When we fired up the airplane a couple of neighbors took off at the same time.
Our neighbors led the way --being much faster than our big lumbering Stearman.
Great breakfast and about a zillion classic cars. The cars were parked in and around the treed property.
A loud round of applause for the Sandy Kiwanis Club who cooks delicious blueberry pancakes out to over 4000 people quickly.
I don't know how many cars were there but it looked like approximately a hundred planes in and out during the morning as well as about fifty motorcycles. Maybe 800 cars? Evidently a huge deal on the car show circuit.
A friend of ours came in just as we were leaving. He finished working on this "Bamboo Bomber" this last year. See end of post for a video clip of it's first flight.
Harleys were there as well, lined up next to the runway. The sound of a Harley is almost close to what our big round engine sounds like.
Neighbor's biplane. This plane flies way faster than ours.
Just about ready to leave.
One way in, one way out was an interesting runway experience. They had filled up the east field with planes so the ground crew sent us back down the runway to park in the west field. Meanwhile in a coordinated attempt at craziness, two planes were trying to land and had to go around (add power and not land) as we were still on the runway. By the time we left, there were quite a few planes down where we were.
Almost home. I managed (finally) to get a fairly decent picture of the airpark. We are turning into the right-hand pattern as we start our landing sequence. Our airpark consists of two rows of houses divided by a taxiway (aka Skylane Drive) and the grass strip is to the right - next to the vivid green field. The middle of the runway has been re-seeded this year and looks like a green stripe.
The farmer on the other side of Township Rd has tilled his fields and planted to be ready for some hot summer weather this week. He's watering. The last few years, he's grown zucchini.
This picture shows the entire airpark; houses, street/taxiway, houses, runway.
Our friend's Bamboo Bomber - First flight video. Plus - you get to hear round engine noise.
I am long overdue in sending a card to a friend who is enduring chemo. I try to send one every week or so but with the summer bronchitis I have not been doing my job of making sure her bright outlook remains high.
I rummaged around in my 'waste' basket pulling out fabrics I have been working with lately - scraps - with no plan at all. The pale yellow knit from yesterdays knit shirt success 'wound' itself into a rose sun. Then a house with smoke? (sunny summer day here folks) and windows with some flowers growing in the grass and up high, an airplane.
All of my cards to her feature an airplane. She doesn't have to read the inside, she can just see the airplane and know that my thoughts are circling above her, watching out for her.
I stitched the denim to some card stock and zigzagged for good measure and took it over to my cutting board where, horror of horrors, I used my fabric rotary thingy to trim the edges tru-er.
Now to find an envelope that fits.
Hand made as well as it was actually just about right to fit my odd-sized card.
This whole project took me about 25 minutes
including the time to photograph and write this blog post.
And, it took two stamps because it slipped over into the second ounce and it was a bit 3-D.
Thanks to having bronchitis and making bosses want to kill me for staying home, I sewed a t-shirt.
I subscribed to Ottobre a year ago and was very pleased with the pattern designs. I first subscribed to the kids' patterns and I loved that Ottobre was designing patterns with ready-to-wear in mind as well as the fact that kids play and they wear knits. There is a lot of RTW detailing on the patterns as well as the basics. I had heard via blogland, primarily Stitches and Seams and Sew-4-Fun, that Ottobre's fit was right on as well. When I used to sew more garments, I was forever fussing and trimming Simplicity and McCalls (& Buttericks) patterns. They would add 8 inches to the length that I would cut off before I even cut out the pattern. I gave up with the kids because the big 3's patterns were so huge - if you followed the size guidelines on the back of the envelope. I would buy RTW and make a pattern from those pieces.
I also got blog encouragement from a few sewers out there who were not afraid to take photos of their finished garments on their plus-size bodies. With Ottobre's t-shirt pattern (#303 Women's best tops), I followed the size guidelines and --IT FIT!!!
This is what the pattern layout look like. A little puzzle to get your juices flowing.
At Sewexpo this year, I bought some Swedish Tracing paper which worked like a charm. You can trace a pattern piece to this, pin them together and pin-fit it without cutting into your fabric. The swedish tracing paper is a light, durable fabric/paper that has a bit of drape to see where you might need to adjust.
This basic T had three main pieces - back, front and short sleeve so it was easy to cut out.
Small print and a huge pattern layout meant I discovered how much seam allowances to add - later. Which worked out.
I planned on serging so I added 1/4" (6mm) to everywhere except the neckline.
If you squint - light yellow fabric with whitish pattern on top -
you can see me cutting 1/4" out from pattern.
The most difficult part of the shirt was the neckline binding. I have got to get one of those coverstitch binders for Christmas. I actually sewed this wrong but it all turned out anyway. I used my serger to attach the binding and then flipped it over and coverstitched it down.
Before pressing it, I thought it looked mighty fine. Like RTW. Yeah, I know, I'm full of myself.
My bathroom mirror photos turned out the best and not too fat-looking.
There are maybe two things I would differently on this pattern: maybe hem those sleeves a tad higher and bring that v-neck down an inch. I utilized this yellow micro-fiber performance knit because I bought some knits from Fabric.com in May and this yellow arrived looking a little on the pale side. So I figured, no problemo, if the t-shirt doesn't work out, c'est la vie. Instead, it surprised me with the great fit so now I need to think about embellishments up by the neckline. The yellow is a bit see-thru and it could use some help up there.
This blog is my creation.
Having spent time on the construction and content, please
e-mail me at airplanes(at)web(dash)ster.com to ask to 'borrow' photos and/or content.
