November Retreat

Our annual Stitch 'n Bitch retreat is held during the off season for a lovely hotel in the Eastern Townships.  The Quilliams Inn welcomes us with open arms and the staff are always friendly and helpful.  The food is superb.   Our workroom handles the 20 of us without crowding and overlooks Brome Lake.  

This is the quilt that Janet and I made for Quilts of Valour.  

 and this is the quilt top that I completed for moi.  It will be our summer quilt.  The pattern comes from the book Around the Twist.

Each morning at 6:30, just as the sun was coming up, 3 of us went for a walk on the nearby golf course.  It was quite cold - hovering around 0ºC and there was frost and some ice.  

A tale of 2 behinds, or left behind. 

 My companions hiked this hill faster than I could - my heart rate was already up at this stage, and I didn't (couldn't!) go any faster!  Slow down and smell the pines was my thought.

 Too bad you can't see the sparkles.

This is part of the marsh at the back of the hotel and it was frozen over one morning.

Dyeing day for Text'Art

A while ago our group met to do some dyeing in my backyard.  Lots of good results and a lot of fun.  I only did a little.  Tried out a plain grey  and also a dye called red brown.  Interesting to see how the colours split on the scarf on the right.  The silk picked up the green and the rayon the red/brown.  Serendipity works for me!

Beaconsfield Quilters Guild Retreat

The guild retreat at the Hermitage Ste Croix was lovely this past week.  The weather was good and the colours were superb.  It's a lovely relaxing place to work.  

The views over the lake are endlessly fascinating.  Especially with the migrating geese.

Beechy Island, Glacier face, Taloyoak,

Sunsets were spectacular.  So were some of the sunrises, but with the warm temperatures we had a lot of fog in the morning.

This glacier face was about 2 Km long and probably 5 stories high.

Beechy Island.  These are graves from Franklin's last expedition.  These bodies were exhumed and examined and found to contain deadly levels of lead - probably from the canned food that they brought along.

It was cold in the wind.  The ground was entirely stone with almost no vegetation at all.

The remains of a house.  You can see the barrel hoops scattered about.

These two buildings are at Fort Ross and were the Hudson Bay Company outpost.  One had been nicely fitted out but with time and the help of  a polar bear or two the interior is in sad state.  The other building has been fitted out for campers.  Recently 3 yachts had turned up and spent the night in the bunk house.

The community of Taloyoak were very welcoming and there was a party laid on for us with dancers, throat singers and wonderful food - arctic char, seal stew, and bannock along with some other dishes.

The next day we travelled to Pointe de la Guiche where our historian, Ken McGoogan had several years earlier place a cairn and a plaque to commemorate John Rae finding the final link in the North West Passage.  Ken is on the left, with Robbie in the middle.

We were fortunate in having not only one Inuk guide, but then 2 young ladies were shanghaied in Pond Inlet and kept us company for the rest of the trip.  They were delightful to meet and gave us great insight into living in the north.  

Icebergs and Pond Inlet

Most of the ice that we saw was either in Greenland or in the Baffin Island area.  Once we went further south the water was mostly clear.  

 In the picture below there is a little black dot just left of centre.  That is the zodiac with 10 people aboard.  Just puts a perspective on things!

 The colours of some of the icebergs were amazing.  This was probably as high as a 4 story building.

We passed quite a few of these monsters while cruising.  At least 10 stories high if not more!

Pond Inlet

Greenland, Kayaking, Ilulisaat

We watched this Inuk doing all sorts of feats with his kayak.  Remember that we are above the Arctic circle and the water is about 0ºC!  He did a variety of rolls, and then in the last picture he is paddling while upside down - a sneaky maneuver to get past a polar bear.  Yikes.

Two more shots of Sisimiut.  

In our "wet suits" coming into the harbour at Ilulisaat.  It was foggy and the bay was filled with ice.

There was a lovely boardwalk to take us to a fjord to see the ice bergs that had calved off the glacier.  It was across rough tundra terrain and as we came around a corner we could see the tops of the bergs in the mist - a very magnificent sight.

North West Passage - Greenland

Our trip through the North West Passage with Adventure Canada started with a charter flight from Toronto to Kangerlussuaq and the following three pictures were taken from the plane over Greenland.

 The spikey bits in the above picture are labrador tea.  We found cranberries in this area too.

 Just an evening view from the ship.  

SISIMIUT

 husky pups

 Kayaks

an old whale bone