January In The North Country

When you live in the Upper Peninsula, you’d better enjoy winter, or you’re in for a long, hard slog.  As the saying goes, we have ten months of winter, and two months of rough sledding!  Actually that’s not quite true.  Winter is about six months long here, usually starting in November, and extending into early April.  But the summers, short and fleeting though they are, make getting through the long winters well worth it.

Andrew wanted to go fishing Saturday afternoon, and he invited me to go along to go snowshoeing.  We finally had some sun, the first sunny day in well over a week.

Fishing in the winter, you say?  Oh yeah.  Like I say, you gotta make the most of winter around here!  Apparently the Chocolay River, south of Marquette, is a hotspot for steelhead (rainbow trout that live in the Great Lakes and come back to their native rivers to spawn)  and even salmon.

Here’s Andrew, making a cast.  He did get a nibble from a big steelhead, but wasn’t able to land it.  Apparently they’re hard to catch.  Of course, the fishermen use little tiny hooks, which I don’t understand.  Seem like you could catch a big fish easier with a bigger hook, but then I’m not a fisherman!

While Andrew was fishing, I strapped on my snowshoes and wandered around in the woods.  It was cold, but I was bundled up, and I stayed warm as long as I kept moving.

I took several pictures of coyote tracks weaving through the woods.  I want to figure out how to use the tracks in a quilt design.

I liked the way the sun was shining through the trees, backlighting them.  The sun is so low in the sky this time of year that it looks like it’s much later in the day than it really is.

These icy beads hanging off a branch in the river caught my eye as I was walking along the river. The sun was already too low to light them up anymore, but it’s a neat picture anyway. Another idea for a quilt design?

I’ve had to take a break from working on my AAQI Challenge Quilt. I enjoyed the handquilting so much the other day that I definitely overdid it! I have carpel tunnel syndrome, and it usually doesn’t bother me if I’m careful.

But I cheerfully threw caution to the winds last week, and I’ve been paying for it with numb hands at night, and achiness in my wrists and hands. It’s getting better now, though, so maybe I can work on it a bit tonight. There’s not much to do to finish it, but I do need to pace myself.

I had cut the blocks from the Quilt from Hell in half last week. Yesterday I cut my brown squares. Using the technique you use when sewing lots of half-square triangles,  I sewed two triangles to each square, so I could avoid stretching the bias. Then I cut the squares in half and pressed them open.

Today I’ll trim the blocks so they’re all the same size, and square them up. Then the fun starts as I try out different arrangements for sewing them together. The blocks will end up being about six inches, which means they’ll finish at about five-and-a-half. Small blocks, but I have sixty of them. It will be interesting to see what I wind up with!

Tagged with: AAQI Challenge • snowshoeing • Upper Peninsula • winter fishing

Filed under: Neat Things In Marquette

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