Smoke that Thunder

On 22 June we celebrate our 25 th wedding anniversary. As a child my parents took us on holiday to Victoria Falls. I always wanted to go there again. This was the ideal opportunity and I convinced my husband to go.

It was really a magical time. We stay in the Elephant Hills Hotel. This Hotel has a Golf course. On our arrival we walked around the golf course. We walked only meters from a range of animals!

The hotel had very appropriate interior decorations. Unfortunately I forgot to take photographs of the masks and the basket display on the wall. I did take a picture of this wall hanging.

The next day we walk along the Zimbabwe side to look at the mighty Falls. Once again the baboons and monkeys share the route with us. The Statue of David Livingstone greeted us there as well.

We also saw some crazy people Bungie jumping under the rainbow.

The workers climb on the bridge for maintenance as if it was not over a drop of 100m.

On the sun downer cruise we were lucky enough to see an elephant.

The two crocodiles we saw lay lifeless on the sandbanks- I cannot swear that they were still alive. To me they did not look quite "real".

.The three hippopotamus only showed us their nose and eyes- but it was still amazing to see them only 20 m from the boat.

The lovely sunset concluded this cruise.

On our anniversary I treated Stephanus on a helicopter ride over the falls. My fear of heights made it impossible for me to share this experience with him. We took a taxi to Customs on the Zimbabwe side. Then we walked the three km to the Zambian border and went to the Falls from that side.

 On this side you are nearer to the Falls and it is quite breath taking. We also got thoroughly wet- our rain jackets were soaked as well. Luckily we could warm up in the nice winter sun- I have a red nose from this.

Before leaving we went for another walk on the golf course between the springbok.

Looking forward to our next anniversary!
(And finally the Anniversary couple.)

Applique in the hoop

The National Festival is 2 weeks away. Today I finished the signage and laminate them all. I made yo-yo's with my yo-yo tool and turn them into small pincushions-Don't they look to sweet in the small flower pots. This is to place in the classroom if the teacher need some pins.

I have  made another 2 traycloths- also to be placed in the classrooms. This is our Festival logo interpreted by me and digitized to combine applique and embroidery. The first thing digitized is a placement line. This helped me to position the two background fabrics. The blue fabric is then sewed to the yellow. I remove the hoop and trim the blue fabric.

The "mountain pieces" are "sewed" together (remember the machine is carrying out the digitized instructions) one by one. First the seam is sewn and the machine stops. I open the piece and the machine then stitch an outline. This is a placement line for the next piece as well as the trim line for the top and bottom of the mountain. The two pieces on either side of the mountain is small and I have digitized embroidery stitches instead of using fabric. Underneath the mountain the edge of the fabric is covered with green embroidery. At the top of the mountain a stem stitch cover the raw edges.

The blue fabric's raw edge is also covered by a stemstitch. The words are embroidered. When all the stitching is completed a straight stitch is digitized on the edge. Before this is stitched, the hoop is removed. I put some glue on the back and place a piece of fabric to cover all the stitches, on the back. The straight stitch are sewn and the back fabric trimmed. I have folded the raw edges of the fabric on the front in and try to position it so that the satin stitch would cover it- you can see I was not so successful at the bottom.

Hope this make sense to those of you who have never seen the operations of an embroidery machine. The possibilities that quilters have with the embroidery unit still need to be explored- this is fascinating for me- this whole world that we still need to discover!