I can hardly believe it but this is actually my 300th blog post! I had sort of planned that I would do something special for this post, but between family coming to visit and everything else going on this summer I haven’t had time to plan anything. So instead I am going to post a bunch of photos from the day trip we took over to Bainbridge Island on Friday. I am sure there will be a giveaway or something in the near future though to celebrate 300 posts, but just not today :)

If you ever get the chance to visit Bainbridge Island, visiting Esther’s Fabrics is an absolute must! :) Of course I didn’t get to spend nearly enough time here (I could have spent all day in this shop), so I think I might have to go back sometime in the near future…

After doing a little shopping, we walked around the town a little bit…

Friday was actually a pretty hot day for around this area, so we ended up at one of the beaches on Bainbride Island… It was a gorgeous spot for photo taking.

Looking in the window of a house for sale on the beach…

The outside of the house…

It is a very beautiful house in a beautiful location, it makes me wonder why anyone would want to sell it! I would just love to live in that house (well if it wasn’t totally impractical:)

After a bit of walking around on the beach, Ben and I set up a blanket overlooking the water and just sat for awhile while his family walked around some more… It was a great view, well until the waves crashed in and got our blanket soaked (luckily I grabbed my camera off the blanket just in time!). The spot & the view before…

Taking the ferry ride back to Seattle after a beautiful day on the island…

I am sure that anyone who lives around here has probably around made this day trip, but if you haven’t you should since it is just a beautiful place to visit. :)

Totally unrelated, but I wanted to say hi to anyone who is visiting from Molly’s post over at Momformation. Also if you have emailed me lately about the blog meet up or anything else, I am a bit behind on my emails (only about 100 unread emails in my inbox) & plan on getting back to you very soon! :) (I am also totally behind on replying to comments, but hope to catch up soon. In the meantime I should say that I do read every comment & appreciate every single one!)

These pillows have been sitting on my works in progress pile for a couple months now… (Apparently since the end of May actually according to this and this.) We have family coming to visit this week though, so I decided it was time to get these finished and onto our couch. The fronts are just slightly different (mostly because I didn’t actually have enough of the same linen for both pillows), but I love how it looks. They match this quilt, and all are now in our living room. (At some point I will take some photos of the whole room to post.)

The backs of the pillows are just a plain grey organic cotton, which is quite soft…

It does make me laugh a bit when I look back at that quilt post and realize that both the quilt and the pillows sat on my wip pile for quite awhile. At least both projects are finished finally :)

Onto a totally different subject… If you are a craft blogger and you live in the Seattle area (or feel like visiting for this:) on Saturday, September 6th I am arranging a little informal craft blog get together. It will just be getting together for a bit of coffee and chatting, but if you are at all interested send me an email (chara at charamichele dot com) and I can send you more details about location and time. It should be a lot of fun! :)

Oh and despite the fact that this week is promising to be a very busy one, I decided I just had to redecorate my entire blog with a new theme design (+ banner). So if you read this post in a feed reader, feel free to pop on over to my blog and take a look :)

I finished this quilt block just in time yesterday afternoon to send it out in the mail. It is actually going back to Illinois to the first blogger I ever met :) Dorie & Meg decided to start a little quilt along called One Quilt, with 12 of us ladies and they were sweet enough to invite me to participate. This month the block was for Dorie & I absolutely love the fabrics she picked! So much that I just couldn’t bring myself to add any other fabrics into the block… I actually had a few fabrics that I considered, but decided I just loved the 3 fabrics she picked too much. :) (Dorie you might have to tell me where you found that cute tree & squirrel fabric…)

Speaking of bloggers that I have met… I had a lovely morning yesterday meeting Joanna and her 3 little boys for a bit of blueberry picking! I had never been blueberry picking before, but had an absolutely wonderful time chatting with Joanna. I didn’t leave empty handed either, I picked enough blueberries so that Ben had a nice snack after work (blueberries are one of his favorite fruits…).

Joanna also brought me some beautiful fabric and this amazing hanger…

I had actually been thinking I really needed to find a pretty hanger for photographing shirts & other things sometimes and this is perfect! It makes me think about the Pacific Northwest every time I see it (which makes me think about how happy I am to live in such an amazing place:)