This has been quite a week. Some slow Sunday Stitching will be a good plan for the afternoon, just to relax and focus on what's right in front of me. Living in Paradise during this time of year is challenging. We live in an area that frequently gets very strong gusty winds. Mix that with fire and you have disaster, which is what happened here in 2018. Though our home was spared and we were not here during the Camp Fire, we still live with the devastation of our town. We are also more acutely aware of the danger of fire during such wind events. 

The North Complex fire began miles away from us a month ago from a dry lightning storm. There was lightning all around us that day and we were so relieved that it didn't start any fires very near to us. We didn't expect to be impacted by the fire that started so far away so many weeks ago. However it has been slowly coming our direction and on Tuesday we had one of those wild wind events that caused us to evacuate. We had a warning last Saturday evening that our power company would be shutting off the power to our area because of the predicted wind event. The planned power outage was for Monday night until Wednesday night. Power went out around 10:30 Monday night. 

Tuesday evening I stepped outside and saw this. The photo doesn't show just how dark that smoke was. As the evening progressed the smoke spread to cover the whole area. So after dinner we packed our bags by flashlight and set everything by the garage door ready to load the car. It was difficult to go to sleep that night, the wind was howling around us and ash was falling everywhere. At 1:30 we got an emergency alert for an immediate evacuation for an area closer to us than was comfortable. We we grabbed the cats, got them in their carriers, loaded up the car and left. We headed down to Chico and tried to find a hotel room, no rooms available. We spent the next few hours in our church parking lot, trying to sleep. 

We headed back home around 5:00 am, showered, slept a couple of hours and woke up to this. The red was not just in the east with the sunrise, it was everywhere. We got another evacuation warning, closer to us than the one in the night. We loaded the cats back up and left again. We were able to drop our cats off to be boarded at the vet in Chico and headed for my Dad's house in Redding, where we spent the night Wednesday. Sometime during the day on Wednesday we got notified that the East side of Paradise, very close to us, was under evacuation warning and that the community beyond the canyon was also under evacuation warning. 

Thursday the winds had calmed down significantly, the power company restored our power mid morning, and later in the day the evacuation warning in Paradise was lifted. We came home. Ash everywhere. I swept and hosed down the ashes from the front porch Thursday afternoon. I haven't done anything about the ashes on the back deck or our patio in back just yet. It's taken a couple of days to get our bearings back. About an hour ago we got another evacuation warning to an area near us, though not as close as the ones that came on Tuesday. It was windy here this morning but not like early this week. And the winds have died down for the moment and ash is no longer falling here. That's a relief but we are still on the alert. Smoke has been very bad here as you might imagine, so thick sometimes that we can't see the far side of the canyon behind us. 

I didn't get much sewing done this week. I did manage a few blocks for the small Magic Stars quilt, in red and purple - covering the Red challenge for the RSC for September. My plan had been to get the large Magic Stars quilt sandwiched and basted while the power was out. So I spent a good part of Monday putting the back together, and ironing the front and the back while the batting was laid out on the bed relaxing. When we packed Tuesday evening, I packed both the front and back of that quilt, so much for having ironed them. 

Tuesday I got some hand stitching done on my mama's Dresden plate quilt. My mother started this piece when I was a child. She died when I was seven and my grandmother saved the project for me and gave it to me early in my marriage, almost 40 years ago. So these are not 30s reproduction prints, they are the real deal. My mother and my grandmother both quilted, I consider it part of my heritage, though I didn't learn quilting from either of them.  I'll try to get some more work done on it today. I tried early on to get the plates appliqued onto the background but had no idea at the time what I was doing. I didn't start quilting until some years later. I'm nearly done with getting the plates sewn down properly now, I don't work on it often. Sometimes it sits for years in between getting any attention from me.

Yesterday I got the large Magic Stars quilt top and back ironed again and this time also got all the stray threads cut. I got it layered and started pinning, and today I finished the pinning. I hope to start quilting it tomorrow.  Here it is on the bedroom floor getting measured for the back. I found a new much simpler way to measure, but I will write about that some other time, this post has gotten rather lengthy. 

A quick glance outside just now and the canyon has completely disappeared into the smoke again. I'm so thankful to have some bold fabric colors in my life right now, because my world is gray and dreary. Yet for now we are safe and hope that the smoke will clear at least some this coming week. 

I hope you are safe and well where ever you are. 

Thanks for reading! 

I'm linking up with Kathy at Kathy's Quilts for Slow Sunday Stitching.