Morning snow pictures

You can see one side of the finch sack is coated with snow. The storm came at us from the north and coated that side of all of the trees and anything else that snow would stick to. There are 5 finches in this picture, 2 on thistle seed sacks and 3 waiting their turn to eat.

I wasn't quick enough with the camera to catch the cardinal eating below the squirrel. He flew off with a seed to take to his mate in the tree.

I hope this is the last time this year that I will have snow in April pictures for you!

Nature inside and out

Here is the forsythia in the snow last night at 11 p.m. It started snowing around 6 p.m. but the streets and driveways were warm enough to melt it. It looks like about 2" on the grass this morning.

I finally resorted to using the flash to get a picture of the Christmas cactus. The flower color isn't quite as true, but I wanted to show that it has 6 full blossoms and two that are still hanging on but almost gone. This is the most blossoms I have ever had at one time on this plant.

Binding finally done!

This one is 72" x 94" so it took a long time to hand finish the binding. You can see that I have better lighting to the left side of the picture. I really need to find a better solution to even lighting. This Turning Twenty Again will be used on one of the twin beds in my house. The binding is one of the purple batiks that is also in the quilt (top right corner above).

I purchased the backing at one of those "25% off if you finish the bolt" sales. It is a Moda batik.

I have seen pictures from Nebraska where our snow storm is coming from. They are predicting at least 2" for us, more up by the Wisconsin border. If the storm sticks around all day Monday we may get more. My mother has a dr. appt. Monday morning. The last appointment was in a thunderstorm. It looks like all we have to do is make an appointment and we will have stormy weather.

What is on my design wall?

Here is one of my design walls in the basement. I have finally started sewing the curved pieces together. I will probably work on them anytime I am doing a load of laundry. Since my washing machine is 35 years old, I have to put the fabric softener in when the rinse water starts filling. The automatic dispenser doesn't work any more. As long as I have to stay down there to the mid point I usually stay until it is time to put the clothes in the dryer too. On this other piece, I have decided on 4 different fabrics for the narrow border (out of my boxes of 1.5" strips) and then I cut wider ones of the same fabric as the alternate squares.

I am about 2/3 done with my second binding so hopefully I will have it done to show tomorrow.

One done, one binding to go

I finished the binding on this one yesterday afternoon. I am glad I waited until I found the perfect border fabric before I finished it. It ended up being 62" x 80". It is hard to get a picture of my Christmas cactus where it sits, but if you move it while it has buds they sometimes will fall off and I don't want to take a chance on that. I guess it is only going to have about 3 or 4 blooms at a time and there are still lots of buds.

Free brush pickup starts next week so I spent some time carrying all of the winter fallen branches around to the driveway. I also cut all of the smaller branches off the tree that is laying in my backyard. My brother will come back and cut up the bigger part with his chain saw. They are talking about possible snow Sunday night so it may be a messy pile for the city crew to pick up.

And now I am binding

I finished the quilting on yesterday's quilt and then cut binding for 2 others that I quilted last week. I started the binding on my dotted quilt. Click here to see the top before the border was added. I finally found the perfect border for it and a backing on sale. It originally had 168 different dotted fabrics. Now it has 170 with the border and back. The binding is one that was already in the quilt.


I have almost 3 sides hand sewn down. It is amazing how nice sharp needles work. A couple of my readers sent me needles to try so I will know what to buy. I threw away the needles that I had been using for a couple years.

It was fun to hear all of the ways the readers described themselves as quilters. I think it is still the hardest to describe to non quilters. When I see their eyes glaze over I just excuse myself and walk away.

Not so great quilting

This is the one I am quilting that I am not too happy about. It is my own fault so I can't complain too loud. I decided to ditch quilt in the seams first and then follow the seams in the blocks as a kind of grid quilting. I didn't mark the lines in the squares between, just eyeballed them, and you guessed it, they are pretty crooked in several places. I still have 6 more lines to quilt. This is one of those cases of whether you add more to camouflage it or just leave it. I thought about putting in wavy lines between all of the straight lines so you wouldn't zero in on the crookedness but just see an all over pattern.

I was emailing a friend yesterday and we were talking about those of us who do lots of different kinds of quilting, some traditional, some arty, some just fun stuff. I know some of you probably make just one kind of quilts and I'm wondering what some of you call yourself when you introduce yourself to another quilter. I just decided I'm eclectic, as in eclectic decorating; a mix of many styles that all complement each other. How do you describe yourself?