Birds Before the Storm

It is fixing to storm here.

And the birds are gorging themselves at the feeders while McGee hides in his hidey hole in the laundry room.

I was going to go to the grocery store and grab some Windex and

Ice Cream (seems I am out of both) but I have to baby sit the scaredy cat boy for a while yet,  I guess.

The other feeder has 4 perches and is upright.  there was a waiting line for the feeders as the storm got closer.

















I lost all the bird books in the flood so I can't identify all the different species but they are most likely house wrens of various sorts.





The chickadees are usually here in force but I don't see them today.



You can make any of the photos larger by clicking on them.

The cardinals were trying to keep the squirrels from getting the sunflower seeds that the little birds were kicking to the ground.   When the cardinals would fly away, the squirrels would come back.  I wonder why my HUNTING DOGS don't help the cardinals take care of the squirrels.

When I had Swissys we had NO SQUIRRELS.



 So while I was waiting. I threw some blue fabric on the long arm and did some play quilting.  I should be cleaning up the house since I have this huge party this weekend.

Anything to do FUN Stuff and not CLEANING stuff.  You know.

I did get into the Long Arm Room and straighten up and organize a lot.  You may not think I did anything but I really did a lot of cleaning and organizing.

Birds, Bobbins and Birdbrains

I have a half an hour before I have to leave for my big Performance Test.

Figured I needed to get the Birds on the frame yesterday.  Took me forever! 

I got the backing on and it just wasn't sitting right.  No matter what I did it kinked.

So I took a blue marker and made some lines where it was off and took it to the machine to do some take up sewing. 

Ah, tres bien!  Don't you hate that?  You think you get the back all worked out straight and then it doesn't work out?  It really makes it worthwhile though, when you spend the extra time making it work out.

And I am one of those people who hate those details.  I generally let the "quilter" make it work out!  LOL.









Then I debated on what color I needed to make the back thread.   I chose a yellow poly I have worked with before and have a love/hate relationship with.  I liked the yellow, and the sheen, and the fact that I only had 4 free bobbins. 

Does your bobbin case look like this?

So what do you do with all your leftover bobbins?  Do you just buy more empty bobbins?  Do you take off the leftover thread and dump it?  Do you just keep them like this? 

I have a lot of that teal blue because I ran bobbins then changed my mind about the color I wanted on the back of the quilt somewhere in time.



Like this one.  After I got the first bird quilted, the block had a yellow cast to it, and I wanted it to be white.  Maybe it was my imagination.  Maybe it was real........but I spent half of My 600 Lb Life ripping it out!

Soooooooooooo

And I took all the thread off the 4  bobbins I ran and refilled them with white cotton. 

I will re-do the block with white thread today and see if it still looks YELLOW to me and see if I just need new eyes.




 This is the basil that was so tiny when I planted it!  Growing like a weed!  I pulled some leaves and  brought them to my PT people yesterday.  The chalk seems to be hanging in there with the rains and sun beating on it.  Kudos to PATTY!

DiNozzo.......says, he is NOT the dog eating the lettuce on the lower level of the herb garden. 

But he did ask for me to plant some tomatoes this year......

New Rotary Cutter and Failed Food Standards

Yes, I broke down and purchased another rotary cutter.  Mostly since I have no idea when I will get mine back.  Not having a rotary cutter means you just cannot even work on piecing anything! 

I guess I just took my rotary cutter for granted.  I will have to rethink its position in the quilt studio.  It definitely needs to be elevated to a higher shelf and maybe cleaned more often.  Something befitting quilt room royalty.

I put together a few zip pouches and tagged them with the Art Abandonment info.  I included some of the toiletries from the hotel rooms I gathered in recent trips like hand lotion and smelly scent things I can't use. 

I left this one at the library in the large print stacks.  I hope to get some sort of acknowledgement from one of the finders one day.  It would be nice to  hear about the finder's experience and if they liked the pieces I have left over the years.


I talked to Margaret at the Quilt Corner this morning.  I think the screw is loose on the flywheel again.  We fought with the baby quilt she was working on Saturday morning.  When I realized that I had no rotary cutter I decided to put a quilt on the long arm and work on that. 

But when I was working on getting the tension set I could hear something rattling in the head.  I am thinking it is the screw loose again.

This time he will come to the house so we can run it on the frame and get it to work.

Aghhhhh!

Long Arm Spa and the Stash Report a Day Late

Whew!  Yesterday was busy.  When Frank had a gout attack he is like an invalid.  No, a needy invalid.

He sits on the sofa with his poor swollen foot propped up and has "requests".  He says, can I have some water?  I get water for him, he want 4 ice cubes rather than 3.  And in "his" glass, one of the coke glasses that came in a set, I had no idea they were his until yesterday.

OMG!

I hit my 10,000 steps between him and the  dogs by 1 pm. When I put the garbage (which is usually his job) out last night, I broke the kitchen garbage can.  Now I have to go to Bed Bath an Beyond and get a new one. It has a collar that holds the top of the bag and a step that opens the top.  I couldn't get the collar out, ripped the bag, broke the step opener and had trash and bassets all over the kitchen.  It was a mess.  Of course I had to mop the kitchen at 10 pm last night.  Just what I wanted to do.

He is OK, just whiney.  We both will get over it.  I told him that if he asks me for something and I  do it, he needs to just say, thank you.  All the other stuff is counter productive.

My Long Arm went to the Spa on Friday.  She said the flywheel slipped.  So their tech guy will fix that and do a yearly check up and cleaning.  It was excited when I left, much like the dogs going back into the kennels for their "spa" visit when we go on vacation. 

My stash report is late,  but it is good!  I like red!

Used this week	-4.75	Used this month	-11.5	Used this year	-94.75
Bought this week	0	Bought this month	13	Bought this year	67.25
Plus or minus	-4.75	Plus or minus	1.5	Plus or minus	-27.5

Baby Squares Quilted

I finished up the quilting on the baby squares.  this one does not have an intended that I know of.  But I am sure Carrie will call in  an absolute panic and want a quilt for a shower in two hours.  So it will be ready.  All it needs is a binding.

I bought a new Angela Walters book called Shape By Shape to use as a guide for doing some free motions quilting on some larger quilts and I thought I would try a lot of them out.  I did find some favorites though.  Like the squares that sort of resemble Greek Key pattern.  That one is easy to do and looks great either in a square or along a border.

I tried to do some square work and some curve work intermixed in the blocks.  Here is the entire back.  It is Ecology Cloth.  I like using Ecology cloth because you can get it on the internet at a really low price, you can get it in wider widths (not 108 however), it is a nice weight for the back and it washes beautifully. you can see your thread work on the back.

A big con is that you can see all your thread work on the back!  I can't remember if I have seen it in colors, I think I have.

Here are the individual areas and the quilting.

My favorite one, easy.  Just mark your areas so  they are somewhat even.  I put a book on it and eyeballed the distance.  These are about 7 tall x 5 inches wide.







 t
This one is also easy to do.  I probably would have looked better had I marked the distances, but heck, it is free motion.  Get over it!

Here I just did some smaller squares and kept crossing over the lines to make more squares.  I got myself into a corner once and it was easy to get out of.  That is not always true with some designs.





This was kind of a crescent moon shape that seesawed back and forth.  I don't think marking is necessary for this design.  It was easy to do if I paid attention.

Good old meandering!  What can I say.  I
was running out of things to do and I had already repeated several.  So I meandered  in the last block.


This one was interesting.  I make the center chain and then did the echo lines around it.  As you can see, I am not an expert at making circles nicely!

I did some individual work in the two center blocks.  Actually there was only one center block, but I did what I wanted for the center block in the NOT the center block.  So I adjusted.

You should too.







 This was pretty easy.  I guess I would like it better if the lines were more rounded in the centers.  I am talking about the points.  I wrote that in the book, "Make the points more rounded and you will like them better."


Most all, you just have to relax, loosen your death grip  on your machine and drink a glass of wine.  Then just dive in!