Ducks and Quilts

I finally finished machine quilting this king sized "serendipity quilt".  As I was doing the freehand quilting, I spent a lot of time (and I mean a LOT of time) fighting with the sewing machine.  I finally put on my Pride and Prejudice dvd and became much more meditative and calm and the machine responded accordingly.  I might add that I also changed how I was quilting the quilt.  I found that using the thin (60 weight) thread I was using, size 14 needles and going over thick seams, I was having constant thread breaks -- I was attempting to do a lot of free hand quilting in the ditch.  You can see by the next two pictures that I switched to a more free pattern on the blocks and things improved a lot.  I still did some "in the ditch" quilting but took it slowly (something I generally don't do impatient person that I am).  The quilting in this quilt will definitely never win any awards (I wouldn't even put it in a quilt show!) as I put some border strips on that were obviously a little too big and so there are a lot of pleats (yes, pleats) in the quilting (they look like seams as I actually pleated them rather than let them bunch up)!!  However, the dark brown hides almost everything so from even a couple of feet away, 
you can't see them.  

 This is the center block where I put a little more quilting in (click on to see closer).

You can see some of the other quilting I did in this view.  I still have five more "serendipity" quilts to quilt but they are all smaller and hopefully I have learned from this one.

 My elegant  Great Egret posed in the late afternoon two days ago.  I put this in Facebook but thought it deserved a place in my blog as well.  Yesterday we had some "Rochester"  (dreary, rainy, chilly) weather just to remind us why we prefer North Carolina this time of  year!!

My very smart egret is again at the lake today and is is really chuck full of fish!

I decided to try to see if I could get to the secret beach this afternoon but the access is gone and it was close to high tide so no go.  I was really quite distant from this very large flock of ducks who were riding the waves and literally playing in the rough surf.  These are American Scoters (black Scoters) which I have seen before down there but not in such numbers -- usually only one or two among the Buffleheads.  These are mostly females and first year birds.  Migration has obviously begun!!!

These are two of the adult male Scoters.  Note the bright orange at the base of the bill which really distinguishes these birds!  There must have been close to 100 and I saw another flock fly over as I was standing there.  I was really quite a distance and the sun was getting very low but the little camera has a pretty good optical zoom (35x) so I was able to get some pictures.  Too bad I couldn't get down the beach.