Back to Some Quilting (Okay, There will be Birds too - Okay a Lot of Birds)

I can never get enough of the live oaks down at Ft. Fisher.  Here they had a grey/blue sky behind them and I liked the shadows.

With all the nasty weather we have had here in North Carolina, I finally spent some time finishing up this wall hanging.  One of the things stopping me was the question -- how am I going to baste this as I don't have any of my clamps nor a proper table down here.  Necessity is the mother of invention despite what Dr. Leslie White (my cultural anthropology professor in college) said. The quilt is about 25 inches wide by 48 inches long.  My design wall is 48 x 48 inches.  

So I pinned the backing tightly to the design wall, covered it with the batting and then with the quilt top with straight pins at the side.  The problem was then how to NOT catch the flannel on the design wall when using the pins to secure the three parts together..  So I ended up staggering straight pins across the quilt and then slipping a 6 inch x 24 inch ruler behind the quilt balanced on the straight pins.  It was easy to pin baste after that.  I just moved the ruler down with appropriate pins and pin basted the whole thing easily!!  Wouldn't work for big quilts but was perfect for this smaller quilt.  I don't like to use the spray inside which would be the other option.

I finished machine quilting the piece today so now just have to face it.  It looks a little boring to me so at some point I may add some stuff on top.  We shall see.  

A closeup of the quilting.  Most of the time I just followed the lines with straight quilting but in all the sandy looking pieces, I did the pebble quilting which is time consuming and probably doesn't show enough to justify it but I like to use it to give some texture to a kind of boring piece.  This is the third in my "strata" series.  I do love curves A LOT!

I should let everyone know that I live in Southeastern NC which was heavily hit by the recent ice storms, all except for the tiny little area where I live.  I am between the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic Ocean and was saved from all the mess because of it.  We had a little coating of ice on the palm tree but no problem at all.  Half the county where I live was without power but we had power, cable and internet!  It is amazing how different the weather is within a ten mile area.

I have been seeing a lot of these plovers -- the Kildeers.  On a sunny day, they are all over.

No day is complete without seeing the Cedar Waxwings with their beautiful colors!!

I think they have eaten all the berries on the island!

A fellow birder told me about seeing a Waxwing with a different color on the tip of his tale and here is one with orange instead of the yellow.

There were probably 150 sitting on the power lines when I headed down to Ft. Fisher the other morning!  This is only a small portion of one set of lines!!

This fellow was looking for a seat!

I got a glimpse of one of my favorites -- the Pileated Woodpecker.

A beautiful male Bluebird was sharing the line with all the Cedar Waxwings.  He is so brilliant, he fades into his bright sunny sky  background!!

This is the closest I have gotten to a male Hooded Merganser.  I was using the car as my "blind" and it was drizzly and raining so shot out the window and he didn't see me!!  He has his crest up here.

The Royal Terns were staying put on the dock.

A pair of Forster's Terns were also occupying the dock.  You usually see them just diving for fish and moving quickly through the air.

I believe these are Red Knots which I hadn't identified before.  I know they are common down here though.

I saw this bird among the Dunlins again and thought it was the Black-bellied Plover.  I was right as can be seen in the picture below -- here he is flying off showing his black armpits.  In the summer, he will have a black belly as well.

It was a very drizzly miserable day but glad I finally identified him for sure!!  He is another fairly common bird but one that I hadn't seen before here.  

I finally managed to get a decent picture of the American Avocet which is the bird on the far right with the upturned beak.  Behind him is an Oystercatcher and a Royal Tern on the far left.

The wind gusts were probably close to 30 mph and it was hard to even hold the camera still to get a picture.  There were several windsurfers and I think they finally scared all the birds off the wall!!  Besides the Oystercatchers, the Avocet and the Royal Terns, there were a lot of Dunlins and a couple of Red Knots on the wall this morning.  It was so windy, they were all awake just trying to stand I imagine!