Back to Work!!

 Yes, I have been working on quilts again.  The weather has been so wonderful since the hurricane, I have been compelled to spend a lot of time just watching the waves rolling in.  It hasn't rained in three weeks!

This is the Albers quilt that I finished some time ago.  I finally finished the quilting last week but still have to sew down the binding.  It is made from a lot of my hand dyed scraps.  I am working on another quilt now using even smaller scraps from an old dyeing project. This uses a special set of rulers which are not quite square and not quite a diamond and there was lots and lots of trimming but I had seen a small quilt using these rulers and liked the look of the block and thought it would be good to showcase my hand dyes.  I have an awful lot of smaller pieces of hand dyed fabric from when I did much smaller batches at a time!

This is a closeup showing the quilting.  It really took a long time to get it done.  I called it the Albers quilt as he was the artist that did a lot to show how colors were influenced by the colors around them.  So there are colors in this quilt that look different but are the same.

I finally finished this quilt as well and it is on the bed that it was destined for.  It was another of those projects that I brought down here last year.  It was just unfinished squares and not enough for the king sized quilt that I wanted.  I really didn't enjoy making it as it was just too much green.  I tried adding other colors but they just didn't work so had to be satisfied with the touch of yellow and yellow/orange.

This is a closeup of the above quilt which gives  you a better idea of the block itself.  It was Margaret Miller's Easy Pieces.  I gave the book away as I have made four quilts now from that block and I am just done!!

These are blocks that were cut down from larger pieces (not much larger - only 8 x 11 inches).  I had a whole pile of these small pieces from several overdyeing sequences I did after taking Carol Soderlund's class.  I used some different sets of primaries.  The snowflakes were made by applying thickened bleach through a silk screen that I had made.  You can see which colors discharge and which don't.  I wanted to do something with all these blocks so the next project is being birthed now - more later!

As usual, we have pictures of some of the local fauna!  This is the backyard of my daughter's new house.  It is wonderful to sit by the pool with my camera and a good book.  I have seen three kinds of hawks, lots of vultures and several smaller birds.  She has trees all around the lot and it backs up to a marsh so lots of potential for bird watching here -- just have to get her some feeders!!

This was the rather large Bullfrog that decided to nestle into one of her pool skimmers.  She thought it was dead but Warren found out differently when he tried to get it out and it jumped into the pool and starting swimming around!

I followed it back to the woods when Warren finally got it out of the pool!

Two kinds of Skippers -- this is a Silver Spotted Skipper.
 

This is a Fiery Skipper.

This is a young Cooper's Hawk that was flying overhead quite far away.

While Lisa was cleaning out some brush, this Eastern Phoebe took interest as they do like bugs!

I have also seen both Red-shouldered and Red-tailed hawks, lots of Vultures, Yellow-rumped Warblers and others that were deep in the woods and hard to see.