Friday, May 5, 2017

A Couple of New Birds for Me!!

I have been in charge of trying to manage my daughter's pool before she moves here and I sit on her deck with my camera in hand.  She has a pond edging her property and their are woods on the other two sides.  She doesn't have feeders up yet but I have managed to see two new (to me) birds this week  This is a Great Crested Flycatcher who sings quite loudly and quite a bit!!  Here he is mid-song!

He turned to watch me and gave me a glimpse of his yellow belly and the little bit of red on his sides.


 You can see his "great" crest here.  That was how I knew he was a flycatcher.
I took this the next day and the picture isn't too good as he was bac klit but you can definitely see his  yellow belly and reddish tail here.  I haven't seen him the last few days.

The second new visitor was a Brown Thrasher which is a fairly good sized bird.  He was very good about posing in several different positions so I could correctly identify him!

You can see his wing marks here and his long legs and tail.

He was stunning against the Carolina blue sky.

A Tufted Titmouse stopped long enough so I could finally get his picture.

A couple of Carolina Wrens stopped for a visit one day.  I thought they were going to set up housekeeping in the balcony but looks like they thought better after seeing me.

A male Cardinal stopped one day to get his picture taken.

There have been frequent visits from a male and female Bluebird.  Here is the more colorful male.


Here is the female who is not quite as colorful.  I think they are nesting somewhere nearby.

I will miss seeing all the colorful birds at my daughter's house.

Thursday, May 4, 2017

The End of Marbling for Awhile

Well, finally have cleaned up the area, gotten rid of the remnants of size and retrieved all my efforts.

I have forgotten how difficult it is to get what you want.  The high humidity when I was doing these didn't help as it was difficult to accurately dip the quarter yard pieces -- a problem I haven't had before.  This was was pretty good.

I kind of liked this one also.

I can retrieve fairly large areas of this one and I liked the colors.



The purple looked faded but if cut up, I am sure this will be okay.


I liked several of the second pulls I did.  I define this term as laying a second piece of fabric down after you have just marbled one piece.  You don't add any more paint, just take what is leftover.  I did this one on an already dyed piece of fabric.

I am leaving my paints and supplies here as this is something I can do easily at the beach.  Maybe next year I will have better luck!