turkey flap and sock wrap (up)

Ack!  I'm falling further and further behind with my photos.  I've taken hundreds since last week.  It's easy to do, since it's so beautiful outside.

Mornings are delightfully cool - usually in the 40s - and the afternoon sun is warm.  The cats love to take advantage of that bit of heat!

I'm doing my best to bring a little of the outdoors inside.  Last week, I gathered up leaves from the yard and made some leaf garlands to hang around the house.  Nothing fancy, but it adds a nice splash of color over the sink, windows, and fireplace.

It is officially candle season, too.  I have about a thousand IKEA tealights to run through, so we have candlelit suppers nightly.  I've got them in little glass holders, sitting on a pottery dish.  Simple fall tablecloth over the middle of the table, and 2 taper candles.  It's light enough to read by, but doesn't feel "cluttered" like it has in the past.

We bought our Christmas tree...

...but we're going to try to hold off on decorating until after Thursday's feast!

Meanwhile, I've been crafting like crazy.  I wanted to make some Christmas-themed quilted pillows, but so much of the fabric lines feature maniacal Santas or scampering elves.  I was really pleased to find a Nordic-themed line:

I used it to make a nice throw pillow. 

It measures, I think, 18" x 18". 

I also finished piecing together the blocks for my quilt.  Without sashing, it looks too bright and busy...

...but the sashing adds just enough "calm space."

It's not done.  I have to make over 200 tiny gingham triangles for the border, then sew on another 2.5" border, then the edge binding, THEN the actual quilting.  But my goal is to complete it - or at least everything but the final quilting - before 2018.

Speaking of gingham, I finally finished knitting these socks!

I didn't think I'd ever finish them, and I'm taking a serious knitting break now.  I'm still struggling with the proper finger positioning and on these, switched around between 3 different styles (resulting in 3 different tensions) before finally slogging through the last toe.  The fact is, I've damaged my hands through improper holding of the yarn over the years, and have never given them a chance to really rest.  I'm going to take a multi-month knitting break and then start off slow again!

Meanwhile, I'm going to work on other projects and enjoy the leaves...

...turkeys...

...and the ornamental kale I'm starting to see everywhere!

Have a great week!

quilting zen and woodchuck den

My Farm Girl Vintage Sampler quilt is coming along nicely!

I'm nearly halfway done.  I organized my scraps into "rainbow order" and the bright, bright, bright is now coming more naturally! 

I'm not sure how I will feel about the finished quilt.  There's a part of me that wants to order a few mixed fabric bundles in the beautiful muted, earthy colors I love from Fig Tree and make another version of this quilt which is more suited to my color preference.  I have enjoyed making this so much, though, that I don't think I'll mind making another. 

I've also been knitting, although not nearly as much, since knitting still hurts my hands.  I'm making a pair of gingham-checkered socks and I've just started the second one.

Another fun project!  I heard about "half birthdays" earlier this year - celebrating the halfway point between your last birthday and your next one.  I definitely don't need a real reason to have a celebration, so I scheduled it on Google Calendar.  When it popped up this weekend for Todd, I had a great idea.  I didn't want to make a whole cake (to be cut in half), and a half cupcake seemed like a bit of a stretch for a celebration.  I decided to take a small-batch chocolate cookie recipe (which made 12 cookies) and press the dough into half of an 8" cake pan.  I made a foil "wall" and used pie weights as a buttress. 

The resulting cookie was a perfect half-cookie cake size.  Livened up with a little almond-tinted frosting and festooned with sprinkles, it made a very cheerful half birthday surprise!

Around the house this week we've had a lot of interesting creatures.  A wheel bug was resting in one of our ferns.  They're pretty aggressive and have a nasty bite (said to be much more painful than a bee sting), but I've found that the general wildlife rule applies:  leave them alone and they'll leave you alone.

Check out that spiky wheel!  Both males and females have them and its general purpose is unknown...perhaps an intimidation tactic?

Can you see that long, pointy rostrum?  They're in the assassin bug family.

I saw some wood ducks a week or so ago, but they're very flighty (no pun intended) and I've been unable to get close.  These ducks, though, don't seem to mind. 

I was gratified to see the growing flock.  Last year, we only had four!

Our little woodchuck has been very active too.

He's got a den under a fallen tree stump in our back yard.

I don't see him very much, but I'm always keeping an eye out!

For weeks, spiders everywhere.  Then, boom!  Nothing.  I did find a nice web in the back yard, where this yellow jacket had just been tidily wrapped up for later consumption.

I couldn't catch the spider, though...he was too fast for me!

Lots of flowers still blooming.

Our orange ginger lilies, which I transplanted around the front of the house, are blooming.  I wouldn't plant them again, though. The flowers are too short-lived and the plants themselves remind me of corn stalks.  While they last, though...

A few random gardenias are still opening up, and the japonica bushes are starting to sprout the funny 'puffballs' that will eventually become bright black berries.

Some leaves are falling...

...but I miss the bold, varied displays of the Midwest.  At least it's a little cooler this week.  Last week we hit 90 degrees again!  I dreamed about a snow storm last night.  I think it's back to winter-scene puzzles for me!

Have a great week! 

Feel the vi-BURN-um

Another weekend, another walk through the botanical gardens.  Todd and I love to take early-morning walks and spring is the perfect time.  It can be bittersweet, because I saw a few favorites from my Indianapolis garden.

There, I'd planted viburnum on either side of the front door.  It's an attractive shrub (if you prune it into submission) and the flowers in the spring have a delicious scent.

Oh, the daffodils!

I just finished a book on garden theory and design by David Culp (The Layered Garden) and he advised that you can stretch out the growth of a favorite flower by planting early-, mid-season, and late-blooming varieties.  I did this with the lilac bushes I planted in our Indianapolis back yard.

Deer love hydrangeas, and I have yet to find a cage that lets our hydrangeas spread and grow but keeps the deer out.  In Indianapolis, I had both Endless Summer and Little Lime growing all season along our side fence.  At the botanical garden, I discovered something that I never knew existed...a hydrangea TREE!

My mind positively boggled at the bouquet, wreath, and landscaping possibilities.  Needless to say, this tree is going to the top of my list for our FRP, or "final resting place" - the property where we settle for good and where I'm able to throw myself into making the cottage garden I've dreamed of since childhood.

But there are things here, of course, that I've never seen thrive in the midwest.  Camellias, for example.  The botanical garden has over 60 varieties.  They've mainly bloomed and dropped by now, but the walk is still lovely.

Nice to meet an old friend on the trail, too!

I love seeing the semi-wildlife out and about, whether napping...

...or having a very serious meeting of the minds!

By the way, a group of turtles is called a bale.  This discovery led me down a rabbit hole of delight (a group of caterpillars is an army!  A group of ferrets is a busyness!  A group of wild cats is a destruction!) but I was able to pull myself away to read more about the next creature we found...a banded water snake.

Non-venomous and totally benign, just having a rest in the sun.

The dogwoods are in full bloom, both at our house and at the botanical gardens.

Redbuds are still going strong.

I love walking on petal-strewn paths!

Borga doesn't care either way...she just wants to be out.  Check out that smile!

I recently finished knitting a pair of socks, Jaywalkers.  It was a bit of an experiment.  When I first started knitting, I stocked up on any yarn that appealed to me without being particular about a specific project need or fiber content.  Now that I'm more knowledgeable and discriminating about what I buy, I have a big box of these "guilt yarns" in my cabinet.  I don't want to use them, but I hate to waste the yarn.  I'll probably end up donating a lot of it, but I'm trying to find uses for some of it first.  Self-striping yarn is just not my preference, but this pattern cleverly draws it into a kind of zig-zag design. Still, I'm just lukewarm about these.  At least they're a good fit!

I've also started  a quilt.  No, I didn't finish the big star quilt from last week.  I put it away until I feel more excited about it.  I bought a coordinated layer cake set (42 10" x 10" fabric squares, all different) called Strawberry Fields Revisited.  Beatles reference aside, I like the cheerfulness of the pieces and feel like it's a perfect spring quilt.  I'm paper-piecing large stars that showcase 8 different designs.  I'll have four (five?) squares like this:

...and four (five?) squares each of four other fabric combinations.  I'm grumpy that even with paper piecing my points still aren't lining up perfectly or even very close in some cases, but I'm going to push forward.  Practice makes perfect, and the quilting itself will hide a multitude of sins.

Have a great week!