Quilt for The Gathering

Teri Quinn, friend and fellow member of The Cottonwood Quilters took on the HUGE task of providing quilts for The Gathering, a fundraiser for a local private school. I agreed to quilt one of ten quilts which will be auctioned. Janice Lippincott and June Jensen combined blocks from a Houston class and made a beautiful top using colorful batiks and black and white prints.

I quilted it using a free-form spiral feather design. The thread is Superior Rainbows #821 - a multi-colored thread that was PERFECT with the batiks and showed up just as I wanted on the B&W prints!





Janice pieced a batik back that is as wonderful as the front! You can see more detail of my quilting in this photo of the back. I can't believe I didn't take a picture of the entire quilt! The quilt is in the hands of yet another volunteer, who is doing the binding. I will add a picture of the finished quilt when I see it again! You can SEE MORE detail pics of this quilt on flickr.

Jack Frost Stopped By

I woke up this morning to a beautiful white world. A hard frost produced white frosty needles on branches, sticks, even my scarecrow! The needles were on fruits, grass, even the fence around a rose bush.




Although it was harder to see, even the edges of the snow has sharp frosty needles!

A low-hanging fog shrouded the world in white, shrinking my world to a just a few nearby houses. See more Frost Pictures on Flickr. As I write this, the sun is shining, and Omaha is expecting temperatures above freezing for the 2nd day since early December! Our 24+ inches of snow is going to turn into a mushy mess!

A Black Belt Quilt For Alyssa

To celebrate her First Degree, Level 1 and Level 2 Black Belts in TaeKwonDo, I made Alyssa a quilt. Each fabric in the braided sections represents one of the belts she earned as she worked her way to the black belts. The separator bands (sashing) between the braids represents the First Degree, Level 1 belt. The outer border represents her First Degree, Level 2 Belt. This belt has their name and rank embroidered with gold thread, so I quilted it on my HQ16 using yellow thread. In the braids, I did a free-form spiral-y feather.


In the outer border, I wrote the ten tenets of Ho Am TaeKwonDo - Honor, Courtesy, Integrity, Perseverance, Self-Control, Courage, Community, Strength, Humility, Knowledge. In the sashing, I wrote the dates she earned each of her color belts. The center of the quilt back is a straightforward look at the color belts, white, yellow, green, senior green, blue, senior blue, brown, senior brown, red and senior red.

You can see more pictures of the quilt, including closeups of the quilting on flickr.

Close Encounters with a Hawk!

We have snow. A LOT of snow. Around two feet fell in December, more already in 2010, and another storm is expected to dump 3-5" on Omaha tomorrow. When the snow started on December 8th, we made sure the bird feeder was full. The birds who come to our feeder include birds we like - cardinals, blue jays, juncos, finches and wrens, birds we don't have strong feelings about - doves and sparrows, and birds we could do without - starlings and grackles. One unexpected visitor was this sharp-shinned hawk.

He (she?) saw the birds around the feeder as a full menu buffet! We're happy he is catching just starlings (so far!). So revolves the circle of life!



He has been back a couple of times - see more of the pictures I took of our hawk on flickr.