Dallas Quilt Celebration

Went to the quilt show today and got entirely carried away. 

Too tired to blog tonight but I wanted to get my pictures out here- (I only take pictures of the quilts that I like- there are entirely too many quilts to take them all.)  The quilt below is the Best in Show.

Other photos are here:  2012QuiltCelebration 

Blackland Prairie Raptor Center

Saturday was a beautiful day in Texas- I was excited early in the morning because I now have TWO Blue Jays coming to my bird feeder.  (Yes, I am easy to entertain.)  So I put more peanuts out.

It suddenly occurred to me that it was the first Saturday of the month.  Just down the road from my house is the Blackland Prairie Raptor Center which is open to the public on this day.  This is the park where I took the photos of Hunter and Miki to make the quilts which you can see from the link in the top right corner of this page.  So I went out and had a wonderful time taking more pictures and talking with everyone.  I just love the people out there and they just love showing off their birds and the park.

While I was there I was told that they had spotted a wild Great Horned Owl nesting in the park.  I went down and took a look through their scope and sure enough- there she was.  I snapped a couple of shots of the tree with my camera, but figured there was no way I could get close enough without disturbing her.  Later I came home and discovered that I had managed to get a shot of mom hunkered down on the nest.  Here is the severely cropped photo:

Can you see her?  She is all but invisible up there!

I got some great photos, mostly due to the fantastic guys handling the birds. Theri's photos at the BPRC  I think my next quilt will be of Sierra- this is the photo I am coveting at the moment:

 

Isn't she spectacular?  I am so excited that I went out to the garage on Sunday and tried to dye some striped fabric to make those beautiful feathers.  (I have to say that I may not yet be recovered enough to perform the strenuous dyeing process.)  As it turns out, the colors I picked were wrong and I think I added the salt at the wrong time.  The good news is the folding method that I used and the Shibori technique should give me some fantastic patterns to work with.  So I have ordered some rust colored dye and will be trying again soon.

Now all I have to do is start cutting out feather patterns!

And Now It's March....

I think you should know that God is laughing at me.....

There's and old saying that goes something like- "There's my plan and then there's God's plan and I don't seem to be living life according to my plan."  Well, this seems to be 2012 in a nutshell for me.

So I had decided at the beginning of the year that I was going to get one pastel project and one quilt project done every month.  Then I ended up with my job in jeopardy and it looked like I was going to be laid off from work.  I had been having some medical issues which had been getting worse and with the threat of unemployment decided they needed to be taken care of immediately. 

So I located a doctor and found out I needed surgery.  The surgery was somewhat more than expected (6 hours instead of 2) as they found some additional things wrong once once they were in there. Thanks to the doctor (who turned out to be fantastic) this was all done laproscopically and I didn't end up with a big incision in my belly (and the additional recovery time).  The night in the hospital was miserable, but after a week I felt fine.... as far as the pain goes.  What I didn't expect at all was the fact that major surgery apparently sucks the life right out of you.  Typically, I can't even sit in front of the TV without some project in my hands.  Being completely disinterested in moving, food or picking up a needle was somewhat worrisome.

Was out for almost a month but I am in good shape now and last week was my first full week back at work.  While all of this was going on my employer sold our department off to another bank, which is good news.  It looks like I will have to relocate to another state, but at least I still have a very good job.  (Even if it does infringe on my quilting time.)

Obviously the two project a month plan has been a complete bust... when I did get back to feeling better, I didn't want to work on anything I might mess up.  After I came home from the hospital, I was sleeping 12 or 15 hours a day and I had been staring up at the full moon when I was up in the middle of the night.  So when I was starting to feel perkier I thought I could do a little hand sewing.  I made a couple of little (8 1/2 X 11) quilt tops of the moon.  These aren't quilted yet, but thought you might like to see them: