It has something to do with the orientation of my woods and my hill to the sun, which warms the hill all year.
Turkeys used to hang out here all winter—30 or more of them around the house was not at all unusual.
AC doggie does not permit them in his territory though.
I woke this morning to AC telling me there were turkeys in our woods.
There were—and there was mating going on.
The large band breaks apart as the breeding cycle begins—and the males start to court the females and to assemble their small breeding groups.
Friend Marsha Smith sent me a nice pic of a male turkey in her yard who had puffed himself up to attract a female. You can see his head is starting to turn blue.
She also sent me a picture of one of her Snow Drops blooming.
They can and do survive the brrrr cold we have right now for a few days.
It’s Monday morning, and the temperature at my back door is 10 Degrees!
How did that happen after our series of such pretty and warmer days? It’s spring in Maine, that’s how. She’s a teaser, that spring.
My cataract operations have both been done now—the second eye was done two Tuesdays ago. And my vision is once again AWESOME! I only need some reading glasses for fine print—and I can see my phone screen just fine if I hold it away from me. My world is filled with LIGHT (lots of light) and color again, and I am so grateful for this senior citizen gift.
I got a MUCH-NEEDED haircut this morning and am now feeling less old and way less all-the-time messy.
I’ve been working on the log cabin quilt for my niece and have a bit over half the blocks done now. It will be 8 rows by 8 rows, or 96 inches square.
The fall crop of butternut squash is running low in our stores now. I found one and roasted the cubes I cut out of it. Roasted this way, butternut squash is like eating candy it is so sweet. And it is easy to make. I love it best in the fall with fresh rosemary, lots of garlic, some good olive oil, and a sprinkling of coarse sea salt. I make do now with dried herbs if I don’t buy fresh rosemary, which is expensive.
Cut the squash in half lengthwise and them slice the halves into half circles. Turn these on their sides and trim off the outer skin and cut each slice into chunks. Place them all in a parchment lined pan and apply the herbs, garlic, salt, and olive oil. Roast at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes—you may want to turn up the heat at 25 minutes or so to pop the chunks with stronger heat—which starts to caramelize them.
Enjoy! And the extras reheat well, but they are also good cold in a salad.
I say “we” because AC watched the entire movie with no loss of attention. I would probably have stopped and moved to something more “adult,” but AC was watching so intently. Occasionally he would leap from the couch to more closely inspect the tv screen. Or, to guard us against “those dogs” in our house. It was too funny to miss. He’d run back to me in a bit and wedge himself against my body. Gradually he relaxed and lay down beside me, but he never took his eyes away from the screen.
Any appearance by the BIG black wolf (the movie’s metaphor for “the call of the wild”) always produced a trip to the tv screen.
The scenery was pretty.
I am easily amused.
The pandemic is hard on dogs that are very social too.
I finished the expanded “My Bokeh” quilt top today and purchased a backing for it this past week.
You may recall that I thought I’d finished it. Only, it kept calling to me, and I had more fabric. So I turned what I had on its side and added more rows. Now it is a lap-quilt size: 60 by 72. And I like it a lot.
Now it has joined the other ongoing projects on the bed next door to my quilt room. There are two finished quilt tops that need to go on the longarm, all the ironed fabric for the blue/grey log cabin for my niece, backing and binding fabric for the log cabin, a pile of fabric sent by Sewtopia for this month’s Color Collective project, a BIG block I cut out to see how it would look that needs to be sewn together, and the “funky” wedding quilt project I’d like to try out—the one Debbie on A Quilter’s Table blog tried and posted, from a book by Gwen Marston and Freddie Moran (COLLABORATE AGAIN) about “funky” quilt blocks and projects (see a previous post for pics).
I cleaned off the design wall and put up the log cabin blocks I’ve already made. My niece and her husband chose a barn raising format. So now I’m really excited to cut more fabric and to make more blocks. I’m thinking 8 rows at the very most—that would be 96 inches square. But it is already looking really pretty!
The best thing about roasting a big chicken may be what comes after that first meal, as in the gorgeous lunch salad the next day:
Or the broth-dense soup for dinner last night:
Unfortunately, I’ve reacted slightly to this soup, so now it’s a benedryl nap day. I don’t know if it is that the stock cooked too long in the Instant Pot, or if it is the teaspoon of tumeric I added, or both. I’m resisting throwing out the other half of the soup. The 5.5 pound chicken produced 2 dinner meals, a big lunch salad, 3 soup meals, and 4 cups of stock frozen in 1-cup portions. AND, some really healthy and delicious meals.
My boy was so pretty yesterday that I took a picture of him.
That’s “the look” that says it is well past time for us to do something TOGETHER.
AC has been telling me repeatedly that there are chipmunks under the front deck.
If you look where the deck meets the side of the house, you can see a cache of eaten seed husks. The feeders are on the upper deck and do create a big mess. But I can’t quite let go of feeding my resident birds. Likely I’ll have to trap and rehome the chipmunk population this spring and summer. And, the little destructive red squirrels too.
This lunch made me feel like spring is coming faster now: a mozzarella, herbed omelet, cottage cheese, and a lovely salad with the snow peas just showing up in our markets and sweetened with cubed apple. (I flipped over my omelet getting it out of the pan, so part tore off just a bit.)
I have totally fallen in love with Ghee (butter melted gently until the milk solids can be removed). Ghee does not need refrigeration unless you somehow get some water into it or you contaminate it with food on a spoon. It isn’t as stable in a hot pan as beef tallow, but it will take a fair amount of heat. And it distributes the most heavenly buttery taste throughout whatever you are pan sautéing. I really like using it to saute chopped veggies. Delicious!
This Tuesday morning I will (God willing and the creek don’t rise) have cataract surgery on my right eye—to which I’m really looking forward. The vision now in my left eye is just awesome. It will be terrific to have both eyes working together again. I’m thinking I’m only going to need reading glasses once everything settles down post-surgery.
For us here in mid-coast Maine, it is warm this Sunday morning: 38 degrees on the north side of the house. AC has been out for a two morning runs around the property now: pre and post breakfast. He comes to the window where I am writing this post and drinking coffee to tell me he is ready to come inside. I go to the kitchen door, and he runs around the house to meet me at the door. It’s wonderful how dogs and humans create a language where they both understand what the other is saying.
Daylight is filling our days now, some warmer temps are flirting with us, and both AC and I feel a renewal of energy after our winter resting time.
A dear friend hung a very pretty bag on my outside door handle the other day. Inside was a very sweet card, a beautiful pin, and this gorgeous cowl made in the green colors I so love.
I already adore it and wear it every chance I get.
The kindness of my friends and family are what are getting me through the isolation of the pandemic. And I do try to play this kind of kindness forward as well.
You may recall that this quilt is a project in the current season (3) of The Color Collective, hosted by Amy Newbold’s Sewtopia, and with projects by designer and quilter extraordinaire Tara Faughnan and one month with another designer—this year it is Latifah Saafir. I think the fabric palette Tara chose for this project was just delicious. I cut and sewed until I ran out of fabric.
I quilted on my domestic with a walking foot (see the book WALK by Jacquie Gering) with a medium grey Gutterman thread, using a swirly pattern I saw in a post in Debbie’s A Quilter’s Table blog. I did not do the opposite diagonal as the quilt told me it was done. Pips are apple seeds, and this quilting pattern made me think of spring winds swirling through apple trees as they begin to leaf out in spring.
I would also say that I lost some of my points on the top and bottom rows—as the quilting shrank up the quilt, as quilting does. I think if I were to make this block again I would set my top and bottom rows BEFORE trimming those blocks at the top and bottom—and would only trim them after the quilting was finished.
I had enough of Carrie Blomston’s “Newsprint” fabric (108 wide leftovers) to cover the back, and I ordered more of the Kona “Thistle” in this palette for the binding and for another project as well.
I can see other uses for this block—for sure. It could be made to highlight a printed fabric in a quilt for someone to whom the fabric would “speak.” Learning about using Sewline glue to hold the curves while one sews is an awesome trick.
I’ll use this picture to make a photo card to have on hand—I’ve been doing these cards for years now and use them for every purpose where I need to send a card.
Thank you Tara Faughnan for this beautiful project!
One of the projects in our Mt. Battie Modern Quilt Guild this past year was to make Temperature quilt during the year, starting in January 2020.
Jan Corson sent me pics of her finished Temperature Quilt the other day. And it is quite interesting and engaging.
Jan and I have been exploring methods and patterns in Jacquie Gering’s book WALK, which uses one’s walking foot to quilt. Jan used the information in the book to quilt her Temperature quilt.
The big “reveal” of several ongoing challenges will occur later this month in the Mt. Battie Modern Quilt Guild meeting. So pics of these challenge projects will be on the Mt. Battie Facebook page some time after the reveal.
Wildlife here in Mid-Coast Maine is often in very close proximity to us.
A friend who lives in town has had at least two Bobcats visiting her property over the winter. She says this one sat on her back steps for several hours the other day. She said it is smaller than another one who has also visited.
I thought you’d enjoy the pics she sent me.
A full grown male can weigh in at 20 to 30 pounds. The females are smaller. A size comparison would be AC doggie, who weights about 26 pounds. So you can see these cats are NOT the size of a housecat.
They eat a wide variety of foods, from large to small, and can take on an animal the size of a deer.
I finished this top last night—it’s 36 by 42. It is the 4th project in my online class with Tara Faughnan, hosted by Sewtopia’s Amy Newbold. Tara called her demonstration quilt “Bokeh.” I’m not going to post a picture of her work as I do not have her permission to do so and could not get a picture of her whole quilt anyway, just parts of it. She will post images of her Bokeh when she is ready to do so.
I looked up what “Bokeh” means and found it is a photographic term for pictures with deliberately manipulated fuzzy backgrounds with a sharp foreground image. Suddenly what Tara was attempting fell in to place for me. And I loved the transferring of that concept to fabric “pixels.”
I don’t think I’m done with this project. I have more fabric and could add more (I added white and cream here). I wasn’t sure how to think about color in the individual blocks, and now I would NOT line up strips of color but would work with light, medium, and dark blocks, but in a way where individual pops of color allow more “twinkling” in all of the blocks. The light blocks could almost always have a pop of dark color and the dark ones could pop with the bright fabrics. In that way the way the colors fall doesn’t necessarily matter. So I may start from a light center and work out to medium and dark blocks—but with patches of light blocks mixed in appropriately. It won’t be a large project. I just want to see if this way of thinking about the colors would work.
I do like my dark patches here—they seem to glow—and I didn’t expect that effect. I think that speaks to how well Tara chose these palette colors. I moved blocks around and moved them around, but still wound up with three places that butted up the same patches. Ugh!
Also, I’m finding that these clips I purchased (and included in a previous blog post), REALLY help with keeping all these seams perfectly aligned for sewing. So a big thumbs up for this product. I sew right up to the first prong and then hold the fabric with finger pressure as I slowly slide out the prong to near it’s end so I can keep sewing without hitting the metal of the prong. I also fold back the fabric to make sure the seams are nested correctly before inserting the prong at each seam.
What a fun project this is. Thank you Tara for this one. It’s been a real distraction from the required social distancing of the pandemic. And a joyful project for winter sewing.
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