While I did all the quilting on the baby quilts at Mom’s, I brought them home to tack the binding down. I’ve said before, I love hand sewing the binding. I put on some good tv and just get to it. The first quilt whipped along nicely. Then I picked up the second one, and the skies got dark. The wind began to howl and a thunderstorm rolled through.

That wasn’t a problem… until it knocked the power out. Happily, we have the wifi on a back up battery, so I was easily able to look-up and see if the power company had an estimated time to get the lights back on. They did… but it was three hours away…

Nothing to do but kick-it-old school…

I lit some candles and my new-to-me hurricane lamp, and got to work. I’m lucky that it was light-coloured binding, because even with the candles, it was hard to see. How did our ancestors do it???

I got about half of it done before my eyes got to sore, and I decided it was time to give it up and go to bed. The power came on about five mintes after we got under the covers, of course!

I finished it up the next day in some nice, bright sunlight, and now I give you… Darling Duckies!!!

The pattern is Oh My Stars and it’s one I’ve done in various ways, several times previously. It’s a great way to use a charm pack.

I tend to stay away from pastels for babies, prefering much bolder colours, but these little ducks were just so sweet. the dark teal gives it some pop, which makes me content with the more subtle palette.

The back is a chunk of mottled teal flannel that is almost the exact shade as the solid on the front. It was leftover from a quilt Mom and Paisley made a few years ago.

Now I want to get a couple things knit before I send this one off. Maybe something simple I can knit in the dark… just in case!

As I mentioned yesterday, I spent a good chunk of the weekend quilting the baby quilts I had lined up.

The first to share is the fun, woodland-themed one.

I love this one because it’s a great example of not only what you can do with leftover fabric (these were almost all leftover from a fat quarter bundle that made this quilt), but also that simple is beautiful. These are all just four-patch within four patch blocks, surrounded by a couple simple borders.

It’s the type of quilt that really lets the fabric shine.

Sadly, I forgot to take a picture of the back of this one, but it’s the fun flannel I showed in a previous post.

This weekend was another busy one. Most of it was spent at Mom’s, quilting away on the trio of baby quilts (which I’ll share throughout the week). By Sunday, I woke up with a major headache, and I was soooo whomped that I wanted to do nothing but lay in bed and read all day.

And I did just that… until about 3 pm. For the past week, Dave has been bugging me to do something. You see, when we brought all that furniture home from his grandma’s, we had to start deciding what to do with it all. Some of it, we already had plans for, but a few things we took just because Dave didn’t want to see them thrown out.

One of those things was a large six drawer dresser. We’d already brought home two matching “fancy” dressers that I planned to use in the bedroom, replacing my old dressers (which I’ve had since I was a teen). And there was another smaller dresser he tucked in his closet for things like hats and stuff that tend to get lost in dark corners.

But that big one, we had no plans for. Until I was looking at Facebook and several people in a quilting group I belong to were showing off their cuttings spaces. Several different people had taken old dressers and cabinets and such, and turned them into cutting tables.

My current cutting space was serviceable…

Mess aside… It was a folding plastic banquet table. Big enough to hold my cutting mat, with extra space for my project boxes (which is what most of the mess is), and room for my rubbermaid bins of yardage and backing fabric underneath.

The biggest downside of it was the height. It was a little low to be comfortable for cutting. So, I took my idea of turning the dresser into the cutting table to Dave, and let him run with it. He worked away on the dresser for a few days, and had it all ready to go by mid-week last week, but needed my help to get it up into the sewing room.

But I had eleventy billion things to do… until I finally gave in Sunday afternoon. We hefted it up the stairs and…

I wish I’d taken a before picture of the dresser. It had been in Grandma’s garage for at least 30 years. It had been used to store car parts and tools and other random auto-related things. It was so filthy, you could barely tell it was white.

When I told Dave my idea, he gave it a good clean, and several new coats of paint. He cut a piece of plywood to make the top as deep as the old table was, painted it to match and secured it with screws. It’s not as long as the table was, but it’s a much better height. And the drawers give excellent storage space. The top drawers hold my project boxes for current WIPs. The rest of the drawers now contain most of the yardage that was in those Rubbermaid tubs. The only tub I couldn’t fit in was the one full of all my backing fabrics. But it fit nicely down the side.

Burton can’t wait until we have time to make use of it.

While I love showing off the big beautiful blooms of my garden, there’s a whole other world in there, beneath the petals and the leaves.

A vast city of tiny creatures making their way through nodding skyscrapers of flowers.

I’ve shown you all the butterflies that stop in and say hi, but if you look closer, you see some real magic…

Crab spiders are abundant in the garden .It’s not uncommon to find one hiding in the petals of a coneflower or tickseed (as seen here). What is unusual is to catch it eating a meal of stinkbug. Even more unsual is to see it eating a meal surrounded by a bunch of baby fly minions…

Seriously, I’ve never seen anything like it before! Lets also note that the spider is smaller than the nail on my smallest finger… so those flies are TEENY!!!!

Fascinating!

And just as fascinating…

These guys are so small that I wouldn’t have noticed them if there hadn’t been so darn many of them!!! They are Milkweed Aphids. Sadly, if I wanted to keep my milkweed, I had to give them a good dunking in some soapy water. If they get out of control, no more milkweed.

And here’s the reason I’m so keen on keeping that milkweed.

It’s only my first year with the plants, yet the Monarchs laid eggs, and at least one hatched into and became a nice fat caterpillar!!!! He’s since disappeared so I can only hope he wandered off to make his cocoon, and as I write is working on becoming a beautiful butterfly.

There’s a new one on another bit of Milkweed on the other side of the yard, so I’m keeping an on him as well.

But as I said, butterflies aren’t the only pollinators we cater to.

This plant is called Boneset. It’s one of the native plants I put in this spring. It’s not very showy, and it’s flowers are kind of odd looking. But it’s ALWAYS covered in bees, wasps, and hoverflies.

This plant is a pollinator powerhouse!!!

And check out this neat guy hanging off a Cosmos bud

He’s a Green Lacewing. It’s not a great picture, but he was hard enough to see, let alone get a good picture of.

And while honey bees are abundant, we see loads of native bees.

These shiny black-bummed Carpenter bees are easy to mistake for Bumblebees, though they are much bigger… and of course, have a shiny black bum!

I don’t know what kind of bee this is… I can’t tell what’s under all that pollen! It looks like he rolled in it!

But nothing is sweeter than these little bees I keep finding asleep in my sunflowers at the end of the day.

I’ve never seen it before, but it happens pretty regularly. Now I check the sunflowers every evening, and there’s almost always one bee who’s settled in for the night. But one evening…

There were three!!!!! Can you bee-lieve it???

I don’t need the calendar to tell me that autumn is on its way. Nor do I need the earlier sunsets, or the crispness in the night air. I have a garden.

The pretty purple blooms of the physostegia are always a good sign This late bloomer is a favourite of the hummingbirds, which the cats absolutely love. The neat thing is the roots are on the inside of the catio, but many of the blooms have grown through the fence and are on the outside, so the little hummers are in no danger from stalking felines as they stop by for a treat.

The daily abundance of cherry tomatoes is another good indicator the end of summer is nigh.

The grand chop of the Holly bush did it no harm, and the berries are starting to turn red. It will be filled with sparrows come the cold weather, which absolutely delights the cats.

And then of course, there are chrysanthemums. One of the prettiest parts of fall, if you ask me. So far it’s just this purple one, and the rusty red one I bought in July.

But I have two more by the catio gate that should start opening any day now.

And though fall is just around the corner, there’s still so much to enjoy.

The new False Sunflower is really showing off. And it looks so nice beside the red zinnias. I’m definitely going to have to remember to plant more zinnia seeds next spring. They are an annual and won’t come back on their own.

And I keep forgetting to show you my Cardinal flower.

It needed to be staked because it kept flopping over, but it’s just covered in this vivid red flowers. I really hope this one makes it through the winter.

Every corner you turn in this garden, there’s still beauty to behold… and will be until the first frost.

Despite always getting along with each other, it’s unusual to see Burton and Relic snuggled up and sleeping. But on the rare occasion they do…. it’s hella cute!

August is just zooming by, but I did find some time to make this month’s Rainbow Scrap Challenge block before it was over. This month was orange:

Orange has historically always been a challenge for me in rainbow quilts – it’s just not a colour I tend to have much of. But I didn’t have too much trouble for this one. Admittedly, some are a little more peach or coral, but once in the whole block, it still has an overall feel of ORANGE.

And when placed with the other seven blocks, it looks just right.

I am still leaning towards an on-point layout for this, but I didn’t want to disturb the two comfy kitties who’d taken over the design bed.

Now there are just four more months and blocks to go. Where has the year gone???

Unlike the last few walkabout posts, this one doesn’t really have a theme. It’s just random things I’ve seen lately.

The other day, this plane was flying really low over the town. It did about 20-30 loops over our house. Despite it’s low altitude, I still had a hard time getting a picture of it. This is one of the best, and I kind of like the way the sun shines in it. I still haven’t found out why it flying low, or doing loops. Possible theories are dusting crops (though I didn’t see any apparatus attached to the plane that would indicate that), dropping rabies vaccine baits (though the Ministry of Natural Resource planes are usually yellow/orange) or (and this is Dave’s theory), the pilot is the aviation version of those seadoo jerks who just do donuts around the boat launch.

It was kind of cool for the first few loops, but by about the 10th, it was just kind of loud and annoying. Whatever the reason, by early afternoon it was no more and we just got to listen to lawnmowers for the rest of the day.

Speaking of lawnmowers, I’m guessing this homeowner sold theirs…

Now, it’s not something I personally would do. But it’s definitely a creative “alternate” no-maintenance lawn.

I’ve you’ve been enjoying my posts, and think you might want to move to my little town – this house is for sale. That said, the housing market has really changed… prices are still too high, but no one seems to be buying them. This one has been on the market for about a month, and there’s one down the street and around the corner that has been up for almost three. When Dave and I were looking, we found most houses were selling within a week. But early summer, as in other countries, interest rates went up here. The buyers appear to mostly be waiting for prices to drop, but it seems the sellers don’t want to give up the idea they can still get sky high prices.

It’s fascinating to watch how quickly things changed.

This house isn’t for sale, but when I took the picture, it was in the process of getting a new roof. But that’s not why I snapped a photo. If you’ll notice, it’s another of those houses like mine, but I really love the way they added to this one. The little porch at the front door is charming, and I love the side addition, complete with enclosed sun porch and second-level balcony. The fact that is has two front doors makes me wonder if it’s split into two units. One of our neighbours has a similar style addition (without the balcony) and the addition is a second unit.

And from houses we go to a completely random scarecrow on a post by the sidewalk. I think I remember reading something about a scarecrow contest, with winners announced at the fall fair. I’m going to have to do some digging and see if I can find some more info on it. I may have to go on a scarecrow hunt for a walkabout post!

And last…

This is the newest beauty on the lot up the street. I spied it when walking to drop off parts at the mechanic for Dave’s Charger. Dave thinks this Charger is a ’76. It is the same colour as his though, so I told him if I win the lottery, I’m buying it so we have matchy-matchy cars. He just rolled his eyes, but I think it’s a GREAT idea.

It is going to have to be a big lottery win though… because it seems I plan on buying a lot of classic cars!

After driving long distances, and moving far too much furniture on Saturday, I was really looking forward to devoting Sunday to sewing. And sew I did. (With some help from Burton, of course)

We were several blocks behind on the Moda Blockheads quilt and I was determined to catch up.

First was a block called Bauble.

It was a very neat block, but in all honesty, a total pain in the butt! The designer used paper piecing to make those top and bottom triangles. Paper piecing still confuses me so I tried to figure out another way. Eventually, I got it, but it took some trial and error (and several swear words).

After that we moved on to something more more enjoyable. One of the bonus blocks was a basket block. But we noticed that the basket block is really just a bear paw block with a base added on. So we decide just to make a bear paw block… or in this case… a cats claw.

And we liked it so much we decide to make two!

Then we did the most recent block in the quilt along.

Just another variation on a star block, but Burton did point out that it gave us more practice at quarter-square triangles. And we are getting much better at making them!

And before we laid it all out to see how it would all look, Burton reminded me that when we made the dizzy daisy quilt, we’d thrown together a pair for this quilt too (they were the right size, so why not?!?)

Aren’t they sweet?

Now we have 26 blocks total. I’m aiming for 30, so that’s just four more to go. Another block will be released tomorrow, so we are definitely nearing the end on this one!!!

Life continues at a furious pace.

On Saturday we were back at Grandma’s liberating more furniture. We came home with another display cabinet, THREE more dressers, two wooden desks (one of which was VERY heavy) a butcher block island, a coffee table, a wooden rocking chair, a tea cart, and a pile more boxes of who knows what…. I don’t know where we are going to put it all, but Dave was insistent.

Sunday I was sore from all that lifting, so I told him to leave me alone and let me sew all day. You’ll see more of that later this week, but in between all of this, I have been knitting.

Because there’s only one girl in the wave of impending babies, I really wanted to make something pink and frilly.

The pattern is Wee Leisl. The yarn is a ball of Regia I got not too long ago. The picture doesn’t do it justice. It’s a soft, powdery shade of mauvey-pink with a little bit of heathering. Its so pretty in person.

The pattern is one I’ve knit twice before and it’s defnitely a favourite. I’m just past the split for the body, though in truth, I should be further along. This is actually my second go at it. On my first try, it seems I completely forgot how to read a chart. I got to the split for arms and body, and came up short about 20 or stitches. It took me far too long to figure out where I went wrong. And when I finally did, there was no solution but to frog the whole thing and start again.

But… I’m on track now. As I’m making the smallest size, it really shouldn’t take too long to finish up. I just need to devote my after dinner hours to knitting and nothing else. If I do so, I can probably have it off the needles by this time next week!