With the warmer weather, Rupert has been joining Lemmy in the catio more.

That means lots of gingery chaos ensues…

Tuesday night, Dave and I headed in to Strathroy to run a few errands. On the way home, we noticed a bright orange glow in the western sky. As we got a little closer to home, we realized the glow was from a fire. And from the amount of glow… it looked like a big one!

We decided to see if we could find it. When we hit Petrolia (about 35-40 minutes from where we started), I realized the flame was coming from a stack. I grew up in Hamilton, and flames on stacks were a fairly common sight at the steel plants nearby.

It was still pretty far off in the distance, so we kept going toward it. Finally, we got up close and personal at Nova Chemicals (they make plastics), just outside Corunna (a town about 10 minutes south of Sarnia)…. a good 70 km from where we first saw the glow.

I pulled into the plant’s drive (something we were never able to do in Hamilton!), pulled off to the side and Dave took a picture.

The flame is from a process called “flaring” where they burn off excess hydrocarbon gases that cannot be recovered or recycled. We were probably still a good kilometre or more from the actual stack, but you could hear the roar of that flame and feel it’s warmth.

It was a pretty wild site – and a fun little evening adventure.

We’ve had a nice little warm up this week. Yesterday it got up to 8 Celsius, so I took my lunch hour and enjoyed it with Lemmy in the catio.

It was wonderful to sit and soak up some warm sun. Despite the warmth, there’s still a lot of snow out there.

Still, I trudged through it to check on my pussywillows.

The pink ones are a touch more pink… but not as pink as they’ve been in previous years. There are however lots of them! The bush is just covered in catkins and they are so fluffy!!!!

The black pussywillow is always a little behind the pink one…

It’s just getting started.

And the grey one… well I let the grey one grow a little too much…

So all the catkins are out of reach! It will be getting a good pruning this spring.

Elsewhere…

I relocated my white double lilac last fall. It had been getting shaded out by the raspberries, and wasn’t growing well. I wasn’t sure how well it would survive the transition, but here it is sprouting up through the snow.

The rest of the gardens pretty much look like this…

But there was one bare patch beside the house and look…

Green sprouts!!!! Spring is coming…. eventually!

This is the current state of block seven

After working all day and part of Saturday evening on completing the quilt top, I didn’t have any energy to do any stitching in the evening. I had a hot bath, then watch a bit of TV before bed.

Sunday evening was more productive embroidery-wise. I did the stems on the outside flowers and then got a start on all those French knots. You can see how far I got (and how far I still have to go). I’md definitely improving at them, but they are still hard on the hands.

It looks like my new kit has a lot more satin stitch and I think I will enjoy that much more. But… I’ve got to complete this kit first! One more weekend and I’ll be onto block eight.

I’ve got plans to head to Mom’s in mid-March. Whenever I got to Mom’s, I like to take at least two tops to quilt. But so far, I only had one – the Blockhead Bee top.

So I decided since I finally had some time to get in the studio this weekend, I needed to complete a top. I only had two choices – the diagonal four patches, or the retirement quilt.

Since the retirement quilt has a deadline (April 30th), so I figured that was the obvious choice… and I got to it!

And Burton immediately got to helping!

Working around him, I sewed and sewed and sewed until I got all the sashings done.

And then it was just a matter of sewing everything together. And throwing on some borders.

The boys gave it a thorough comfort test. When I have them some treats for their effort, I was able to get a better shot.

It’s fairly simple, just nine-patch stars with cornerstars. But it creates a few different secondary patterns depending on how you focus on it. And that’s one of the things I love about quilting!

In these crazy times, you just gotta focus on the things that make you smile. Like this wee dragon and cauldron I got at the thrift store.

They don’t actually go together, but I think that they are just perfect as a pair. I found the cauldron first. Its cast iron too – basically a real cauldron in miniature. I had no idea why I needed it, but I felt I did. Then several shelves away, was the dragon. Some of you may recall that I have a little collection of dragon stuffies. I thought he would be right at home with them. And then I put him beside the cauldron. I think it was meant to be.

And if you’re wondering just how small the cauldron is…

Here’s some bananas for scale!

I feel like a broken record… but incase you missed it – we are having a VERY snowy winter!!! So its not really a surprise that we’ve seen A LOT of snowbirds this winter… aka the Juncos.

Sun or cloud, wind or snow, at any given time, on any given day, there are between 10 to 30 juncos in the yard and around the feeders. This is the first time that I’ve noticed that there’s a difference between the male and female birds, with the female birds being lighter and just a touch brown.

I’m terrified one of the cats is going to bring one in any day now, because they love to hop in and out of the catio, even though I got rid of the coneflower seeds heads in there so they wouldn’t be tempted. They just love to hop along the snow drifts.

The Mourning Doves are back too… I don’t think they actually leave, but I don’t tend to seem them in January/December for some reason.

There’s something very elegant about them. And they almost always hang out in pairs.

Another regular visitor are the Starlings.

I know many consider them pests, and they can be bullies at the feeder, but I love their speckled feathers.

I love their calls too. Our first winter here, we had them nesting in our attic, and you could hear them through the ceiling. I made Dave wait until the babies fledged in spring before evicting them and boarding up their access. They seemed to have moved into the neighbours next door, so we see them around a lot, though I don’t often get pictures. Fun fact: Starlings have blue eggs, very similar to Robins.

And of course, my army of Jays are about as long as their are peanuts in the ring.

It’s always a delight to watch my bold, brash blue friends.

This has definitely been the snowiest winter I can remember in a long time. We’ve pretty much had a good covering of snow since Christmas. We’ll get a warm up for a day or two, and then bam, another storm comes through dumping several inches of fresh snow.

Now I’m not complaining, my brother, who lives three hours north of us in the snow belt, has been getting HAMMERED with snow. Check out the famous 12 ft snow wall a few towns over from him.

But it has meant that the kitties haven’t been going out as much. Well – most of the kitties

Not much but the biting cold stops this idiot from going outside. The snow bothers him not a jot.

These pics were taken over a week ago. We got a good walloping on the weekend and now there’s about double that in the catio yard (and everywhere else).

Lemmy doesn’t quite see what the birds see in the seed heads that are scattered throughout the garden.

But he does enjoy a good scratch/roll on the scratching log!

The second, smaller Kitty Cat hat is finished! And it doesn’t look much different than the first, other than it is, in fact, smaller.

I am moderately annoyed. I thought I would have enough yarn left from the original ball to eke out this one. But I was short.. by like two inches of that bottom ribbing. That’s it! I literally needed probably 20 feet or so of yarn, so I had to go out and buy another full ball.

I’m tempted to make the middle size (this was the smallest, the first, the largest) and she can just basically have a series of hats that fits her forever!! Lol.

As you saw in my clean up post, I had a big pile of scraps to deal with. Normally, when I finish a quilt, I try to cut all the leftovers (anything under 1/4 yard that is) into smaller squares and tuck them away in my scrap bins for scrap quilts.

Sadly, I’d neglected that on the last 10 quilts or so so I had quite a pile to do. After getting the room organized, I set to it and in a couple hours, I had everything cut and put away. And I thought I’d share a couple other things I do with my leftovers.

Once the quilts come off the quilting machine, we have to trim off the extra backing. There’s usually a fair bit left and I like to cut it into strips for binding.

When I have a little more time, I’ll sew the strips together, iron them, measure them and tuck them away in this binding bin.

…ready for any quilt they might happen to match!

And here’s a new thing for me. You may recall that I have bolts of solid fabric in several neutral colours. I keep these on hand for background fabric in my quilts. But that means I get quite a pile of scraps from them too.

So I decided to cut the smaller pieces into 2.5″ squares.

They are now bagged up by colour and ready to go whenever I need small squares.

It’s fun to get organized!