On the weekend, I turned my attention to making more of those pretty parrot blocks. Once I got going, I got pretty good at them. I could turn out a pair in pretty short order. I got to the point where I could put them together with barely a glance at the instructions.

And before I knew it, all 10 were done!

As you can see, they got sewn together, and then a strip of the light blue background fabric sewn to the top. Now the quilt is almost done!

The above panel you see is about 60″ wide x 14″ tall. It will make up the top portion of the quilt. The bottom will be all one fabric.

This beautiful leafy green batik you see on the bottom right. The rainbow flower batik will be the binding, and those colourful dots the back!

It’s a fairly simple design, but I think it’s going to be a stunning one when it’s all together!

Burton, however, would like me to give all these bird-themed projects a rest though… I guess I better go hunt in the stash for some cat fabric!

Well, I did not expected to have these finished quite so soon… but you know how it goes with self-striping yarns. “Just one more stripe” really adds up – even on giant man socks

To recap, the main yarn is KnitPicks Felici, in the Thunderstruck colourway. I have no idea how those colours equate to the name. But they are colourful and fun at least.

My camera is still having difficulties capturing the difference between the two lighter oranges.

I finally got it on that close up, but it took some tweaking. It’s still much MORE noticeable in real life. For cuff, heel and toe, I used some leftover Alley Cat in “Sea Spray”. It was left from Rowan’s Christmas hoodie. It’s not perfect match for the blues, but I think it works none-the-less.

This pair is for my brother for his birthday… which you may recall is in December. So these will live in the gift box for a good long while. Nothing wrong with being ready, though!

My HST Leader/Ender project has been languishing since I finished the last of the 256 HSTs needed for it. To be honest, I’ve been dreading working on it. That’s a lot of HSTs that needed to be arranged and sewn together. It seemed like a HUGE task.

To make it a little easier, I decided to sort the HSTs and break the quilt down into quadrants.

I took an afternoon to lay the first quadrant out.

Normally I would clear the whole bed off to use it, but look closely in the upper left-hand corner of that picture.

I obviously couldn’t disturb Rupert’s beauty sleep. So I quietly worked around him. After an hour or so…

One quarter of the quilt top was done! Only three more quarters to go! That wasn’t so daunting after all.

Right Rupert?

Continuing to take advantage of the beautiful weather, the other afternoon I decided that G’Nomeo was in desperate need of a refresh. (You can read about how G’Nomeo joined our family here.)

I should have given him one last year, so now he was in desperate need of attention.

You can see how faded the poor chap was. I set up on the back table with my paints and my brushes. Relic and Burton took up appropriate snoopervisor positions…

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…and I got to work. It didn’t take long. He needed a couple of coats, but the sun was warm and dried him pretty quick. In under two hours, he was back at home in the garden under the butterfly bush.

Once things green up around him, he’ll look right at home!

I can barely believe my eyes!

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It’s still only March and I have actual blooms!

This is the earliest I’ve ever had something bloom in the garden. The reason is three-fold. Crocuses are, of course, early bloomers. But, I finally got smart and planted some in an area that gets sun constantly. And this week the weather has been spectacular. It’s not odd to get a warm day here and there in March, but we’ve had a whole week of it… temps almost reaching 20 Celsius! That is unusual!

I’m sure Mother Nature will put us back in our place this week, but I certainly enjoyed every minute in the sun I could.

Relic has been too… with little respect to the tender green things popping up around him. Still.. you can see how well the spring bulbs and irises are doing already.

The Crocuses will soon have company.

The Candytuft is already budding up. Once she gets going, she’s a show-stopper.

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And there are daffodils all over the gardens, but the ones in the sunniest spots already have buds!

The most surprising thing of all…

Almost all of my roses have tiny little leave sprouts. While it’s definitely early, it makes me very happy. As you may recall, in September, I did a big reorganization on the gardens and the roses we not al all happy with me. I wasn’t sure any of them survived the winter. Now it looks like all but two did. And as I said, it’s still early so they may surprise me.

Ginger is the spice of life!

It’s rare that I have two full days to myself on the weekend. I usually spend at least one day at Mom’s quilting (I’m not complaining). But this weekend was one of those weekends.

After devoting Saturday to sewing, I decided that on Sunday, I’d tackle a little more of the yarn that needed to be dyed.

First up was eight skeins of our Tabby Cat base, but in the Chunky weight. It was another one never planned for the shop – I’d long wanted to dye it up and make myself a big, warm grandpa cardigan.

Since green is my favourite colour, I decided a nice strong pine would be perfect for a work-a-day cardigan.

Next up was seven skeins of Alley Cat Falkland.

I did four of them up in a pretty Wedgewood blue. I don’t have a lot of blue in my wardrobe, so I thought it would be fun to step outside my colourbox and make myself a blue cardigan – one day.

The other three were dyed up for socks.

I’m going to have quite a stash of sock yarn by the time I’m finished.

Last were two single skeins of lace-weight.

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The first is Twinkle Cat Lace. I’m not a huge fan of blue, but we have one shade – Twilight, that I just adore. And it really makes all those sparkly bits stand out.

The second is unknown. All I can tell is that it’s 100% silk. I dyed it up in a warm, dusky burgundy – It will become something gorgeous and lacey…. one day.

Now I have just one Rubbermaid tub of yarn left. But it’s packed to the gills, so I suspect I have at least two more dyeing sessions ahead of me.

Back in December, neighbour Krista asked me if I could donate a quilt to a silent auction. She volunteers at a local volunteer-run aviary.

Unfortunately, my stock had been bought up by then, and I was focused on my Christmas list. I promised her that come spring, I’d make something special that they could raffle off to raise some money. I had the perfect idea.

Well, Saturday saw the first day of spring, so it was time to get moving on it. I pulled together a rainbow of batiks, and got cutting.

I only got one bird done (I’d worked on the Jane Austen quilt first), but I’m quite pleased with the result. And I think Burton is too!

The pattern for the block is from Sew Fresh Quilts. She’s got a lot of amazing quilt patterns. This is the first one I’ve bought, and I found it quite easy to follow.

I love working with the batiks, so I have a feeling the rest of those birds are just going to fly out of the sewing machine!

The first of the Thunderstruck socks is done.

In this light, you can finally see a bit more difference between the pumpkin orange and light coral stripe. The camera still has trouble capturing it. It’s much more apparent in person.

It’s been nice mindless knitting. Work has been crazy, and now we’ve added house-hunting into the mix. I’m just not up for complicated knitting right now.

The Felici is great for that. It’s a nice yarn to knit with and they are such fun colours. It’s the kind of yarn that makes you knit “just one more stripe.”

It certainly makes giant man socks go much quicker.

And I’m happy to say the replacement order of Felici arrived safe and sound.

There’s still no sign of the lost order. I think it’s well and truly lost. I hope, at least, it’s been found by a knitter!

As you may recall, if I have a free day on the weekend, I like to use them to sew quilt tops together. I save block building for during the week when I may only have an hour or two. But on the weekend, the chances are better that I have a few hours strung together… the perfect time to assemble a top.

The only project I had at that stage was my Round Robin quilt. It just needed the last border assembled. So Saturday afternoon, I got to it. Despite all the pieces, it went together fairly smoothly. After it was on, I decided it needed one last plain border.

At about 86″ square, it was too big to really show off it’s full beauty on my bed. So I took it outside.

It was almost too big for the only patch of shade in the yard, but I managed it. And now you can really see how good it looks. This quilt-a-long was so much fun. It really stretched the brain, and helped me with my quilt math.

I’ve convinced Mom that is needs some fancy quilting, so you won’t see it finished right away. But when it is, you can bet it will have some quilting worthy of it!