Just Me: June 2012

I think Gobi is here to stay. We tried to take him to my mother's for weekend visitation and he was a bad boy. :^( My mother really misses him and he really loves her, but her condo is just too small and she is just not in good enough health. He is a high energy boy who loves to run and jump. There is no room for that in her tiny yard. She is also not very good with taking him outside, so her house was too unsanitary for him to live there. Here he does great! We got a wireless electric fence and Gobi has it all figured out. We were hoping to trick him by putting up flags where we didn't want him to go-mainly to the front of the property, but he found out they were not real pretty quickly. He loves being outside chasing bunnies, balls and birds. My biggest concern is what will happen when the baby birds leave their nests. I am going to be vigilant and try to prevent any disasters.

I just added this picture to the Pets on Quilts show.

Here is my latest quilt finish. It is an older Bonnie Hunter mystery quilt, Carolina Christmas, that I posted about previously. It just didn't want to get finished. I had another border on it and didn't like it. I took the border off, took the top apart to see how I would like it with sashing. I ended up liking it better without the sashing, so finally got around to putting it back together, adding Bonnie's pieced border, which was much nicer than mine, and started to quilt it. I found one area that I hadn't sewn completely so that got hand sewn while on the frame. Then my helper from above-Gobi-decided he was going to play with the batting while the quilt was on the frame.

I was quilting it from one side and he was doing his thing on the other side. There were a total of two holes and the bottom piece was torn out. I cut some batting and patched them and can't tell where the holes were now that the quilt is all quilted. The final minor disaster was that I ran out of the thread I was quilting with. I was using a pink variegated thread. For about 1 square foot the thread isn't pink. It isn't very noticeable.

I decided to sew the binding on by hand. It has been a long time since I did anything but machine binding. I didn't mind the process like I used to, but I didn't love it either.

Here are a couple of pictures of the flowers in my yard. These are in the front of the house and I can see them while I am working. My desk faces the front windows, and if I look between the computer monitors I can see the taller ones. These are coreopsis, Johnny Jump ups and either Dawn or Sunset or something like that coneflower. I love the coloring of the coneflower. It is a little more orangish (made up work?) than the picture shows.

One more flower picture. Here is the bouquet that my son surprised me with for Mother's day. It was absolutely beautiful and lasted a long time, because they had a lot of buds in the arrangement.