Mountain Laurel and other flowers

Our mountain laurel has started to bloom for the first time since we moved here. I took this closeup mid-afternoon. My parents are here visiting and had never seen them in bloom before. From a distance, you just see the white balls of blooms - close up (click on the picture) you see these peppermint stripes. This smaller shrub is ahead of the others - we'll have a lot more mountain laurel to enjoy in the coming weeks.


I've been noticing butterflies lately and when I went out to the Mountain Laurel spotted the first Monarch I'd seen in a while. Then I headed over to the "wildflower meadow" and found a trio of brown and yellow butterflies of vastly different sizes. To get better pictures I should have sat down and waited quietly till they approached, but I have cropped this photo of the largest of the three. We were looking through on-line butterfly identification information to try to figure out what they were (not all the same type). We never settled on the right answers - we might need to get better pictures and a book where you can compare the photos side by side.





And last, I have a photo of a quilt I returned to its owner last week - pretty flowered fabrics in a design that showcases the prints.

Rain Barrels Installed

This weekend we installed the last of our rainbarrels.  Since our home well only puts out about 1 gallon/minute, its great to have an alternate source of water we can use for watering our gardens and landscaping.  We have another pair just like the ones in the picture below, so we have four barrels that can hold a total of 260 gallons of rain water.  It takes less than 1/4 inch of rain to fill them up.  Although it doesn't show up well in the picture, there is a valve where the downspout splits so we can either divert the water into the barrels or let it continue down the downspout, which is what we will do in the winter.  But during the non-winter months, the rain water is diverted into the first barrel until it fills up, then it overflows into the second barrel (on the left) via a short piece of gray tubing you can't see very well in the picture.

When the second barrel is full, it overflows out the black tubing you see in the photo below.  That tube is connected back up to the downspout drainage system.  The downspout drainage goes into a larger underground pipe and comes out down near the bottom of our property.
We can connect hoses to the barrels to get gravity-fed water out at low pressure, or we can connect it to a small electric pump which puts out water at higher pressure for higher flow rates and so we can water uphill from the barrels. Unfortunately, our new pump worked for about 30 minutes yesterday and suddenly died.  Hope it doesn't take long to get a new one.

Look Up, By George

That's my name for the blue and white trapunto wholecloth I've shown a few in-progress pictures of. It's done ! with it's little imperfections, and I'm glad. I don't think I'll attempt another shadow trapunto quilt. If there's a next time, I'll do regular trapunto or get someone else to trim the batting - I slit the sheer top layer of white fabric about 10 times trying to get close to the stitching lines.

One of the full quilt -



Some closeups -

no flash makes it sepia toned - but shows the quilting detail much better.


The last photo shows how I made the textured triangles, which I based on a photo of an Erte design. The long vertical lines are 1/4 inch apart and were done with a straight edge. The ones that make the triangle were free handed afterwards between the 1/4 inch lines. For scale, the largest cirle at the top fits in a 1/2 inch space. Those were also quilted free hand, but I used a circle template to make the smooth arch that separates them from the triangles.



And now to address the question, where did I get that title "Look Up, By George" - I started with quick little sketches of architectural details from George Vanderbilt's Biltmore house and furnishings that I made when Jeff and Joanna visited last Christmas-New Years. (photography is not permitted inside the house.) Some of the sketches were from ceilings. The center design started with a motif from a photo of a tin library ceiling in New England, but I made it into a feathered quilted medallion. The quilt was made in response to this year's Asheville Quilt Show theme, Carolina Blues.

Saturday Photos

Saturday we went to the small town of Marshall for the annual Madison County Arts Festival. Unfortunately, there were only about half as many crafts people and attendees as we saw there last year. We didn't find anything we needed to buy, except for lunch.

We decided to take a picture of the office of the Marshall newspaper, the Sentinel. As you can see, their office was made by joining two railroad cars together.

When we got home, we also took a few pictures of parts of our landscaping that are currently in bloom. Here you can see our Cotoneaster is flowering with some of the Rhododendrons in the background.

This shrub is called a Nine Bark.

Reston, Dew Drops and Harmony

These are the quilts I mentioned in the last post, all quilted for the designer Ann Weber for her own pattern line http://www.ginghamgirls.biz

The first is called Reston - it was a block of the month sampler she designed for the Reston chapter of the guild I still belong to in NVA.


I'm making this quilt also - it's all put together except for the applique - which will take a while! This next view is a little closer - we quilted it a lot like Countryside Star, except there are leaf wreaths on the yellow and red blocks in the center part.


This one is called Dew Drops -


Here's one of the back since you can pretty much see all the quilting on the above shot, except you don't know I've outlined all the flowers on these, and with this combination of backing and batting (Dream Wool) it shows well.

And probably my favorite of these, Harmony -





We quilted a "medallion" design in the center portion - it doesn't really show up as well as the fold line!

Countryside Stars - a quilt from last fall

I quilted this for Ann Weber, and it's now been published in McCall's Scrap Quilts/Spring 2009 edition. I'll be posting more of the quilts I did for Ann this week.




The photo above was taken with a flash - I took the rest of these with a side light, not corrected so the colors are way off.

After the rains

We might still get more rain today. Western North Carolina has gone from "extreme drought" to "moderate drought" in recent weeks. A lot of the improvement has come just this week as we've had lots of rain every day, sparing me from all the watering chores in our landscape. And the landscape is responding - here are some of the rhododendron in the front yard -





And this view is looking from the driveway up the slope at more rhododendron just beyond the !vegetable garden!


We decided we'd try to grow some lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, cucumber and zucchini in this patch above the driveway retaining wall. It won't make a permanent vegetable garden - when the river birch and red bud in the background of this next picture mature a little, they will shade the area. But the "right" place in our landscape, on the other side of the house, is very steep and would require some serious earth moving to create terraces. We'll see how we do with home grown vegetables from this easily accessible spot before we invest in the terracing.


We also put in some asparagus roots and rhubarb on the other side of the house, but those should not be harvested this year.


Lu has been indoors all week and welcomed a chance to go out today. I figured he'd turn his kitty nose up at the wet grass and opt to stay on the driveway - I was wrong. He was all for Big Game Hunting -- actually, just grasshopper like insects we always find in the wildflower meadow and the rye grass areas.