Lal Lal Falls

This is how we know there has been a bit of rain:

Lots of water flowing over the falls, (drop is 34 metres, if you are wondering) and it's even flowing around the next bend:

The dogs and I enjoyed walking somewhere different.

Feral Bees

Took the dogs out for a walk in the sunshine. They've missed their walk for the last few rainy days.

Just down the road some bees circling around drew our attention to this:

We must have walked past here a hundred times, but never before noticed this colony of bees living in a tree stump beside the road. Perhaps that's because we don't normally go out walking in the middle of the day?

A closer look:

I couldn't get too close. They are bees, after all! But this seems to be a very exposed place to set up home. I'll be surprised if the colony survives the winter. Unless there is an enormous reserve of honey further inside the stump, I don't think the bees will have enough energy to keep the core of the colony at 36 degrees when the air outside is below zero at times, and not very warm for the rest of the time.

Out of the House

I haven't been out anywhere since Saturday, so today I went along for the ride to a hardware store. I was happy to find this little plant on their marked-down table:

I saw dogwoods (Cornus florida) in flower on my first trip to the US, and fell in love with the shape of the "flower" (I now know the interesting bits are actually bracts around the flower, not the flower itself). I hope it will do alright in this little part of the world!

The rain stopped long enough for me to look at some gravel:

for future pathways in the garden.

Lots of options.

Binding

Stitched the binding to my Zoo Animals quilt:

I had been dithering about which fabric to use, but I told myself to just pick something and get it done. So it is done. Still have the hand-sewing to do, of course, but the quilt is very close to being finished now.

Curves

On Friday our internet connection came back again. (It stopped working last Monday, after I got so excited about having it.) So yesterday and today I watched the other Craftsy class I had purchased:

Free-Motion Quilting with Lines, Curves and Loops, taught by Debby Brown. Debby taught the workshops I did at AQC last year. She is a delightful teacher. Very gentle in her manner, while giving lots of good information.

Some of the Craftsy class covered the same information as the workshop at AQC, but a lot of it was new. Here's a practice piece I did today for one of the "curves" lessons:

The thread is a pretty variegated purple, and the fabric is black. That doesn't make for a good photo! It was fun, but I will try it again as the curvy bits were actually meant to touch each other (as in the middle circle in the class photo above).

Democracy Day

First election since moving here. That meant finding a handy polling booth. The nearest booths are 12km to the north-west or 13kms to the south. I went north-west, but from the time I arrived at the booth to the time I finished voting took an hour. Later I learned that there was no queue at all at the booth to the south, so I'll probably vote there in future.

After voting I went to a guild "sit and sew". I took along my UFO for this month, Bonnie Hunter's Easy Street mystery:

I got the five pieces all sewn together quite quickly. Having a large space to spread out in helped. I hadn't expected to get that much done, so I didn't take the borders with me. That was a shame!

Tonight I'm watching the close election result. It's an interesting evening!

UFOs for July

This month's numbers for the UFO game I'm participating in are 6 and 23. I don't have 23 unfinished projects, so I can ignore that large number, fortunately.

My number 6 is the Bonnie Hunter mystery, Easy Street, from 2012. Last seen when I had partially assembled it in January 2013:

That's the centre of the quilt, and there are four triangular pieces to make the corners. Back then I was intending to quilt it in these 5 sections, so they'd be easier to manage on my tiny machine. But now that I have my Sweet 16 quilting machine, there's no reason to do that.

So this month, as well as binding the Zoo Animals from April, and completing the quilting of my Feathered Star wall hanging that was actually June's UFO project, I will plan to sew those 5 sections together, add borders if required (I can't remember what I was planning to do about borders), make a back, and baste this quilt. That sounds like quite a lot, actually!