Progress on my new piece

This is my favorite perle cotton for hand quilting.   It is Valdani perle cotton size 8.  The color is M80 'Distant Grass'.

I hand sewed the strips together with batting on the bottom.  Now I am hand quilting the strips.  I decided to do that before I add the red.

More spring

The house on the corner with a red camelia.  Looks good now but that won't last.  I was excited to live in a climate where you can grow camelias until I saw how they really behave.  Once those flowers start to go by it will look like the bush has been toilet papered and rained on.  Yuk.

Reliable beautiful yellow green bleeding heart.

Arriving home from a walk.

We had the volunteer Portuguese laurel taken out.  It used to be right there.  It was a hard decision because it provided such good cover for the birds.  But despite our efforts to keep it small, it was getting too big and our efforts to keep it small were making it most unattractive.

 We are replacing it with a manzanita "Austin Griffiths".  Manzanitas are native and very good with our climate.  They also provide evergreen cover and the flowers are loved by hummingbirds.  Won't that look nice?

manzanita 'Austin Griffiths'

New piece started

I cut 2" wide strips and shaped them by hand and now I am sewing them together by hand.  I plan to add red and orange highlights to the piece.  And then I will hand quilt it with perle cotton.

Wonky pillow

I really enjoy the hand stitching.   I have another piece started and a few more ideas...

This is the piece when I showed it to you before...

February front garden

Coffee on the porch...

 Trifecta of fragrant shrubs.... daphne, viburnum bodnantense and sarcococca.

Today at Portland Nursery

I went for the eye candy AND to pick up a few things.  I walked over and then John came and picked me up (along with my new babies).

Edgeworthia in the display garden

New piece started

I've been futzing and futzing with this one.  I like a process that supports design changes even after construction is well under way.  I am happier if I can build things rather than plan them out.   On this one I couldn't resist starting the handwork even though the construction is not complete.  

Today's walk through the park

A little out of focus but looking so happy...

Witch hazel and cherries blooming and smelling good,

And we have SPRING!!!!!

It smells so wonderful in our front yard.  We have the viburnum bodnantense, daphne and sarcococca all blooming.  It will be spring for a lonnnnng time, which is one of the things I like about our climate

Viburnum bodnantense (fragrant)

Our coldest weather comes early in the season and is over by early January.   The eastern US gets its coldest time later in the season, generally in February.  So say the weather experts...

"We already know our coldest winter temperatures are often in late December, but you can see here it tends to be later in the winter in the Eastern USA, especially in the northern areas.  That’s because widespread mid/late winter snow cover reflects the sunlight well over there.  A wide open path for arctic airmasses to move south over the snow-covered terrain doesn’t hurt either."

Cat in the Ball Pit

I've been mired in computer issues.  Not what I wanted.  But this is fun.

J. Harlen Bretz Floods

Old Man Travels did a wonderful photo series on the Missoula Floods.  I think he is as fascinated by the Missoula Floods story as I am.  These were ice age floods that originated from a glacier near Missoula Montana.  They were huge floods.  This is a quote from "Cataclysms on the Columbia"

"Most geologists now believe that for slightly more than 2000 years .... at least 40 tremendous cataclysms of almost inconceivable force and dimensions swept across part parts of the Columbia River drainage basin. These occurred between 15,000 and 12,800 years ago, at the end of the Ice Age. More than 16,000 square miles were repeatedly inundated to depths of hundreds of feet, ..... These floods on the Columbia contained up to ten times the flow of all the rivers in the world, 60 times the flow of the Amazon River."

These floods shaped the Columbia Gorge and made all its waterfalls.  They also gave the Willamette Valley 100 feet of topsoil because that is where there was enough room for the water to spread out and stop moving.  Thanks Eastern Washington for all the topsoil!

Old Man Travels calls them the Bretz floods because he was the geologist who first figured out that the floods happened.  Of course he was ridiculed at the time.  This link will take you to his photo essay on the Bretz Floods.


This is a photo of a back road on his journey.  I wish I was driving on this road.  I need a road trip...

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