Birds and Quilts

It's a strange combination, birds and quilts. But believe me, there is a connection between the two.

All winter long I have been working on a Mystery Quilt, developed by Bonnie K. Hunter at www.Quiltville.com. Finally, in the last few days of February I put on a push and finished piecing it together. It will be awhile before I can afford the materials to finish it off and have it professionally quilted, but it is done.

The "En Provence" pattern for the 2016 Mystery Quilt by Bonnie K. Hunter,
which I completed at the end of February 2017. Almost 12 weeks of work.

It was a great way to spend the dark days of winter, sewing for hours, cutting for more, stitching up and having dates with Jack the Seam Ripper, but I learned a lot. Oh, did I say that it was my First Quilt ever?

So, as I was recovering from looking at the purples, pinks, yellows and greens of the quilt, my eyes were given a treat of seeing several types of early birds at the casual feeder I set up. This has been a particularly cold (and wet, and snowy) winter here, so I decided they could use some augmenting fuel. I had junkos, chickadees, sparrows and the biggest were the Varied Thrush pair that really chowed down at my seed restaurant.

According to several bird books, this is the male of the
Varied Thrush. Isn't he beautiful?

The entrance to Robin Hill Park, Sequim, WA after a 3-inch
snowfall. Quite a bit for us in this area.

Last year I signed up to be a Weather Spotter and part of my volunteer assignment is to report into the local National Weather Service office as we have interesting weather. I do not have a weather station, but my camera and my ruler were acceptable and there must have been hundreds of other spotters who used the same devices to report our storm conditions. And as I write this tonight, March 4, we are under another weather advisory for snow conditions tonight... sigh.

Outside my front door during the February 6th storm.

But, I have good wheels for getting around in adverse weather, so it doesn't really bother me. What I noticed in the February storm was how sparkly the snow crystals were. Sometimes they are just pellets or too wet to be very interesting. I love the sound of snow crunching under my feet.

So we go from seeing green grass to white snow and back again. The promise is that if we get snow again, it will melt quickly because the forecast calls for temperatures in the 40's.

I am just about ready to start spending my days getting my garden cleaned up and watching the clematis bloom. Maybe now the quilt is done, so is winter.