I take lots of pictures, and sometimes I wonder why.  When I go to the birding center and Paradise Pond, I have taken over 600 pictures on a single afternoon.  Then I delete-delete-delete, until I have a more reasonable number to save.  The good part of having so many pictures to choose from is sometimes I find a surprise in the pictures that I didn’t notice when I was busily shooting away.

When I took this picture, I was noticing that the Black-Necked Stilts and the American Avocets were out of the water and standing on the sandy point with the Roseate Spoonbills.

As I got a better view of the point in my pictures, a big white bird entered into view.  I didn’t notice it at the time, but viewing it on the computer monitor I thought maybe it was an albino!!!

What the heck?  Then I started looking for this white bird in other photos, and I could see it was a White Ibis, doing wing lifts just like the spoonbills.  (Albino!  What was I thinking???)

I enjoyed getting a better view of a Black-Necked Stilt right on the point of the sand bar.  (The Black-Necked Stilts look like they are wearing tuxedos.)  Look at those skinny, long legs!  (The Avocets have the white horizontal stripe on their wings.)

Another computer monitor surprise was the big turtle in the midst of all these birds.  Do you see him?  He on the far side of the sand bar.

What a busy little piece of real estate.

–Sue

Check out a fun posting on Kerry’s blog…

Kerry is an accomplished musician, and has a professionally done CD of her original arrangements of traditional Christmas music available.  AND she’s giving away three copies of her CD on her blog.

If you’re lucky enough to win one, you will be delighted with the music.  It’s all I played last year.  I believe Kerry has a link to a sampling of some songs on her posting.  Be sure to check it out.

–Sue

PS:  I should mention that I used Kerry’s photos with permission.

Last week I had a big finish of a UFO from 2003 — Afternoon Tea. 

On my actual design wall is still Judy L’s Freeze Frame, patiently waiting.

Quilting plans for today are my last customer quilt of the year, and it’s a fairly small one.  Woo-hoo!

On my size 2 circular knitting needles is a pair of socks with the most wonderful yarn, Crazy Zauberball.  It is really lovely to work with.

I have two doll quilts to make for Toys for Tots.  This will be our Wednesday group’s third year to go down to the local NBC affiliate, Kare-11, and appear on the broadcast.  We will be on the Wednesday, 12/9, 5:00 pm news (probably about the time of the weather), bringing baby dolls with handmade doll quilts to go with them.  We’ve had a lot of fun in the past, and I’m sure this year will be equally fun!

– Sue

On my Design Floor is my PhD project:  Afternoon Tea by Judy Flanagan, Quilter’s Coop, which I started in 2003/2004 in a class with Celine Perkins (Perkins Dry Goods).  I had most of the 28 8-inch blocks done, and then it went into the closet.  That’s never good.  Things tend to not come back out of the closet.

However, back in June, Pam B and I thought it would be fun to have a PhD program in our Wednesday day group of quilters.  The requirement was to find something “significant” (after all, this is for a PhD) that was approximately half done that you had abandoned.  We had very good participation numbers, as it seems nearly all of us have lots of PhDs in bags or boxes in our closets.  Well, then there was Luanne…who starts one project and finishes it…who had to quickly get something half done so she could play along!  We like her anyway.

Wednesday is graduation day, and true to form, I’m not ready.  Also true to form, I will be done by 1:00 Wednesday!  So here’s a photo of my PhD quilt before going on the longarm:

It’s big, 91 x 94 and I really like the vertical setting on this quilt (picture it rotated 90 degrees — or turn your head sideways!). 

I started this quilt, as I said before, in 2003.  At that time, I really didn’t have any Civil War reproduction fabrics in my stash.  I wayyyyy overbought fat quarters for this quilt.  (The class was two block patterns per month, two different colorways of each, for a total of 4 blocks produced at home per month.)  I never seemed to have enough lights, and every time I went back to the shop for another class, more fat quarters came home with me. 

Because this quilt wasn’t finished, I’ve kept all the fabric I bought for this quilt in a large container, “off limits” for any other project.  I have enough fabric left in that tub for at least two more quilts!  This is how stashes get out of control.  But on the plus side (and there’s ALWAYS a plus side when you’re talking about fabrics), these are beautiful fabrics that I still love.

Check out JudyL’s blog to see who else is answering the question, What’s on your design wall???

Well, gotta get back to work.  The clock is ticking!

–Sue

I know, I’m slow getting this up — I don’t know where the time went!  Anyway, check out the adorable elf-style Christmas stocking pattern on Linda’s blog.  Really cute!  And add a comment to the posting.

Sue

We were at “Port A” for 12 days last month, which we greatly enjoyed, despite the fact it was a working vacation.  We have a condo we like to visit from time to time.  Because it’s in rental when we aren’t there, it needs some concentrated TLC at least once a year. 

We had quite a range of weather this year — cloudy, REALLY cloudy, REALLY-REALLY-ALMOST-SCARY stormy, and absolutely never-been-better beautiful.  So some pics…a beautiful day on the Gulf:

 I think the storm is here!  This was taken at 11:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning:

The weird light after the storm/rain:

A beautiful sunset — and this is kind of a reflected sunset.  We are facing kind of south/southeast:

This was the most unusual sight — the Gulf was almost smooth and the evening light made the water look like a pale aqua mirror.  I tried adjusting the camera settings every which way, and just couldn’t capture what the eye could see.  This was as close as I could come:

And a favorite view — DH Jim enjoying a walk on the beach.  (And darn it!  I got the water line crooked again!  Oh, well, he’ll get extra exercise walking uphill.)

–Sue

This was our view out the back yesterday (Monday) morning, and it was still snowing:

A close-up view of some sumac bushes:

But my favorite sight was of the hummingbird feeder…

I guess I should take it down; I don’t think they’re coming back any time soon!

On the news last night, they said this is only the 4th time we’ve had a second snow this early in October.  We don’t need to be making these kinds of entries in the record books!

And to add insult to injury, it’s COLD.  It was 28 degrees when I got up this morning.  11:00 am, we are all the way up to 34!

–Sue

is your plane leaving without you…

so we’re sitting here at the las vegas airport, weather delay in minneapolis, so we don’t know when we will be taking off.  there were tornados (plural?) in the minneapolis area today.

so we may have a little more las vegas time

–sue

Yup, I’m back from vacation, rested and ready to get back to work on my UFOs.  Okay, in actuality, I’m back, I’m unpacked, and I’m tired, but I don’t want to let UFO Thursday sink into oblivion. 

One of my UFOs (I have my first ten or so listed under the “UFO” tab at the top of this web page) is Amanajean’s 9-patch quilt I started with her first group this spring.  I’m making mine a little bit bigger, and I need a total of 80 9-patch blocks.  I finished up ten more, counted up my total, and … I have 75!!!  If I realized I was that close, I would have done 15 instead of ten!  Here they are in all their scrappiness (these are all made out of my garbage scrap basket):

Amandajean has started a second quilt-along of this 9-patch quilt, in case you’re interested.  Her plan is to piece a block a day, but that doesn’t work for me.  I need to do several at a time.  This quilt WILL BE DONE this summer!  Woo-hoo!!!

How are you doing on your UFOs, any progress to report?  Hang in there, every little bit counts, and don’t put it away.  Leave it out where it can haunt — I mean, remind you.  Happy quilting, whether it’s on new projects or old.  It’s so good to be back home where I can sew!

Sue

Short and sweet — I’m away from my sewing machine this week and consequently not working on my UFOs.  They will be patiently waiting for me when I can get back to them in a week or two.

I get my share of spam, which is why I have to moderate my comments.  The exception is if I’ve approved a comment from you previously, your comments are able to bypass the moderation process.  Of course, spammers know that and try to leave chummy sounding complimentary comments, but you can still tell they’re spammers. 

Most spam is for on-line medications.  I won’t go into details but you can use your imagination.

I had to scratch my head though on a very lengthy spam-ish comment I received recently.  It was advising me to stop believing in extraterrestials and start believing in God.  Oh, my, it’s because I’ve been blogging about UFOs!!! 

I originally wrote a message to the spammer to read more than three letters (U-F-O) before making a comment, but then I realized it’s probably all done by computers searching blogs for key words to comment on.

Anyway, thank you for listening.  I feel better now.

And if you have an update on your UFO progress, please feel free to comment here!  I’d love to hear what you’re working on!

Sue

Sue