Denton's showing two prongs of a second molar, on the lower left side of his mouth. And there I thought his nap problems yesterday were due to too much coffee!
Now finished:
I still need to try again for a better picture.
Stitch-in-the-ditch quilting was on the awkward side; I think for next time, paying more attention to matching the thread, and avoiding doing stitch-in-the-ditch everywhere, would be preferred. It's roughly single-bed sized, though on the narrow side even for that.
Denton's been working seriously on mastering his fish puzzle. Right now, I still need to help him get the stripes in order, but he can complete the puzzle without me having to touch any of the pieces.
We did end up going to the quilt show yesterday. We stopped by the pond on our way, and flushed a woodcock, though Monty had his back turned, and I didn't manage to point it out in time.
Denton and Monty found this rather charismatic bug by the pond.
It seems to be the nymph form of a green stink bug (Acrosternum hilare).
Denton was in no mood to refrain from touching the quilts, when we got there, so we looked at quilts one at a time, and not for very long. I got a better feel than I had for what scales of pattern are feasible, and how my own first quilt's construction quality stacks up (just fine). Which was pretty much what I went to see.
So to my eye, the Olympus 570UZ has some significant color fidelity issues. I wanted to illustrate with a couple of photos from this morning. Here's Denton, standing on a wall, picking holly berries (no, he's not going to eat them). His sweater is royal blue, with white owls; note how at his shoulder, it comes out almost a sky blue, with very little contrast between the owl and the blue above it; that's camera artifact. (Photo is cropped, but not by very much, and scaled.)
Setting the exposure compensation to -0.7 helped a little bit, but not a great deal. Here's Stella fumbling a frisbee catch, cropped by ~50%, full zoom, -0.7 exposure compensation. Nice crisp focus for an action shot, but the frisbee is suspiciously blotchy.
A more aggressive crop, so you can see it more clearly (still scaled down considerably).
There's presumably some spittle on the frisbee, so distinguishing glare from blow-out is a little tricky, but it still seems a bit off to me.
Getting the dog even in the frame was tricky; I didn't have a camera strap, so I had to put down the camera to throw the frisbee, then grab the camera and try to track the frisbee mid-air. Some combination of the viewfinder geometry and view angle made this considerably harder than getting binoculars on a moving target at that range.
Denton being spun around on the kitchen floor by Nick.
It was about 55 degrees inside and outside, when we woke up this morning; I dug through the cupboard to deploy some warmer clothing for Denton, but ended up dressing him entirely in stuff he'd worn last winter. (Yes, the sweater looked better once I matched the buttons to holes correctly.)
His 18M t-shirts are getting on for too small, but his best fitting pants are 9-12M's. I got him lots of sweatpants at various garage sales over the summer, many of which are still waiting for him to grow a bit taller. It may amuse me to make him a few long sleeved t-shirts, but I think stopping by Goodwill for my raw materials may be necessary.
He recently said 'drawer', and he's very keen on finding trash to put in trash cans, with perfect accuracy so far (he took my napkin to the trash unbidden at a non-table-service restaurant, and helps with bagged dog waste, when we're outside). He's become quite opinionated about where and when we sit down, and will pat a chair to indicate where we should be sitting.
These tropical fruit stamps are gorgeous. A minor nuisance that I have little cause to use postcard rate stamps; I'll get some and use them as change when I send out overweight packages of photographs.
Monty found a katydid just outside the front door, and we wanted to show it to Denton. He was somewhat suspicious, but took rather more interest once he discovered that it would hop-flutter a short distance if he shook the perch it was sitting on.
I left a watermelon in the fridge until it eventually fell out and smashed, and then when I tackled it I spent a while seeding the flesh and putting it in chunks in a bowl. I left the rind in a basin on the counter, intending to take it out to the compost, when I had a chance.
When I came home, I wondered about the sticky marks and stray seeds on the floor (I'd mopped just before taking Denton to the playground) before noticing that the bowl of rinds had been emptied. Stella needed to pee rather more urgently than would otherwise be expected for the time of day, too.
I caught this in the kitchen this morning. I think it has to be Acanalonia servillei (from bugguide.net).
It flew fast, when it flew, and seemed to land hard on the nearest surface it ran into. I released it outdoors to take its photo. It's roughly half an inch long.
Stella flushed the white squirrel off the fence, when she went out to do her business, this morning, and the commotion from that was followed by flapping in the tree, from a hawk. I pulled Stella back inside and got binoculars on it (from really quite nearby) and noted:
* Large bird, ~crow sized
* Stout yellow legs, yellow eye
* Long tail, broadly striped in black and gray, white at the tip, not really square (middle two feathers clearly slightly longer), held narrow in flight
* Pale underparts, including around the shoulders and the lower head, all of which were streaked with dark brown
* Dark back, no hint of rufous coloring
After looking around for a few minutes and taking stock of things, it made a clumsy pass at the squirrel causing quite a lot of commotion and broken twigs, then flew off. I got binoculars on it again from the other side of the house, but had a rather more obstructed view.
I think it had to have been a juvenile Cooper's hawk. But aren't they supposed to be graceful? Trying to chase a squirrel through the middle of a mulberry tree just doesn't seem that. (I'm not sure she was even big enough to take a squirrel.)
There's a splash of feathers below the tree, that appeared on Tuesday morning, which makes me wonder if that location is being used as a regular hunting perch.
I had just picked up our farm share this evening, and decided that dinner was going to be corn for both of us, and a tomato and basil sandwich for me. I boiled two cobs, and sliced the kernels off of one of them for Denton. Spooning that into him seemed to be going well, so I stopped to fix my sandwich before sitting down with my corn cob.
Denton then made it very clear that he wanted to bite the corn off the cob, instead. He was really pretty effective at it.
Yes, the knee scrape on the formerly pristine left knee was today's. It sure looked like it should've hurt longer than he cried for.
Denton likes throwing tennis balls for Stella. The fancy tennis ball has a squeaker in it, and playing with it encourages her to actually bring the frisbee back.
( Stella pictures )
Here's my current work in progress. The lighting/photography is bad; in person, the pale pink and the beige are easily distinguishable. The fabric is silk dupion from the upholstery remnants section of Fabric Place; it's foundation-pieced on top of thin muslin, in horizontal strips.
I followed the directions given by Silk Road Fabrics for pre-shrinking the silk.
No, this isn't going to be a quilt; the materials are much too annoying to work with for that...
Here's my current project; it's awaiting backing and quilting, and somewhere I can get far enough away to take a decent picture. The pattern is David Bird's hexomino tessalation.
See the disclaimer on the previous post of this sort. This is another along the same lines; the fabric is a length of Liberty lawn that my mother gave to me from her stash. It's a lovely fabric, but it gave me a lot of trouble going through the pleater, because it tended to pull off-grain, so I adapted the pattern to cover fewer rows (and miss the rows that the pleater really mangled). Next time, I will try using lots of spray starch beforehand.
This stuff is common around here, and I'd looked it up at one point before without retaining either the name or the fact that it's apparently considered a rather noxious invasive. (I'd just been thinking of it as "that milkweed-family vine".)
Considerably enlarged; the flowers are about 1/4" across.
Monty bought me more bobbins for the featherweight. He got them out to give to me just before Denton's bath time, but Denton caught sight of them, and was determined to play.
They roll nicely, but it's tricky to aim them without knocking them over.
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