Month: January 2021

Indiana Homestead

We traveled to the past down an old country road and took along an old-fashioned new quilt.

I’m one of many quilters who has used all this time at home in the past year to finish some UFO’s.  An oldie but goodie that finally saw completion at my house is a quilt I call Indiana Homestead.  After spending a few years folded on a closet shelf, a few days of work in late fall 2020 brought this piece to completion.

Yesterday was not a glorious sunny day, but we were ready for a ride-about.  We threw the cameras and a few quilts in the car, and drove away from home for a while.

We found ourselves on the grounds of an old church building with fabulous trees.  The quilt posed in one tree, under another, and then hanging on the back door.

We had visited this church before when the vicar was there and got permission to come back with quilts.  It’s been a while; there’s been a plague, you know, but we did return.

Indiana Homestead is based on a traditional pattern.  What you see is my interpretation of a pattern Fig Tree Quilts designed based on a time-honored peony block.  A little research when I was making these blocks (12 or more years ago) led me to the title Indiana Homestead because Indiana’s state flower is the peony.

Non-quilters, and some really structured quilt makers, may question why an almost finished project might languish on the shelf for years.  In this case, I made the blocks and loved them, began the machine quilting process and still liked the quilt; but life interrupted.  

While this quilt was under construction, we moved houses. Our new home did not have a room with these colors, so finishing this was not a high priority.  Once I pulled the quilt off the shelf to work on it, I realized I wasn’t happy with the batting I had selected (some organic cotton that sheds everywhere – I had since found other battings I liked better), and I didn’t like my original plan for the border.  After considering several alternatives for the border quilting (over the years I would pull it out, think about options, put it back up), in late 2020 I solved the problem.  I cut the border off!  I liked that much better.  And to get rid of the shedding batting, I bound the quilt edges before I completed the quilting of the blocks.  Done!

The quilt now measures a lovely 60” square, a perfect size for a napping quilt. In the above photo, Jim worked his magic with color…perfect for this old setting!

Chortling

Thousands of Sandhill Cranes winter in a county near us.  It’s a thrill when they fly in groups over our house on the way to this temporary home – the sound of their call is unmistakable.  Varying terms are used to describe the sound:  bugling, trumpeting, rattling, croaking, but I like the word chortling.  These birds seem to be so happy that a muffled laugh fits.

We went to see some of these wonders yesterday.  The flock we saw numbered in the hundreds, but they were accompanied by thousands, yes, thousands, of blackbirds.  The vision of the groups in flight was enchanting!

The cranes look gawky in some cases.  When they fly about in small groups over short distances, they are funny with their wings and long legs all akimbo.  In serious flight, up high for long distance traveling, they are elegant.  They tuck their legs neatly behind them for streamlined flight and they fly in a v-formation.

And the blackbirds were so abundant that their flights about the field created a murmuration.  Well, I thought of it as a murmuration.  That term is by definition applied to starlings, not blackbirds.  But the image of the huge numbers of blackbirds twisting and swirling in some sort of shape shifting cloud was mesmerizing to me.

Jim’s Canon camera with 1.6 crop factor and 1.4 extender paired with a 500mm lens gave him the best view of the birds.

The skies were blue, the fields of brown and green stretched on for acres and acres.  It was a glorious day to be out in nature.  

This photo is a good representation of what we could see with the naked eye. Binoculars and cameras with long lenses gave us better views of the birds.

The Sandhill Cranes were more than 200 yards from our vantage point, but Jim’s camera setup could “reach” them. 

I did get some passable shots with my little Sony. In all cases, if you enlarge the image, you can appreciate more detail.

At another stop on this outing, I had fun photographing cows.  More on that later.

I didn’t think to take a quilt along for a photo shoot – our days at home have ruined my sense of preparation for a drive about.  But the day certainly provided inspiration for future quilts.  

By the way, these Sandhill Cranes are huge birds.  Here is a photo of some walking by me a few years ago near Melbourne, Florida.  They are comfortable with humans here and you can get an idea of their size relative to me.