Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas Everyone! I hope that you are safe and warm and with your Loved Ones today.

I pulled out the Christmas Round Robin that my Kansas City "Just a Little Crazy Stitcher's Club" did a few years ago. This was my quilt. I pieced it and then the club members helped to embellish it.

My quilt guild, "the Nite Owls", had a Christmas party on December 3rd and part of the fun was that people made things for raffle drawings. I won two quilts. One was this great table runner that I put on my dining room table. I will have to make something like this next year. I made 2 CQ stockings for the raffle. You can see them here.

December in California. Hummingbirds! They must stay year round. We are still getting 20 to 30 of them at times. A lot have moved on but a lot more must have moved in because a couple of the species are not coming right now. It will be interesting to see how many we have next Spring.

By the way, Kansas City had a major snow storm today with 7 to 10 inches of blowing snow and 10 degrees. Burrrrr! I so don't miss that!

Xmas Stockings and November in California

It has been a while since I posted to my blog. I have gotten a new job at a Dental Lab so I have less time to sew but my Husband likes football so on Sunday I escape to my sewing room and get stuff done.

I finished these Xmas Stockings for the raffle at my quilt guild for the December Christmas meeting. My Friend Jeanne is in charge of setting it up. She has gotten a ton of quilts for it. I am really interested in how they set it up. I will post back when I know. Maybe I will buy something! There are a lot of really talented people in my new guild!

I made 11 mini art quilts before I went back to work. I will probably use them for gifts. They are all raw edge pieced. Even the bindings.

This is the amazing thing about California. It is November and we still have Hummingbirds coming to our feeders! It was 75 degrees today and it will be 80 degrees on Thanksgiving. That is just not right! I still have tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini in my garden.

Wildlife - Inside and Out

October in California means we still have Hummingbirds. Not as many. Some of them have left like the Black Chins and Allen's but we still have plenty. I think we are going to take one of the three feeders down for the winter. We may even go down to one if more quit coming. I am not sure if some stay around all year or not. When we moved here in February, we had Anna's at the apartment we stayed at. Each of these feeders has 10 feeding ports.

We have a lot of Finches too. We so seldom see them taking a bath but this day must have been bath day! It's funny, the Hummingbirds will take a bath on the leaves of our plants after the sprinklers have been on in the morning. They flit from one leaf to another for about 15 minutes.

This Dove decided the water on the patio was better.

This is our Flicker that comes to visit for a drink every day. He is quite loud when he arrives. He always does a little dance on the fence.

Speaking of Wildlife. This is our indoor variety. This is Fergie. She is the Queen of the house and keeps the boy cats in line. She has been known to growl and slap them. She is the smallest but she is not to be messed with. She is a horrible beggar for food and she was probably doing that in this picture.

This is Buster. One of two male black cats we have. He is the lover of the household. He follows me everywhere and wants to be touched all the time. He is quite a pest! We shaved him about a month ago because he is a beast with very long hair and he is like velvet when shaved.

Road Runner in My Back Yard

I had the back slider open because it was nice this morning and the cats like to look out. All the sudden, I heard a weird noise. The cats looked a little freaked out so I looked outside and found this guy hanging out.

He was very interested in our hummingbird feeder and was watching them and they were watching him. I carefully got my camera and snapped a few pictures. I also got a short film of him but it was of him leaving.

They are fairly large birds and quite the character!

Kestrel on the Hill and the Crazy Quilt by 2012 Challenge

I love my back patio. It is really special in the morning when it is shaded. I like to sit out there and drink my morning coffee and watch the birds. This morning I took a book by Michael Connelly called The Brass Verdict. It is the follow up book to The Lincoln Lawyer that I thought was great. It is starting off really good so I have high hopes for it.

This morning, there was also a Kestrel hanging out looking for a meal, so I took a couple of pictures of him in a dead tree on the hill.



They are those birds that you see hovering in the air by the roadside looking for prey. I love my hill view!


On a Crazy Quilt email list that I belong to, we have put out a challenge to get a major Crazy Quilt done by 2012.

I love this antique CQ and have wanted to do my take on it for years. I started it once before but decided I didn't like what I had done. There is a previous post about it on my blog here. I think the fan blades are too wide. They need to be narrower like the original, plus, I don't like the colors of my first attempt.

Allie of Allie's in Stitches is doing a take on an antique CQ and has inspired me to start mine again. I have started planning it out on a muslin foundation.

Hummingbirds

We now have a 4th type of Hummingbird coming to our feeders. I thought I had seen one in the Spring but it was just once. Now we have confirmed that we also have Allen's coming to the feeder too. You can really tell the difference because they are very brown. My Husband calls them crawdad color. The photos are not the best but they are so quick!

We now have Anna's, Costa's, Black Chins, and Allen's Hummingbirds. I counted over 30 of them out there the other morning. It is so amazing!

Yard Birds

Here are some pictures I took of some of our hummingbirds. This is a Costa's.


The bird on the right is a Black Chin and I think the one on the left is an Anna's but I am not sure. I could have types of hummingbirds that I haven't recognized yet.

This is definitely a Anna's. They have such a pretty red head.

These are 3 baby "Say's Phoebes" that sat on our chair and squawked for food and the Mother would fly up and while hovering in front of them, give them bugs. That is her flying away.

I am such a bird nut. Moving to California has given me more new bird sightings.

Orioles

I think this is a family of Hooded Orioles. The hummingbirds get upset with them but they don't seem to care much. Here is the female.

Here is the male.

And I think this is their male youngster.

I have seen an Oriole feeder that attaches to a jelly jar that I want to get. They really love grape jelly.

Our First Month in California

The first month we were in California, we stayed in corporate housing in an apartment. We were on the second floor and had a great view off our balcony that overlooked a PGA golf course. This was in February. We had a hummingbird feeder and had Anna's Hummingbirds coming right away. Back in Missouri, Ruby Throat Hummingbirds don't arrive until the middle of May so this was a real treat for us.


We had a pair of Hawks that patrolled the golf course everyday. There was quite a lot of wildlife. One night, a coyote barked under our window and woke us up.



One day, I was looking out the door on our deck and saw that one of the Hawks had taken a full grown rabbit and was standing next to the cart path on the golf course happily eating his kill. The rabbit was as big as he was!

Later in the day, a Turkey Vulture showed up and finished off the remains.

At our new house, we have 3 hummingbird feeders and sometimes, that doesn't seem to be enough. We have several Hooded Orioles that compete with the Hummingbirds. We also have a thistle feeder that the Finches empty in 2 days. It might be an understatement to say that we love watching birds.