Storm #3 of 4

Southern California, in general, and Ramona in the back country were hit with a series of storms the week of January 15th. It rained for days. And there were wind gusts up to 75 MPH reported. Highways were closed due to the danger of winds. Then it got cold and we had snow in Julian for the first time this year. Julian is 22 miles north of us and sits at elevation 4,200 feet. First the wind. I got this with my Olympus Stylus 740. You can hear the wind blowing in the YouTube video.

Then we lost a tree in the back yard. See my post.

Today, we had a crew of 3 men working on getting the tree to stand back up. That's Jessie on the left, another guy and Jerry is behind the tree and up about 3 feet on a bulldozer. They lifted the tree with the dozer and dug it back in. Hope it stays up. Hope it lives.

Dogs and Doghouses

Barb wanted the dog house to show on this one. I just went overboard with fill and had a blast. I did a dog bone background fill, hearts in another doghouse, paisleys in another. The dog houses all had wood quilting on the sides and some sort of roof treatment. There were shingles, corrogated tin, red tiles, etc. The dogs were all outlined and had black thread whiskers. I had way too many thread changes on this.

Green Tea Batiks

Mary always picks out the loveliest fabrics for her quilts. This one is no exception. Pieced perfectly, flat and square, it is always a delight to quilt for her. She likes puffy batting so I used Quilters Dream Puff. The thread was both So Fine Chocolate and So Fine Green Pastel. The green block photos don't show the green too well, no flash so I could show off the quilting.




I used Darlene Epps's Tropicana block in the green blocks and Tropicana half in the triangles. The border is a variation on continuous curves with a leaf spike on each leg. The set is called DEST04C and I got the set from DigiTech. The set came with 3 squares of the CC, 4 squares and singles. I used the singles in the brown blocks. I had planned to string the 4-CC squares together but could not make it work. I decided to use the singles and discovered that by rotating the single blocks, a leaf design emerged as a secondary pattern between the CC-squares. If you look at the border, you can see the leaf as it alternates pointing inward then outward across the border. What a nice surprise. I delivered it yesterday and she loved it.