Birds and Bees

Yesterday I started sewing together the Baby Birds baby quilt I'm making for my cousin's granddaughter. As I typed "my cousin's granddaughter," I became curious about how I am related to this new little person, and so I inquired of The Google. As it turns out, she will be my first cousin twice removed. How many of you knew that?

So, anyway, here's Row One:

I was still mulling over that lavender. It actually looks more intense in photographs than it does in person, I'm realizing. It has some sheen, and it appears darker than it actually is. This morning I looked at it again (in person), and I think it's going to be fine. When I added the second row, it seemed to fade a little.

The second row has the chicks. These took quite a while to do because they are fairly large. The block rows are 12.5 inches tall, and the chick is probably about 6 inches. I used Wonder Under for these, although my favored fusible is Heat 'n Bond Lite. The Wonder Under is less stiff, and so for their size, I decided Wonder Under was the better choice. Besides, I bought some for a class that I won't live long enough to use up. 

Here's the middle chick. As it turns out, I didn't have enough of my first yellow for that background, and so I switched it out for something else.

I used a lavender thread to top stitch them. The legs were done using my machine's triple stitch (Stitch #6 on the Bernina 750QE). The eyes and beaks were hand embroidered.

I used my original yellow for the chicks' bodies. Here are the first two rows laid out together. So far, so good, I think.

Today is a grocery shopping day, but I'm hoping to get some more time to work on this, and at least make the third row. That will be the zig zag row. And if I don't link to the free pattern download, I know someone will ask for it.

Yesterday two more sunflowers opened. This is the Ring of Fire sunflower. 

Also, I noticed that both plants of the Cherry Rose variety had died. One had broken off in the recent rain. The other was just withered and brown. No idea what happened to it. Those seeds were the last of the five varieties to germinate, and so I won't use those seeds again.

The other project I'm hard at work on is Block 5 for the Bee-utiful Quilt-A-Long. I misspoke when I wrote its name yesterday. This one is actually called "Bee Courteous".

It's taking a surprisingly long time to stitch those hexagons for the honeycomb. I've spent several hours on it already. When I moved my hoop this morning, I'd taken it this far.

I'm hoping I'll have time to work on this a little more this afternoon, and perhaps finish it off. If not, it will be finished tomorrow morning.

As soon as I finish up here, I'm heading off to the grocery store. When I get home and put away the groceries, I have a little bit of housework. We're expecting a sunny day, which means I'll need to water the annuals as well. That always makes Smitty happy since he gets to go outside with me.

We ate our dinner outside yesterday, and he was out with us. We've had a young buck hanging around. Last night, he and Smitty had a good sniffing session. They spent about an hour just nosing around one another. Smitty was not afraid of the deer at all, and the deer was very curious about him, following Smitty wherever he went. Pretty funny. Sorry for this pixelated iPhone image. Sometimes you just have to go with the camera you have, even if it's not the camera you want.

And that's all the news from the Three Cats Ranch for today. I hope your day is a good one.