A new house, a new life!

I can hear Norma’s voice telling me I haven’t written a new blog in a long time and I’d better get to it. This one’s for you Norma.

My life has been in a changing mode for many moons now and it’s finally stopped being chaos and turning into life again. I got wise to the ways of apartment living and started looking for a house when I got a new dog. I miss Angus and Fiona a lot. Eubha was a charming young lady but she had no personality and did not understand she was even a dog until the last few months of her 17 years. The new puppy, Jake, has mighty big paws to fill to come close to Angus, but he is capable of filling them. He is a character.

My studio in Cuyahoga Falls is as different to quilt in as living in an apartment was to living in a house. I live in a home again. I still quilt in the studio in CF. It’s nice. I don’t miss the cars zooming up and down the boulevard because it was a convenient cut through for hundreds each day. I don’t miss having to sleep with closed windows to drown the sound.

I will dispense with the words and go straight to the pictures. This is a smattering of customer quilts and my quilts for the past 14 or 15 months. I have many more to share, but it will be another day, as my internet is being stinky.

Change is good

It has been a busy year. I had put my sewing on the shelf, so to speak, to get through each day. Yesterday I put the sewing machine to work again and picked up a long forgotten project and sewed a few rows together.

Tom and I have moved into a very small apartment. My quilting business has been moved into a very small studio space about a mile from the apartment. The sewing room was the last thing to get organized in the move. The house has sold and our lives go on.

Today as I drove to the gym before through the blowing snow spits I was very thankful that getting up and lighting a fire was no longer the first thing I do every morning.  My priorities have changed! I go to the gym first thing. Next on the list of things to do is to go to the studio and quilt.

I don’t have internet at the studio so my quilting routine has also changed. I sit and read on my kindle for a few minutes when I am ready to take a break. I feel guilty when I’m reading and not quilting so I don’t read for long before I am back at the machine.

The biggest change of all is when I leave to go home the quilting on customer quilts is done for the day. No going back into the other room after supper to do another pass. I have to be more determined when a project stretches into longer than I wanted it to. I have not fallen behind and I am not too old to learn a new trick or two.

I have had the good fortune to have such excellent customers they were willing to find me in my new place and keep on keeping me busy.

My new studio is cozy, only 400 square feet. ¼ of that area is an enclosed space where i can keep my “to do” quilts on a shelf.

Finding clever ways to hang the pantographs and to store all my tools required a very good lot of thinking. I have many of my studio quilts that were displayed still in a storage locker. I am not sure yet how to utilize them.

Looking out the window as the fine snow was blowing made me feel like I was inside of a snow globe. The world goes by outside. I see the cars waiting at the traffic light each morning during rush hour. I hear sirens as the ambulances go down the street on the rare occasion one rushes by. I see an occasional walker and once in a while someone walks into the studio and asks something of me.

The first day a man stopped in and asked if I would consider hemming pants for him. No. Yesterday a young fellow stopped in and asked what tree quilting was. His dad cut down trees and they had a lot of wood that they needed to find someone to sell to. I explained that I quilt for people and it has nothing to do with trees. Well thanks anyway for stopping in. He didn’t have a clue.

Life goes on.

June musings

My front yard looks like a Walt Disney movie. There are 10 turtledoves, a squirrel, 3 blue jays, and a red winged blackbird. At least 5 chip monks, a sparrow, a purple house finch, a cow bird and enough bird seed on the ground for them all to gorge themselves.

The chip monks run right through the turtledoves and make them jump up in the air and put their wings up like hackles because they are being disturbed. The blue jays think the red winged blackbird needs to share whatever white bug he has in his mouth and chase him around the yard. The squirrel does not move. His belly is so white it gleams and I try to remember if squirrels really have white underbellies or just this one. There is one that I see often in the winter with bright white tufts of hair behind his ears. He reminds me of an old man with hair in his ears.

The bird song is amazing and the silence from the now dead cicadas is welcome. The cacophony of just a week ago was deafening and getting quite old. Not being able to speak to someone beside you because bugs are singing out loud is pretty incredible to say the least and truly indescribable for the decibel level. The noise they made would start at 3 am on hot nights and 5 am on cooler nights. If it rained they were silent until their wings dried. Thankfully the good lord saw fit to make that cycle be every 17 years. I’m not sure I would want to live in the woods if it was every year.

June slipped by so quickly this year I almost missed the lightening bugs. I would see them out the bathroom window at night when I got up to use the toilet and would remember that it was June already. Too fast this glorious weather slips by.

The house is being sold and whenever we have a showing Tom and I go to the park to wait it out. This recent sunset was captured only because I had the foresight to bring my iPad with me. Too bad I was not quick enough to catch mama duck and her 10 incredibly tiny ducklings walking in a line to the water’s edge and all hopping in one after another and trailing slime behind them through the scummy water.

Spring has arrived...

..., or has it?

For many years I have had a wren build a nest in the window which houses my air conditioner for the studio. I listen to the fluttering wings as the nest gets built each year and I hear the peeps of the babes as they eagerly eat the meals brought to them by their devoted parents.  I watch the wren swell with pride and hear him announce to anyone or anything that cares to listen, what a great dad he is, what magnificent babies are in the nest. It is a rite of passage; the building of the nest before the weather really changes and the ongoing noise.  Wrens are incredibly loud for such a small bird.

Tom and Laura build bird nests one spring and we hung a few in the yard for the sparrows and other small birds who grace our trees and bushes.  They eat my sister out of house and home as she is the person of interest who gets the feeders filled.  I stopped feeding birds years ago when I realized I just was fattening them up for the greedy cats that lived here, too.

The wren, I have been told, courts many women and has more than one wife.  I can’t prove this, but I have no reason to disbelieve it. Mr. Wren spends a lot of time after the nest is ready convincing Mrs. Wren to choose the nest.

This year the fluttering started in early January.  With this bizarre winter not really arriving, all things outside were confused.  By mid-February when the sub- zero weather actually arrived, all activity stopped at the air conditioner window and silence ensued for several weeks.

Suddenly today there is a flurry of activity, but it isn’t wrens!  I think a sparrow has gotten a real estate license and has evicted the wrens.  I hear arguing and loud chattering and stamping feet on the air conditioner and when I peek out, it is sparrows; dozens of them. I’m sure sparrows have a right to nest as do wrens, they just aren’t as amusing to me.

It seems rather odd that so many sparrows are out there arguing. Maybe sparrows court more than one woman or maybe this one just brought all his friends around to check out his most excellent nest he confiscated from the wren.

Hopefully Mr. Wren will find one of sweet little bird houses and take up residence.  I will miss his boisterous announcement of the wee ones he is always so proud of.