A Glossary of Silly Words

Backlit Perilla in our garden- Weedy sort of Basil-ish plant but very pretty, especially up close.

The sun is shining. The air is cool. I am WRACKED with guilt- well , not so much GUILT as a feeling of contrition for having spooked so many of my kind followers as I did with my last post. Now you see the REAL ME!! I am a KOOK! I am a WIERDO. I am a NUTCASE. Call me any name you wish. I am ME! I do goofy things and I ( and my darling daughter too, I might add) have a language all my own and I pity the people who have to try to understand my ravings. Don't you feel sorry now for DH???Anyway, I have a couple of pretty photos for you and a glossary of terms  to enable you to understand the ravings of my last post! Here we go....

GLOSSARY OF CAROLYNN-ISMS FOR THE TOTALLY OR SOMEWHAT CONFUSED

BOKEH- NOT a Carolynnism but a bona fide photographic term for the background blur in nice  "artsy"  photos- see above

WOPSES- wasps

HORNETSES- hornets

HUMMERS- hummingbirds

BEESES-bees ( are you seeing the pattern??)

BUMS- bottoms, situpons, back ends etc

TRUNK SHOW- a display of a body of work as IF it had been carried about in a trunk or box from venue to venue. I will be taking about 35 of my quilts "on the road" to a guild meeting locally and speaking about them. MY quilts will get to and from the venue in the TRUNK of my car- which some of you may call a BOOT. That said, the TRUNK in TRUNK SHOW would mean more of a travel trunk. Are you confused now? I am.

THE DREADED SPON- who knows?? It is a condition inflicted upon us via the Goon Show which starred Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan. No one really knows what it is but here it serves as a sort of metaphor to me for an unexplainable illness or wound that seems to have been visited on DH this week. The Goon Show was a BBC radio show that ran from 1951-1960. It was insane, absurd, hilarious and the basis for MUCH modern comedy- along with the influences of Monty Python( which, in turn was heaving influenced by the Goons!)

There! Did I cover everything?? I hope so and I apologize profusely for any confusion caused my my attack of the Sillyses!!! Enjoy your weekend and stay cool.

Red poppy in an Obelisk "jail"

Perilla photo heavily Photoshopped. Could I do this in transparent
 and translucent fabrics??? Hmmm!

It SEEMS it DOES pay to advertise!

Dear Friends, You may recall the loud whining last week about the lack of bugs this year! Hah! Well, it is the time of the summer when the hornets and wasps get VERY keen to sup at the Hummingbird feeders. Suddenly, we are inundated by wopses and hornetses. The Hummers are FURIOUS. Our back garden is all a-flutter and a-frenzy of tiny wings, long bills and flashes of metallic green and ruby red as The Hummingbirds cannot make up their minds whether they'd rather fight each other or the bugs. Gross as it may sound, the two little red feeders keep running out of sugar water and filling up with drunken bugs! QUITE disgusting! I just keep boiling the kettle to fill up the sugar water jar and washing the feeders and refilling them. Keeps me off the streets and out of the pool halls!

We suddenly have all sorts of beeses too- Sweat Bees ( seriously- look 'em up!), a few Honeybees, regular Bumblebees AND - Eastern Carpenter Bees( look those up too!) The Carpenters are enormous, not very fuzzy and they have VERY shiny bums ( apologies to the delicate among you!) In case you do not believe me, here is photographic proof...

A female - they have black faces. The male has a white patch.

You know how big a phlox flower is...!!!

Pretty decent little portrait

I DID promise you a shiny b-m!!!

As well as photographing bugs, I have been working with flowers - again. I am trying to improve my capture of RED flowers. For the digital buffs out there, you will know how hard it is to photograph red flowers.

No caption required really. They are not too bad,

I bought these glads for the purpose of photographing them. I am not even very fond of them!

Also been working VERY hard on getting better Bokeh ( that lovely blur behind the main subject of a photo)
This is an Anemone Japonica Vitifolia from our garden.

As well, I have been trying NOT to mess the finger up any  more than it already is. I am invited to do a Trunk Show for a local guild in Mid September so the house is littered with piles of quilts and with piles of notes as I prepare for that. I am speaking on Motivations and Inspirations. Hope it goes well.

DH , I believe, has the Dreaded Spon for the Goons among you. NO idea where he got it- maybe from digging up horrible sod on the weekend but , whatever, he is VERY incapacitated and miserable. I believe the cure for the Spon- or is it a preventative measure?- is to carry a gas stove over your head but I don't think he's up to that! Guess the Spon will just have to run its evil course :-(

And so, on that VERY silly note, I am off to write some more Trunk Show notes. Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye! I will post this to the needleandthreadnetwork.blogspot.com. There is no sewing involved in this post really except for the mention of the Trunk Show but, believe me, it IS a WIP!!!

Experiment! Please bear with me.

I have had a bear of a time trying to figure out how to post a link so I am gonna give you one pretty picture that has nothing to do with anything and post this to TNTN.

This is to thank you for your patience! Now I will post this to the needleandthreadnetwork.blogspot.com
Thanks again. hope this didn't waste too much of YOUR time!

Worse than bugs??

What's worse than bugs?? NO bugs, in my humble opinion! What's happening where YOU live this summer? Here in sunny Southern Ontario , I am worried sick as I am seeing VERY few bugs this year. Almost no honeybees or bumblebees. Precious few wasps or hornets . Maybe three or four big butterflies- one Monarch, a couple of Tiger Swallowtails and a Mourning Clock or two in the early spring. There WERE quite a few little Hairstreaks :-) And I think I have seen about three Damselflies and one Dragonfly. What's going on, folks? What has happened? Is it the cold winter we had last year? Is it something in the air? I do NOT like this!!! I have only seen about three Cabbage White butterflies, for heaven's sake!! I call that NO cabbage butterflies! What' up???

I have my marvellous new camera and a stellar Macro lens- I am getting LOTS of lovely flower closeups and macros. I was so excited to try to capture some cool bugs with my new equipment. But..... :-( VERY few have been around so here are a few of my attempts. I have just not gotten good at BUGSES, coz I can't find enough to practise on.

My one and only dragonfly, not well focussed! Shooting from a distance into the setting sun is NOT recommended!

THE only Cabbage White- away too quick for me . I barely caught him(her?)

A bug who shall remain nameless on a coneflower petal.

This pair is overexposed. I am illustrating a point!

One of VERY few honeybees I have seen 

Another little fellow I cannot ID- on a Matricaria bloom

Something bee-ish!

NO shortage of spiders

Same chap- or lady!

You see how bad these are. Practice is a WONDERFUL thing. An old maths teacher of mine used to say, "practice saves milking time!"

This guy is a little better. There is no shortage of these leggetty beasties either this summer. They are ubiquitous.

Besma Quercivoraria- he's a caterpillar and he is VERY cool!

A lovely little Hairstreak - minus his tails- on a Rudbeckia

And a little Skipper also enjoying the Rudbeckia

Well, there you have it folks! Not many bugs and not very wonderful pictures. I DO hope to get better with practice! I just need the CHANCE to practice! When I grow up, I want to be Frank Jacobs- a Belgian photographer ( check him out on Flickr- especially his Dragonflies and Damselflies!!) His work is amazing!

What I am REALLY saying is BRING BACK OUR BUGSES! We NEED them! I am going to have to hand pollinate some flowers in our garden this year. It is VERY scary! Tomorrow, I shall post this to the needleandthreadnetwork.blogspot.com despite there being not a single stitch of needlework in this post. Hope you enjoy everyone's posts. I hope I can make a link again! Anyone else having trouble??

FINI!! Enfin!!

Thank goodness I have finished "In a Green Shade"- full title- "A green thought in a Green Shade". All it needs now is facing, sleeve and label. I will face it and make the sleeve but that's all for the moment as I have more pressing things to get done before I go for "the CHOP". Here is the squared and finished piece, minus the facing and plus a few detail shots for the people who like that!

The quilt spent last night dampened and pinned to a board  being blocked nice and FLAT!

DH and I spent an agonizing hour or so squaring the darned thing! I am a stickler after a few small disasters so we almost ended up in a D.I.V.O.R.C.E.!!!

The finished quilt but it is not REALLY quite square.  I just cropped it square coz it was easiest! It is about  36" square- ish! Final measurements to follow soon.

Just some quilting details for the people who like THAT! This looks a bit yellower than it is in real life but that's OK.

DH gets the prize for the World's most Patient and Long Suffering spouse today. We had to go all the way to Guelph this afternoon( 50 km , one way!) after failing to find 1/2 m of dark green "batik" to make my sleeve and facings locally! I have to admit to being very iffy about the prospect of hand sewing my facings down and will not add the sleeve till my hand feels better- unless the facings are not too bad to do. We'll see.  I just REALLY want the edges of this piece protected.

As you can see, I figured out how to make  Watermark Brush that I can easily reuse on my photos. Yay ME and Yay, DH! Once again, he is my hero. He did a LOT of research and I did a lot of messing about but you can see WE got it and I now have a nice reusable watermark!

I made a few pictures that you may have already seen if you follow my Flickr. If not , here are a few recent shots- WITH Watermarks!

Bloom of my Fire Island Hosta just opening.

Garden flowers. If we lived closer to each other, I would have brought you a bunch. These will keep longer ;-)

Same flowers, different angle!

I got pretty good bokeh ( out of focusness) in the back AND foreground here :-D

Nice little macro shot of one of our yellow Rudbeckia centres.

And, once again, that odd looking Shirley poppy with the emerald green pollen.

I feel like I have chatted too long so I am going to post this to the needleandthreadnetwork.blogspot.com  . I have been kind of slack about posting this summer. Looks like a lot of people were the same. We'll all be back with a vengeance in the fall, I hope. I look forward to posting, to reading YOUR posts and to your kind comments too. Have a good rest of week and happy creating!