LONG WEEKEND QUILTING

 Hoooo Hummmm. Long weekend. Nothing to do but sit in a bucket and snooze.Bunny's snores rumble  through the fabric room.  Nothing to do. As if.

 Leftover fabric to tear through. Upholstery and decor fabric to piece together. Fabric from old dresses found one day at the Sally Ann. Fabric good enough to use in runners.Gold fabric from a 1960's dress to rip up and make new as a centre in a star.The possibilities.....

 New patterns to try out with leftovers. Recycling.
                                                    But some of us, ho hummmm,  would rather sleep in the bin.

 Finding fabrics that can go together for another star runner, but in pink hues. Christmas, and yet can carry over into not-Christmas. One for me, one for a friend, that's how I look at it. Or, one for me, and two  for two friends. Or three. Or four. Power quilting...

 Backing and filling and pinning panels, ready to be quilting. They're piling up. And still other panels stretch out on the table, ready to be disassembled and reassembled. Always a cat lying in or on something. Bo likes the sewing stage. Gotta love Christmas.......

     Big quilts hang  here and there. Never enough wall space. Lots of fabric though.  The brown quilt actually is an Autumn-Christmas quilt. Found the brown pointsettia fabric a few years ago. Very unique. Have never seen fabric quite like it. Bordered it with a flying geese pattern of triangles, as the geese fly south for the winter .Or, as in B.C. , they just fly around in circles and stay all year. The Christmas quilt on the right is a "Broken Glass" pattern. I used leftover bling fabric and did it up like a stained glass window. It's one of my favourites. I leave it up year round. Gotta love Christmas.....

And then there's Bunny. Sleepy Bunny. In the bin. On this long weekend of power quilting.Unfortunately, I need the fabric that she has squashed herself onto. She has done such a good job of supervising, may just have to leave her to snoring.

IN GREY LIGHT ( collage)

 I love grey.It's mysterious, mecurial and so neutral. I love the weird light you get thru fog. Fog on the water. Fog in the sky. Grey skies shining with light. Light shining thru fog .Storm clouds. Just a little collage of  grey and light...............

 Discovery Passage....

                                Sky before storm

                                                      

 Beach in grey

                                                Looking south

                                                                              Above the forest line....

                                                   

                                  From the cliff.....

  Gulls feeding............                                                Above the copse.....

                          Scary forest arms......almost all Hallows Eve............

APPLES and CRANBERRIES

 Time to pick the last of the apples. Kind of  a little wormy and buggy on the inside, so  requires a deft hand when cutting around the core. No slate bugs allowed in the cranberry sauce. Already had an earwig crawl out of the pot.....

 Labour intensive picking  apples.This year, the trees produced heaps and heaps.Every so often an apple would come plopping down. Good idea not to be standing underneath. How many  times did I feel  like Chicken Little and think the sky was falling......

 As always, the neighbours' cats  kept us company, watching while buckets and bags were filled and piled.

 Opened a bottle of Cordelia's Concord Cordial to let it breathe. Plenty of time to slosh a generous amount into the cooking apples and cranberries. 

 And let it  breathe, and breathe and breathe while the apples were peeled.After about the first couple of dozen I wished they could peel themselves.

  I tossed  apples into a lemonade bath. I think they like floating in their bowl of lemonade.They don't brown as much, and you can add extra lemonade into the pot when you cook up the fruit.

 I guesstimate everything to make this. Just take a large pot, toss in a lot of apples, and maybe 4 bags of fresh cranberries. Add some sugar to taste, or add 1 cup per bag of cranberries. It is whatever you like best. You can add no sugar at all, and just add it later. But it does best added in the pot so it cooks down.

 I also added  1 cup water to each bag of cranberries, and substituted a cup of wine ( or two) instead. And a good shake of cinnamon. If you have a cinnamon stick you can add that, but I don't have sticks at the moment. Fresh cookies had just been made, so we snacked on those while waiting for the pot to finish blupping away.

 Let cool. Freeze. Serve with anything you like.Let the  pot  bubble and burp away. Be careful of splattering, keep the heat fairly low. Ladle into a pretty bowl,or freeze in plastic containers.

          

SNAKE CHARMS

 Last day of September.The season is winding down.  I get a present. Smokey is extremely clever. One of the few garter snakes left from the season. Most of them  have burrowed away . Garter snakes usually hang around where there is a water source, and lots of food, like slugs bugs and other things.

 The Stellar Jay ( Cyanocitta stellen) has been known to eat garter snakes. Jays will eat anything, basically, being omnivores. And spiders are basically food to snakes and jays.

                      Spiders  will eat anything that falls into its web.

  Garter snakes will eat the spider, and the Cat will catch the snake that lives in the garden . Young garter snakes are born LIVE around August. Sometimes 70-80 are born a season. This year I noticed there were many garter snakes in the garden, more than in previous years. Healthy garden  healthy snakes.

 Cats will also torment jay, and the jays will torment the cats. They see cats as a big nuisance.

      Jays come down from the forests where they live to eat seeds, nuts, berries, snakes, and torment cats. Snakes like to slither into buckets of apples. Buckets that sometimes have human hands rummaging inside . Snakes do NOT feel like apples, by the way.......

  Ahh yes, there's a water source. Not just cats drink out of the buckets. Snakes, racoons, cats, jays....

                   Sometimes keeping track of the snakes, jays, spiders and other things takes team effort.

                                   

 Spiders in the garden eliminate the need for common pest control substances.

 And if you want to control the bugs and spiders and things, encourage the garter snakes. During the winter, garter snakes will live in undeground dens, hibernating with other snakes. Garter snakes will live up to two years. If captured they will release a musky scent. They are not aggressive unless under attack. 

                                   

 On the last day of September the snakes are heading for their dens. Spencer still sits on his chair, once in a while, in the last warmth of the season. The sunsets are earlier, the sky a little mottled. And tomorrow will be October.

BLUE SHORE and GINGER WATER

 Probably one of the most beautiful Sundays down at the shore, Discovery Passage  expanding  itself in blue and diamonds, or at least  the glittering water looks like diamonds. Lots of blue. The tide is up.The people are out. The gulls are circling,always circling, watching and waiting . The Cormorants are trying to see how many of them can shove  onto their sunning rock.

 This is part of the Inside Passage between the Big Island of Vancouver and Discovery Islands. The shoreline bends  into sand and rocks. And toes. Many toes of beachcombers paddling in the ocean. Bringing kites, picnics, (yes, picnics still, even this last weekend in September). This calls for Ginger Water.

                                               "The sea can hypnotize...." (Henrik Ibsen) 

  GINGER WATER (1880-1910)                                                

 (Modern Ginger-ale has two ancestors. One is ginger beer, which was brewed and bottled at home like root beer. The other is “Ginger Water”, or “Switchel” as it was called. It was a non-alcoholic drink prepared  to enjoy on hot days,like today.)

 ½ cup to ¾ cup brown sugar

1 tsp powdered ginger
½ cup cider vinegar.
1 quart of cold ice water to fill pitcher.

 Dissolve everything in the cold water in the pitcher by stirring or shaking well.

 

 

I would like to say that Ginger Water is incredibly yummy.................it's an acquired taste.
 
 While Mitlenatch Island ( a provincial bird sanctuary), off in the distance,  is a no land zone  for humans......

 .............. the gulls  land in droves at the shoreline.Shrieking and wailing. Gathering to discuss how to take over the world. They will do a fine job as our leaders. Some day.  But not today. Today there is Ginger water, and toes in sand, and cormorants sliding off rocks, and mountains as misty and wonderful as they always are.

          "For whatever we lose, it's always ourselves we find in the sea." (E.E.Cummings)