It's a Jungle Out There

It was a strange day yesterday.

Here is some background.

I live in a suburb but only a few blocks from the city line.  The houses in my neighborhood are older, mostly built in the 20's & 30's and the yards are tiny as was common back then.  If you  could look over the back fence you would see a drugstore.  (Luckily, big trees block the view)  Our backyard is about 60' by  80' and includes a deck, a stone patio, another cement slap patio, a small shed and a driveway with firewood stacked on it.  The rest of the yard is gardens, with a stone path and two water features. One of them is about 8' by 10' and has some goldfish that were feeder fish and one koi in it.  We have some frogs too and they live in both water features

My husband, Roger, is retired and likes feeding the fish during the summer and he also feeds the birds even though we mostly have sparrows.  His fish grew incredibly over the summer.

Yesterday morning my daughter's friend was looking out the sliding door to the deck and says, "Pat, there's a crane or something in your yard."  

I think, crane? What is he talking about?  I looked out the door and saw this huge heron standing about 20 feet away on the path.  I start yelling, " Heron! Heron!" The bird must have heard me screeching through the glass and tried to fly off  but couldn't get enough altitude before the fence.  He landed on top of that and then took to the sky.  The wing span on this bird had to be about  6' .  It looked ridiculous in my tiny yard.

When my husband went out to check his fish, he found two dead goldfish and didn't see any of the others including his koi.  We are hoping they are still hiding under the floating plants but realistically I think the bird probably ate them.  The weather here has been cold so the fish go into a hibernation state and catching one would be as easy a pulling a pickle out of a barrel.  Sigh.

Later in the day, Roger told me to look and see how many sparrows where sitting on our deck railing.  They were lined up all around the deck, looking at the house.  They do this when the feeder is empty.  I told him he better fill the feeder because they are used to it and depend on it now.  He filled the feeder and a bit later we were watching them push and shove each other trying to get to the food.  All the sudden a huge bird (not as big as a heron but still pretty large) swoops in and lands on top of the feeder post.  All the sparrows take to the sky and big bird sits there long enough to tell it was a hawk of some kind.  He didn't manage to get a sparrow for lunch.

I was afraid to look out he window for the rest of the day.  I didn't want to see anybody eating somebody else.  Eeeek!

This morning, I looked out of my 2nd floor  bedroom window at the back yard and I'll be darned if that grey heron was back again.  It was sitting next to the little water feature.  I tried to take a picture but it took off again, this time in the opposite direction so it had more room before the fence.  I got a very blurry picture.  

I guess he didn't eat all the fish yesterday.  I looked it up on the internet and found it was a Grey Heron.  

Gizmo To Keep The Matching Bobbin with the Spool

I was changing the thread on my machine and started thinking about a better way to keep the bobbin with the matching thread.

I came up with this easy-to-do idea and  thought I would share.

You will need:

Some elastic cord and  buttons with holes big enough for the cord to fit through. My spool used about 10 inches of cord.  



Thread the cord through the two holes in the button and tie the ends together in a knot.

Thread the cord through the spool and the bobbin and slip the end over the button.

Fabric Postcards

I finally tried making a couple of fabric postcards.  I received a book about them for Christmas.  It takes me awhile to get up the courage to try new things.  (I still haven't read the book.) 

Playing with scissors and paste all afternoon was very pleasant and now I have plenty of postcard ideas.  

Because I have zero artistic ability, I used kid's coloring sheets that I found on the internet.  I scaled them down to fit a postcard and cut them apart to make patterns.  

After I made the pumpkin and bat I thought maybe a glue stick would simplify the process.  I tried using a glue stick to stick the fabric to the Heat N Bond and also stuck the pattern piece (not completely cut out) to the paper side of the Heat N Bond.  Once all three parts were stuck together, I cut the part  out, removed the paper  pattern and used the iron to stick the bonding stuff to the fabric.  This worked really well on small parts.  

When my daughter  saw the pumpkin card she told me she really liked it but she had  a problem recognizing the candy corn for a few seconds.  I asked her why and she reminded me that candy corn is not black and yellow.  LOL  I had pulled out an orange scrap for it but in my excitement over learning a new craft, I forgot and used the black I had pulled for the pumpkin's face.

After I finished the scarecrow, I realized I should have done his head in pumpkin orange too.  Oh well.  

Four postcards didn't use much fabric from my crumbs bin though, in fact, it seemed fuller and was harder to shut after I dug through it to get these little bits.  

This is the perfect craft to use up all of the old sewing thread I have collected from yard sales over the years!