I had hoped by now that this indigo piece would be done, but I'm just having so much fun with the hand stitching that I keep finding more places to add it!
Having said that, I'm just about out of things to hand stitch and I do have some specific machine stitching ideas that I want to incorporate as well, so I should be getting to the machine work any day now...
As I've said before, you just never know what you might see at our cottage. Today's post features the beautiful Downy Woodpecker. As you can see, this female has learned that the hummingbird feeder is a great place for a sweet drink.
The woodpeckers also enjoy the peanuts we put out on the railing. Here the male is helping himself.
In the next several shots you see an adult (l) feeding the youth (r). Although he's adult sized, this 'big baby' cries for his food and is quite persistent until he's fed!
It's been a pretty rough week around here for our pets. Arbour, our 11 year old cat, has gone missing and we fear she may have fallen prey to a fisher. We've learned since her disappearance that there are more fishers around this area than usual this year. 
Casey was two when we got Arbour and she's always been a bit of a mom to her cat. As a kitten Arbour would just climb into that little nook in Casey's 'arms' and that's how they'd sleep. Needless to say, Casey has been missing her cat as have we.
To make things worse, Casey started limping on Wednesday and she spent last night in hospital, having had to have a minor surgery to have her damaged 'toe nail' removed. The claw may grow back, but in the mean time the limp is almost completely gone and she's happy to be resting comfortably at home! How do you like that cute bandage. LOL
Today I'm playing along in another StencilGirl blog hop using Jamie Fingal's awesome "Houses" stencil.
I pulled out some of my hand dyed cottons, echoing the colour palette I remembered from St. John's. I also pulled out some black acrylic paint, an old paintbrush (my stencilling brush was at home...and I was not!) and the Houses stencil.
I was thrilled with how the black images just popped on the coloured backgrounds.
The next job was to trim the squares up and sew them together. 
If you guessed 'playing with Procion MX dyes', you'd be right. I'm thrilled with the wonderful range of colours I've now got to work with in my art quilts for the next while! I'm especially excited by how well the cheese cloth takes the dye, resulting in fabulously brilliant colours. I also made a bunch of skeins of cotton threads which I also included in the dyeing process, so I'll have all of these wonderful hand-dyed threads to use to embellish my work with hand stitch.
There are so many ideas running through my imagination for what to do with these and the indigo pieces I dyed earlier in the summer...I'm off to sew!
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| Thanks for the peanuts. |
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| So much choice...which one shall I take? |
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| This one looks good! |
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| Look! I got the shell open! |
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| I'll just take this one in the shell. |
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| Thanks. We'll be back soon...
This last image was edited with a layer of Kim Klassen's new autumn texture "Savour".
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I've had a few very stressful days, and I thought some art would be good therapy, but at the same time I really wasn't 'feeling it'. This just might be an indication that I should stick to something that isn't as important to me. Needless to say, I'm not thrilled with this spread. I considered 'gessoing' over it and starting again, but that just seems like too much right now...I guess this will live on as an indication of the mind space I'm currently in and since this is an art journal calendar, maybe that is as it should be...
I recently spent some time shooting hummingbirds. These are the Ruby Throated hummingbirds that are common around our cottage. Their pretty green feathers just sparkle in the sun. Whether perched or flying, I just get so much enjoyment out of these little beauties. The make me laugh when they buzz around my head on their way to the feeders.
