Alternative Photo Op

If you read my most recent post, you will have read that I had one of my brainstorms.

I don't have that much patience to spend hours snapping photos of birds in the right pose, especially when Bailey is balanced in my bike basket.  I couldn't tell the birds to hurry up and turn one way or the other, as much as I would have liked to.  Some times when I tried to get closer to get a better shot, the darn bird would fly away.  I had a better idea!

 

My friend Dan is a volunteer at the Key West Wildlife Center.  On his vacation he helps to take care of the many chickens, roosters, pelicans,egrets and a couple of other birds in need.  So I decided to visit him one day to photograph birds that I could get a lot closer to!

 

A surprise! A resident iguana.

This was well worth the visit.

An idea I may repeat with a trip to the Philadelphia Zoo.

First Scrappy Quilt of 2013

 

You may have gotten a peak of this quilt when I wrote about my Disappearing Design Wall.  

Do you remember when I cut up a bunch of my blue and white fabric with my new toy, the Accuquilt Cutter?  I saved all the 2 1/2" strips to bring to Key West for power sewing scrap quilts. In addition to the strips I had a few blocks.  They were box in box blocks.  I have always wanted to make one of these quilts, and I guess at one point I started, but I don't remember when.

 And clearly I did not get very far.

The basic construction is one large block with 2 adjacent small blocks. The unfinished size of the large blocks is 11" and the smaller size is 6".

 Since my scraps were now 2 1/2" strips, I had to modify the construction of the blocks a bit because the original one had varying width strips.

The finished quilt top measures 66" x 66".   It will have to wait to be quilted until I return to PA.

And here's a vanity shot.

I purposely chose to photograph it with a lizard, because as I was walking to my exercise class, I was scared @#%*less when I saw this creature on the sidewalk.  It was about 3 feet from the tip of its nose to the end of its tail.  It was lurking around some trash cans.

I found out later it was an iguana.

They are an invasive species and there are lots of them roaming around, hanging out in trees.  Their presence is blamed on pet owners who have released them as they grew too large.  There are several groups trying to banish them from the island with names such as "Iguanas Be Gonna".  LOL!!!