My best bird buddies are back!!!

In 2014 we awoke to find the ravens had landed...everywhere .. there were literally hundreds of them.  And they stayed and they not only stayed, they drove off my beloved magpies.  I tried to get a good picture of the "raven happening" but the minute I appear in a window or anywhere near...off they fly.  There are about 100  of them. The collective noun for ravens is an "unkindness" or a  "conspiracy" I definitely had a conspiracy of ravens.  

The ravens were here for 5 years and now they are gone.  Not that I had anything against ravens but they weren't very social with me.  They were all around and flying over the garden but never really entering it.  There must have been nests but I never saw them.  They were very vocal but never really chattered and cackled like the magpies... occasionally one would dive at Morris. Morris didn't like the ravens.

When the magpies left they didn't go far....just to a woody marsh 1/2 mile away.  So when the ravens up and left this spring the magpies lost no time in returning and I couldn't be happier hearing them flutter and cavort about the garden.

I blogged often about their big ungainly nests.  My favorite was one in a hawthorn tree by the sheep pasture.  The tree was not very tall and the nest was at my eye level... I watched the whole process of building, raising young and seeing them fledge.  The parents never landed on the nests... always a few branches away and hip hopped from branch to branch before they entered.

One year they nested in the apple tree outside the kitchen window and gave us a lot of laughs.  Another year they nested in a pine tree very near my little porch and we never tired of watching them hop all over that tree .  Not only do they talk constantly, they splash and play in the bird baths and play tag all over the garden.  I never knew why the ravens suddenly moved in or just as suddenly left but I hope they are gone for good.

And tonight at 10:40 as I type this I am being serenaded by a pair of owls.. I am so thankful for all the joy our feathered friends add to our life.  This is a bumper year for baby quail as well...seeing new little batches of fuzz balls all the time..

Painting what's not there....

Sometimes I paint what I know is there even when I can't see it... this is the case with this sweet dog's eyes... In the photo he has just shadows where his eyes are.  If I lifted his chin just a tad and added some light I could give him eyes.  So I did...

This is Kodiak and I just finished his portrait on a MOP disc.  Actually the scanner did not get the color correct as the portrait is much more copper toned than it shows...

My equipment has been giving me  fits and I am  trying to get everything working together again but so far with very little luck...  I really need an in-house computer tech or a son close by..very little luck there as well.

When I haven't blogged for a long while I don't know where to start when I get far behind.  A lot has happened and I will try to catch up...

For me the button show went very well and I was able to display a lot of crazy quilting and it generated a lot of interest. Especially since I can't do it any more, I love to talk about it.   I wish I had taken more pictures as there had to be millions of buttons of every kind, material, size and shape.

I   darted away from my booth now and again but one had to really take time to get into the collections as there  were boxes and boxes on very large  cards to sort through besides boxes called "pokes" of individual odd buttons .  I didn't find out about them until too late.  I could have found some good paintable buttons I'm sure...

My buttons were a hit and some I sold right out of and will have to get busy again.  These included cottages, owls, iris, bees, etc.  Plus I took many orders for custom pet portraits on buttons.  And again I was taken by surprise by requests for things I had never painted before like a sailing ship for example.  And trees were really a hot item....specific trees in fact.  I have requests for a cork tree, willow tree, olive tree and a box elder tree. 

It really did my spirit good to get up and talk about how I use buttons in crazy quilting...  But today I am tired and am going to treat myself to a very lazy day with a long nap.