Babysitters, Birds, and Binding

J and I hired a babysitter tonight – what a treat! We always had lots of family help with P, but now that my brother has moved away, and my mother has more grandchildren competing for her attention we branched out. We didn’t even know what to do with ourselves! Sushi, bowling, then a walk around the neighbourhood. It felt quite heavenly, and I hope we can start doing this far more regularly. Think of the movies I can see, the funky new restaurants I can try. Yippee! M and P were reportedly very well behaved, and I’m sure we’ll hear their side tomorrow.

Today we found a rather ill bird outside our window. I suspect it flew into our kitchen windows, but I’m not sure. J held it to move it and said it was so light and beautiful. We did some reading on the Internet which said sometimes they just need awhile to recover and they do heal. I was a bit dubious, but we tried to remain optimistic. P got himself quite worked up that a cat might get it. He actually started to cry a bit. It was fascinating, as he’s never displayed that level of empathy to an animal before (least of all our beleaguered cat.) So we cut a hole in a milk jug and made a small shelter. We wrapped a towel around it to keep it warm. P and J went out for awhile. I went to check on it, and jumped back as I found only two little bird feet sticking in the air. I fetched a spade. I briefly contemplated a stark lesson about life and death, but then I decided the world doesn’t need to be that cold and hard at age 3. I told J to tell him it had miraculously recovered and flown away.

J told me later that P had said to him unprompted that he was “a little bit worried” about the bird. J told him I’d checked and the bird had flown away. “To his mummy and daddy?” P asked.

In other exciting news, I finally, finally, finally finished my rainbow quilt, so below are loads of pictures. The last one is the picture of the back. As you can see, a rainbow quilt needed a rainbow binding. I don’t remember what the binding fabric was, but I think it was something Ann Kelle. The whole quilt is about 64×80, but I’m almost wishing I’d made it bigger.

Oh and don’t look too closely as there’s a hanging thread in one shot, and yes, some of my stippling is kind of, um, rough. Stippling is the actual stitching ON the quilt, for the uninitiated – that sort of wavy lok. It took me quite a while to do, and my hands ached from moving the quilt back and forth. Next time I am definitely investing in some quilting gloves.

Anyway there are imperfections, but I don’t care – I love it and I keep pulling it off P’s bed to snuggle under. As I believe I mentioned before, I used Elizabeth Hartman’s Tiny Plates as a jumping off point, from her wonderful book The Practical Guide to Patchwork. I used her measurements for the blocks, but my own fabric “proportions.”