Various & Sundry Monday: Vol. 28

I believe all suffering is caused by ignorance. People inflict pain on others in the selfish pursuit of their happiness or satisfaction. Yet true happiness comes from a sense of peace and contentment, which in turn must be achieved through the cultivation of altruism, of love and compassion, and elimination of ignorance, selfishness, and greed. –Dalai Lama, 1989 Nobel Peace-Prize Speech

Eclipse

Yesterday there was a partial eclipse of the sun here. What a cool event to witness! Mr. Bug rigged us up a shadow viewer and we watched as it progressed. I fiddled with my camera settings, hoping to increase the pixel area/photo size. Instead I decreased it and ended up with teeny tiny photos with even teenier tinier images of the shadow of the eclipse. My little photo is almost not worth sharing, except the next time an eclipse will be visible in Utah is in 60 years.

The eclipse, which was annular {meaning the moon appears too small to cover the sun completely and leaves a ring of light around the moon} was fully visible in California. This is a photo of the actual eclipse.

{Photo: AP Photo/Shuji Kajiyama}

Dog Ear Confetti
These little bits of fabric and paper are the dog ears of 936 half-square triangles. Each square has two triangles and each triangle has two dog ears, that makes a total of 3,744 dog ears {give or take} in this little pile.

I'm doing a half-square triangle swap. I figured out how many 2" HST's I'd need to make a nice lap-sized quilt and then pulled fabrics from my stash. Our swap group used triangle papers that let you sew 12 HST's all at once. It is almost like paper piecing, but not quite. You put your two fabrics right sides together, put the paper on top and use it as a template for sewing and trimming. When you finish, the half-square triangle still needs to be pressed open and you have paper to remove from one side. I did 78 sheets and used a different print fabric for each one. It took me a week, but I am done! I kept four of each of my color combinations {312 HST's} and sent the rest {624 HST's} to be swapped out for HST's made by other members of the swap. Let the record show that I was finished and had my swaps in the mail a full 10 days before the deadline.

I won't be so on top of things with the Sesame Street quilt. Cookie Monster has been giving me the old stink eye for about a week-and-a-half now. I'm going to be right on top of the deadline for the first of three quilt shows, if I don't miss it completely. Besides Cookie Monster's other eye and the rest of his face, I have six other blocks to finish, and then there's assembly, quilting and binding all to get done by June 8^th. It is such a fun quilt to work on and I'm still really excited about it, so I hope that enthusiasm will help me get it finished in time.

Peony of the Day
I have 17 peony plants in my gardens. 13 of them are blooming this year and I intend to show you them all. I still had my camera set to stupid a smaller pixel/photo size, so pretty much what you see here is what you get.

This is Bowl of Beauty. It is kind of the teacher's pet, because I bought this as a dry root start {I know there is a name for it, but I've been trying to remember for days and can't} and usually it takes three years for those kinds of starts to actually produce flowers. This one bloomed right out of the bag {literally} the first year I planted it. I love that kind of self-motivation.

This is Félix Crousse. He's not quite completely open, but look at that beautiful color! Félix & Beauty are right next to each other and they look so pretty together.

And to wrap up, this is my second Karl Rosenfield plant. The first one bloomed last week and now this one has buds starting to open. I has been really fun to see the peonies bloom this year.