Busy Bee

Day 330: My maternal grandmother was a schoolteacher and a thoroughly Christian woman in the old sense of the word. She doted on didactic poems and other Victorian-era means of illustrating life lessons, and one which she quoted to me often was Isaac Watts' "Against Idleness and Mischief." If you don't recognize the title, it's no wonder, although you undoubtedly will have heard it in some form, opening with "How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour / And gather honey all the day from every opening flower." It concludes with "For Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do." She also employed a second take on the ending when she was trying to impart the patience required for needlework to me when I was only three: "Idle hands are the devil's playground." So firmly did she instill the lesson in my youthful psyche that today, I cannot sit down for longer than five minutes without some project in my hands. People wonder how I find time for needlework. I wonder how they can waste it in front of a television set.

Quilting Bee

Day 128: As close friends will tell you, my mind works in strange ways. Oftentimes when I make a joke, it goes undetected for weeks (sometimes forever) before the person to whom it was directed says, "Oh, NOW I get it! That's what you meant." As a general rule, my humour involves word-play in some form or another, even when it translates to the visual in my quilts. Nearly all of my quilts have contained some private chuckle which, if you don't think like a Crow will probably never be recognized. For example, the quilt I'm currently piecing contains several nursery rhymes, including the Owl (obvious) and the Pussycat (also obvious) who went to sea (a nautical motif) in a beautiful pea-green boat (fabric colour but no boat, alas), all pieces within the same block. I don't plan it that way; it just seems to occur as I'm selecting fabrics for assembly. Sometimes the "joke" appears in the stitching, as above. It came to me as an afterthought one day as I was stitching the hexagon quilt. Flipped over to the plain white back, the honeycomb design was too obvious to let go unremarked. I decided it needed a bee...you know, a "quilting bee"...somewhere. Shown with a needle for scale, how long do you think it will take before the recipient of this quilt finds it?

Salmonberry Pollinator

Day 179 (Part B..ee): What could possibly be more cliché in photography than the obligatory "bug in the frame?" I had cooperative bees today while on a hike in Pack Forest. I'd stopped to take a photo of the Salmonberry blossom, envisioning exactly the background blur you see here, but when I aimed the camera and had my finger on the button, the bee I hadn't anticipated landed on the flower! You can't pass up a bonus like that!