Mushrooms and Trees

After a long hot dry summer I was surprised this Autumn with all the different varieties of Mushrooms I've seen on my walks along the quay.  No I don't know their proper names or if they are edible or not.  I'm just fascinated with all the colours and shapes.

 This one looks like a gnome must have sat on the edge to cause the deformity.

 This is one of my favourite groupings.  It was hidden under a rhododendron bush.

 A different perspective of the ones above with a few added friends.

 Looks close to the ones above but none of the orange or brown colouration.

 These I found around the base of a rose bush.

 A teeny tiny one.

Love how they layer together overlapping.

 Decapitated by the wind or an animal.

 I flipped it over to find the colour.  It was probably close to 8" in diameter!

 Interesting fringe version.

 Weird shapes.

 Another interesting shaped grouping.

 Love the colour and shape of this one.

 A neighbour pushing thru looking almost perfectly formed.

 Deep under a mossy carpet under a rhododendron.

 Love these skinny stemmed variety.

 Love the shapes of their caps I imagine some fairies dancing amongst them.

 Here are all my swap trees.  The Jane Sassaman dot print is pink and red and hard to get a good colour representation against the bright green.

 Red and green striped versions were my second grouping.
                                               
The Pink, Red and Green ones together.

 A green, red and white text with a green and white text version.

 My golden yellow and white version.

 The red, green, white and golden yellow versions together.

Finally a sampling of each of the colour ways together.  They soon will be in the mail to California and close to Christmas I've have a surprise sent back to me.

 Today my friend Anna shared she is doing a pincushion exchange with a group of stitching friends.  It reminded me of a couple that I made in November 2010.

This one was part of a Fall-O-Ween blog hop and was designed by Kim Diehl. If you are interested you can click here and get a copy of the pattern.
                                         

This second one was inspired by Kaaren of The Painted Quilt blog. Sadly she is no longer posting on the blog but has lots of inspiration and tutorials that you can access by clicking here.
                                       

Finished!

Tonight I finished the hand quilting and binding of my Snowman in Wonderland quilt. I think he turned out rather nice.



Happy Birthday cousin Carol hope your day was great!

-Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Winter is making an early visit!

Yesterday morning I woke up to find that we were having a light dusting of snow.  It has been hovering at and below freezing here for about a week and the weather people keep saying we are going to have snow. In the distance you might be able to see that there is some ice on the Fraser River.

 Looking at our water feature you can see that the upper and lower pools not only have ice but also snow covering the ice.  The water is still spilling over the waterfall feature, but some years it has frozen over.

 This morning it was snowing again, usually it rains before snowing but this time because of the cold snap it didn't happen.  As a result the snow flakes were very small, often we have large clumpy snowflakes.

 The trees are now lacy with snow on their branches.

Sunday afternoon my mom and I went out for dinner and then checked out the lights at St. Paul's Hospital.

 They use the lights as a fund raiser for the hospital.

 This is a project that I'm currently working on, a mix of cotton and wool.  Kim Diehl designed this mini quilt and you can get the directions here.  The templates are located here.  You don't get an layout so I just winged it.

 I'm interviewing my blocks for the borders and working on my star corners.  As you can see I went for a much brighter white version than the creamy Kim Diehl version.

One last thing I saw a delightful story about the Canadian company WestJet and I thought I'd share this link with the Huffington Post.  Below it for me is a slide show about Christmas Giving in Vancouver that features some lovely photos.  I hope you enjoy these both.