All the blocks

I finished the quilting the blocks on the "Chimney Sweep" quilt (that's the name, or at least the name that Martha McCloskey gave to the quilt in the book where she had its pattern. This is a quite old picture of it but here it is as a reminder:



I still have the borders to do. I'm working around the pieced border, just quilting 1/4" away from some of the seams. I also had originally traced a design on the outermost border of interlocking circles (when the design is used on a large block of space, it's called either Wineglasses (because you can make it by repeatedly tracing around one) or Orange Peels). I still haven't decided 100% whether to do that border that way (because I'd have to try to find the stencil and re-draw the areas where the chalk pencil got brushed off over the years) or whether to just do a simple line 1/4 away from the seam, just mainly in the interest of anchoring things. I have a while to think about it though because I think I want to finish the inner border first.

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Second day of fieldwork done. We're mostly done at the first site, but the "replacement" batteries my student grabbed from the GIS lab for the GPS unit were worn out. (Arglebargle. I'm guessing what happened was that one of the students in the class, when they returned the unit, just put the worn-out or nearly-worn-out batteries back in the box of "new" batteries.) So we're going to have to go back to get the coordinates of the sample points. IF we can find them again. I didn't have any surveyor's tape to mark with (and besides, there's some evidence that deer will eat surveyor's tape), so I "blazed" a tree in each sample...like the oldtimey GLO surveyor guys (The General Land Office survey, done in the early to mid 1800s in much of the country...it led to the township and range and section system of designating locations, so settlers could find their land and to hopefully cut down on land fights.) I used my pocketknife (and it was lucky I had it with me) to score a large "X" in the bark of the marker tree. (I also tried to score in the number of the sample, but after "1" it gets very hard to do).

I think the GLO guys actually had a proper blazing tool, that would cut deeper and more surely than a pocketknife would, but whatever.

We saw a deer. It startled me at first - I just saw this brown SHAPE running through the underbrush and I didn't know if it was a deer or a coyote, or even a dude in one of those shaggy sniper suits. I admit I screamed a little bit, it changed course, and I could see it was just a deer. (I have seen coyotes out at this site, but they've always run in the opposite direction from me when they saw me. The one non-human animal I'd really worry about running into out in the field is wild boar. Coyotes will generally run the other way, bobcat will usually run the other way, we're too built-up to have mountain lions right where I am (or at least, no one I know has ever reported seeing any), but wild boar can be mean and aggressive...and one boar can weigh more than both my research students and me put together (and none of us is a tiny woman: we're all fairly tall and fairly densely muscled).)

Even snakes don't worry me that greatly - I have a big stick that I carry and use like a walking stick, and I figure that that probably will scare any snakes out of my path. (Besides, with the exception of the black rat snake yesterday, I've never seen any snakes out at this site).

I would also worry about other people out at the site. Most of the people you will run into will either just be guys walking out to the lake to fish, or possibly birdwatchers or mushroom-hunters, but it's also possible that there may be some unseemly activity going on...we often run across piles of beer bottles (probably high school kids partying, and you're unlikely to run across the kids at 8 in the morning), but it's also possible people could be doing stuff out in the woods...back when I lived in Ohio, one of the volunteers who worked in the Cuyahoga Valley parks used to warn backpackers away from certain areas...he had lived there all his life and knew those were the areas where the pot growers had their crops, and he also suspected they defended them with things like punji stakes and pit traps. (Though I'd like to SEE someone try to dig a pit trap in the soil here...)

So I do admit some apprehension going "way backcountry" in this site, like we did today...we went to an area I'd never even been in before.

One other thing we saw, that was weird and I had never seen before - at the base of a tree, a small brown bird (wren-sized or slightly larger, and it was sort of a red brown, like the Carolina wrens here) flew out from a little "cave" of leaves at the roots. I carefully peeked in...and there was at least one tiny white egg. I don't know of any forest birds that are ground-nesters; I wonder if this was a cavity nesting species that couldn't find a tree cavity? We were very careful around the nest and moved out of that area as soon as possible so the bird could return to its nest. (oooh, a quick internet search says that ovenbirds will ground-nest. Yes, this could have been an ovenbird. Cool! In fact, this site says they are called ovenbirds because their nest is shaped like an oven...and is found on the ground, at the base of a tree.).

We also saw dog-vomit fungi on a log, and a polyporus fungus on a tree that fungus beetles were feasting on. Sadly, they were just plain black fungus beetles and not the "shining fungus beetle" or the "pleasing fungus beetle."