Falling Water

Lots of rain here for over a week now and our waterfalls are working overtime. Above is the “Boiling Pots” area of the Wailuku River. Downstream a ways is Rainbow Falls, which is usually a nice little waterfall that looks nothing like this:

There’s so much soil in the water that the mist drifting into the parking lot smells like wet earth.

These pics are from Wednesday afternoon, and it’s still raining. We’d hoped to get up to Honomu to check out how Akaka Falls looks today, but we’re still having showers moving through with strong gusty winds and rainfall rates at over an inch an hour, and there’s been a Flood Advisory in place since yesterday afternoon. We’ll wait ’til it lets up a bit before hitting the road.

This kind of rain is not unusual for Hilo. It makes impressive waterfalls, but is lousy for quilt photography. My scrappy trips quilt — I’ve gone back to calling it “World Traveler” — is DONE and on our bed, yay! I used Quilter’s Dream Orient batting, which is a lovely weight to sleep under, not too light, but not as heavy as 100% cotton. My 64-block layout is 96″x96″ and I’ve not figured out yet how to get a picture of the whole thing other than hang it from the deck railing, a strategy that awaits drier weather. BTW: this is what 11 yards of binding looks like before it goes on the quilt:

And here’s a teaser of the finished product in action:

Mr. de Hilo is a later riser than I am, so he’s in charge of making the bed. Sometimes Halo gets there first, and Mr. de H is too much of a softie to disturb a sleeping cat just to pull the covers up.

Finishing the sectional quilting took several days longer than hoped. Tutorial is still in the plans, whenever I can get a full set of pictures. Here’s a tiny detail:

This little embroidered flower is about 5/8″ across, and is covering up the spot where I accidentally snipped a couple of threads of the fabric when trimming a thread end. It’s teeny hole, but a hole nonetheless, and needed some kind of rescue.

In between marathon quilting efforts, I’ve snuck some other sewing in. This is a new foundation pieced star pattern that I tested for Esther:

… and below is a quick block 12.5″ that will be mailed off to Victoria tomorrow if the rain lets up a bit and I get out to the Post Office.

Next I’m going to finally get to playing with my Improvi-Robin block, passed on to me by my friend Mariah, who has joined the fun this time round. I have an idea what to do with it, but that could change between here and the sewing machine…

 

Tagged as: foundation piecing, Kaffe Fassett, quilt cat, Rainbow Falls, scrappy trips, waterfall