Autumn Skies and Hand Dyes.

I think one of the reasons I love Autumn is the amazing skies we get.  And not just sunsets, but the cloud formations and day time colours are always stunning too.  The kids spotted this sunset last night and suggested I take photos - and I'm so glad I did.

Here's another sky.  This is what my hand-dyed blues have been used for. Probably 95% of the sky in this shot is my own fabric, either hand dyed or painted.  A lot of the purples are too.  Lots more work to go on this quilt yet - a base of greens and browns, a trunk for the nikau palm, trim the white off the leaves, lots more birds.......

Yesterday (Sunday) we did a big mission on the studio and now most of it is painted with undercoat.  And we only stopped because we ran out!  I'm getting a little closer to decided what colours as topcoats.  To help me I wrote a list of criteria that will influence me:  

• Warm colour - the room has windows only at the back and front and so can be a bit dark and cool feeling, I want to feel warm and cosy when I'm working.
• Light colour - again because of the lack of light, I need a light colour that will reflect natural light as much as possible.
• Neutral - I've decided to head more towards a neutral so that my wall colour doesn't influence my colour choices when I'm making quilts and using my design wall.

But, my oh my! There are hundreds of neutrals when you go looking at the colour cards at the paint shop!!

A good blogging friend has asked for an update on how our piece of land is evolving.  I realise I've blogged much more about my quilting lately than what has been happening on the farmlet, probably because I haven't been doing much outside lately.  I guess my focus has been turned inwards on the studio and with the cooling weather gardening etc takes a back seat.  The vege garden has truly become a wilderness, but I can forage something out of it most nights.  

The orchard trees will be needing their second ever winter pruning soon.  Both them and our shelter trees grew well last summer as it was a mild season.  

As for the animals, I have four bunnies at the moment, two mamas and two daughters.  Our breeding buck went to bunny heaven a while ago and I'm going to hold off on sourcing a new one until spring.  We killed our two ram lambs the other day and a friend hung them then butchered them for us.  They were nine months old and in good condition, we have polled wiltshires and they are not overly fatty, and we've had one beautiful meal of chops so far.  It's not so far till spring and then we'll have more lambs bouncing around.

None of the chickens are laying as it's moulting time - they are all at least two years old now and I'm going to have to do some serious culling soon and then start again either using my incubator or some point of lay pullets.  The ducks are still amusing us with their antics, but they aren't laying either.  In spring I will hatch a new bunch out.  

Yes, I love Autumn, but Spring has it's joys too!