Happy Birthday Grandma!

We've had a few birthdays this week, as this is birthday season for us.  Between the 23rd of March and the 2nd of April, there are 2 birthdays in our immediate family and 3 in the extended family.  This year the most important was Grandma Anderson, who turned 80.  Because it's the only time she'll have an 80th birthday I made her a quilt.  It's the first quilt I've made for anyone and it wouldn't win any prizes but I thought it turned out ok.

I put silhouettes of all the grandchildren on the front and a bargello pattern on the back, which is actually centered although the perspective in the photo makes it look off-centre.

I did a lot of free-motion quilting to hold it together, thanks to David buying me a decent machine for my birthday, as my old cheap plastic one couldn't handle anything like that.

Rainbows

We had a couple of the most beautiful rainbows last week, big and bright.  Unfortunately there is a speck of dust in our camera (on the sensor, and unremoveable, according to Malcolm, who knows about these things).  But anyway, we took some photos...

The lights in the sky are the reflection of our dining room light, by the way

March

So... it looks like we skipped February...
We have been busy with all sorts of things in the last month or 2.
We went fruit-picking in Central Otago.  Apricots, nectarines, peaches, and plums - the kids had such fun!  Then we had to cook it all up - into apricot jam, apricot sauce (for pizza), plum jam, dried apricots, plum cake, and everything else got bottled.

Free plums from the side of the road

We've started Saturday Morning Music Classes.  Bryony's learning singing, Hannah violin, Daniel guitar and Andrew recorder.  Jean has also joined the Recorder Ensemble, to save sitting around for 3 hours doing nothing every Saturday morning.  It's been nice to refresh recorder skills which have been shelved for about 25 years.

Daniel has moved up from cubs to Sea Scouts, he couldn't wait to learn to sail so when they offered a place he jumped at it. 

The 3 older girls have been doing art lessons - a 4-week course - which they have enjoyed.

We've made several trips out to the coast to look for rocky shore creatures.  The last trip was the most successful, we found starfish, crabs and fish, and got some good movies on the underwater camera.
 

We only just noticed there's a fish in this photo, and a crab too

 The girls sold 12 baby rabbits after Christmas

We're still mulching, and the kids have been helping by carrying bucketloads of mulch from the pile to bare patches of garden.  It's our only hope to keep down the weeds, seeing as we don't want to spray.  I'm going for a cottage-type flower garden, the first patch is looking nice.

The next move for the house is to install a wood-burner - bought but not put in yet.  Hopefully it'll be in and finished by mid-April.
Oh, and Petra and Eva cut their hair, again.  It was pretty bad this time, Petra gave herself a mullet.  Eva cut the back short as well as the front.  Even a month later it still gets odd looks from people if we go out.  They told their Sunday-school teachers that I did it...

Before

After

Never mind, it'll grow.