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garden, cows, flowers and feathers

Today has been the most amazing day in my little corner of the world. One of those beautiful, sunny, blue-skied Spring days that makes you forget all about miserable, muddy winter and has me feeling so glad I live in the Yarra Valley. I seriously hate the cold and cannot wait each year for winter to end. Those of you who live in climates that snow would probably find our winter laughable, but, hey, we do have frost a few times each season, and I can see snow on the mountain caps in the distance.......well, every few years, anyway.

So, today. STUNNING. Slip on a pair of thongs and get out in the garden weather (thongs = flip-flops for those of you who just had the truly horrifying thought of me gardening in my underwear). I managed to pull a few weeds, remove the chicken wire fence from around my flower garden (the chickens kept getting in and ripping through my seedlings - we think we have now stopped them from getting over the house-yard perimeter fence, so my flowers are back out of jail), took some photos, uncovered the daybed and had a nap on the porch - something that I really needed - it's school holidays and I have been staying up late drawing, blogging, whatever, telling myself I will sleep in in the morning. Problem is, when John's alarm clock goes off at 5.45 and I wake up, my brain just starts spinning, spinning and I can't go back to sleep. So, anyway, now I feel fantastic. Ready to take on my Zumba class tonight.

In another adventure today, when I went up to feed muffin and puddin' (my pigsters) this afternoon, I forgot that the paddock that I walk through had some of the cows in it. In a funny and somewhat terrifying experience, I had a train of 6 cows and their calves following me across the paddock trying to steal the gone-to-seed broccoli plants out of the bucket I was taking to the piggies. Funny, because they frolick around like lambs, running and bucking. Cute! Terrifying, because they do this by running up behind me, and, ya know, those mamas weigh over 500kgs each! The old house-cow that we used to milk a few years ago was very spoilt and used to getting treats. She would spot me in a paddock and come running full-bore towards me, then skidding the last couple of metres so that she didn't take me out! LOL.

O.k., a few days ago I was playing with Knyt and once I started drawing the pattern as I posted in my knyt post I became really fascinated by the linking centre, and couldn't resist making a feather out of it (never saw that coming, right?)

Here's what I came up with:

Greyscale link feather - probably my favourite - you can see I didn't continue the centre line through the entire feather - just to the base of the links.


Basic link feather - continued the "link" a little way along each scroll. Centre line goes to tip.


Link feather with bubbles. I don't love this one, it was the version before above - I don't like the lines, but I DO like the bubbles :)

Double strand link feather: on this one instead of joining the 2 lines from the link I have continued each out into scroll to create a fuller feather.


The step out - shows how to do the basic feather, the variations are pretty straightforward from here.


I think that this has satisfied my feather fetish for a while :) Or has it? Probably not.......
hx