Owl Epilogue

I was so delighted when I went out to fill the bird table this morning. I was greeted by this spirit overseeing the front deck. I'm pretty sure it's the same owl. How beautiful it is!

An Owl Story

 

Barred Owl, picture taken last year

I was sitting at the piano this afternoon when a bird flew by the window. Since I was focused on the music, it was only a fleeting sense of movement out the corner of my eye so I don't know what kind of bird it was but suspected a Blue Jay because they often fly by on their way from the front yard to the back yard. Immediately, the sound of something crashing into one of the bird room windows shattered the peace. I decided I'd better have a look and glancing down from the bird room (it's a good five feet above ground), there lie a beautiful, motionless Barred Owl, head back, wings spread out. Ohh, nooo. It was such a sad sight, a magnificent bird lying there dead by all appearances. It put the kibosh on the musical euphoria of the moment. I thought I saw it take a breath, the breathing of an injured bird, so I went downstairs with the broom to see if I could reach it from the cellar door but the snow was way too deep and I was sinking in up beyond my knees. The broom reached it though and I used it to flip the owl's head as it was sort of flopped back. I realized there was nothing I could do and it would perish. It made me so sad. It was taking a few breaths, and by the time I got back upstairs it occurred to me that maybe it had only been knocked out, and perhaps, just possibly, it would come to. So I kept going to the window to look for positive developments, alas not. But finally, it moved it's head! It had been rendered unconscious! It got up on it's feet and drew it's wings in and sat there for a good ten minutes more then flew to a tree on the front lawn where it remained for the rest of the afternoon. I breathed a glad sigh of relief.

Stitching progress and notes

 

The walkway lights are trying to keep ahead of winter!

Steady progress is being made on the tapestry. I have moved beyond the halfway point!

On a large, repetitive project like this I have found that reading about the craft (needlepoint in this case) is a good motivator. History, techniques, pattern books, they all inspire me, hence boost my interest in keeping the stitches going. I have also found that having set times in the day for working on it is a boost. At the moment my favorite times to stitch are right after breakfast--usually for about an hour--before moving on to piano practice, and again for a few hours in the evening when I can watch ridiculously silly Britcoms on DVD while stitching. It helps that I've seen all the episodes before so I don't need to look at the screen all that much.

Suspending the frame from the ceiling is working out really well. I re-rigged so I can pull it up and away when I want freedom of movement around the sofa. It might seem a bit silly, but it's great! It's rigged so as to be easy to turn over, making the back readily accessible for finishing off a thread. (I prefer to finish off in back rather than park the thread to the side and wait until it's covered by other stitches.)

The tapestry is on large scale mesh: 7 to the inch (the yarn is doubled), and I felt like I wanted something a little finer to work on in spare moments, so I actually started a cross stitch. I found another kit at the thrift shop last week for $7, holiday themed and that's ok because it will likely take me all year to finish it. I like it, and at the moment the biggest trouble is finding the tiny little holes from behind the aida cloth. I keep poking away at it and hope that it will get better with practice. In the meantime, I'm turning the work around to see where the holes are quite often. But it's in hand (not in a hoop) so quite convenient to do so.

So far all I've been stitching are tent stitches because there are a lot of them on the door, so that's very much like needlepoint with the difference being that I do needlepoint in the continental style and the cross stitch as half cross stitch. I'm enjoying it.

A picture of the pattern: