Home to Roost: Colour & Inspiration Tuesday

Last but not Least

The last block to reveal in the Lunarcy quilt is the Year of the Rooster. So we will finish the Lunarcy set today and make plans to start releasing the patterns for this fun quilt.

And if that wasn’t enough to crow about, I discovered yesterday that the Royal Agricultural and Horticultural Society of South Australia chose one of my quilts for their latest promotional material. It isn’t of any real consequence, but it made me feel good.

I’ve also dug out a few interesting pics from our recent Coober Pedy side trip, as promised last post. The first is a Wedge-tailed eagle. It’s Australia’s largest bird of prey, and reportedly the third largest eagle in the world when ranked for wingspan. We get them in Arkaroola too, but they are much easier to see up close on the highways, where they take advantage of roadkill. This one briefly posed for me on our way home from our recent trip to Coober Pedy.

I see your rooster, and I’ll raise you one! At a wingspan of 2.8m (9 ft 4 in), it is a very big, and very stunning bird.

Back to the Rooster

Look at this plucky fellow! Fun fact: did you know that roosters have special ears so that they don’t crow themselves deaf? Apparently Belgian researchers discovered that when roosters open their beaks fully, their ear canals block off. Now, that’s clever. And totally necessary if you are announcing your business at over 100 db on a daily basis!

Here is the lantern I chose to stitch with the rooster.

If you are a Rooster, I hope you like your lunar zodiac block!

Disclaimer: Island Batik supplied these fabrics to me free of charge to create the prototype Lunarcy BOM available here soon at Clever Chameleon for the remainder of 2020.

Our local Shows and Fairs are cancelled, but the advertising rolls on….

Yesterday people on the Royal Adelaide Show mailing list received information on some of the virtual events running in lieu of the annual event that should have started very shortly if it hadn’t been for Covid. Including a segment on “Learn how to Judge”…..

Always a Curious Chameleon, I clicked on the link to the “Quilts” section. And encountered this…..

Fun, mostly because it was a totally random surprise to see my own quilt staring back at me, but fun nonetheless.

Coober Pedy follow-up

A fortnight ago I showed you how we had lived underground for a week in Coober Pedy, which was a fabulous experience. But I didn’t get time to show you some of the other amazing sights in that part of our great Outback. So here goes with a second dose…..

We spent an afternoon visiting The Breakaways, just north of Coober Pedy. The landscape is just amazing.

One of the best known features of The Kanku-Breakaways park is “Papa” or “Two Dogs”. This landmark is a pair of hills that are in stark colour contrast to each other due to different speeds of erosion. The traditional land owners see these two hills as two dogs lying down together, and the nearby conical hill as their owner.

While in Coober Pedy, we were also fortunate enough to have a local miner offer to show us his active opal workings. So we were allowed to accompany him onto the restricted opal fields. There were piles of dirt and deep shafts everywhere, and green mulla mullas too. In the slideshow you can see several of the traditional “blowers” used to remove dirt from the mines – they look like a drum suspended on a truck bed – but our new friend uses a more modern approach. It’s still not a job for the faint-hearted!

The flipside to all the stark landscapes is that spring comes early to the Outback, and there were quite a lot of wildflowers already starting to bloom around Coober Pedy while we were there. And even more in the Arid Botanic Gardens in Port Augusta. Both of these regions have had more recent rains than where we live in Arkaroola.

There was even a thin layer of water in some of the lesser salt lakes. These “lakes” are very often totally dry.

In the meantime, back at home….

….. the Chameleon’s quilting friends have been far more industrious than him.

Oh how I wish I could spend an afternoon with Turid from Den Syende Himmel observing how she makes these tiny hexies and wrangles them together. And drinking in her wonderful Norwegian scenery too. A feast for your eyes awaits you in Turid’s post.

The night skies are often really clear here in Arkaroola – so much so that Paul got this photo of Jupiter and its four biggest moons (the Galilean satellites) with just a digital camera on a tripod and no extra lenses etc, from our back verandah.

But I digress. Here is Michelle’s elephant block collection, which you can examine closer in her post. Looks like they’re dressed to party.

So party we shall!

I will be leaving this new party open for a fortnight too, as we are travelling away for school again soon. So I will catch you in two weeks’ time, and I am aiming to have Lunarcy pattern installments available regularly from then. Fingers crossed!

So, in the meantime tell us – what are you working on, or have recently finished in your sewing room? We want to know so we can visit and be inspired. Link up a blog post, an IG post or simply a photo from your computer.  See if you can get the Chameleon to turn quilted with happiness. We’d love to see your quilting colours!

• Link up your latest or recent quilt/sewing excitement. All quilt construction stages welcome – finished quilts, quilt blocks – even fabric pulls! Or inspiration sources!
• You have 50 characters in the link description…. tell us who you are and what your fantastic project is.
• URL links are not necessary to link up…. non-bloggers 100% welcome! If you don’t have a URL, you can link up with just a photo.
• Take a moment to visit some friends who came to the party – leave a little love and make their day. And a link back to Clever Chameleon is always appreciated.
• Do it now……. before you forget!

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Would you like to keep in touch with Clever Chameleon and the fun quilty ideas I design as well as find all over the internet? You can follow directly for email updates, or through Bloglovin’, Pinterest, IG or FB. All your follow options can be found here. Don’t forget to link up all your current quilting projects on Tuesdays at our Colour & Inspiration Linky parties!