Dan's Ramblings

Dan here ~

Thursday evening. Today was a wet dreary day, in the 40’s but I’m ready for a little warmer than that. 

The other day while I was playing with the water on the driveway on the hill I noticed an interesting phenomenon floating on the surface of the water.

It is the minor debris that was picked up and was floating on the surface of the water as it ran down the driveway. As I gave the water a faster flow the effect was lost. Was cool to see and capture.

I found other water related issues to play in as well this week. Carol came home from a trip uptown and said that the water was half way across the road at one of the culverts on Old County Rd. I knew there would be issues this spring because the wonderfully intelligent highway crew that was trimming the sides of the road last fall had left both culverts at least partially plugged off. I found this one with the piece of wood right where they had left it. 

The wood propped up on the opening of the culvert slowing the flow to about a quarter of what it would have been. I moved the wood and cleaned out the debris and let it wash out the other side.

The other culvert was plugged a lot worse. On the downstream side there was water flowing but not enough to show any indication on the upstream side. I found a 3” diameter piece of the wood the trim crew left behind about 10 feet long, I guessed where the culvert end was and started probing. It wasn’t long before I had sufficient hole through it that a whirlpool began and the water began gushing out on the other side. 

I again probed and pushed the leaves and debris into and subsequently out the other side of the culvert. Crisis averted, no thanks to the town. The road has been just about passable for days. I will need to go out to the post office tomorrow and see if they have been delivering to us or not. I have a coffee delivery coming tomorrow, I guess time will tell.

More and more open water is being noticed on Mud Pond and Green Pond is breaking up a little around the edges. We wait and see how much longer it takes and how much further up the beach the water will come. 

I finished quilt #10 for 2025 the other night. I went down a little different rabbit hole this time. On the last quilt I used 8” blocks with a frame around them to make them uniform 10” finished blocks. On #10 I kept them as 4” blocks, added sashing and corner stones and then made the quilt top out of eight sections. Each section is made up of fifteen blocks. Most of the blocks were created around fussy cut square in square units using my Square Squared tool. As I assembled the sections I used a wider sashing strip and two different sized stars as corner stones. Two of the stars were created using my Corner Pop II and on the larger star I used my Corner Pop III. The addition of the 2” finished pieced border gave me a little more width and added to the overall effect. I know I’ve said it before but I really like this one. 

2025-10

Here are some closeups so the detail is a little easier to see. 

I am now deviating from the scrap quilts I have been creating and will be making a couple for the graduation grandkids. Parker’s quilt has been designed and approved by Parker, fabrics obtained and is well on the way.  There are only 160 V-block stars and 8 more rather intricate accent blocks. Time will tell. At least this time the v-blocks are 3” not 1” like I used in Insanity. Kailey’s will be next after a bit more tweaking with the design and fabric selections.

There were over 5000 1” V-blocks in this quilt. I doubt I’ll travel down that route again. Very time consuming repetition. But precise repetition anyway.

Enjoy your weekend whatever the weather brings us hopefully there will be no more snow. Unfortunately my desires carry very little weight in the matter. Stay safe and enjoy, regardless whatever we get, we are getting closer to warmer weather every day. 

Until next time...