guerrillas and squirrels

I feel like I've been away for ages -- and in fact it's been two weeks! I haven't actually been anywhere, though... just working, pulling weeds, wondering if we're ever going to get real summer weather here in the foggy Bay Area.

I have been plugging away on some UFOs, too. This is my August challenge project -- yet another set of blocks. This was a round robin from last year that started from a black & batik block swap a couple of years before that. I only actually made one of these blocks -- the orange ring in the upper right corner. I seem to have a thing for black & white sashing -- in fact there's another quilt top coming up soon that I sashed today with black & white dots. It's about 52" square, and I need to think of a simple quilting scheme for this one, since it's already pretty busy...

Have you heard about knit-bombs or guerrilla knitting? It's an international phenomenon that involves yarn-o-philes creating knitted covers for public property such as trees, light poles, statues, etc. It showed up near me on the Berkeley/Oakland border recently with a knitted cover for the letter "T" in a big metal "There" sculpture which created a bit of a controversy. ( You can google "guerrilla knitting" and get to the flickr gallery as well as thousands of articles)

I hadn't seen any of this up close, though, until we went for dinner in the Elmwood district last week, and noticed that a number of signposts had been "bombed" -- they are so cool!
Here's Al posing with one of them:
and a close-up of some of the funky details:
I came home and immediately started knitting a cover for the stop-sign pole at my corner. I suspect the witchy woman next door will tear it down, but we'll see.

Spotted in the camellia bush outside my window this afternoon -- a reminder to stop and smell the flowers:
Annoyed by the paparazzi -- now if I could just get him to leave my apples alone!