Sunshine

NOTE: I've replaced the original photo with this PhotoShopped version. After reading this post, my friend Bunny emailed me that her husband Joe also has a hobby, and it's photography. So I sent them the photo and he was able to work some magic and get a much better image. Thank you!! Here's the orignal post with the improved image:
This is a terribly overexposed photo, but I don't know enough about photography to get rid of the excess light and still capture the crucial image. We came home about 5 o'clock yesterday afternoon and for a split second I thought the tree in our front yard was on fire. Both edges of the trunk were glowing, radiating, shining, shimmering with a blazing red-orange light. It really did look like fire, it was that bright. I've never seen anything like it.

The tree is a paper bark maple, and the bark is always peeling off the tree. The sun was hitting the trunk at just the right angle and the hanging pieces of bark were glowing red orange. You can see that the hanging bark in front, where the sun doesn't hit it, is just dull brown. Amazing! I took lots of photos, but all of them have too much sunlight. Still, I think you can see the effect in this closeup. A few minutes later the fire was gone, but what a blaze of glory for a moment.

I've been working on another small word quilt while I wait for the background fabric to arrive for my Stroop quilt. My niece Laurel commented that a small wall quilt with a child's name in Tonya's wonky letters would make a great baby gift. Good idea! A former grad student where I used to work recently had a baby girl she named Sruti, and I thought this would be perfect to send her.
I was playing here. I've decided to change out the 'u' and 't' for small letters rather than capitals, hope to do that tomorrow, and then to dot the 'i' with a heart, which so far is all I've done for the 'i', but I may want the heart bigger). Now that I can make these pretty quickly, it's not a problem to see whether something works and toss it in the parts pile if it doesn't.

My husband has a hobby, too, though he doesn't indulge it as often as I do my quilting. He bakes bread. Good bread. Great bread. He uses a baker's stone in the oven and spritzes the dough with water for the first ten minutes to get a crispy crust. The smell drove us crazy while this 7-grain loaf was baking, and we had heavenly warm bread just after I snapped this photo.
Nature does wonders during the spring, but sometimes nothing can compete with good oven-spring!