Reds and black

But not in the same sentence...
I'll start with the Reds :-) I shared the sneak peek below in my last post —

Some followers may remember the 80 hearts quilt I made Mum for her birthday last October —

I was always going to come back and write a bit more about the construction of it but haven't yet had the chance.
I used the tutorial from Cluck Cluck Sew to make the heart blocks.

Rather than drawing 480 diagonal lines on my cream squares I used a piece of painter's tape in front of my machine foot as a guide. (The edge of the tape is lined up with the needle.) It cut out a lot of preparation time.

Keep the tip of the fabric lined up with the straight edge of the tape.

I eye-balled a second line of stitching so that when I cut off my corners I had a big pile of bonus Half Square Triangles.

Cutting the corners off creates lots of bonus HSTs.
(No I didn't save the triangles off the small corners!) 

I let them marinate for a few months then pulled them out for some Christmas sewing. I trimmed them all to the same size (these ended up 2 ⅜").

A bit of serious sewing later, I had a Leftover Hearts Table Runner.

I quilted along all the seamlines and did continuous curves in the cream triangles.

I know the recipient won't mind knowing that this was a very satisfying runner to make - bonus HSTs, batting scraps joined together, backing scraps joined together....

...even the binding was a scrap!
The binding is extra skinny as I only had  3½ inches of it!

But of course it's priceless when you consider the time and love that went into making it!!!

Now on to the Black...
It's been said recently that if you want a bit of excitement, come and live on our road. We seem to have more than our fair share of drama out here.
Last week a fire broke out in the bush at the back of one of our neighbour's farms.

One beautiful thing about living out here is the bush that we are surrounded by. There are large areas of bush, all interjoined and belonging to a lot of different entities; farmers like us, private forestry, Department of Conservation, privately owned iwi land, Maori trust land, privately owned reserve, and so on. The key factor here is that it is all interjoined therefore fire can sweep through it all without any stops. Oh and it's mostly all landlocked too, with no road access.
Ground access to this fire was through farmland, but with a river and an unsuitable bridge in the way, helicopters with monsoon buckets were the only thing that could fight this fire.
Luckily there was little wind so it was relatively slow moving.

At this stage about 3 hours after it started I thought they were getting on top of it.

But when the helicopters had to stop for the night it was still out of control. 

This photo was in an on-line paper and was how it was looking late at night.
(Not what we could see from our place!) (Photo by Brooke Sabin.)

This is what I saw at 5am the next morning. Filled our hearts with dread.

We woke up to ash everywhere, including on the trees outside our bedroom window.
And the cows were covered in a layer of ash too!

The next morning I went up the back of the farm and onto the tracks the beekeepers put in to access the bush. I saw to my delight that in the night firebreaks had been put in which stopped the fire from spreading over our way.

A firebreak put in overnight which stopped the fire spreading our way.
You can see it's all burnt on the left and completely unspoilt to the right.
The bush to the right is immediately above our property.

Putting in the firebreaks was a brave move with a huge forestry bulldozer.
These hills aren't easy.

The helicopters were back in action; I couldn't see the flames from my vantage point, but did see plenty of smoke!

Thank goodness the wind stayed away and it was only a few hours until it was officially under control :-) I think they may have isolated an area and let it burn out?
On Sunday we had a trek up the back to show family what had happened.

They estimate 130 hectares were burnt but it seems a lot more!

Another view of the firebreak that stopped the fire from spreading our way.

The beekeepers were very grateful that the monsoons had dumped water on
the hives and saved all three sets of them.

After a big run through all that dust a bath in the river was very welcome.

We had some good rain this morning so hopefully that has dampened down the last of the hotspots.
Sorry about the photo heavy post - I couldn't decide which ones to use and which to leave out!
Ok that's enough drama for now - see you next time

Happy stitches,