Carpathian Mountain Sunset - DONE! And baby fish...

Carpathian Mountain Sunset by Cathy Geier

 ~What a week (or two!) I've had ~

 *Cue the music* 

What have my last couple of weeks been like?

Click to listen and guess. 

First the GOOD!
My book is still up on the top selling lists on amazon. This is good, though I wish more people would write up reviews for it... hint hint hint.

Now for more GOOD - I'm on youtube! I won the Blue Ribbon for Sunset Sentinel at the AQS show in Albuquerque and they interviewed me.  If you want to know what I look and sound like, here is a link.

Cathy Geier, AQS Interview

(My nose is too big, I should have had on more makeup, that blouse looks too tight, nice hair though, lol)

And the last of the GOOD, I finished my quilt. You may remember that Leonid Tit gave me permission to use his photo of pink azaleas in the Carpathians. Here is is photo.

Leonid Tit's photograph

 I took some detail shots of the finished quilt for you, the rays were made with yellow and white tulle and stitched with yellow and light threads. It was a little trickier quilting the mountain slopes because of the tulle 'interruptions'. 

Detail of the mountain and sun rays 

 I stippled the foreground and added tiny loop da loos here and there in both pink and green threads just to give it more texture. 

Detail of the Azaleas and leaves

Another detail shot of the foreground quilting

 And now for the BAD
Not my computer, but my Mom's.

UGH!

When they are good, computers are very good and when they are bad, they are horrid. Between her email server changes and her hard drive failures my poor mom has been dealing with major computer problems since December!

Soooo, we helped her get a brand new computer a couple of weeks ago because her old hard drive crashed and burned. (She was still using a computer with Vista!)

Did that fix it? No, because there was a hard ware issue and her new computer crashed after the first day we installed it!

Sooo, we got her another new computer. Cross your fingers, this one seems to be working just fine. All this is why it took me 2+ weeks to finish my quilt. We were at mom and dad's house every weekend.

Now for the Ugly.

Boesemani (Rainbow fish) fry

 Once every year or so, I like to raise baby fish from eggs. My tank in the above pic is clean and nice with little 3 mm fry. They just hatched you see and I'm so happy that there are about a dozen! (Can you see the tiny little critters?)

The moss is nice, the walls are pretty clean... 3 weeks later it is an UGLY tank.  The fry are too fragile for current and water changes, plus algae has taken over my nice java moss. (Fry grow faster when the lights are left on 24/7. I bet you didn't know that! Now you do.) AND, there are probably 50-60 little fishies in the tank.  

This means I might end up having to sell some to a local pet store which I don't like doing. Who knows what kind of home they'll end up in?! Will their new owners take good care of them? Change their water and feed them right?! Lol.

Boesemani Fry, 3 weeks later 5-6 mm?

Anyway, that is all from me this week. I'm keeping busy and planning a new quilt. WI Quilt Expo is having a contest with the theme "Wisconsin Fall Leaves" and that sounds like a theme right up my alley.

Happy Quilting Adventures everyone!