Ozzie and I would like to wish you all a happy and safe 4th of July if you live in the US, and a happy Thursday if you don't! We plan to go to a barbecue with the family, and my corn salad that I posted on a week or so ago has been requested. I told you it was good!
Ozzie isn't too keen about all the racket the fireworks make, but he plans a restful day up until the festivities begin. I will spend the day making corn salad and reading my book. Talk to you tomorrow!
I am really enjoying this sweet little table topper I made last year. It is "Endearments", a pattern by Betsy Chutchian. The fabrics I used are hers as well. I love piecing small block units and this pattern definitely fit the bill. Those half square triangles finish at 1 inch!
It is placed on my kitchen counter with a pretty orchid my husband picked up at the grocery store. Here is a closer look at the pot the plant came in. How perfect for summer, right?
We are busy bees at my house lately. Summer is in full swing, and as you see in one of the photos above, my Eva is spending a lot of time with me. We work pretty steadily at our projects. Look out little sea horse!
I thought I would share a quick look at my July table runner. This one was finished in 2018, but quilted fairly recently. I used fabrics from my stash, and a Miss Rosie's Quilt Company pattern called "Recess", which I adapted to be rectangular in shape. It measures 19" x 41".
Here is a closer look at the quilting. I chose a stars and crescent design and really like how it came out.
Hope you are all having a great week. We are really into swim team practice and spending hours at the pool!
My friends, I have been starching and cutting fabric for a week! I am going to make the Temecula Quilt Company's One Block Sew Along (which is actually over). I wanted a huge variety of fabrics. There will be around 360 blocks and I did not want to repeat combinations. That meant 45 lights and 45 darks, or 90 fabrics total. I thought I was going to have a real issue getting that many suitable light backgrounds together, but, um, no I didn't.
My gosh, starching all that fabric took forever. F.O.R.E.V.E.R. I must have used 10 bottles of spray starch. But I'm done now, and the strips are all cut-all 180 of them. You see how I lined them all up on the upstairs railing. I don't know why I bothered, except to keep track of how many strips I had so far. They will all end up balled up in a bin while I grab a light and a dark to each block pairing.
So the really ridiculous thing is--how much fabric I have left over.
Just feast your eyes on that pretty sight. I have an entire bin of mostly fat quarters with four inches cut off. You will be seeing more of these in future projects, I promise.
I am so eager to jump in and start making my blocks. Monday is the first day of Summer Vacation however, and Miss Eva and I have plans. We need to make a very cool Father's Day card for her daddy, do a cooking project, do some home schooling and go see Aladdin. So I may have to wait until Tuesday for any sewing machine action.
Hope you had a splendid weekend. It warmed up into the low 90s here, so as I predicted, we skipped spring and went right into summer!
The binding is going well. I've been sitting on the porch with an audio book and stitching for awhile every day. This Fig Tree runner looks so pretty on my dining table. I love the toned down colors for summer.
The colors in this one definitely are not toned down, but it is so darn cute. That quilting design is called Mini Marmalade, and may be one of my favorites ever. I have this little topper on my kitchen counter at the end of the island, and am really enjoying it.
I took my husband's pocket change and a business card off of it for the picture, but even with the junk it seems to attract, it's cute.
Hope you all had a nice weekend. We apparently have gone from a rainy Spring directly into Summer, but I am not complaining. We got our herbs planted this weekend, and I am looking forward to making pasta with them sprinkled throughout.
We bought these raised boxes last year and they definitely solved the issue we were having with gophers!
The flowers are going crazy, including these petunias I thought were goners after the deer ate the tops off all of them. We just put them in the back yard out of the deers' reach and they grew back better than ever. I guess that proves the rule that once your flowers have bloomed, cut them back and they will bloom again.
Hope you all had a wonderful Mother's Day. Mine was lovely. It was also Sara's birthday, so we had a double celebration. She and Eva came over for brunch and we sat outside and opened presents and had mimosas and a nice breakfast.
I managed to catch the miserable cold my husband had while we were on our vacation, so I was down for the count last week. I still have a lingering cough and am blowing my nose all the time. Such fun. I have not been doing any sewing, so I apologize for the lack of quilty content, but it will probably continue like this for the foreseeable future. Eva has three more weeks of school, and then I will be spending more time with here during the summer. I hope to get some kind of schedule in place where I sew for an hour or so a day while she is occupied with something else.
The table runner in the photo above is super cute, in spite of the terrible lighting. I will get it trimmed up and bound this week, and think it will be a pretty addition to my dining table. Inside or out!
Ah. I am home from my trips, my laundry is done, the Easter decor has been put away, and my husband has gone back to work. That man has been sick for ten days with a horrible cough, fever and an ear ache. He lost his hearing in the affected ear and every time I spoke to him he looked at me with complete incomprehension. That got old pretty fast I tell you.
It wasn't that I was completely unsympathetic, but he refused to go to the doctor in spite of indications that it might be a really good idea. What is it about men and going to the doctor?
Here is a close up of the quilting, which I think is so pretty. My roses are going nuts, so I sacrificed one for the bud vase. It matches perfectly!
I am so glad to be home. Did I say that already? I am a creature of routine and it just was too much to be gone to Palm Desert, home for a few days, then off to Lake Tahoe. I have no plans to go anywhere for the foreseeable future.
I have a story to share. Our son Ahren lives in Dublin, Ireland, as many of you who follow me know. Well, last week, his house was burglarized. While.he.was.home.
He had worked late and didn't get home until nearly 9:00. He'd had a long stressful day, and had over an hour commute on public transportation to get home. His habit is to come in, disarm his alarm, and re-lock his front door. He thinks that is what he did that particular night as usual. He threw together a light dinner and went upstairs to sleep shortly after 10:00. He took his laptop upstairs with him to look at something before he fell asleep. He sleeps with his bedroom door closed and locked (kind of weird, I never knew that about him). So, obviously sound asleep after a long day at work, with his door shut, he wasn't really hearing anything that transpired downstairs.
At some point during the night, someone either used a pick on his front door to gain entry, or (if Ahren forgot to lock up, which would have been very unusual) just opened the door and came into his house. They didn't seem very professional, just stepped in, probably looked around for a purse or car keys, grabbed his bag from the foyer and ran back out. What they took was Ahren's messenger bag that contained just about everything that meant something to him. His eyeglasses, his iPhone, his Filofax (with all kinds of personal information), his wallet, his cash (only 20 Euro thank goodness), his house keys (!), his ATM card, his writing journal (with all his stories he had been writing for the past year), a sterling silver fountain pen his ex had given him that he treasured, and an expensive leather pen case his sister had given him for Christmas. There may have been more things in the bag, but those are the major losses. The main things they didn't get were his laptop and his passport which were elsewhere.
He got up in the morning, came down stairs, saw his hall table drawer ajar, a book on the floor and his bag gone. And his door unlocked. It took all day to go to the bank and report his missing cards, go to the Gardai (Irish police) to report the break in, acquire a new iPhone, try to get new glasses, a new National ID, a new public transportation pass, new wallet, new FIlofax etc etc. He also had to go buy a new lock for the door and install it. The Gardai were real interested that the crime had been committed while the resident was on the premises, but so far nothing has been retrieved and nothing really done about it.
He is going to put a deadbolt and chains on his door, and will be setting his alarm while he is in the house, which previously he had not done. He feels pretty shaken about the whole experience but is being philosophical about how lucky he is. "At least they didn't take my favorite Staub Dutch oven, or my Baccarat wine glasses". As if the typical thief would know the value of those items.
Have any of you been robbed? What is your story? The most memorable one that has stuck with me over the years is the woman whose house was broken into and her husband's guns stolen. She didn't give a hoot about the darn guns going missing, but the fact that they stole the last quilt her dearly departed mother had made to wrap the guns in was a very hard blow to take.
It has become something of a tradition for Eva to make a special Easter cake with me. This was our effort a couple of years ago. Eva is in charge of choosing the design, and as she has gotten older, she has taken on more of the decorating responsibilities as well.
This is what she came up with for this year. I tried in vain to talk her into making a flat bunny cake, but she insisted on this 3-D version. It came out fairly well, but those ears were a challenge to attach, I tell you.
As you see, she has not lost her fondness for incorporating Peeps into her designs. Despite the cake's somewhat disheveled appearance, it actually tasted pretty good. Eva is already talking about what we will do next year.
Today our schools are on holiday, so Eva will be spending the day with me. I am hoping to get some laundry done and maybe even get up into my sewing room. What is it about vacations and laundry? I don't seem to generate that many dirty clothes on a regular weekly basis. Our weather has turned lovely, so "there will be good drying in the day" as my Irish relations say.
Hope your week is getting off to a great start!
I believe I may be getting over my cold. Which is a good thing. I have had Eva since the beginning of the month because her daddy is traveling, and she has suddenly come down with the stomach flu. The less said about that the better, but the up shot is, she has been sick (v.e.r.y. sick) for the past two days and now Sara has come down with it as well.
Doesn't my sweet girl look pitiful? That is what one looks like when all you have had to eat all day is weak camomile tea, plain toast, water, juice and white rice.
All I can say is that we have a big vacation planned for Spring Break starting Saturday, involving plane travel and other exciting things, and we all better snap out of it. Wish us luck...
I have been cooking up a storm in my new Instant Pot. I may have made the best soup of my life-Loaded Potato Soup. The recipe can be found here. The recipe was for the 3 Quart Mini Instant Pot, and made at least five servings. I have had it three times since I made it and there is enough for two more bowls. I made it just as the recipe dictated, but I did use my immersion blender to puree things before I tossed the crispy bacon in. Bowl licking delicious.
At some point, I am going to get this new appliance off my kitchen counter and want to put it away. Which got me thinking.... My pantry was a horrible mess. Who even knew what was in those far corners and on the top shelves. So, I pulled every single thing out and Kon-Maried my pantry. Not much sparked joy, and I did a massive purge of outdated and unwanted items. It took hours. No before photo as it was too terrifying. That is my after photo above.
I have ordered some clear plastic bins from the Container Store, which will allow me to put like items together. The bins have a pull handle on one end, so you can use it like a drawer-pull it forward and you can see how many cans of diced tomatoes you have instead of rummaging around moving things aside on the shelf to see what's in the back. I had a few of these bins already, but went online and ordered eight more for my canned goods. On sale right now too.
Here is one of those organizer bins with Eva's favorite snacks in it. It is hard to see, but there is a handle on the front that you can grab and pull forward like a drawer. My pantry shelves are super deep, so this is so handy.
Here are my bottom shelves with some of my appliances easily accessible. My new Instant Pot and my panini maker on the shelf and my bread maker and pasta maker on the floor.
Gosh I love being organized.