Cantaloupe!

Here's Babyloupe! I never knew that teeny cantaloupes had fuzz, did you? It's about the size of the end of your thumb. It looks soft and . . . pettable here, doesn't it? But it feels a little bristly instead.

Here's my mid-size one. I'm calling her Mamaloupe. She's about the size of a peach.

And here's Daddyloupe, my largest one. He's bigger than a biggish orange. Maybe grapefruit sized? No fuzz left on him. Tomorrow, I plan to hang him in a hammock from the trellis, to take the weight of the melon off the vine. They say that groing them up instead of letting them sprawl on the ground makes for bigger fruit with no blemishes. We'll see!

End of June Harvest

Just a quick post—I was away for the weekend and came home to a nice lot of ripe veggies:

That's one last snowpea, but paired with my very first yellow pear tomato. The bush is loaded with them, so I predict a lot more! I also picked six banana peppers, eighteen cherry tomatoes, and two medium sized tomatoes that will be good for slicing. And my black-eye peas are producing pea-pods too! I only saw two pods with peas big enough to pick today, and I've got to admit that I just ate them raw. The peas, I mean, not the pods, lol

How does YOUR garden grow?

Spinout Reveal!

Well, today's my reveal day, and I get to show you all what my final Spinout quilt top looks like:

I loved doing this one in batiks, they're so nice to sew on, they don't fray much, and you don't have to be careful of wrong-side or right-side up. It seems when I sew with white-on-white fabric, I always get one square or triangle wrong-side up; by the time I notice it's wrong, it's buried deep in the piecing where it'd take a lot of unsewing to get to it.

The inside of this quilt, Spinout, was designed by Barbara Cline, and if you follow the link, you can get a copy of the magazine with the quilt pattern in it. It's the July/August 2011 issue.

Diane Harris, of Quiltmaker magazine, is blogging about the Scrap Squad's interpretation of the Spinout pattern, and she did a very nice blogpost about my quilt, go look! Lots more details there, and you can also use links to see other Scrap Squad versions of the same pattern:

Scrap Squad Spinout

I also made a tutorial on my website to show people how I made the seminole border—or you could call it a bargello-type border too.

Seminole border Tutorial

Here's a closeup of the border I did:

Now I need to get to work on the next Scrap Squad assignment. This has been so much fun—to get the patterns before anyone else does,and try it in different fabrics. :)

Cantaloupe on a Trellis

I've been reading online about doing cantaloupes in a container garden, and one site mentioned that you could grow them in less space if you'd train your cantaloupes to grow up a trellis. I stopped on the way home from work the other night and bought two of them. There was a lot of trellises to choose from—wooden ones, plastic ones, fan shaped aluminum ones. I knew I wanted something tall, so I nixed the idea of the 3 and 4 foot versions. There were a lot of wooden ones with diagonal slats hanging on a rack waaaay over my head, but some of them had loose slats already, or slats that had come apart from the outer frame, They were unpainted and looked pretty cheaply made for the price. I didn't want something that was going to last only last one summer. Here's what I got:

They're nicely made, and I liked the idea of NOT having the 2 inch wide slats creating a lot of shade. Plus, I needed a trellis that had horizontal bars as well as vertical bars. Supposedly, when the cantaloupe get baseball sized, you use pantyhose or plastic mesh to make a sling on the trellis to support them, to take the weight off the vine. I have lots of the bird netting I put on my tomato bush, so I'll probably use some of that.

Here's my cantaloupes right now, I've used some saved selvedge to gently encourage the vines to grow toward the trellis. They're not knotted tightly, so I'll be able to shift them as the vines grow. This is my first year for cantaloupe, and I didn't know that the plant has those little curly tendril things like the snowpeas do, to connect them and help them grow up.

And one last garden shot - these are my yellow bell peppers, at golfball size. I wonder how long it'll take them to get ripe? I've never grown them before.

In other news, I've eaten LOTS of cherry tomatoes so far, and handfuls of snow peas. Oh, and three banana peppers. I love it when stuff starts getting ripe, and I can't wait for my first big tomato of the year. :)