Snow Pea update

My snowpeas have their first bloom. :) You can see one cherry tomato on the bush behind it, if you look close.


My banana pepper plant is producing more leaves. getting bushier and greening out, but nothing exciting:


The squash didn't like the transplant to the pool. Think I must have broken some roots? Some of the leaves turned yellow, but now they are finally producing more green leaves, so I didn't kill all of them off. If you look at this pic, then scroll down to see the first squash-pool pic, there's not much difference in the size.


But you can see the double leaves of the 4 new squash I planted when I transplanted the older ones to the pool, right there in the middle. They look nice and healthy, at least! End of this coming week, first of June, I'll plant 4 more, I think.

Tomatoes and Quilt Blocks

How 'bout another tomato picture to start off with? These are my Early Girl tomatoes, getting visibly bigger every time I go out and water.


I've been working on some quilting web pages and the blocks that go with them. My guild has everyone make a block for the guild president, as a thank you for her year of work. She gets to choose the block style, size, and colors. This year's pres. selected a house block, 9½ inches square, any pattern house.

The guild has a huge mix of ability levels, from beginners to national award winners. I drew the simplest house block I could in EQ, then I'm telling people they can embellish or make it more complex if they feel inclined. Here's mine:



For interested folks, here's the web page for the easy house block:

http://www.ucquilts.com/bomjune09.htm

For those of you independent quilters and blog readers who've been joining the guild's row of the month quilt for this year, there won't be a new row for June. Instead, you have the whole month to catch up! Check out our guild bulletin board if you want to see some of the rows people have done. ;)

Finally, here is the progress on the ForestJane name block I'm making using Tonya's free pieced letter making techniques. Eventually, I plan to take a pic and use it for a blog header, like Tonya did for her "Incredible" header.


Much of it is still not sewn together. The crossbar of the J isn't attached, so it will be skinnier. There's nothing sewn to the right or left of the big S, so it'll also be thinner. Only thing I'm not sure about is the space in front of the J - that flowered green fabric could be swapped for a more solid green, then maybe applique a flower (red? yellow?) or possibly a light green leaf and curly vine there? Or will that make it too busy? Does it need a spot of color? Opinions?

Wordzzle

Bloghopping around google's Blogs of Note today, I found a neat weekly challenge!


She posts a bunch of ten random words and phrases. The challenge is to make all ten words, any order, into a SHORT paragraph. Guidelines for playing are posted HERE. She also posts a mini challenge with only 5 words and phrases.

Here are the words for next Saturday's ten-word challenge:
albino, trench, marble, assistant, Indian, What's that supposed to mean?, sound first principles, the key thing, moat, curtain

and for the mini challenge: under the surface, doomed, grand design, temple, aspirin

Here's my paragraph - I decided to try both challenges, and to tie them together into one coherent story.

Marie looked at the others sitting around the faux marble conference table. An albino, an Indian, and a soldier fresh from the trenches, what an eclectic mix. But the key thing was, they were all the best in their field at creative software design. Their new platform was going to be based on sound first principles, and protected by an impenetrable security moat.

She moved to the window and pulled back the heavy brocade curtain. Where was Carl? It wasn't like him to be late, especially for something as vital as this final, pre-launch meeting. Suddenly, a knock on the door.

Mike, her assistant, stuck his head in. "Carl's not going to make it today."
"What's that supposed to mean?" snarled the marine.
"He's dead." stated Mike.

Anna slid under the surface of the table in a faint, a crumpled puddle of orange, batik cotton saree. She'd been fasting and spending time at the temple in the days before their grand design was to be unveiled.

Marie fumbled in her purse for an aspirin. Without the information on Carl's flash drive, their press conference was doomed.

May Garden Update

Meet my new crookneck squash pool! I picked the yellow to match the squash. I'm sure my neighbors thought I was nuts to be out there hammering drainage holes in a brand new wading pool, but it's perfect for a container garden, lots cheaper than buying the lumber and making one.


Besides transplanting the two squash hills I'd already started, I also poked some finger holes in the dirt (near the bottom of the picture) and started 4 more new seeds. In June, if there's room, I'll start 4 more. Hopefully that'll stagger the ripening squash times so I won't be overwhelmed. But I can eat a LOT of squash, that and tomatoes are my favorite veggies.

I've also been inspired by Deborah Smith to start a sweet banana pepper plant. I'm not sure how much one banana pepper plant produces, perhaps I'll pickle my peppers if there's plenty. *grins*


But seriously, I do love the pickled banana peppers you can get on the sandwiches at Subway, so now maybe I can have some of my own. They're supposed to be very mild, I'm not a hot pepper type gal.

Here's my tomatoes and snow peas - Now that the peonies have bloomed, I took the rack and moved it to the snow peas, so they can climb. I couldn't figure out any way to get the trellis to stand up unless I moved them to the dirt and jabbed the ends in, so I put down plastic and maybe that will keep the grass from growing up around the peas.


Finally, the tomato plants ALL have little green tomatoes. The Early Girl has the largest ones (above) with about 5 tiny ones on the cherry tomato plant behind it. The two below are on the Better Boy plant.



How does YOUR garden grow? Does anyone know what kind of yeild to expect from one banana pepper plant? Any good recipes for them if I'm overwhelmed?

And I just had a horrible thought - do I have to have TWO pepper plants at least, for them to pollinate? Or, like the tomatoes, do they pollinate themselves?

A Package!

Absolutely love coming home to packages on the front porch, don't you? Especially unexpected ones. I'd ordered some books and cd's from Amazon, and thought that's what the package was, but no - it was a gift! Yay! The box was from BelleBooks, the publisher I recently started proofreading for.

Have any of you read the Mossy Creek books? I've read the first one, Mossy Creek, and the second one in the series, Reunion at Mossy Creek, but not any of the others.

A quote from the first book: Mossy Creek is "...the town that ain't going nowhere, and don't want to. You could count on Mossy Creek to stay put, to always be the hometown you remembered, the place you would never forget and never wanted to. We might make only a pinpoint on the maps of the world, but that pinpoint was a jewel."

I've got the whole series to date, and I can't wait to get started on them. I'll post a complete review when I finish, but if they're all as good as the first two, I'll like them. The stories in each book are by different authors, and typically, one author will write for the mayor, another for the police chief, etc. I don't know how multiple authors get the details tied together, but they do!


Inadvertently, BelleBooks also sent a gift to Toby and Libby. Every box has to be inspected AND tried on for size. Toby fit nicely. Libby's butt was slightly too big for comfort, but would she get out so Toby could take another turn? Noooo, not as long as Toby wanted it. :)

They're here!

Went out to check my veggies when I got home from work this evening, and whee, I have tomatoes! Only three so far, and on the Early Girl bush, which makes sense. And YES, I know it's silly to get so excited about three marble-sized green tomatoes, but hey, you take your happiness where you can find it. :)

Letters and Growing things

Free pieced letters anyone? I'm in the midst of making a new header for my blog, and who knows, it may be a small wall hanging when I get done. Many thanks to Tonya of Lazy Gal Quilting for all the tutorials on the letter making. Jane will be added under the Forest, with the J starting right below the high spot under the OR in Forest. I'm worried that the S looks too big, what do you think?


I've also promised Tonya that I'd do a SNARL for her Halloween letter quilt she's making, and I have the fabric picked for it, and some definite ideas, but you won't see it here until I've sent it to her. :)

And then, because my last post had no pictures, I have to make up for it by adding a couple of garden pictures. Here's my whole setup... 5 containers and two window boxes, out on the washed pebble slab that serves as my patio.


And a closeup of the snow peas. Everything's really green with all the rain we've had for the last 4 days, and weathermen predict 2 more cloudy, rainy days here in Memphis before the sun comes out.

Shelfari

Got a bookshelf on my blog now. :) Scroll down, on the left there. It's a pretty cool widget! And very simple to stick on your blog.

You can add as many books to your shelves as you wish, sort them by:
Books I've Read
I'm Reading This Now
Books I Plan to Read

You can easily move them back and forth from category to category as their status changes. You can mark some as favorites. You can rate them, one to five stars. You pick what books will display on your blog - I decided to have a 4 book shelf, with 4 top favorites showing.

Click on my shelf, and it'll take you to my profile, showing you all the categories, the 50+ books I have on there. Hover your mouse over a book on the shelf, here on my blog, and it gives you the short review, plus a button where you can add it to YOUR shelf, and put it in the 'Books I Plan to Read' category.

Once you have some books on your shelf, you can (if you choose to) hook up with other people who read what you do. The site is filled with book clubs, some divided geographically, some by genre, some by common interest, like Mommies Who Read. Each book club has a bulletin board to post on.

No affiliation to Shelfari here, just thought it was a neat idea. And I'll be looking for bookshelves on others blogs, to see what YOU read!

Wallhanging almost finished!

This is the mystery quilt I started last Nov. at our retreat. Everyone else did it in three-inch squares, but I didn't want a huge wallhanging, so I scaled it down to one-inch squares. I left the fence hinge (well, ok, the GATE hinge) on the pic so you could get some idea of scale. It finished at 27 inches square.


I don't do much machine quilting, so this was a challenge to me, making teeny loops and squiggles around the little half-square triangles. None of the green or brown in the center of the quilt has any quilting, so they puff out a bit, compared to the flat quilted white areas.

And I machine sewed the binding - have you guys seen the funny blog post on binding tutorials? I couldn't help but laugh at it:

Binding Tutorial Spoof

Finally, here's another flower picture from my yard. The wire trellis I borrowed from my sugar peas is keeping them all upright this year, and they look much better:


I love my peony bush, and I'd take some into work for others to enjoy if it weren't for the ANTS! Tiny little black ones that like my peonies as much as I do! I took 4 huge blooms in a couple of years ago, having put them upside down in a bucketful of water for an hour first, hoping to drown the ants, or at least chase them off. Didn't work, and I was thumbing ants to death on my desk at the library all day. :D

Anybody have a solution? I don't want to use ant spray, the flowers would smell bad, instead of sweet, like they do now.

Veggies and Tomatoes

Anyone ready for a status update on my tomatoes? Here's the Early Girl. I read a couple of reviews online after I bought this one, that said the tomatoes were early, but not as good as the tomatoes from plants that ripened a couple of weeks later. If I'd known that, I may have gotten something else, flavor is the most important reason I am growing my own.


Blooms on my Cherry tomato plant! Last year I got Husky Cherry Red, and enjoyed them very much, we'll see what difference there is between the two. I almost got a grape tomato plant too, I can buy a container of those at the store and eat almost the whole pint in one sitting. Maybe next year.


Here's the Better Boy, and I've heard only good reviews about this one. I'm actually thinking, if they all have blooms right now, don't you suppose all three of these plants will end up having tomatoes at the same time?


And I posted this one last, so you could easily see the difference between the previous week and this week - what a difference only a few days makes on my snow peas! A trellis that I bought for the peas is around the front of the house, holding up my peony bush. Those blooms get so huge that the flowers usually get too heavy for the stalks and arc down till they touch the ground. Now, watching these grow so fast, I'm hoping their blooming time will end before my snowpeas get tall enough to need the support!

Veggies and Flowers

Well, ok, they're not veggies quite YET... :)

But these will be my snowpeas:

And these the crookneck squash:


This is what Toby was watching from the front window, some yellow iris I planted ten years ago. I love stuff that comes back year after year that you don't have to keep planting, don't you?



As for my three tomato plants, the Early Girl has big blooms, the Better Boy has smaller blooms, and the Cherry tomato nothing yet, but it's still early. I'll try to get pictures of them later this weekend.

Are any of you planting container gardens?

Seminole Patchwork

Here's my first try at Seminole patchwork!

I've decided to have a Seminole strip in the Block of the Month strip quilt I'm doing with my guild. Since I'm offering it in several sizes, I'm giving them the choice to do a narrow, 2 inch strip, or a slightly wider 4 inch strip:



Because I had to test the sizes first, I'm doing both for my quilt. :) Some of the more complicated Seminole patchwork was really impressive, but I decided to do an easy one. If you'd like a sneak preview of the block of the month instructions that will be given to the guild at the end of April, here's the link:

Block of the Month for May, 2009

And of course, all the instructions for the previous four rows are on the guild's website at www.ucquilts.com

Ready for another Toby birdwatching picture? He thinks when he sits behind the curtain in the front window that he's hidden - unaware that he's totally exposed to the anybody at the front of the house... :) I have a bed of yellow and purple iris that are blooming there, so right now, the stalks are tall and green, lots to watch!

Container Gardening Again

Well, here I go again - pictures of my little excuse for a garden. I enjoyed growing three tomato plants last year, so THIS year, I'm doubling the size of the garden, adding several more containers.

I'm trying some snow peas in window boxes. I saw online where it's supposed to work... :) When they get big enough, I have a trellis thing I'm going to put between the boxes, for the peas to climb. The package says you can usually get two crops, start one in Spring, and start one in late Summer.


I'm also going to try a couple of containers of crookneck squash - I know there's not much dirt in here, after they come up, I'll add some more - I may even move them to something bigger, like a kiddie plastic wading pool with some holes drilled for drainage.


Here's the three tomatoes I decided on. An Early Girl, this one already has teeny blooms about to open:


A Sweet Cherry Red. There were two plants in the same pot, but they were planted so close together that I hesitated trying to separate them, I was afraid I'd tear up the roots for both. If it gets to be too much for the container, I may have to cut the smaller one out later.


And last, a Better Boy. They all look a little short now, but the instructions on the pot said to plant them deep, so I did.


And just for the regular readers of my blog... remember when I put the whole raw egg under all my tomato plants last year? When I dug out the old dirt from the pots this year, I was especially attentive to watch and see how much of the egg was left, and what had happened to it. All three eggs were flattened, you could see grayish bits of shell in almost a deflated water-balloon shape. None of the three eggs were surrounded by especially dense concentrations of root. I didn't put eggs in the containers this year, so I'll see if there will be a difference.

Kitty Pix

The weather in Memphis has been alternately nice and nasty. Today we're under a tornado watch, we had thunderstorms with hail this morning... but just last week we had a couple of lovely, sunny days with temps in the 70's. Both cats enjoyed sitting in the open windows, snifffffing long sniffs thru the screen.

First, here's Libby. This was just prior to a sneeze. I think she must have inhaled some pollen. :D


Below is Toby, and the sun on his window moves off to the left as the afternoon progresses.

*sings* ...but tomorrow may rain, so, I'll follow the sun....


I keep thinking he's going to fall off the window, but he hasn't yet!


Sometimes I think see Libby looking over at him and smirking at the poses he contorts himself into, to get the last dregs of warmth:

Clutch Wallet

My old wallet was just about to bite the dust... and the ones I saw in stores didn't have all the features my old one did. I like zippers and hidden pockets and velcro and lots of space for credit and ID cards. Sooo, I decided to try to make my own. I had bought two old purses at a garage sale for a quarter each, and that's where I got all the zippers and accessories.


A money slot first (and that dictated how wide the wallet had to be) with a zippered pouch for coins in front of it, and a pocket for stamps and stuff. You can't see it from the picture, but the dollar slot has a fold of fabric on either side, so it accordians out. I unpicked the plastic for the card slot on the bottom from the old purse, and used that AAA card to get the size right. That's where my driver's license will be.


Then I made a different 'page' that has four slots on either side for credit and ID cards. The velcro tab you see closes that half of the clutch, so when I'm getting money out, the cards don't flop open. There's also a hidden big pocket under this whole section here.


When the card page is flipped to the other side, there's a long pocket for my checkbook.


Here it is shut halfway, and below, completely closed.


There's another pocket on the front, with a second zipper repurposed from the same garage sale purse.

The only thing I don't like about it is the edges. I'd planned on putting some bias tape to finish it, but the card page had to be two cards wide, which meant it barely fit. I had just enough room to zigzag past it, but I'd never get bias tape on nicely. There's so much denim in this that it'd be a booger to hand sew bias edging on. If I ever do it again, I'll make the wallet ½ an inch wider, and that would give me more room to finish the edges. :) Live and learn!

March Update

First, the block of the month row quilt addition for April, 2009:


I'm alternating colors each star, some will have green centers, some brown.


All the stars will be the same off white muslin. Here's the link to the directions I made for my guild (and anyone else that wants to follow along.)

April's Row

I'm also working on a Heartstrings style quilt, but trying to use up all my strings and strips that are too short. Can you tell this will eventually be a tumbling blocks style quilt? Making that one side of the square from strips allows me to avoid the Y seams that are the bane of tumbling blocks. :)


I have plenty of the navy blue and plenty of the small sprigged white, for my solid diamonds, and of course I'll never run out of strings. I'm paper piecing the string triangles. This one will probably grow to be wheelchair lap sized, for donation.

It might be interesting to try this with all strips, divide them into three piles, strings mostly white, strings very dark, and strings in mediums. Of course, it'd also look neat in batiks too!

And finally, Spring has sprung in Tennessee, here's the daffodils around my mailbox - it's an especially thick clump of them. I hope I remember to separate them before next year.

Row Quilt, Row 3

Houses and Trees!

Row three for our guild's block of the month row quilt is up! This row is the one the members will be working on for March, here's the instructions, - I'm going to stay a row ahead.

I give folks the option of using any color palette they want, mine will be in browns and greens and creams... Here's my EQ coloring:


But if they want to make it bright and scrappy, that's ok too! So I colored one for the bright folks. As I was playing with the brights version, I kept singing that beatles song - the one about tangerine trees and marmalade skies:


Here's mine in fabric - I added the last green strip along the bottom after all my blocks were connected, but it' didn't make the picture.



I also gave links if folks wanted to use Tonya's Wonky Houses that are linked on Quiltville instead, so it'll be interesting to see what everyone's row looks like next guild meeting!

Top Finished

Another top finished... to add to the other tops that are done but not quilted... :D This one, I'd like to add an extra layer of batting under the two hearts, and see if I could get a heart feather design put on them, to make kind of a trapunto effect. Looks pretty much like the EQ design, doesn't it?


Now I need to go start making backs for all these unquilted tops, and maybe I'll send them off to the longarmer.

Smaller Tote

Now that I've been using my big totes to carry stuff home from the grocery, I'm getting less plastic bags... which is good, but I was in the habit of using one of those plastic bags every day to carry my lunch, to work. I also used them to line the small trashcans in the bedroom and bathroom... now my supply is dwindling. So I decided to make a smaller tote the size of the plastic shopping bags:


I still get plastic bags at the store (I tell them to put my raw meat in plastic, I don't want it to leak on my big totes) plus things like bread, bagels, squishable stuff doesn't work in the big totes. Anyway, I looked online, and found lots of free patterns for a smaller tote. Here's the pattern I used for the shopping bag itself and here's the site I used for the folding pocket.

I made the solid green pocket to fit a 1 liter bottle of water, and I wanted the main tote big enough for a Healthy Choice or Lean Cuisine (what I take to lunch every day) plus an orange or a yogurt, a diet coke, a book or two, a sewing project... etc. :)


And here's the neat part - when empty, you can roll the bag up, and that same pocket that holds the liter bottle becomes a wallet type closure, so I can remember to put it in my purse and take it home.


Now that I've made a utility one for my first attempt, I think I'll get my pretty batiks out and make a fancy one. :) That flap that laps over the pocket to close it all up was a little long, it's not a tight roll like it could be. I also think I'll put a teeny snip of velcro on the bottom so the flap doesn't hang loose - like you can see it does on the doorknob pic.