Quilting........some.

 After showing all of my things at our last quilt gathering, I went ahead and decorated for summer.  I made this wall hanging and pillow from some patriotic scraps I had.  I really like the pillow.

There is a matching table runner, and a patriotic basket with geraniums on the table.  Unfortunately, something keeps "happening" to the geraniums.  There is usually a little trail of geranium buds thru the house.

I spent some time processing a basket of scraps that had accumulated on the cutting counter.  This photo shows the pile after I had worked through about half of it.

I cut everything into usable strips and squares.  I had the idea that if I got rid of the basket, maybe this accumulation wouldn't happen and I would just process as I go.  It does free up some space.  We'll see how it works.

Esme found all of this effort exhausting!

I spent some time in the sewing room late last week.  I was able to stream the Iowa state high school track meet while I worked.  I was still using up some of the Halloween scraps for a table runner and a piano runner.

I also had a quilt of my Mom's on the long arm.  I love this pattern.  The backing fabric was a pale green and I used a warm gray thread.

The top was all different greens.

I really liked the back when I took it off.  The pattern was called Falling For You.

I also finished piecing this quilt from a layer cake I won (yes, these are not my normal colors!).  The fabric up at the top is the backing on the left and the binding on the right.  

And some more cat photos.............just because!

Christi

Babysitting the Grandcat!

Day 1

 Well Sarah is on her first solo vacation this week.  She flew to Huntsville, AL yesterday to visit her college roomie.  They are heading to Disney tomorrow.  This means that Dory is spending the week with us.  We met Sarah halfway to pick up this lady and bring her back home with us on Saturday.  Dory was not in favor of this "vacation".  Here she is curled up on a dirty sweaty t-shirt of Sarah's (this is somehow supposed to be comforting) on Sarah's bed.  We are required to send "proof of life" photos everyday.

Of course, with the price of gas, I made sure to make the most of the trip.  We loaded up the back of the car with a bunch of things that had accumulated in the basement and dropped them off at Goodwill in Columbia.  I also cleaned up the "treasury" of boxes that had accumulated and committed about half to the recycling.  And then we stopped at Hy-Vee (David now has .65 off per gallon on his gas), and since we had a gift card to a BBQ place that still had a little left on it, I suggested we pick up some pulled pork to take home for supper (in order to use up the gift card, of course!).  It was just a day to get rid of stuff......gift cards, boxes, Goodwill donations............and we gained a cat!

Sunday was beautiful, if a bit chilly.  Here are the new flower boxes my dad made.  I filled them with red and white geraniums.  Leia was enjoying some sunshine on the bench seat.

I tilled the rest of the garden.  You can see the rows of peas that are poking thru in this photo.  

My neighbor gave me 2 watermelon and 2 cantaloupe plants, and even thought we never have any luck with them, I planted them.  I also planted the cinnamon basil plant he brought.  It smelled wonderful.  And, I planted tomatoes.  I like to plant roma tomatoes because they make such great sauce and salsa.  I have some really good recipes for tomato sauce and salsa.  I normally plant 2-4 plants.  At the produce market, I found 4-packs of romas, but they didn't look very good, so I picked up 2 packs and thought I'd try to make a deal of buy 1 get 1 since they didn't look great and probably less than half would make it.  Before I got the chance to make my offer, the gal working said, "Oh, I have some much better ones over here.  You just take those free and I'll sell you these better looking ones."  So, I ended up with 16 plants.  And I planted them all, fertilized them, and gave them a little drink.  I can hear my mom saying, "What in the world are you doing with all those tomato plants?  You don't even like to eat fresh tomatoes!"  We'll see what happens.  I mean, half of them were FREE!  Of course this means we are experiencing a great shortage of tomato cages.  It will be feast of famine on the tomatoes this year.  

Here are the potatoes and onions that were planted early.  The potatoes are just over a foot tall, but seem to be mainly a stalk.  We think that when the adjacent field was sprayed, they were at just the right stage and the spray drift caused all the leaves to curl up.  We're hoping that they can still grow some potatoes.

The truly amazing thing about these photos is the lack of weeds!  If you know me, you know that I am an equal opportunity gardener...........weeds get the same lack of attention that everything else does!  My dad was recently telling me about his grandparents and he mentioned that his grandfather always had a garden that never had any weeds.  Somehow, that hereditary trait must have skipped me.  Of course, he also said that his grandmother was always working on a quilt, so maybe I just got double of that to make up for the lack of gardening gene.

And the sweet corn is up!  All 12 rows that have 205 seeds per row (the hubster counted.......it kept him occupied while he was waiting for it to dry up enough to plant his crops).  It's planted just to the west of the backyard at the edge of the cornfield.  Hopefully, we can beat the wildlife to it.  I am not responsible for the weeds in this one..............it was round-up ready sweet corn, so the weeds should be taken care of when they spray the field.

And while we're talking about "growing" things, I checked on Lloyd's kittens..........

There were a couple of new ones!

And, we played with the other ones............

This is the perfect age for kittens!  

There have been a few accomplishments in the sewing room.  I'll try to catch you up on that in the next post!

Christi

The Ugly Quilt

 WARNING:  The ugly quilt, that used any and all 1.5" strips of fabric is finished, photographed, and will appear at the end of this blog post.  You have until the end of the post to don your protective eyewear.

I have recently finished 3 of the quilts on my UFO list.  The first was my Woodbury Way low volume eye spy quilt.

David really likes this one.  It was fun to make and you can spy all sorts of things in it.  They were all 5" squares with little 1.75" solid squares in the corners.  It made a nice big quilt.

I also was the recipient of the  Round TUIT at the April guild meeting.  So, I had to get around to it and get something finished.  I chose my little maple leaves that I had made as a sew-along with Shelly Pagliai last fall. 

The leaves were made from scraps, so I took 1.5" scrap strips and turned them into log cabin blocks.

I had 39 little 3" leaves.  This used 36 of them, so 3 were tossed into the orphan bin.  I have some ideas on using those later.

I love how this turned out.  I'm planning to hang it in the living room this fall.  

And now.............do you have your protective eye wear?

This pattern is Bonnie Hunter's Bitcoin.  I used ALL of my 1.5" strips in this.

I sewed 2 strips together and then cut them into 2.5" segments and made them into ladders.  The ladders were sewn into strips - I chose to put 80 in a strip and made 36 strips.  This was the fun part.  The not-so-fun part was sewing the strips together and matching the 79 seams in each strip.  

Quilt Path, the computer program for my longarm just went through a big upgrade, so this was my first quilt to quilt on the new program.  I figured if I messed it up, no one would be able to tell on this quilt.

So, it's done.  And I don't have any 1.5" scrap strips left.  I have decided to call it Medusa....... for the obvious reason.  I hope you haven't turned to stone yet from looking at it.

Oh, and for those of you who are counting (or maybe just doing some math), let me help you.  There are 2,880 pieces (1"x2") in this one.

Christi

Mother's Day

 I know I'm a little late with this, but I spent Mother's Day weekend at my parents' house in Bethany.  I hadn't been there since January.  I rode up with cousins on Friday and then David came up on Sunday.

Mom and I made this cute ladybug table runner on Mother's Day.  The hubster said he couldn't believe that with all the complaining I do about ladybugs, we made some to put on the table!

On Friday, we stopped at the Amish auction in Jamesport and I bought geraniums............A LOT of geraniums!  I planted all of Mom's planters and still have several to plant here at home.  We also helped replace boards on the picnic table and painted it, David helped clean the flue, and replaced some shingles that had blown off the roof.  

We also went mushroom hunting.  Mom found these 2 morels.

And Dad found this one.  I looked it up.  It's called a Wood Ear mushroom and is edible IF you cook it long enough.  We didn't even try it.

We also went to their neighbors to see their cute puppies.  

They also had baby chicks, geese, and goats!  

I delivered a couple of quilts to Mom and she managed to refill my tub with at least 6 more things to quilt...........and I still have 2 big quilts of hers here.  I have been spending more time quilting and have been knocking out some of my things.  I need to spend a morning measuring and cutting batting for her stuff and I also NEED TO SHOP for thread.  

It was a fun Mother's Day weekend!

Christi

Just Kitten Around

WARNING:  This post of full of nothing but cats and kittens!

I finished the Just Kitten Around quilt.  I purchased it as a kit so got all the fabric for the top and binding and the pattern.  There was so much leftover fabric.  At Sew Sweet Quilt Shop, they always say to make some small things with the leftovers right away rather than dump it all into the scrap stash.  So, I made the above wall hanging with leftovers.  It's going to the home of a friend whose boys take piano lessons from me.  They have a new house and have nothing on the walls yet.  She's going to hang this over the piano in the fall.  It's to remind them of how Esme likes to walk down the steps during their piano lessons and walk onto the top of the piano and stare down at them while they are playing.

The full quilt is pictured below.  It was a lot of piecing, but it's so cute!

Several quilts have been quilted recently, so Esme has been at work holding them down while I do the hand binding.

You can see in the above photo that her hair was not looking the best.  She looks much better in the photo below........

Because she got a bath............

As did Cici!

The drying out process takes awhile.

Grandpa Bentley has 2 litters of kittens..........3 in each litter........

Litter #2..........

And litter #1..........

And, of course, one more photo of Esme to finish this post!

Hoping you have a PURRfect day!

Christi