Playing Catch-up - quilt finishes and around the farm

 Once again, I've fallen out of the habit of posting a couple times a month.  Not because I've given up quilting, not a chance!  Time, being what it is, seems to become more fleeting the older we get.  Anyhow, here's a quick catch-up on what I've been working on.

First up are a couple quilts that will be going to the camp auction over Labor Day.  I can't take credit for either of these, though I've worked on them,  as both tops were donated to our ministry by Nann of With Strings Attached.  

This one was machine quilted and bound by yours truly.  It's a nice queen coverlet size.

A close-up - hopefully you can see a bit of the quilting:

The second top is Nann's rendition of a Bonnie Hunter mystery pattern called Rhododendron Trail.  Isn't it just beautiful!  A local long-arm quilter donated her services for this one, I just provided the batting, backing fabric and bound it.  

This one will fit either a queen or king bed.   A close-up:

I finished another quilt destined for the ministry.  Not sure yet if it will go to the auction, though at the moment I'm thinking we will save it for a local need over the winter months when there always seem to be displaced families due to house fires.  I showed the completed top in an earlier post.  I quilted in the  ditch along the blue horizontal sashings and did loopy meanders over the individual blocks.  A preschooler quilt, large enough for a toddler or bunk bed.  Lots of fun I-spy blocks in this one.

We learned a while ago that we will be great-grandparents in mid-October, and I recently started on a baby quilt for the little one - a girl(!).  I have no illusions about this baby quilt becoming an heirloom, especially since the young couple already has two german shepherds in their small home!  So, simple and quick is the mantra of the day.  The top was completed this evening.  A pieced backing to come, mostly pink and yellow, with a lot less blue than the top.

Did I say this baby is a girl!  All the grandparents are so excited as we do not have many girl children in this family!  Of our nine grands, only two are girls, so this is a great start for the newest generation.

At our recent quilt ministry meetings I've begun cutting and piecing stars that hopefully will eventually become a camp auction donation for next year.  No idea just yet what the eventual pattern will be though I've wanted to make a strippy quilt for some time and have a couple inspiration quilts bookmarked.  We'll just see what happens in the next few months.

On the home front, we finally have the vegetable garden almost all planted.  Very late due to some unseasonably late freezes that decimated all our fruit trees.  Many local folks who planted at the usual time lost a lot of their crops.  The local Amish farms that sell strawberries are reporting a very short and sparse season.  I'm thankful our blueberries bloomed late and we seem to have a good crop coming along.  Our perennial flowers are late too, some of the peonies are just now opening, all but one of the irises were killed off in the late freezes, the red poppies are finally in bloom (they're usually blooming for Memorial Day) and so on.  I took a little walk about yesterday and snapped a few photos.

There is a row of these beauties along the south side of the garage this year - volunteers as far as we can tell because neither of us can recall planting them there!  These poppies have a habit of coming up far from where their seeds were sown the previous year!  We're always delighted to see them wherever they pop up though.
  

The latest peony so far - and my favorite.

Poppies by the front porch.  The eastern phoebe couple has decided to honor us again this year by building their nest atop the porch posts - yes - posts!  Mama rejected last year's nest earlier this spring and built a new nest on the post that hadn't had a nest in all the years we've been here.  After her five fledglings left that nest early last week, a couple days later mama bird was back rebuilding last year's nest on the opposite post and is now setting her second brood for the year.  They are such fun to watch right outside our living room window, and so diligent in feeding their babies all the insects we're happy to have gone from the yard.  

A quick peek at a couple of the hanging baskets on our covered back porch - my favorite place for mid-morning lattes and sometimes lunch.  I love this first begonia's two-tone flowers, and hope I can successfully root some leaf cuttings soon.

We also made up a couple of our own baskets using small nursery plants and hoping they would fill out nicely as summer progresses.  This next one is my favorite.

I guess that's probably more than enough for one night!   Thanks for reading, and happy stitching!

Trying Out the New Blogger with a New Finish

June has been a month of contrasts this year, bright starry nights with hundreds of fireflies flickering in rhythmic harmony over the hayfield, nearly 90 degree days followed by a killing frost last weekend, followed almost immediately by more sunny 80+ degree temps.  Apropos for the year I suppose.

And this morning dawned bright and clear, the neighboring subsistence farmer who cuts, bales and takes our hay for his small farm finished baling a couple days ago.  The bales were still in the field this morning, and how could I not take advantage of that for a photoshoot of the newest finish!  Last stitch put in the binding at 10:30 last night.

Accompanied by my trusty friend of course!

And now I can't figure out how to left align the text after inserting photos.  Oh well, onward!

This is Joseph's Coat II, the third of the tops pieced during Lori's Humble Quilts 2019 Stringalong Challenge.  Hand quilted with my version of big stitch quilting with Aurifil 12 wt. thread in a variety of bright colors.  Such fun, and to think there's another one, Joseph's Coat I, still awaiting a similar "organic line, nothing marked" quilting.   

Gibbs and I walked around after these were taken, looking for other things to photograph. There was the quilt, in various poses, of course.

Interesting to see how the camera interprets the colors in sun vs. shady areas of the yard.

OK, now suddenly I'm left-aligned for text again.  Wondering how that happened.  There's not much blooming at the moment.  The poppies are just about gone, and the peonies will be in just a few days.

The area in the photo above will be filled with black-eyed Susans and hopefully zinnias before too long.

Peonies are just about my favorite flower after daffodils, and this one outdid itself this year.  

After our walkabout, the quilt went inside for its beauty bath, and emerged all soft and crinkly after a short session in the dryer.   The top before quilting measured 55x72, the finished quilt is 51x68-1/2 inches.  I'm hoping to finish the other similar quilt later this summer.  I think the grandkids will love snuggling under these bright cheerful quilts when they visit next.

As for the new blogger, I much prefer the old version, so much easier to navigate, but I'm very grateful to my blogging friends who have posted tips on how to navigate this new quagmire.  Some have found uploading photos to be cumbersome and excruciatingly slow.  Out here in the country we only have access to HughesNet, the speed of which is sporadic at best, so that part hasn't been much different than in the past.  

We're supposed to enter Phase III next week, depending on the whim of our state dictator.  Wondering if life will ever reach some semblance of the real normal again, or if this is the never-ending year of the oxymoron.  Nuf said about that!

Quilt on dear friends!  Faith over fear!

One last April Finish

Earlier this month with all the epi-panic-isolation-orders-stay-home edicts, the thought went through my head one sleepless night (and haven't we all had those this month) that if I should contract the virus and leave everything behind, what quilt would I most regret not having made/finished.  Morbid, I know, but ...   And the answer was my three-year-old grandson's big-boy bed quilt.  So, three weeks later, start to finish, here it is, not the most original of design or the fanciest, but after all it's going to a rough and tumble three year old!

The sun broke through around 8:30 this morning  and the temperatures were above freezing!

and just a bit closer view:

The dog wanted in on the act:

It was such a nice morning that we took a little walkabout on the property.  Want to come along?

Can you tell not much is in bloom besides the daffs?!!

But then there's this - overwintered in our little sunroom, looking better than it did all last summer - go figure!

And thus endeth April, and good riddance I say.  And on with the bright new blossoms of May!

Lemons and Lemonade

Good Monday-morning!  Right up front I'm going to show you the lemon.

Last fall I became momentarily enamored with Bonnie Hunter's Scrappy Mountain Majesty quilts and copied off her tutorial to show our quilt ministry group.  Decided to make one.  Well, that turned into a bit of a disaster, and I put it aside for several months.  Got it back out a week ago to try again, and a few things became quite obvious.  I'm way too dyslexic to make these blocks correctly, and beyond that I just don't like making them!  So, this little pile will eventually wind up being finished off to donate to the local nursing home for one of their wheelchair-bound residents.

But, with lemons there's always an opportunity for making lemonade!  A couple weeks ago, Randy at Barrister's Block showed a child's donation quilt she had made using the Arrowhead block.  She indicated she would be sharing her pattern/tutorial soon.  Since I have a big stack of leftover squares from the failed attempt with the majestic mountains block, I decided to try my hand at making  something similar to Randy's blocks, and ended up with these.

I love these little blocks!   I'm looking forward to seeing Randy's instructions to see if she has an easier construction method, but these weren't all that difficult and one of the best things about them is that there are no bias edges around the block perimeter!  That's a pretty big win-win in my book.

After a light frost last Tuesday it has warmed up considerably and has even been sunny for three days in a row!  Seems like a small miracle this year.  The ground is still extremely soggy so much of the garden is not yet planted, but hopefully soon.  We can't complain though as so many in the country have endured far worse in the way of floods and tornadoes and now the fires in the west.  Our hearts go out to all the farm families whose livelihood depends on being able to get their crops in the ground in time for a full season's growth.

Here in our neck of the woods, the late spring flowers are coming into bloom.  The blue irises were the first to open.  These are my favorites.

I think these are Johnny-Jump-ups, correct me if I'm wrong.  They apparently self-seeded from a couple hanging baskets from last year, and they've been coming up all around the property, and have bloomed since very early spring.  Some yellow, some purple, and some a combination of colors.
Last week my husband found this tiny one, only about 1/4 inch across!  I couldn't get a good angle in the bright sunlight, but here's a shot of that tiny one compared with a dime.

The first poppy bloomed on Friday.  There are several more opening each day.  I do wish the flowers lasted a bit longer.  That first bloom has already begun to fade.

Our creek bed is full of fossils of various sorts, but these two are kind of unique, in that the two pieces seem to fit together perfectly!   More and more of these little treasures seem to be finding their way up to the various flower gardens and all along the base of the back porch and decks.  Country decor!

And speaking of country decor, my yard sale find from last weekend, this sweet Wheeling Corrugated Company (WVa) washtub, probably from the 1950s!  In better condition than the battered one hubby dragged home from the hillside (now doing duty as a planter), but with much less patina since it had been stored in someone's garage for years.  It will be planted with flowers as soon as I can make a trip to the semi-local nursery.

The first of the peonies bloomed yesterday.

This variety reminds me of the ones my mom had in her little flower garden when I was very young.  I loved them so much I would fill my pockets with the fallen petals, and even took a big bag of petals to school to share with everyone in my kindergarten class!  You can take the girl out of the country but ...

Til next time, happy quilting!

A Flood, a Finish, and Fur

My last post began with photos of our fall scenery as seen from the back deck of our house.

Our creek runs along the base of the hill, not visible in the above photo but about 30 feet back of the woodpile in the distance.  Forty-eight hours and 4 inches of rain later, the creek had risen about five feet and was well out of its banks

and we could see these rapids from our back windows.

Thankfully the flooding in our area did not cause any serious damage.  There is an inch or so of water in our unfinished basement which will be gone in another day or so when the water table recedes. South and east of us in Pennsylvania conditions were much worse.  But the rains have stopped and the skies cleared late Saturday afternoon.

And, just before supper on Saturday I took the last stitch on the binding and finished the second quilt for grandbaby #8!  These first photos were taken indoors in less than ideal lighting conditions.

These fabrics are wonderfully soft and I tried to keep the quilting from becoming too dense.  After washing it remained nice and soft, the Polydown batting gave it just the right amount of loft yet it is very lightweight.

A closer look

Late Sunday afternoon the skies cleared a bit, the sun emerged for a few minutes, and it was dry enough to try an outside photoshoot.  

my favorite spot to photograph quilts - though better in early morning light

Later as we were eating supper, sort of minding our own business, we happened to look out the window to see this

across the road in our neighbor's driveway

we hurried out to the front porch to capture this visitor who hung around just long enough for us to snap these photos, then lumbered off back into the woods.

No, the cellar wouldn't make a good winter den, thank you!

And how was your weekend?