I've been working on a "Rainbow Baby Quilt" for a friend of my daughter that is pregnant with a baby girl and is due this month sometime!
My daughter told me that her friend had seen this quilt online and really liked it. However, the free pattern on that blog was for a much smaller baby quilt than I like to make AND it was missing the INDIGO of the rainbow. You remember the ROYGBIV of the rainbow, right? Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, INDIGO, violet. My kids had to memorize that for school and to this day I can recite it with ease! LOL
Anyway, I could have just made the free pattern and made the blocks bigger to make a bigger quilt, but that still would have left out the indigo part of it. And if I added three rows of indigo, it left me with a white blob over to the left hand lower corner.
So I drafted my own pattern and went with it. :)
All fabrics for the front were pulled from my stash...no new ones were purchased for this quilt! YIPPEE!
I love scrap quilts, but my daughter told me that her friend doesn't really care for "scrappy", so I only used one fabric of each color instead of scrapping it up! However, I did decide to bind with a scrappy binding using the leftover fabric! Hey, you can only hold me back just so much! LOL A scrappy-quilting girl's gotta do what a scrappy-quilting girl's gotta do, right?
I machine quilted this quilt on my new Juki TL2000Qi and boy does that machine sew fast! It made short work of this quilt and it was pretty easy to keep my stitches uniform!
For the backing I used a yellow and white striped 100% cotton sheet from Pottery Barn that I found at a thrift store while in Tennessee! People often ask about using sheets for quilt backs and I tell them that I ONLY use them if the quilt is going to be machine quilted. They are just too tightly woven to hand-quilt through. They do make a great backing for a machine-quilted quilt, though....especially for a baby quilt as sheets hold up very well through all the washings that baby quilts go through. I don't use sheets all the time, but I do keep my eyes out at thrift stores, yard sales, etc., for sheets that are 100% cotton, in a neutral print (I love stripes for this reason), and are in good shape without any fading.
Despite the issues I had in the beginning trying to design this quilt and figuring out just what size to make all the pieces to get it the size I wanted, I really like how this quilt turned out. :) I hope that mom and baby are both happy with it, too!
Loretta
The weekend before we had to make our emergency trip to Maine in June for Joe's funeral, I had planted a small "container" vegetable garden in the walkway that runs along the side of the house.
While we were on our trip to Maine and then our vacation to Tennessee, our neighbor kept it watered for me. :) I have very nice neighbors! :D
I now have baby green tomatoes, a couple of banana peppers, and lots of sweet basil! The zucchini are having trouble because something keeps eating the leaves. I think it's a ground hog because we have trouble with them here. The hot peppers aren't doing great, either, so I moved the pot so it gets more direct sun. I hope that will help.
Yesterday I dried some of the basil, so I thought I'd do a post about that. :)
Instead of just pulling of the leaves, I actually cut the top half of the stem off, brought them inside and washed them under cool running water. I patted them dry with a towel to remove the excess moisture...
I plucked off the leaves and placed them on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper...
I had read of two different methods using the oven...one you just turn the light on and use the heat generated by the bulb to dry the basil. The other hint was to turn the oven on, let it warm up, then turn off the oven and just use the residual heat. I did a combination of the two...first I turned the oven on for a few minutes to warm it up and then turned the oven off, but left the light on. I placed the cookie sheet with the basil inside the oven.
I left it overnight and this morning I had dried basil!!!
After crumbling it up...
...I placed it in an airtight jar for storage.
All that I need to do now is to label the jar! And I now have dried basil as well as the fresh basil that is still growing outside! :)
I'm going to start growing more of my herbs. I'm planning on putting some shelves on the inside of my kitchen windows so that I can grow things indoors in the winter! Eventually, I'd like to have something like this going on in my kitchen...
Loretta
We are currently in Tennessee spending time with Erin's family and our newest grandson, Clark! He is sooooo precious! :)
Today was Erin's first post-partum chiropractic adjustment, so I went along to meet her doctor, Dr. Nicole Zyla-Herrera in Franklin, TN. Last fall Erin asked me to ask my own chiropractor if he knew of any good Atlas Orthogonal chiropractors in her area. He recommended this particular doctor and Erin started going to her.
Her office has an open adjustment area so I was able to watch the doctor do an adjustment on one of her patients and I was very impressed with her thoroughness.
After Erin had her own adjustment the doctor adjusted Clark....
Birth is a very rigorous activity and if you think of what the baby's body has to go through to get out of the birth canal, you realize how important it is to get a newborn adjusted!
Clark had been fussy and crying the during the 40 minute car ride to the chiropractor's office, but as soon as she started adjusting him he became quiet. Then the doctor put a couple of dabs of lavender essential oil on the padding on his car seat straps and he proceeded to go to sleep and slept all the way home and even during a stop at Joann Fabrics! :D
We are enjoying holding and spoiling the newest member of the family!
Loretta
