Alex's New Quilt...

When the grandkids turn three years old I make them a twin-sized quilt for their "big" bed.  Since Alex is turning three this July, his mom asked that I make another "jar" quilt for his bed since he and Andrew now share a room and have bunk beds.  (I made this "bug jar" quilt for Andrew's third birthday.)

Instead of a strictly "bug" jars, I decided to do more of an "eye spy" type of quilt but put them in "jars".  Unfortunately, I don't have any up close pictures of the "jars", but there were things like tires, animals, umbrellas, candy, monkeys, fish, etc., ....and yes, bugs, too!  

The pieced back...(looks like there is an "orb" on the right side of the quilt because there was nothing on the quilt itself)...

The label...

I hate to mail quilts because I'm always afraid that they will get lost, so as much as possible, I hand-deliver them.  Since we won't be there for his birthday this year, we took it down with us when we went on vacation.

He immediately wanted to go down and put it on his bed!!!   I think he likes it!!!  

Here is a comparison of the two quilts side-by-side.  The brown "shelf" fabric, the black background, and the blue border were different but very similar since the fabric was purchased 5 years apart!

On the Home Front...

I love to garden, but have to used raised beds or do container gardening because of my back and knee.  Last years container garden was a bust and I only have one raised bed that I use to grow green beans in.  Toward the end of the summer last year I saw an ad for the Garden Tower2 and was extremely interested but decided to revisit the idea this year since the gardening season was over by that time last year.  I ordered one this Spring and it came a couple of days before we left on vacation.  This is what it looked like when I planted it before we left on vacation..some plants, some seeds...

And this is what it looked like 2.5 weeks later!!!  Everything is so green and lush and growing so well!!

Loretta

A Gardening Tip...

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...

(photo courtesy of growveg.com)

Loretta

Minty Fresh!!!

Quote for the Day:

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art...

 It has no survival value; 

rather it is one of those things that give value to survival."

~C. S. Lewis 

Yesterday I put a message on Facebook asking where, this time of year, I could get a mint plant to grow indoors.  A couple of people responded that I could get some cut mint in the produce section and root that.  But one friend said he had a lot of mint and all I had to do was come over and get what I wanted!  :)  

I immediately went over and he had already dug up a root ball for me!  Now that's a friend!  :)  Thanks, Jeff J.!!!

I came home and planted a small part of the root ball in a container for the kitchen...

...beside the aloe plant in the window over the sink...

...and the rest I planted outside between the Autumn sedum and chrysanthemums.

Jeff also blessed me with an 18 count of fresh eggs from his free-range chickens!  :D   It's nice to have friends like that.  I gifted him with a jar of blackberry jam made from the blackberries from my back yard!

I've been quilting on my customer's sailboat quilt and am now ready to roll the quilt to the next section in the frame.  I put a line on the picture so you can see how much is done.  Everything to the right of the line is complete!

And here's a close-up of the stitching...the good, the bad, and the, well, you know...

The problem is that the green checked material is very tightly woven and difficult to needle through so some of stitches in that section are not so tiny and even.

"If it can't been seen at 30 paces while riding a galloping horse, it doesn't matter."  Right???

Loretta

Time Keeps on Slippin' Slippin' Slippin'...Into The Future...

Quote for the Day:

My evil genius Procrastination has whispered me to tarry 

'til a more convenient season.
~Mary Todd Lincoln

I've been putting off doing a blog post partly because nothing "blog-worthy" has happened, and partly because I've just been lazy about writing one.  

In the meantime, we've been busy with "life"...you know...the part of the day between 7 AM and midnight.  Yeah...just "life"...work, home, etc.

This past weekend, a friend gave me the equivalent of 3 flats of bedding plants from her flower beds to fill in between my existing plants.  She is a WONDERFUL gardener.  I, sadly, am not.  :(    My friend kept handing me plants saying "these are so easy to grow".  She obviously hasn't seen my black thumb!  LOL

We went over to her place on Saturday evening and picked up the plants.  We brought them home and watered them well because we knew we wouldn't get them into the ground until the next evening and the weather was HOT HOT HOT.   Even with that drink of water, some of them were not at their best when I put them in the beds on Sunday evening.  

Between the intense heat and humidity that day...even into the evening...and my back bothering me,  (I overdid some housecleaning, etc., and my back has been hurting again since Saturday night) I did the best I could in putting the plants into the ground.  I have two raised beds and one regular bed.  The soil in the raised beds is well-worked and in good condition.  However, the soil in the regular bed is hard from lack of rain this year.  I did my best to break up the dirt as much as I could, given the heat and the state of my back, but I'm not very hopeful for the plants I put in the regular bed.  However, the plants I put in the raised beds are looking like they have a pretty good shot at making it!  :)

Doesn't look too bad except for the Lamb's Ear over in the right back corner... 

The tall purple coneflower plants have been there for several years and were a gift from another friend who was thinning out her beds at that time.  The red and green plant to the right of center is a poinsettia plant that a friend gave me at Christmas.  It was taking up room on the kitchen table so I decided to plant it outside and see what happens.  Everything else came from Diana's garden on Saturday.

The bed looks even better from this angle...LOL...

My "fall" flowers...

The mums on either end have been there for several years, but have been suffering from the lack of rain this year.  Hopefully, I've been watering them enough so that they will have a nice blooming this fall.  I filled in the bare area in the middle with plants from Diana, which are also fall-blooming.

I'm purposefully not showing you the ground-level bed because the new plants really don't look good at this point.  If they spring back to life, I'll show you those, too...at a later date.  :/

This weekend our clothesline decided to break, so Andy built new cross-rails and restrung it.  (Oh, look...there's part of the ground-level flowerbed showing along the side of the white garage on the left behind the clothesline pole.  The tall plants are hibiscus that have been there for a few years.  They low-lying gray-green plants are more Lamb's Ears that are flopped over in transplant- exhaustion!)  :(

Like I said...nothing too exciting...just "life".

On the quilting front, I'm coming down to the wire on the daffodil quilt.  I'm hoping to have it done by July 19, which will be 6 months from the date I started on it.  I don't have any current pictures of it, but I'll post some when I get the chance.

Sera, our granddaughter, is coming to visit us next week.  This will be the first time for her to stay at Grandma's & Grandpa's house without her mom.  I'm sure she'll do great because she's a real traveler!  :)


Loretta

Spring is on it's Way!

Quote for the Day:

 “Spring is nature's way of saying, "Let's party!"

~Robin Williams

The weather is warming up and we are starting to see the first signs of Spring here in West Virginia.  


Even though it is gray outside and threatening to downpour any minute, I couldn't pass up this chance to go outside and check on some of my flower gardens and perennial plants to see what has survived the winter.


I found small bits of green poking their heads up through the ground...


Daffodils and Naked Ladies making their appearance...

And this...the start of new Mums under the dried up stalks of last year's Mums...

New buds appearing on the blackberry bushes...

Unfortunately, my beloved plum tree looks like this this year...

It got a fungus last year and we had to cut off all the affected limbs and Andy will have to find the appropriate herbicide to spray it with in the hopes of saving it from demise.  I'm hoping there is enough of it left to even live since we had to cut it so far back.  :(


Since I was outside, I thought I'd take advantage of the warm weather to clean out one of the raised flower beds before it started raining.


Here is a picture of the raised bed before...full of last year's dried up Mum plants...

Here it is after cleaning out all the dead stuff...

Can I call that my "decluttering" for today?  LOL

I'm hoping for more warm weather, sans the rain, so that I can get out and clean the other flower beds, too.  Gotta get the blackberries and rose bushes pruned back before they get too far into bloom. :)

Thanks for stopping by my blog.  Please leave me a comment letting me know how your Spring spruce up coming along?

Loretta