An Ordinary Day

Today was a much-needed break from the excitement of the past two weeks or so.  I generally wake up fairly early in the morning, but this morning I lay back down and took a long nap.  Then I took another nap this afternoon.  It seems I'm still catching up on my sleep.  George was happy to accompany me in my napping.

Yesterday we spent nearly the whole day repotting the tomatoes and cleaning out the greenhouse.  I'm hopeful that all this work will result in a crop of tomatoes.

The wooden frame around the tomato pots is the frame that holds the shelves in place.  I simply line up a row of slats that can be removed to provide more height for any tall plants.  It's a fairly versatile greenhouse, although it's nothing fancy.  The red brick pavers were Mike's idea and effort.

This is the new indigo rose tomato that Erik gave me the last time we went to the farmer's market.  It was a little sickly when I left for Ireland, but it has come back and is now growing as it should.  

If it matures and produces fruit, it will produce a tomato that looks like this.  Pretty, huh?

While I have lots of flowers on my tomatoes, so far, I have only seen one actual tomato.

This brandywine variety.

My greenhouse growing book informs me that tomatoes are easy to pollinate, and that shaking their stems should be enough. Nevertheless, I have been opening the door and the window on the greenhouse to allow the wind to blow through and the bugs to come in.  We did well with our greenhouse tomatoes last year, but they were greenhouse varieties.  This year, I've planted the same ones we have always grown in the outdoor garden . . . the ones that never ripen.  Hopefully, they will produce tomatoes even if they are in the greenhouse.  Vegetable gardening remains an iffy experiment at my house.

Today I did some sewing for the first time in a couple of weeks.  I completed the June block for the We Bee Learning block bee.  This block is for "Nitadances" who requested a Churn Dash with a solid white background and a 1930's reproduction print.  This is what I came up with using the fabrics from my stash:

You can see how lazy I was today.  I was too lazy to find another spot to snap these images, and so each one has a shadow cast by my camera hand.

Then I put the borders on the May block for the Vintage Miniature Sewing Machines BOM.

And I made the June stitchery.

June's block is the Hurtu.  The information I have was that the firm that built this sewing machine was established in the northern French town of Albert in 1881 to manufacture sewing machines.  By the early 1900's they were also producing bicycles and motor cars.  The sewing machine was a heavily cast iron model that measured 7 inches across.  A clamp was fixed under the machine.  There are some collectors who doubt that Hurtu actually manufactured this model because the mechanical parts are identical to those that were manufactured by the Lakner company.  Here is a photograph of the Hurtu.

Finally, I put the borders on the May block for the Promises & Borders quilt.

After that, I came upstairs and helped George hold down the couch.  Things have a way of flying around our living room, and napping is a good way to keep things under control.  It's a wild life around here, I'll tell you.