More on Monday

Yesterday afternoon I was able to get my chicken pot pies made. We had two for dinner, and two are going to be set aside for our trip to the beach this coming weekend. The other four will be going to Canada with us next month. It's a bit of a job making the pot pies, but I like the recipe because it can all be made in one large pot and one large bowl. Even though it's a job putting them together, it makes dinner for several nights, and it doesn't make a huge mess of the kitchen. You can't beat that.

When I had those finished, I did the hand stitching on the Block Party quilt binding. It's finished in plenty of time for my guild's June deadline. 

Here's how it looks from the back.

I went back and forth about that flashy striped binding, but I like the extra bit of pizazz it gives the quilt.

The Resident Engineer agreed with my idea about giving the "zinger" door a hot fix crystal doorknob.

The flash kind of bleached out my hot pink door. It's actually much brighter than it looks in that image above. The last thing to do was to add a label to the back. The label has my address on it, and so I've edited that out; thus, the big space between my name and the year.

Today I need to water the annuals and open up the greenhouse. During the summer, we leave the greenhouse open full time. In the spring when we get a mix of warmer and cooler weather, I'm monitoring it more closely. On a sunny day, the temperature gets well above 100°F...too warm for tender baby lettuces. It's probably time again to do some watering in there as well. It's a good day to transplant the last three sunflowers too.

This afternoon, I should have plenty of time to do some sewing. I want to make the next block for Lisa's quilt. Lisa wants to call her quilt "Live, Love, Teach," and so that's what I'll be calling it from now on. The next block was submitted by the Olivier Family. They chose this block, found on the internet:

Several of the submitted blocks are from pictures found on the internet. I've started doing a reverse image search (tutorial right here...scroll down) to see what I can find out about them. For one thing, I don't want to be violating any copyright laws. For another, I sometimes find a pattern or other helpful information. 

Regarding this particular block, I found that it was posted on a blog written by Emma How in Australia entitled, Sampaguita Quilts. Emma is apparently something of a celebrity quilter in Australia. The post containing this block can be found right here. And all of that to say that Emma has graciously granted me permission to repost and to use her block in the Live, Love, Teach quilt. Thank you, Emma. You're helping to make one retiring teacher very happy. There's no embroidery on the block, and so it should go together fairly quickly. 

Then, I'm hoping to get a block made for this month's Block Lotto.

blocklotto.com

The block for this month is called a Bargello 9-Patch.

That's an image of the sample block, and these are the instructions for our color palette:

Hopefully, I'll have even more time this afternoon to get started on something else from my to-do list. Month's end feels as if it's closing in fast, and I still have a lot left on from my list of goals.

My guild meets tonight. Our speaker is Lisa Crnich. This is what I know about Lisa:

As I was looking for more information about Lisa on the internet, I came across this blog post from Dawn at First Light Designs about last year's NW Quilting Expo. Her post shows images from a special exhibit of quilts called Bridges of Portland. There are some wonderful quilts there, so I encourage you to click on that link I've given you and check out some great eye candy about our fair city's many bridges. Incidentally, Dawn spoke at our guild meeting a couple of months ago. I'm taking a class from her next month.

As for Lisa's talk tonight, it looks like she combines photography with quilting, a topic about which I'm interested in learning a lot more. It should be a good meeting.