Sunny Monday

The weather never improved much after I wrote my post yesterday...not until late afternoon, that is. This morning it's bright and sunny, and that can mean only one thing: Gardening. Mike and Matthew are getting geared up to turn our years-long-neglected vegetable garden into something again. We last planted vegetables shortly before I took my trip to Ireland...and if you've been reading that long, well, what can I say? We must be family by now! Anyway...we planted the garden just before I left on my ten-day trip, and when I came back, absolutely nothing had come up. And let me just say that planting a vegetable garden is a LOT of work. It was so much work putting it in that I actually went back many years to find the picture of it not growing:

 It was so disappointing we swore off vegetable gardening ever again...until now. Just this morning I was reading that COVID has done something nobody else has been able to do: get us in our kitchens and cooking at home. And, well, I've been a stay-at-home cook for a long time. Looks like COVID is going to get us back to growing our own food again too.

So all of that to say that Mike is actually spraying weeds today, which means Matthew will be helping me get the culinary herb garden cleaned up. It needs weeding, and trimming, and raking. The sage plant is taking over the entire garden, and so I'll enlist Matthew's help whacking it back to a more manageable size. Most disappointing is that none of the chives came back this year. You might recall from years gone by they've come up thick as hair on a dog's back.

I've used them to make chive blossom vinegar and chive blossom jelly, and we've had fresh chives on our baked potatoes. Who knows what happened to them? Not a single one has come up. I can only think the winter was colder than we realized. So, I'm sort of hoping we'll find some struggling to reach the sun when we whack back the sage plant, but I'm not really expecting it. I'll probably need to replant. Hopefully, I'll be able to find seeds. Seeds are just the latest item to become scarce.

Okay, so getting back to yesterday, I finished off my latest embroidery piece, and I didn't have another one made up yet. That meant Mulligan Stew got my undivided attention yesterday. Although I haven't shown this quilt for a while, I've been working on it in small bites along with my other morning slow stitching. The area inside the pink line is quilted now.

You can see that just the corners and the borders are left. I'm focusing on getting each corner finished, and then I'll stitch around the border. Come hell or high water, I will finish this quilt before the end of the year. But if I die first, will one of you please finish it for me? Pretty please? I'd hate to die thinking it was unfinished after all the stitching I've already done on it. As an added bonus, you can even keep the quilt! Or not. It would be your choice, of course.

Since I didn't have any other slow-stitching prepared, my first task was to get the next stitchery ready. This next one is just a peek. It's another pay-it-forward gift for friend. I don't actually know if she reads my blog, and so I'll hold off posting a whole picture until it's in her hands. For now, this is all you get.

I've actually done this one before in another pay-it-forward effort. I really liked it the first time around, and so I'm happy to do it again. It gives me a chance to use some more of that pretty pansy fabric.

Okay and so then I got back to work in the sewing room. I sewed together the Trashy Crocus quilt. This only took about an hour. It will be a donation quilt for Quilts for Kids.

Digging through my stash, I came out with this one as a back. They don't go together exactly, but I think it'll be good enough. Also, this gave me an idea for a different name for the quilt altogether. I was thinking of something like Pink Sorbet or Pink Lemonade or Strawberry Ice.

Quilts for Kids quilts have to be bound by machine, and so just a bit of this will be folded to the front for the binding. It's hard to see from the two images I've given you, but the bright pink in the polka dots from the front is the same color as the pink for the back.

And then, this bud from the garden inspired me to start a new project.

I'm so hoping it will turn into this:

And so, I'm egging it on by making this quilt. It's been in my PINS pile (Projects I Never Started) for quite some time.

It's yet another pattern by Jane Kakaley. They are utterly engrossing once I get started on them, and so it seems like a good way to pass the time while I wait for the actual poppy bud to open. And I'm hoping there will be more than one!

So, anyway, I first needed to sort my blue scraps into piles of light, medium, and dark values. There are only three gradients of blue. Of course Sadie was here to assist in this endeavor. She's so incredibly helpful.

When she got tired, Smitty took over. Many paws make light work, you know.

The poppy quilt is in a 28 x 40 block grid. I've divided it up into 16-patch sections, and this one was first.

I'd pretty much used up my sewing day by the time I got this far...only two sections finished.

I spent the rest of the day sorting the red scraps into five piles of light to dark. The reds are hard to discern. When I work on this quilt again, I'll be starting with the first of the red poppies.

Okay, and then...a little blog housekeeping. Some of you wrote about my post from April 16th when all of my pictures magically converted to this bit of loveliness:

At first I thought y'all had lost your collective minds because it looked just fine at my end. But then I tried uploading some pictures the next day. They all uploaded from the camera just fine, but then magically converted to this same annoying image before I could even upload them to the blog. Oy. Checking in at the Blogger help community, others were complaining about it as well. Blogger posted that it was aware of the problem and "working on it." I kept hoping they'd fix my pictures in the process, but they never did. It was bothering me to see it like that and so I fixed all the pictures this morning. If you're of a mind to go back and take a look, you can see that poor sad little post...so old already...right here. Mostly, I just wanted to take this opportunity to emulate our President by saying, "It wasn't my fault! I take no responsibility!" Or something like that.

Okay, so some slow-stitching and then some gardening. That's where I'm headed. What are you up to today?