Barns and Farms

It doesn't seem as if much was accomplished yesterday. Having PT in the middle of the day throws me off my stride. Obviously, no jury duty for me today. And thus ends my second week of jury duty without having to report even once. I'm pretty happy about that too. We have a trip planned for next week, and so I'm excused all week. I won't have to call in again until June 20th. No complaints here about my jury duty commitment.

Not much has happened outside for the last few days. Coolish and unpredictable weather have discouraged me from spending much time in the garden, but I'll get out and hoe some weeds today. There was time yesterday morning to finish off the second Heartland Barns block. These are turning out so pretty.

Here are the two blocks I have for this quilt so far.

Weirdly, the pattern called for five skeins of that dark brown floss. I'm down to just two skeins left and three blocks to go. The center block is a large one. Clearly, I'll need more floss, but it makes me wonder why it was so badly underestimated on the pattern...or maybe the designer used a different size floss skein. In any case, more is on the way. Not to worry.

With that one finished, I'm circling back around to continue work on Calendula Patterdrip's Cottage. You might recall that I'm working on Blocks 2, 3, and 4, which are all on one large piece. I've stitched the 2nd block, and now I'll continue working my way through the third block. The whole piece looks like this.

And, yes, it's nearly impossible to see those traced lines on the background fabric. Imagine how I must feel as the one doing the stitching. It requires keeping the pattern with me so I can make out where the lines are. I got a little start on this last night. I'm starting in the lower left.

As for the farm quilt, I've finished top-stitching all the applique now. Yesterday's effort was to top-stitch/quilt the appliqued border.

Now I have the largest section lined up for quilting some clouds in the sky and some hill detail in the hills. After that, I'll take it off the machine and remove all the jump stitches from front and back. 

When I've removed all the jump stitches, I'll go back and quilt the outer border and the sashings. When that's finished, all the quilting will be finished. Yay! I'm going to be happy to have this quilt out of my life. It will still need binding and embellishing, but the quilting has been the part I've dreaded most.

For dinner last night, we had an interesting meal from our diet. These are Double-Layer Beef Tacos. I didn't take a picture of ours, and so I'm swiping the picture from the internet.

You can find the link to the recipe right here. They use crunchy taco shells and soft flour tortillas. You spread some refried beans over one side of the soft tortillas, then sprinkle them with cheese. The recipe has you broil them to melt the cheese, but I did mine in the microwave. When the cheese is melted, you carefully hold them around the outside of the crunchy taco shell until they adhere to the outside. Then you fill them like any taco. It was a little like eating a hand-held taco salad. Pretty tasty and different. The ground beef is cooked in some tomato sauce. It gave me a chance to puree some of the tomatoes I froze from last year's harvest. 

I just freeze them, then thaw them, and puree them in my blender to make fresh tomato sauce. 

So today I'll get out and so some more work in the garden. I have one housekeeping chore to accomplish, but I'm really hoping I can tell you the quilting is finished on the farm quilt by tomorrow.