Free at Last!

Good morning, my friends. It's as if I have a new lease on life! All the housework is finished. There are leftovers for dinner, and I can spend the day sewing. Except wait...I have to write fast because I'm heading off to the farmer's market with Erik and Mae this morning. I'll admit I'd love to stay home and take a long morning nap. Being with my kiddos is worth mustering up one more morning of energy, and if you want to know the truth, I glean energy just being with them. So let's just get right to it. There's no time to waste. Probably I won't finish this before I need to go.

The kitties and I headed out to fill the bird feeders. Smitty tried to engage Sadie and me in a game of "Made you Look." Sadie always falls for this gag, which is so furrustrating for her.

My first stop was the vegetable garden. Everything is looking so pretty right now. I'm excited for more sunflowers, but I'm also checking the plants each day for anything that needs harvesting. The zucchini reward me with about a half a dozen zucchini per day.

The plums are about their full size now, but they have a long way to go before they reach their purply goodness. You can see one in the lower right corner of the image below that has a red blush near the stem end. The tree will shed that one, and it will shed many more before the rest are ripe. I just hope it leaves enough for me to make some kind of plum dessert.

Also, they'll need to be ripe before we leave on our next trip September 6th. Every year we go through this process of cheering them on and hoping they'll ripen faster. The apples are still only about the size of golf balls, but they are gaining a red blush.

The second flower on Checkers has opened. More are coming.

Now I'm awaiting the second flower on Fuzzy Wuzzy...

And the first flower on the next one to bloom. This one is called "Firefighter."

It will look like this when it opens:

Around front, I thought the gaillardia we planted in the new replacement whiskey barrel was finished blooming, but it put out a few more flowers. The poppy seeds are coming up thick too.

Under all that greenery, I can also see some of the purple poppies. I doubt these will bloom this year, but maybe next year we'll see them.

There were still just a few things to do to get ready for our dinner guests, but I was able to spend a good amount of time sewing yesterday afternoon. I finished sewing together the Vintage Linen blocks.

From there, I needed a consult from my cat to make a final decision on borders. Smitty wanted to let me know he required a deposit of catnip in his dish before he was willing to render any services in that regard.

After he'd snacked on a little catnip, he consented to help.

We both liked this pastel purple, but we had to decide on a darker purple for the stop border and the binding.

We selected this one. I liked how this looked, and so I continued on with the remaining three sides.

And then I added the final border. (I'll use that same dark purple for the binding.) That looked good to me too.

In less than an hour, my quilt top was finished. It ends up at 64 x 64 inches.

This afternoon, I'll piece together a back using these fabrics.

Okay, so on a different day, I might start talking about what I want to accomplish in the sewing room today, but there's no time for that. You'll have to wait until tomorrow to see. As for me...time's up. Heading off to the farmer's market now. I have more beets and carrots on my list. Wish me luck. Have a good weekend everybody.