Planning Ahead

Good morning, my friends. I'll probably get interrupted as I write. Mike volunteered to make waffles, and I hear him moving around downstairs. I'll just type fast.

The farmer's market outing was successful yesterday. I was on the hunt for beets and fresh dill heads. When I mentioned the dill heads, Erik and Mae offered up some from their garden. I'll get to the beets later on this week, but I came straight home with those lovely dill heads and made some refrigerator pickles. I'd accumulated enough pickling cucumbers to fill a quart jar. Mike likes them sliced thin for sandwiches. These will be ready for eating on Wednesday.

From there, I needed to water the annuals. The kitties went outside to help. They're pretty much chagrined that the grass has been mowed...again. It makes for pretty slim grass pickings.

Did you find anything over there, Smitty?

Nah, Sadie. Just a bunch of dandelions. 

When I finished watering, I took a little tour of the garden in search of newly blooming sunflowers. They were not quite open all the way, but close enough. This first one is Procut Red Lemon Bicolor

In this next one, you can see the many flowers on the Joker sunflower in the foreground. Behind those is one of the volunteer giants. It's about nine feet tall.

This next one is called Sunrich Lime.

This one is Procut White Lite.

Here, we have Sunrich Lemon.

And many more are coming. The sunflowers are always so much fun when they bloom.

Also, nearly opened is the Firefighter dahlia. I expect it will have opened all the way when I check this morning.

Okay, so I needed a nap. I seem to be more tired on Saturdays for some reason, although napping is good any day of the week. It was fairly late in the day by the time I made it into the sewing room. I'm thinking about getting started on my next art quilt, but there were a few things I wanted to finish up before the art quilt takes over my life.

Humble Beauty has its borders now. This was the emergency back-up stitchery I picked up when we were in Idaho last spring. I'd run out of stitching, and this little kit saved my life. I used their pre-stamped fabric and their floss. The borders came from my stash.

For the back, it seemed as if this Beatitudes fabric was a good fit. This was some I picked up as a regional print when I visited Lancaster County, Pennsylvania (Amish country), some years back.

Now that will go on the stack of small quilts to be quilted.

We're planning to take off on a trip September 6th. I'll say more about the trip as it grows closer. For now, I'm thinking about what sewing I want to take along. We'll be in our small truck camper, and so slow-stitching is where it's at. You might remember when I picked up this little kit while we were in Three Forks, Montana. There are twelve 9-inch blocks, prestamped. I'll need to add my own floss.

It's a cross-stitch embroidery pattern. Taking it out of the package, it comes on a single long piece of fabric.

Here's a closer look at one of the blocks.

As I was posting those pictures, I grew curious about the manufacturer, and I wondered if there were others. These are practically tailor-made for stitching on the road. The manufacturer is Jack Dempsey Needle Art, and I've linked to the website there. There are lots of other ones. I'll keep this in mind for future travels. 

I'm puzzling over this because the instructions advise against using a hot iron. It will set the ink permanently. My embroidery pieces are always traced with permanent ink, and so that part doesn't bother me. On the other hand, these are rather thick lines. I'm not sure if even three strands of floss will cover. I might need to experiment. Ironing isn't completely necessary, but I like to back my pieces with an iron-on stablizer, "iron-on" being the operative words in that sentence. I might experiment on some of the instruction words with a cooler iron to see how it goes and whether it will wash out. The other idea I have is to use muslin for the backing. I could just spray baste it in place, but even that would work better if I could iron out the wrinkles first. I'm still mulling this over. Suggestions are welcome.

Also, I decided to prepare all the "spines" for my Shop Hop 3.0 book blocks. Here they are, as a reminder.

So I spent some time pulling all the fabrics that will go into this quilt and selected fabrics for the different spines. I'll have those all traced out, and take them along for stitching on the road. 

There are something like nine fabrics. With four blocks out of the 20 already made, I'm nearing my limit on the number of fabrics I can include in this quilt.

Okay, I need to pause here and go eat a waffle. I'll be right back. 

I'm back...did you miss me? It's almost like no time passed at all, isn't it? We're fast eaters when it comes to waffles.

In other food news, this was last night's battle with the Z force. This is a Marinated Vegetable and Cheese Sandwich With Sun-dried Tomato Pesto. 

Before I left for the farmer's market yesterday, I went to work marinating the vegetables. They sat in the marinade all day, and then Mike grilled the vegetables and the sandwich rolls. I already had red pepper pesto in my refrigerator and so I used that in place of the sun-dried tomato pesto. Otherwise, I made them just as the recipe suggests. Tonight's dinner will also include zucchini, but we're nearing the end of our wild week of battling zucchini. Until next week. I haven't decided how much more zucchini we can stand, but there will be more.

Tonight's dinner requires a pie crust. I'll do that first thing this morning. Housekeeping chores have popped up on the calendar again after last week's reprieve. Today's chore will be short, and I'll have plenty of time to spend sewing today. Just now, we had a bit of rain outside...enough to raise the humidity, but not much else. I'll take a walk around and check on any new flowers. Also, we're still hunting down the critter that killed the green beans. Without going into the whole story, I'll say we're now looking for some kind of tunneling critter. We no longer think the squirrels are to blame. I'm sure the squirrels gotten into mischief somewhere else, however, and so I feel no regret about blaming them falsely. 

As for sewing, I'll finish tracing the names and places for the Shop Hop quilt blocks, and then set that aside for our trip. When that's finished, I'm going to get to work on my art quilt. It's pretty well planned out in my mind, and so it's mainly a matter of cutting and sewing everything together. 

What's going on in your sewing room today?