A Little of Everything

Good morning, my friends. It was a busy day yesterday. Today will be busy too. We're getting in our grocery shopping for the week, and we have some other errands to run as well. We have seven stops to make…eight, if you count filling our gas tank. Oy. I’m tired just thinking about it. So let's just get right to it, shall we?

First...I'm happy to announce a finish! The Homestead quilt is finished. I had to enlist my quilt holder-upper to get a picture of it. It finishes at 63 x 80 inches, so a fairly large quilt. This was my project for the 2023 Rainbow Scrap Challenge. The blocks were some we saw on the "Quilt Discovery Trail" at the Homestead National Historical Park in Beatrice, Nebraska.

So finishing the quilt binding was my last gasp of the day. Before I left home yesterday morning, I was able to stitch Tiny Treasure #51. This one has stem stitch, straight stitch, satin stitch, backstitch, and French knots. I like these little birds. There are several birds among the other Tiny Treasures.

From there, I left to get my hair cut. I was home around lunch time. I needed to fill the bird feeders, and then I took a walk around. The sage is blooming. I don’t use the sage blossoms for anything, but I did use them to make some sage blossom vinegar one year. It isn’t as good as the chive blossom vinegar, but it filled in a year when the chives didn’t come back in great numbers.

This Fairy Princess is putting out more flowers. I hoping it will be mostly in bloom by this afternoon. It’s the most watched thing in the garden right now.

Also highly watched…the Edda clematis. This is so pretty, and it has more flowers coming. You’re only seeing one side of it in this picture. There are even more flowers on the other side.

I checked inside the greenhouse and discovered two tomatoes! Yay! Lookie there!

Here’s another one over here.

And the lettuce is looking more like lettuce instead of spindly little stems with leaves. This is the “Red Sails” variety.

Okay, and I was dragging my feet getting to the strawberry ice cream, but I wanted to get it done. So, I look for these large strawberries. Mike can’t eat strawberry seeds, and so I cut the seedy sides off of them. If I’m to have anything left of the strawberry when the sides are removed (and if I am to maintain my sanity), then I need the biggest strawberries I can find. Sometimes I can’t find the big ones at all, and so I didn’t pass by this opportunity.

So, I slice off the stem end, and the tip, and then I just kind of shave the sides off.

I’ll use the innards in the ice cream. Sometimes I’ll use the sides to make strawberry-infused vodka, but I’m not doing that this time around. The components of the ice cream have been chilling overnight. When I finish here, I’ll get out the ice cream churn and finish it off. We’ll have that for tonight’s dessert. It’s so, so good. Definitely worth the hassle.

Okay, so I’m hoping I have some energy left when we get home today. If so, I’ll start on the quilting for “The Story of My Day.” I have some ideas about how I want to quilt this. I probably should practice what I have in mind first. It’ll be an all-over design. I was going to choose a neutral color of thread, but I’m tempted to use a pastel variegated thread if I have one. I’ll have to go digging through my thread stash to see what I can come up with. 

And if there’s still energy left after that, I’ll get to work on this block for “Across the Wide Missouri.”

I ran out of time to work on it yesterday. I’m afraid it might have to wait another day for its turn. When I work on a quilt project, it takes on a personality and a life of its own. Sometimes I worry they’ll get their feelings hurt and end up in therapy down the road or something. 

Okay, so that’s all I have for you today. Y’all rest up today, okay? I’ll do the running around for all of us.