Pieces of Glass

Well, I haven’t been doing much piecing on the sewing machine, but I did do a fun project yesterday with my Dad.  We had boards in our patio that were rotting and creating enough space to actually trip you or catch the hose so it was time to tackle this project.  My Dad worked with concrete for many years and is now retired, but came out of retirement for a day to help me with this project.  After we dug out all the rotting wood which was really easy since it was rotten and cleaned all the crevices real well, we mixed small batches of mortar in the wheel barrel and added some colorant to it.  Then he filled the cracks with the mortar and leveled them out and I followed close behind with a tray of beach glass that we had collected on a few trips to Glass Beach in Fort Bragg, California.  I also added a few of my favorite broken dishes.  It sure brought back some good memories and now instead of sitting in a box in the garage we can look at them every day as we make our way to the garden or the garage.  It was a fun project and I will also have the added memory of having worked on this project with my Dad.

  We had some other really fun company the week before…my one year old grandson came up with his Dad and spent a few days with me while my son was doing some painting for me and some fishing with his brother.  I had not had much time in the past to spend with Eli so we made up for lost time by digging potatoes, picking strawberries and cooling him off in a wagon full of water.  I’m not sure who had a better time him or me.  Eli is quite the helper and he loves the Swiffer, so all my plants got a good cleaning, too.   The weather was a bit on the hot side so I mostly let him run around in just a diaper and we spent a lot of time playing with water.  Eli surprised me when he showed me the best way to cool off was to just douse yourself over the head with the hose.   Such a fun few days!  I’m not sure who had the most fun, him or me.  And boy do I miss our fun conversations, he is quite a talker.

Oogle-oogle Eli!  I think it means  ”Love you!” and he said it a lot.

Life is good~sewing time will make it even better soon!

Ferne

Body Double

Tomato season has begun!  I really have been busy in the garden and at the nursery and I have a tan to prove it.  Not much in the way of sewing though.  I could really use two of me right now just to do all the things I would like to get done.  I am working on sewing a summer dress, but it might be winter before I am done.  I always want to change the pattern and then it involves a lot of extra work in figuring out how to make my changes work, but I think that is where I learn the most.  I was thinking that a mannequin of my body would be so helpful and thanks to Pinterest I found a website that tells you great directions for making one using duct tape, I think I might have to give this a try!  The directions are on the Threads magazine website.  Now if I could just create another me that easily I’d be in business!

I also found a blog by a girl that is going by the blog name of ‘naughty shorts!’ She is making some lovely dresses out of vintage sheets…another idea I am loving, now to find some sheets and some time.  I can’t help but think how soft and comfortable a dress like this would be, maybe better than an old pair of jeans.

Working in a nursery has brought me in contact with lots of people growing lots of different things and the wealth of information we can bring each other has been very rewarding.  Unfortunately the nursery I am currently working at is about to close, the owner does own another wonderful nursery and that might be my future job location, but for now I am focusing on closing this one and enjoying the company of the many customers I have gotten to know along with the companionship of my fellow employees that have become good friends and confidants. It will be hard to say good-bye to both, but I will hope to see them all in the future and share some more tips and just ‘life’ with them all.

Life is good!

Ferne

I’m Out in the Garden

Not much sewing going on here and not much blogging either.  Between working extra hours and playing around in the garden I don’t have much time or energy for anything else.  But, I am thoroughly enjoying myself!  My tomatoes are growing better than any I have ever grown before and so it most everything else.  It has been said many times around here that is because of spending close to $1000 on organic fertilizers and soils, I think that would be an exaggeration, but I am not looking into it because I’m sure the dollar amount is high.  At any rate I might be missing in action here, but can always be found here…

and sometimes I am swearing at the little critters that are causing this…

thank goodness all my raised beds are now lined with gopher wire.

Yes, I am getting lots of gratification from my little Potager and hopefully soon I can start eating the fruits of my labor.  Right now we have sugar snap peas and fava beans with strawberries on the way any day!

I may not be sewing, but am finding inspiration for future projects all around me!

  

Now you know where I can be found!

ferne

A Walk Through My Garden

After days and maybe even weeks of wind and rain and hail the sun was shining and we got out and about in the garden.  I was very surprised at how well the plants had survived the weather.  Other than putting a binding on the Summer Sampler quilt not much sewing has been done lately, but out in the yard weeds are being pulled and plants feed, trimmed up and admired!  I have loved grape hyacinths ever since I can remember, they seem like magical little fairy flowers and they bloom quite a long time.  As soon as they appear the daffodils are right there too (maybe it is the other way around). 

We have lots of varieties of daffodils here since gophers and deer seem to leave them alone and they come back tenfold reliably.  They really are the perfect sign of Spring!  Even the cats love them.

Another little flower that is blooming away right now is Phlox.  This is the moss phlox that makes a perfect little groundcover.  I have transplanted it several places and it is happy everywhere here.  The pink is my favorite!

Ceanothus is just the most wonderful shade of blue don’t you think?  It is so hard to describe and harder yet to reproduce.  This variety is called Black Knight, it has very tiny leaves and is about 4 feet tall.  It is hiding an ugly pipe in this spot and doing a great job at that.

Kerria is wonderful little shrubby plant with a flower like a mini rose, in fact it is in the rose family and native to Korea, China and Japan.  It doesn’t have a fragrance, but it is loaded with blooms.  I split a clump of this last fall and transplanted it all along a fence and it is looking like they all took.  Yay!

Ribes have become a new favorite flower of mine.  Even more than the flowers though are the berries that look like jewels hanging on a bush.  The birds like them as much as I do.  I actually picked berries off another shrub I have last year and made one jar of jelly from it.  It was a beautiful little jar of clear red jelly.  Hoping to get lots more this year.  We planted several different varieties of ribes last fall and they are all just starting to bloom.  Some make berries and some do not, but I love the flowers and the leaves on these beautiful, easy to grow plants.

Another plant that is blooming now that I have several varieties of is euphorbia.  I love the funny looking flowers and all the different colored leaves that the many varieties have.  What a versatile plant.  They seem to do as well in shade as sun here and with very little care.

The rain is making a come back today so maybe there will be some more sewing done…or a painting project that I have been contemplating for a headboard in my room.  I am working on a plan to paint a Frank Lloyd Wright type design on my wall as a faux headboard.  There may be pictures to come if it works out.

Last by not least, the smell of this little Daphne flower is so intense you can only imagine.  When you walk by and smell it you look everywhere for the big flower that it must be coming from but, no, just little ole me here!

 

Lovin’ Spring!

Ferne

Thread Dancing on my Quilt

  The windy, rainy weather has given me lots of time to dance with thread all over my quilt.  Luckily somehow the electricity has not gone off even once, with the 50+ mile an hour winds we have been having this surprises me.  When the wind stops blowing and rain takes a break I go outside and can’t believe how crisp and clean everything is, those times have made wonderful breaks then the wind picks up or the rain comes down and I am back inside dancing with the thread again.

I have been sticking to my plan to tackle free motion quilting and build my confidence so that I can finish some all of the quilt tops that I have enjoyed piecing.  I want to be able to put them to good use and enjoy them or give them to someone who will.  I have been following Sew Cal Gal’s quilt classes and Leah Day, who has some wonderful videos.  At the beginning of the month I printed out the class by Ann Fahl on Sew Cal Gal’s website.  I read and re-read her lesson.  It was jam packed with helpful tips and lots of quilting food for thought.  She didn’t give us any real fantastic design to quilt, but went further than that with tips on needles, thread, feet, marking, batting and making a notebook of ideas.  I have been pinning quilting I love on Pinterest so I pasted my pins in Word and printed them all out for my inspiration notebook.  I left extra space by each picture to practice a little drawing of the design.  I found this very helpful on my current project.  Ann also covered a topic that I have problems with and that is how to get my quilt sandwich layered just right.  She uses dressmaker cutting boards to pin your layers on and then she steams them with an iron to help to block the whole thing just right.  I am going to have to get a few of those boards and give this method a try.  I think I could lay them on my table and that would get me off the floor with my painters tape.

I am quilting the quilt I put together last year making blocks of things that reminded me of Summer.  I am calling it my Summer Sampler.  I got the idea from a book I read about making a diary quilt.  This is the perfect quilt for trying out lots of different quilt designs.  Quilting with white thread doesn’t really show up very well in pictures, but I will try to post them here and see how they work.  

This is the background of a watering can where I tried out a loopy flower design.  I can see that I have a little space at the bottom I should have filled a little more.  I get a little worried when I get to the edges and it shows here, but I had fun and it was done all too quick.  Ann talked a bit about stippling which is something I have never done much of, but I guess this is a form of stippling.  I don’t usually like stippling on a quilt and I find it kind of difficult to do and make it look right.   More practicing…

Here I am working on the edge of my quilt and will have 3 different designs just on the border.  Those last triangles are what I am working on now and just quilting some straight lines in them.

My biggest problem though has been on how to mark my quilts.  I know I should mark them before I sandwich them, but I can never decide exactly how I want to quilt it.  Sometimes I decide while I am sitting there with the needle in my piece.  On this quilt I drew on it with a Sewline pencil then remembered that I had a FriXion pen so I also used that and I even tried my transfer pencil in one spot and traced the design I wanted on paper and ironed it on.  I also tried sewing on paper and using my Pounce chalk with that, but found it hard to see.  For straight lines I used a ruler and my chalk roller and that I like the best, but it isn’t always practical.  I can’t wait to wash this quilt and make sure that they all wash out.  The funny thing is that after all that marking experimenting the thing I liked the best was to just wing it with no marking.  I found that if I spend some time drawing a design over and over on paper I can usually just sit down and sew it without much of a problem.  I am not fond of ripping out quilting so I usually leave my booboos there unless it is something major.

One of my favorite brainstorms on this project was to quilt into the quilt “quilted by ferne March 2012”.  Now that is there forever, a record in my diary quilt.  I still have to make a label for the back and I should have attached it before I quilted it, but I am kind of hung up on how I want to do it so I figure I will stitch it on later and work it in with the binding.

My favorite part of quilting is looking at the back.  There are no marks and with this light colored back all the quilting shows and somehow all the mistakes seem to disappear.  I really can’t wait to wash this quilt and see it in its quilty fluffiness.

I am doing all this on my Janome 6600 and loving it!

ferne