So, I Read This Book Today

It’s that part of the year where all I want to do is be out in the yard, to garden, watch the birds, plant flowers in the yard. It has been a weird summer, cold then hot, wet then miserably dry, then miserably humid. Pah! Let’s see what I have actually accomplished while not blogging!

First, the garden. The constant rains earlier on means a big, lush garden. Some of the plants, i.e., the zucchini, are way TOO big for my garden! I will have to plant them separately in their own bed next year. They are choking everything else out, and I am

having to strip out leaves in order to let light in to other plants. And of course, there is always the one that ‘got away’. In this case, the one nearly as big as Koda!

The peppers are coming along nicely. This is a photo of a Spanish Spice pepper. Yummy!  Spicy, without blowing the top of your head off while burning off all your taste buds 😮 (The pot? An apricot tree!) I even have Corn!!!

The little flowers you see where I laid a couple of the zucchini I harvested? Yep. Those are morning glory vines. They grow absolutely everywhere, and choke out the other plants unless I rip them out every day. They seem to grow a couple feet a day!

Koda is, of course, my constant companion and helper. I love having his company, and he still adores the taste of mint!

The rare black Russian tomatoes (left photo) seem to be doing well, the ones that starting developing are already about three inches across. The Zapotecs (right photo) are doing well, and the new, tiny Sugar Tomatoes are making a lot of clusters. I am most thrilled, however, with the Grapes! I have always had one or two clusters a year that the birds and other critters get first, but as you can see from the photos, the vine is loaded this year! Me being me, I went out and wrapped the branches around where the clusters are growing with dog fur (Shelties really shed!) hoping to scare off the critter so I can actually get most of the grapes for myself!

Here is the fabric for my next quilt project!

I am helping out Jan Krentz, who is wheeling around in a wheelchair right now from a broken leg. I am making the quilt from one of her test patterns, taking photos and checking for measurement errors in the pattern as I go along. I will send photos when I am done. The one below is going to be for sale when it is done… lots more to do on it, of course, but the top 4 diamonds are all sewn.

I “interview” a lot of fabrics for the spaces between the star and the outer ring of stars. These are three of the first I picked out of my “stash”. The light is bad where I have my big layout board, it always turns everything orange!

Of course, I ‘interview’ several fabrics before deciding on a color palette for the stars as well. Losers?

And another:

This is how I decide if a star is really going to “work” or not. I make one diamond, then use two mirrors to check out the overall flow. These two still have “possibilities” but I wound up liking the one I have on my board better.

I have a ton of reviews to get to, so off to do that! I have been doing edits for Susan Bliler and Michael Angel this summer, as well as some “technical” edits for a couple of businesses (Ugh! Dry, dry, dry stuff!), so I need to get the book edits done, and I have actually read a few books (and listened to more!) since the last time I posted as well.

More soon!