8 week Portrait

Baby had its first picture last week. Looks good!

Block Party

All the blocks for my first quilt are finally finished! They're made of five fabrics from Tanya Whelan's Ava Rose collection. I can't get enough of this fabric - nursery bedding perhaps? I like that the pinks are a little more red, and love the robin's egg blue. There are also several greys in the collection, although I didn't pick any of those for this quilt. I do still have to choose a fabric for the backing - maybe grey polka dots?

The quilt instructions advise turning the blocks all different ways to give the quilt a "scrappy" look. I tried that, but prefer having all the blocks lined up.

It's almost finished - now I just have to:

• sew blocks in each row together
• sew rows 1 and 2, and 3 and 4 together
• sew rows 1/2 to rows 3/4
• cut and sew inner border (pink with white polka dots)
• cut and sew outer border (white floral)
• cut fabric for binding (not sure which fabric)
• order fabric for backing
• buy batting
• take front, back, and batting to Virginia (friend from work who knows someone who can do the quilting and possibly the binding)
• wash and dry
• nap with finished quilt!

Okay, so maybe I'm not almost finished after all.

Maybe Baby!

We're expecting! A baby. Apparently those Lady Tools are also working. He/she will be here in June.

I started knitting a baby blanket for said baby, inspired by SouleMama's baby blanket. It looks so soft I knew I wanted to use the same yarn - Blue Sky Alpacas Organic Cotton. I chose the bone colorway (I like that word - colorway - although I'm not sure I'm using it correctly). I looked around for an easy pattern, but the Project Linus All Purpose Knitted Afghan pattern that SouleMama used was the "fast and easy" one I needed.

I also discovered that this is the same yarn suggested for Alicia Paulson's Tiramisu Baby Blanket. That one is crocheted, and although I know I could handle the main blanket the edging might be a bit tough for my novice crochet skills. If I have any leftover yarn, I think I'll start it and see how it goes.

Fashionably Late

It's a busy time in the garden. My Foxglove finally bloomed - planted her last year and had to wait until this week for the show.
Foxglove, you were so worth the wait. Please fell free to scatter your seeds so I can enjoy these beautiful pink bells for many years to come.

And just when I'm feeling pretty good about my green thumb, my sunflower plant does this:
Sunflower, you suck at life. A squirrel eats one of your blooms and then you just give up. Why can't you be more like Coreopsis?
Elsewhere in the garden, Jackson admired the new rose bed:
I'm digging up a corner of the lawn to make more room for roses. That's "Quietness" and "Aunt Honey", both Buck shrub roses. (You can also see our new rain barrel.) Eventually this entire corner will be a flower bed - probably for more roses and hydrangeas. Aren't hydrangeas the best?

Jam Session

I wanted make jam on my day off. Then I found out I would need a bunch of canning equipment I don't want to buy right now (save that for blueberry season). So I decided on freezer jam - totally simple, and I figured there's no way I can screw this up.


Strawberry Freezer Jam
2 cups strawberries, hulled and mashed
1 packet Ball Freezer Jam Pectin
1 1/2 cups sugar

Mix sugar and pectin. Add strawberries and mix 3 minutes. Ladel into 8-oz. jars. Let stand 30 minutes. Refrigerate some (use within 3 weeks) and freeze the rest (use within 1 year).


Easy and delicious - the most time consuming part is washing the strawberries. This is basically the recipe straight from the pectin packet, although it says 2 cups mashed strawberries = 4 1-lb. packages. No way - I actually managed to get 7 1/2 cups from 4 packages, and I ate a few, too.

Shhhhh.....

Can you hear it? Off in the distance, what is that? It sounds like ... drums? He, he, he...

"Distant Drums" is pretty much perfection right about now. It currently has two of the biggest, most colorful, delicious smelling blooms. When they first started to open, the sweetness was so concentrated they smelled like candy. Mmmmm.....

"Honeysweet", on the other hand, isn't feeling so well. The canes have some pretty bad winter damage and a lot of the leaves are looking a little ragged. I pruned her back pretty hard this week.

It just so happens that this weekend at Great Lakes Roses, Roger Lindley gave a talk on Insect and Disease Control. Swell! So I chopped off a few sickly leaves and headed down, hoping he wouldn't tell me my rose is doomed. Diagnosis = rose slugs. No big whoop.

I managed to exercise a bit of self control this time and didn't come home with any new roses (unlike a few weeks ago, after the Buck Roses talk when "Quietness" and "Aunt Honey" managed to jump into my car). I did spot some new roses to add to my wish list - "Iobelle", another Buck rose, and "Fireglow", a Canadian Parkland (Morden) rose. Dare to dream.

Country Girls

We took a trip to the country yesterday to visit the rose farm:
I could stay here for hours. The smell is incredible.
The farm is closing after this year - the owners are retiring. Everything is for sale - the house, greenhouses, equipment, even the mother plants. This is a "Distant Drums" mother plant:
We wished her a happy Mother's Day and told her how well her baby plant is doing in our garden.
I've reserved a spot in the garden for a new rose. I had my eye on "Prairie Sunrise":
This one was reserved for some other lucky sucker, and unfortunately it was the last one!
I decided on "Earth Song". Here she is with her friends:
I think she'll do quite nicely.

While we were there, we met the nicest group of girls. They've worked at the farm for as long as they can remember and are so sad it's closing. They don't have anywhere else to go, so we offered for them to come live with us and help tend our garden. They happily agreed!
Meet Jo, Billie, Frankie, Sam, and Andi:

Country Girls

Originally uploaded by karmadee

It's raining today so they were hard to photograph. We'll try again tomorrow - they want a nice picture to send to their friends.
The other girls gossiping while Jo gets her picture taken:
They think she wears too much lipstick. I think she's lovely.