Garden Update

The heat wave we had in July really seems to have agreed with the garden. All the plants are really taking off - tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, raspberries, blueberries and all the herbs.

This is also the earliest I can recall the tomatoes starting to ripen. Usually they are not ready until mid August. I went out today and picked the first cherry tomato and as you can see in the photo the first of the full-sized tomatoes will be ready in a couple of days.

I will have to remember to put bacon on the grocery list next week in anticipation of making BLTs with fresh tomatoes from the garden.

Still Reducing Scraps

Well, I am still working on getting my scrap pile reduced but I have moved, at least temporarily, from crumb blocks on to other projects. I had some bigger scraps and some partially pieced blocks left over from my nieces and nephew's quilts. Since they are bigger pieces I figured making a crib-sized quilt out of them would help reduce the scrap pile a little quicker. This quilt will be donated for the quilt guild's community service project.

As you can see the top is done. Next week's goal is to piece a back for it and get it basted and ready for quilting. As this is only crib-sized I should be able to machine quilt it on my home machine.

From Scraps to Crumbs

When the sewing room reverted back to a guest bedroom a couple of weeks ago pretty much all the sewing stuff was packed away. As a strategy I have decided only to pull out my scrap bags/boxes and I am trying to make a dent in them by making crumb blocks. The goal is to reduce the scrap pile by about half before I let myself start pulling out other projects or starting new ones.

Here are the 12 blocks I made this week. I would have likely made more but the heat wave this week made the sewing room upstairs (with no air conditioner) pretty intolerable. I couldn't imagine sitting up there in the heat with the iron on as well.

Where did June go? - New Stuff - Part 2

Along with the family arriving in June for a visit we had a few other additions in June.

The big item is the new gazebo. When we bought the house 10 years ago one of the first things my dad said was that we should get a gazebo and place out by the brook. So here we are 10 years later and we finally have one. Officially this is my birthday present with several family members and Damon contributing, but I paid a big chunk of it too. The biggest benefit of this is that it is fully screened in. I can go out and enjoy the warm summer weather without all the pesky biting, swarming bugs! I still would like to do some landscaping around it, but I think that will have to wait till next year.

A few days after the gazebo arrived our ridding mower died so we had to go out and get a new mower. The new mower has a wider deck and is faster so getting the mowing done should take less time. Of course since the mower is wider than our last one, all the spacing between the raised beds in the garden is a bit to small. The mower will fit between the rows but not between the individual beds, so this means more time and areas that will need trimming.

I attended the Vermont Quilt Festival (VQF) in June. While I am on a fabric no-buy challenge (and I was good and did not by any fabric) I did buy a few books, a pattern, a stencil, and some pearl cotton. So as you can tell, June was an expensive month. The rest of the year will be devoted to building the savings back up.

Where did June go? - A Re-cap - Part 1

One of the big events this summer was the whole family coming up to the Adirondacks for a visit. Since this is was the first visit for my nieces and nephew (all between the ages of 4 and 8). I thought it would be nice to make them all quilts for when they arrived.

I started on the quilts in March. My sister told me their favorite colors and I came up with what I hoped would be visually interesting quilts that would be pretty quick to piece.

The first one here (the pink one) was for my youngest niece - she is all about pink and princesses. I found a picture online of a quilt made of quarter log cabin blocks and decided to use that block. I could not decide on one single corner block to use for the whole quilt, so I went with 4. I used a variety of different sized strips for the rest of the block.



The second quilt (orange) is for my nephew. I found a picture online - I think the pattern is called 'Stones and Bricks' or something like that. As with the other quilt, I did not use a pattern I just figured how to create the blocks on my own. All the blocks in this quilt are made with 2 1/2 inch strips.

This quilt was the first one I finished. I got the top done in about 2 days at a quilt retreat in March. Of all the quilts, this one seems to have the biggest visual impact - it is very bright.




The third quilt (Blue) is for my eldest niece. She lives in Michigan and is a U of M fan. Having been born and raised in Ohio myself (the rivalry between Ohio and Michigan in college football is legendary) I could not bring myself to go with a purely Michigan theme. The result is the use of the U of M colors, but the night sky with stars is a nice neutral idea.

The blocks were constructed using Gwen Marston's Liberated Stars method (Gwen lives in Michigan so there is another Michigan connection for the quilt).

Montreal Quilt Show

Trudy, Cheryl, Jane and I went up to Montreal on Saturday for the Quebec Quilts Salon 2010 Quilt show. A few quilting friends from the Wadhans Hall quilt retreats are members of the guild in Montreal. So we went up to see the show and have lunch with them. We had gone to their previous show 2 years ago. It is a really great show - a lot of variety and really stunning quilts. I took lots of pictures. As I am on the fabric no-buy challenge I did really good and did not buy anything at the show from the vendors. Of course it is a bit easier because fabric in Canada is more expensive.

The pictures are the 2 quilts that our friend Katherine "Kat" Hornstein had in the show. She has a wonderful flair for using vibrant, beautiful colors. The top one is called "Amish All Sorte" and the second one is called "Bohemia".

The trip into Montreal went well, we didn't get lost and the traffic wasn't bad. And on Saturday there was no smoke. Today (Monday, Memorial Day) even here in Saranac we are engulfed in the smoke and smell of the large fires burning in the Quebec Province. We checked the maps and nothing appears to be very close to us but the winds are from the north so here we sit in the smoke. It really smells strongly of fire in the neighborhood. Its a great reason to stay inside and quilt. I am putting the bindings on the quilts for the nieces'.

My First ADK Mountain

I finally got around to 'hiking' an Adirondack peak. It only took ten years to get around to doing it. The Conference on Instructional Technologies was on campus this week and as part of the pre-conference activities was a group hike up Poke-O-Moonshine. We were a small group - apparently the 90 degree heat scared some off.

Having grown up in a very flat area of the world, I have been very poorly prepared for the sort of 'hiking' done here in the mountains. The hike up Poke-O-Moonshine is real more of a climb, scrambling over rocks and pulling your self up using small trail-side trees.

I blame the heat for not making it all the way to the top. But I did make it to the ruins of the cabin that the fire tower watchers lived. The photos I took do not do justice to the trail. It is very steep and I was glad that we had a guide, because the trail looked more like a dry stream bed. I would not think it was a trail at all with all the rocks. The ruin is just the fireplace and the foundation of what was a log cabin. The fire tower is still at the top of the mountain.

I figured that the trip down would be less strenuous, but I was surprised at how easy and quick getting back down the trail was. It took us about 3 hours for the trip from top to bottom.