First, the Drift white roses are in bloom. How fun is that!
The “XO” quilt is off the longarm, at last. It got ignored for almost two weeks.
When they passed out visual conceptual genes, I didn’t get many. I thought this “XO” title meant an X block and an O block. Nope. The X blocks make an O block as soon as they are put next to each other.
Now this donation quilt is trimmed, bound, and is getting its binding sewn down by hand at night. I was going to machine sew the binding, but I needed some night time tv hand sewing. Otherwise I get restless and do things like making popcorn.
What has been fun is that I couldn’t throw away these larger half-square blocks made when one trims and sews the diagonal corners of the XO big rectangle. Each. rectangle produced two half-square blocks in the same colors. So, I made flying geese with them as a leader/ender project–and then made this little table topper piece.
The backing is a cute one of sheep that has been in my stash for years and years.
I am so enjoying this piece on my dining room table. (So far I have not killed that poinsetta gifted to me at Christmas.)
I made several table toppers these past months, and I have enough now to change them out seasonally. Or when I get bored with one.
It is Sunday, and I have clean sheets on my bed, the washer is running, and I’m enjoying my morning coffee. It is a beautiful day, and later I will walk.
Here are the roses. They curve around the porch, which got cleaned yesterday and put back to rights, which had not happened yet in the pictures below.
The Asian Jasmine (not a real Jasmine) is plush this year. Will it finally bloom? I hope so. The blooms are said to be white and very fragerant. (The grass is suffering from the drought, but I watered a few days ago.)
It took most of yesterday to clean the screened porch, which involves washing the pine pollen drenched rug, washing winter mold from the blinds that can be pulled down to screen the porch for privacy and from the afternoon sun, washing pillows and cushions, and, of course, washing the floor.
Now I can’t wait to eat my noon meal and read for a bit out on this shiny, clean porch.
The lavender and the yellow miniature rose are both blooming right outside the back porch door. They are next to my kitchen garden herbs.
My grandmother name is “Lovey.” The little concrete heart was made for me in 2005 by the older two grandchildren (with a lot of help from their mother) and delivered to me in Maine on one of their family’s visits. Of course it came to South Carolina with me. We moved to Maine in 2004, and the two girls in that family were not yet born. So that little heart is now 21 years old. Memories…
The white azaeleas on the side of the house are so pretty this year. They were transplanted from the front of the house as it was way too hot out there for them. And they have struggled as the soil on the side of the house is very poor. But two years of fertilizer and nutrients is showing, despite the ongoing drought that really needs to stop–without jinxing us with the dreaded “H” word.
And, a long view, with the camellia at the end:
My little front porch has a bench now, made and gifted by my beloved neighbors. Earlier this spring, I got a nice pottery pot for Impatient plants and repurposed a pot gifted to me at Christmas that now holds a Foxtail fern.
The Foxtail fern is putting out new growth, so maybe it will be happy in this spot for the summer.
Beyond the front porch is a bed of Drift white roses and hollies that came with the house that are now thriving. The roses are covered with bloom buds, but that will be a picture for another day.
It’s late afternoon Sunday, but not really late as we just “sprang forward” with regard to time, and I will need several days to adjust. LOL.
It has been a quiet week on the sewing front as I’ve been in the yard for 4 full days now working at the spring clean-up, uprooting plants that are not working, pruning, raking grass, weeding grass and just loving being outside in shorts and and a short-sleeve t-shirt in warm sunshine. I think I was spurred into going outside by the fact that our brown grass is turning green.
I’ve never raked the Centipede grass before, but it has been 3 years now, and there was a lot of thatch that this grass doesn’t like. I did what I could with a wide leaf garden rake. I hesitate to have a professional person thatch with a machine as the sod has a net of plastic on the bottom, and I’m pretty sure a thatch machine would pull it up and make a huge mess.
I’ve also replaced all the dirt in my outdoor planting containers as it was well past time to give new plants a dirt uplift. I visited the local plant stores, but we are apparently between very early plants, like viola and pansies, and the summer annuals that can take heat. So I didn’t come home with any plants for my containers. Maybe later next week.
As I wrote months ago, I saw an orange blooming Tea Olive last fall and fell in love. I think I have a spot where one could go, especially as they are slow growing and prune well. Remember this picture, taken outside Local Jo’s Natural Foods, where I get my raw milk, raw butter, raw honey, local clean eggs, and so forth?
Tea Olives are famous for their strong fragrance in the late fall or early winter. The white ones are more common, but…I loved this orange one. And look at that gorgeous foliage. Tea Olives are one of the iconic plants here in the Charleston, SC, coastal, tropcal area.
I’m also gradually refolding my t-shirts so that they look like this picture in my bedroom shows:
And I’m liking the result a lot. I can see what I have without pawing through stacks, and the shirts do not wrinkle as they do when folded flat, especially when they sit for several seasons to pass.
But first, a camellia saga. Last winter the buds on this plant did not survive the cold weather, though I wrapped the plant to protect it. This year, it was loaded with buds, and one day a month ago I went out to check it, and they were all gone but three at the bottom. Deer!!! (And now I’m wondering about the buds from last winter. Deer LOVE flower buds.) But after almost three years, the remaining three blooms opened up. Can you imagine how pretty if the bush were covered with these pretty blooms? Nevertheless, I’ll take what I can get. Joy in the moment, you know.
I hope you can see where the quilt is and where the rug is in this picture. It’s the best I can do for the moment. I put it down to measure it to make sure it is square. It is a half-inch off on the bottom right, but the corners are all square, and the bottom line is true, so I’m going to call it a day. The longarm quilting process can gather up fabric during the quilting, so I think I’m good on this one.
I had such fun making these blocks. Many were the trial blocks for my online Tara Faughnan class, Blocks 3. Many were just playing with scraps. And many were made while playing with rulers I haven’t used in a while. I am especially intrigued by how a pineapple block looks with the neutral part of the block the same color as the quilt field fabric. I love how the colors float as a result!!!
You may remember the improv quilt I made a few years ago with the blocks from the Blocks 1 class. It now lives on the end of the guest bedroom bed, right now alongside the sewing supplies I’m collecting for the college granddaughter and the three younger granddaughters. Two sewing machines are coming for them in late March.
How did it get to be Wednesday already?
It is getting warmer here, and I put away my warm knit pants, though we will have another bit of cold weather at night early next week. Or so the weather says…
This low-growing camellia blooms in the fall and early winter. This winter is her second winter, and she is…happy.
The other camellia I planted is on the other side of the house and blooms later in the winter. There are buds… Last year it lost most of its buds in freezing weather, even though I put a protective cover on her. This one is a taller form. Camellias can get quite big and wide.
AND, here’s another smile.
These trimmed back trees along the path I often walk are LOADED with orange berries this year. More than I remember from the past two winters I have been here. They are probably some holly form, and they are all along this path.
Can you imagine if they weren’t trimmed so drastically? They would be…glorious.
“Garnish” is set up for hand-quilting. Yes, I put the binding on as well, as that task prevents the edges from fraying and the batting from shedding. I used Dream Cotton’s thinnest weight batting for hand quilting–Request.
My “Garnish” is one of many forms of this idea given to us by Tara Faughnan in the online Blocks3 class that is happening now and will last six months, with a new block idea every month–and a new palette.
Here’s another form of this block–which I will put on a stretched canvas when it is done. The batting is already glued to the canvas.
If I were going to use this form in a quilt I think I’d separate it with narrow sashing. Otherwise the flower form would dominate.
This piece is waiting for the “brass” color to arrive in the mail–12 wt. cotton thread–for that top right “pickle.” I order this thread from Red Rock thread online as our local stores don’t carry much 12-wt. cotton thread–which I love best for hand quilting. You can the smaller “petite” spools online for a reasonable price, so I have a good collection of colors. And many thread makers produce 12-wt thread now, so if one doesn’t have the “right” color, another might.
This afternoon my DIL and I are driving out into the country to pick up our local organic turkey. I will join her family (my younger son) for our meal, and the whole family will gather at the older son’s house for dessert. All the grands will be there, along with two grandmothers, one grandfather, and a possible boyfriend.
Have a great Thanksgiving if I don’t visit with you here before Thursday.
We’ve had temps dropping into the freezing area these past two nights, so it’s been time for me to seriously undertake the outside late fall cleanup chores. The red roses have survived the cold though, so I have not had the heart to cut them back.
Here’s what rosemary does in this climate: it makes bushes. Right now it is blooming, and the bees and hummingbirds have found it. But I think I’ll cut it back some after a hard freeze.
Still no rain though. But the walking has been delightful in these clear, sunny, cold days. Of course, if I were in Maine, I wouldn’t think this weather “cold” yet. I’d just put on socks and add a sweater layer. The wind here, though, was quite biting and strong for at least one day. And the trash cans, put outside the night before the weekly trash can pickup, had their tops opened with the night wind. We are all still picking up bits of trash that littered our front lawns.
I finished the quilt top for “Under the Maple Tree,” a Rachel LaBour’s Stitched in Color blog sewalong. The perfect backing fabric finally got here–delayed due, perhaps, to the slowdown at the airports during the shutdown. It’s a Tilda fabric. Yesterday I found a fabric for the binding locally as I couldn’t find something I liked in my stash. This quilt was a lot of work, fun though that was, so I wanted the backing and binding to really “go” with this top. The leaf blocks are all from my scrap stash.
These blocks are sewn on point, and those little cute gold side pieces were a bear to get “just right.” I worried and worried during the final trimming, but it all came out well. (Thanks Rachel LaBour.)
This little no-name donation baby quilt–made as a leader/ender with my 2-inch square bin and half-square triangles cut from scraps–is done. The pattern is from Bonnie Hunter’s free selection on her blog. It’s “Patches and Pinwheels.”
The on-point squares that form caught me by surprise. I didn’t see them coming. But I love how this secondary pattern makes this quilt so much more interesting. I’m still using those 2-inch squares to make four-patch blocks as leader/enders. So there may be another donation quilt from at least the “patches” part of this quilt down the road.
I saw my first Tea Olive shrub in bloom. It’s an orange one. They also come in white. This plant comes to us from Asia.
The fragrance is just heavenly–like apricots. I just stood in front of it and…smelled. The official name is Osmanthus fragrans…with further identifications based on family species.
I’ve been obsessed with Rachel LaBour’s “Under the Maple Tree” sewalong. I’ve made a lot of progress, too.
That picture could be…brighter. I took it last night. Now I’m down to making more leaves, moving around blocks, and sewing everything together. In other words, there is a long way to go–25 or so leaves, for one thing. Boy is this one chewing up scraps. I love this 8-inch leaf block. It is so fun to make.
This as yet nameless little neutral “Stacks” quilt–a Tara Faughnan pattern from season 2 of The Color Collective years–is off the longarm, trimmed, bound, and has its binding installed. So I have night sewing once more. It’s so cute.
I’m running out of October days to also play with Tara Faughnan’s October Blocks 3 block, “Crosswalk.” Here’s where I am now. There is also a block “in progress” at my sewing machine.
The block on the right is going into that improv quilt growing on the design wall. It will be such a nice fit with those blocks.
And the other finished “Crosswalk” block is now installed on a 10-inch stretched canvas:
There are so, so, so many ways to manipulate this block idea and so many colors with which to play in this month’s palettes. My two finished blocks are made from the brighter fabrics; the in-process block uses some of the duller/softer colors.
Today is a beautiful fall day. I’ll walk, and I’ll be able to have my noon dinner on my porch.
The scrappy quilt top from Bonnie Hunter’s 2025 Leader/Ender FREE block, released in July each year, is done and will go on the longarm next. This top is the 2-inch version and finishes at 6 inches. It is 60 by 60 and will be a donation quilt, though I LOVE IT. Once I made a few of these blocks, this quilt immediately turned into a primary project. Note that there are alternate settings suggested that involve sashing–and that Bonnie used only two color families that alternate for the diagonal rows. So, lots of room for differences in this project, including not making it scrappy at all.
Leader/Ender projects are meant to be…slow…with block pieces to be sewn instead of sewing on a little scrap between the sewing on your primary quilt project…or instead of breaking your thread. I’m addicted to this block and will next make another gift quilt with the 8-inch finished version. It is already started, LOL.
Here’s a link to to Bonnie’s “Four Patch Fun” leader ender project. ***Pay attention to how to feed the block parts through your machine so that you can “swirl” the joins in your units AND so that ALL the seams butt up to each other. Bonnie’s patterns always contain tons of “how to” pictures and other information.
The third and last of my quilt series using the large and small Cat’s Cradle rulers and this fabric palette is off the longarm, trimmed, bound, and is now my nightly tv watching and hand sewing project. These three quilts are so handsome.
Taking the place of “Four Patch Fun” is “Stacks.” This Tara Faughnan pattern and design dates to her first “The Color Collective” year (2019 I think). I made a big one for a wedding gift, but had a lot of cut pieces and a lot of fabric leftovers. I put them all in a big bag when I moved to South Carolina from coastal Maine. I still like this quilt a lot. Since this picture, I added two more rows to the length. So it will measure 63 by 67.5. ***This block would lend itself to prints. Of course it would. And I’m wondering about making the main part of the block in neutrals, as I have a lot of those in my stash still. I will try that idea soon maybe as it could be a good leader/ender project.
Believe it or not, my stash fabrics are diminishing in places, but there is still a long way to go. And occasionally I do buy fabric for backs and sometimes will buy for specific colors or patterns that I need. Some of my stash colors are now…limited.
One of our local quilt shops is switching from Kona solids to Northcott–and they put their remaining Kona on sale at 30% off. So as I was there, I did get some of the sale brights to add to the Log Cabin on the design wall. (But, let’s just say I also have alot of colors in the solids now.)
Northcott is fine. It has about the same density as Kona. But it does not have as big a color selection. I am sick about this store change (done as Kona has had some recent supply problems), but I will now be getting my Kona online. This local store was the only one with a big Kona solids selection.
Here’s a pic of the hibiscus plant I’m fighting the Mealy worms to save. That situation is better but not yet cured. It required daily attention. The front porch plant had to be dug up and thrown out. It had a big ant bed nearby, and though I have poisoned it with pellets twice, the damage was done. Ants “farm” mealy bugs for their sugary “honeydew secretions.”
The ants: the escapees just move to a new spot and are a real problem here. These ants can produce a HUGE ant hill in what seems like overnight. And if they bite your bare feet when you don’t see a hill that has emerged overnight, the pain is intense. Maybe with my Histamine Intolerance issue, their chemicals are stronger. Maybe this pain is why these ants are called “fire” ants, if that is what they are. In my case, it takes both lavender and Purification essential oils to stop the pain. and I have little blisters for days afterwards.
I am now savoring the last Jan Karon book in her 14-book Mitford series.
I will truly miss these characters. Mitford is likely meant to be somewhere in the North Carolina mountain area–and maybe is meant to be a smaller town, but something like Asheville, NC.
We have a hurricane that is now a category 5 moving toward our coast named Erin. Projections are for it to NOT hit the coast, but it is huge and the wave action will be intense.
I’m hoping that he models will be correct and it will stay out to sea.
Yesterday we had what I call a “gully washer” thunderstorm. The rain gauge said almost 4 inches in about 2 hours. The front ponds are now full again, and the fountains are working again.
Have a great week everyone! Find joy in the small moments of your lives and pause to drink them inside fully. This morning when I checked the rain gauge outside, I could her a bee buzzing on the roses, the locusts singing, the frogs calling after yesterday’s rain, the crows talking to each other, a slight coastal breeze moving the spectacular clouds–all a moment celebrating summer so I paused to let it all happen.
And on a new prennial in the new front garden by the porch?
It’s Mealybugs.
Here’s a pic of what they look like that I found online. I sprayed the tops of the infected plants with 50% alcohol and water, but it didn’t get the underside of the leaves on the plant outside–and we’ve had a fair amount of rain that will wash off the alcohol too.
Ugh! I’ve got the Hibiscus on the porch mostly under control. But not the front area plant that is NOT on a porch. So more spray this morning to include trying to get at the areas under the leaves.
Mealybugs, says the video below, can really be a plague in greenhouses.
And here’s more info on the Mealybug life cycle, if you are interested. There is a fly form involved too.
The third and my last quilt top in this current series exploring how blocks from the small and large Cat’s Cradle rulers might work together is done and folded up on the design wall while it waits its turn on the longarm. There is now, too, a purchased backing that is…”wild.”
I used the same fabric palette for these three quilts. The middle quilt, “Spring’s Song” is on the longarm now.
The first quilt that started this journey, “Fall’s Splendor,” is getting its binding sewn down.
And I will confess, I had another idea of a way to combine these blocks but if I go forth with it, I will use different fabrics.
Bonnie Hunter has released this year’s leader/ender project–“Four Patch Fun.” She starts a new leader/ender project on July 1st every year. One is meant to just sew one of these block components in the place of breaking thread on a primary project. Or, to sew one of these components instead of using a fabric scrap to keep sewing without breaking one’s thread.
I have fallen in love with this 6 1/2 inch block that uses 2-inch strips. (She included measurements for 2 1/2 inch strips for an 8-inch block as well.). These block components are easy to cut and easy to sew. Here is what I have done so far, and I can tell you that these blocks are addictive to make all on their own. No way will this one stay in the leader/ender category long for me, LOL. Nevermind how they look together on my design wall as I’m sure there will be a lot of moving blocks around.
Bonnie included, as she always does, a lot of “how to” in her directions AND numerous ways to set these blocks. I like the way the blocks form diagonal braids, but one could also group 4 blocks to make a circle pattern, with the light cross in the middle, and to maybe separate those blocks with narrow sashing and cornerstones. I have no idea where my blocks will go, but I’m…addicted to making them. For sure.
One project that has been ongoing as a leader/ender project for me is making a dozen placemats from the bin of 2-inch squares. I had a lot of fun devising various patterns using color, but also just making scrappy blocks. I had enough leftover fabric in one print to back the whole dozen. And enough of that fabric to make some bindings too, though not bias binding which I prefer. The rest of the bindings will be made from leftover bias binding strips I’ve saved along the way.
BUT, another goal with this project is to figure out how to install binding on BOTH sides with my sewing machine. I have been lousy at that task. Yet many quilters here that I know do this work beautifully. I tried with the placemat you see on the top. It was…terrible. I had to take the whole binding off and start again and to sew down the binding by hand.
I’ve watched some videos now and have some new ideas–especially with how to handle the corners. And I’ve ordered a Janome foot called a “left bi-level foot” that let’s the needle lie right on the binding edge while the right side of the foot is higher to accommodate the binding thickness. (There is also a “high bi-level” foot available for other projects that have two levels of thickness involved.)
Wish me luck as I’ll try one idea for sewing down the binding later today.
I went through all my saved solid strips and culled the really narrow ones–and pulled out all the bright colors. I’m making log-cabin blocks (14.5 inches unfinished) with these strips. To what end, I don’t know yet.
There is one lone one on the design wall, with the second to follow later today. The wonky strip below is as yet not exciting me… Maybe I’ll try one more. Maybe not.
I think, next, I’ll pull out one of the projects from The Color Collective where I had a lot of leftovers already cut and a stash of those fabrics saved. That project would make a good donation quilt at the very least and would move that fabric along nicely.
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