More Gardening Goodness.

I whined the other day on Facebook that a whole day had come and gone with my not having a thing to show for my existence. However the same cannot be said of yesterday.

I began the day on the quilt below....

My aunt did the piecing and will be here next week so I'd like to have it ready for her return to Houston. Each square has a different quilt design and I think I might take photos of each one to remind myself when my imagine turns to dust and I don't know what to draw on another quilt. I do this to myself.... get all excited about quilting on the machine and then draw a blank as to what to stitch on the top. Luckily, Patsy Thompson has lots of great ideas from which to springboard and I found another machine quilter, Leah Day, who taken upon herself the task of coming up with a new design each day for 365 days. Very inspiring.

I think I might set up a quilttop with simple 5" blocks and practice some of the designs she demonstrates on her blog.

After coffee and the newspaper, John said, "let's go burn!" and we did. All the remaining piles except the huge one that CAME with the property are all gone now. It was a good day for burning. AND I got to drive the tractor for the first time. Talk about GOOD! No, not me, I am lousy at that driving but the tractor is FUN!

Once the fire became totally manageable for one person (I'm talking 3 hours later), I headed back to the house to transplant the seedlings we started 3 weeks ago. These would be the 2nd set of the staggered plantings, but I wonder if they will catch up now to the 1st set. Below you can see the center two trays are the 1st sets and the outer two trays are what I planted yesterday.

And I have certainly gotten my technique down pat this time around. No more washing of the roots to "save" a plant. This time I will snip out the lesser of the two seedlings in each pot. I shall be ruthless.

Additionally, these will not have the stress of being in moldy pots so they are bound to jump and grow quickly. I have been taking the 1st sets out each day to enjoy the sun but man they got a little wilted yesterday. The raised bed garden is really beautiful now. The mustard greens are in full bloom and the bees are having a blast. Nothing else is in flower here yet so the plants are loaded with honey bees buzzing. They haven't bothered me.

Rooster Stu is a hoot. I love that big bird and am going to start carrying my camera everyday out there to shoot him because one day very soon he will have found a new home. His spurs are starting to grow but still no crowing. And he really is beautiful. I should ask the lady who gave the chicks to us if she would want him back with her flock.

I have not been sewing much but I did manage to crank this out:

Yes the image is blurry but I did not realize it until I had uploaded it to the computer. I'll get a better shot later. In the meantime, what is it, you ask? It is the center block (quite large, too) of what we at Sharp Needles refer to as Leslie's BOM. I skipped ahead of the routine in order to be certain I had enough fabric in the Christmas project to get that one completed. And I am glad I did because the individual pieces are larger than you might think. Now I must do the same with the other 5 quilts I have in the makings before I go back and proceed with the 16" blocks. I have sewn 5 of those blocks each. It's getting there.

Here is the February Mini-BOM from Bright Hopes Quilting:
Except Easter falls in April this year. Oh well.