Saturday, August 27, 2011

Plums, puzzles, and patchwork

We have a lovely plum tree in the back yard, a bit overgrown, prone to broken branches and with at least one squirrel's nest up high.  This year was kind of a slow year for it; we'll most likely eat all the plums fresh.  There have been years where I made plum jam, plum chutney, dried plums for school lunches, made plum leather for school lunches, froze them by the quart load and gave them away to the neighbors.  I have to put the plums in my plum-glazed bowl (from college Ceramics class) every year.  This year I actually took a picture and blogged about it.
Nostalgic for Ohio?  I was after helping Quarta put together this 500 piece puzzle my mom gave us over a decade ago.  I should get a puzzle like this for all the states we've lived or vacationed in.
Farmer's Wife Quilt block 27: Darting Birds.  I needed more red in the quilt, and this definitely is more red.  Now I'll need to put even more red in.  That's not a bad thing.  I started this block by making a grid of eight 1 7/8" squares for the HSTs.  There are 4 additional brown check 1 7/8" squares that I cut diagonally into triangles, and four brown 1 1/2" squares, and 4 red 1 1/2" squares for the heads, and two 2 7/8" red squares cut diagonally for the birds' bodies.  I really like how this block turned out.

I've been busy but not in a bloggy way the last few days.  I need to photograph what I've done so I'll feel more productive: organizing the basement, back-to-school shopping, estate sale shopping (!) and cleaning house (ugh!)  Secundus is running cross-country for the local public HS this fall, and practices have started for that.  Personally, I'm hoping my lesson plans will format themselves with a minimum of input from me, and dreading the moment when I actually have to start digging in.

No comments: