All Decked Out

Summer Gardens

Sunday, July 10, 2011 2 Comments »

Just finished de-leafing a ton of green and purple basil in preparation for pesto making. DH should have picked this crop a week ago; 7 days made the difference between nice, full leaves, and a lot of semi-chewed leaves. It all gets ground up anyway, but it isn't nearly as satisfying to do the same amount of leaf stripping & only net half as much. We'll pick earlier on the second crop!

Now if you really want to be green with envy, take a look at the garden in my SIL's father's house; he's recreated a Mexican courtyard right here, in eastern Pennsylvania.

This is only a small part of the garden. What you can't really see in the picture, is the large koi pond buried in the middle of it. And it's just one of 3 ponds! The garden is lit in various places as well. See that tin star hanging in the very back? At night it is lit from within, and creates a lovely, twinkling highlight. What a lush and delightful place!

Calling All Techies!

Thursday, July 07, 2011 3 Comments »

Robert Kaufman Fabrics has helped developed a set of 8 very handy quilting calculators that are available for iPhones and iPads through the iTunes AppStore. The set, called The Quilter's Little Helper is also available for smart phones with the Android operating system. The app is FREE! I tried to poke around the RK site to see if the calculators were available just via the web, but I didn't have much success.

Here is a link to a full description of the app. And here is what it does:

Fabric Measurement Conversion: Converts between inches, yards in decimal form and yards in fractional form.
Backing and Batting Calculator: Determines how much yardage from a bolt of fabric is needed to make the backing for a quilt.
Piece Count Calculator: Shows the number of fixed-sized pieces of fabric that may be cut from a larger piece.
Pieces to Yardage Area Calculator: Indicates how much fabric is needed in order to cut a given number of fixed sized pieces.
Binding Calculator: Tells you the amount of fabric required to bind your quilt based on the quilt’s dimensions and the binding strip width.
Border Calculator: Shows the amount of fabric required to create borders, based on a quilt’s dimensions and the width of the borders.
Square in a Square Calculator: Works out all the key dimensions of a square in a square block.
Set-in and Corner Triangle Calculator: Determines the size of the square piece you’ll need to cut in order to create both unfinished set-in triangles and unfinished corner triangles.

RK also has a nifty little blog and a newsletter you can subscribe to. Just what we need -- more temptations!

Guild-ty Pleasures

Monday, July 04, 2011 0 Comments »

I've joined a guild. I've wanted to join a guild for a while, but most have meetings that are not very inconvenient for my schedule. I work in Center City Philadelphia, commuting on the train, & not arriving home until 6:00 PM; that makes getting to a meeting difficult, especially if the meeting is some distance away.

The Philadeplphia Modern Quilt Guild meets about 15 minutes away, and at a time that is doable. Bobbi no blog asked Nancy, Near Philadelphia and I if we wanted to go to the June Meeting, where Jay McCarroll, a former Project Runway winner, was speaking. You betcha! I am addicted to PR, and this was the perfect excuse to dip my toes in the guild pool. Nancy already belongs to another guild, but Bobbi and I both ended up joining PMQG. We are now both card-carrying guilders!

Jay has a new fabric line, Habitat. Were we game for a challenge? The resulting quilt would benefit Quilts for Japan. If we chose to participate in the challenge, we were given a paper bag with cuts from one of the colorways from his line, and charged with making a block for a group quilt. I finished mine yesterday. It was my first challenge ever, and used fabric that just didn't speak to me, but here's what I came up with.

Yep, I used my Go! to cut those drunkards path blocks. I'm not wild about the block, but I have to tell you that the pieces were a cinch to cut and went together easy peasy.

One more item from my quilting-things-I've-never-tried-before checked off the list! And Jay McCarroll? He's about the nicest, sweetest guy you'd ever want to meet. AND he's from Pennsylvania!!!

Sister Suzie's Runner

Sunday, July 03, 2011 5 Comments »

My golfer sister had a birthday in May. She asked for a summer table runner for her breakfast room table, in "modern fabrics". My sister is an incredibly talented, wonderful woman, and a gifted athlete, but her knowledge of fabric is about as great as my knowledge of golf. "Modern fabrics"? What exactly did she mean? Hmmmm.

This is what I came up with. 4-patches, set on point, with solid center squares.

Many fabrics are from Sandi Henderson's Meadow Sweet line for Michael Miller. Looks "modern" to me, and very summery. I'm wishing those "eyes" didn't bunch together at the one end, though. That's what I get for being in a hurry. I'll just tell her it's my way of keeping an eye on her.

I did most of it while we were using her beach house in North Carolina. The binding was completed yesterday -- just in the nick of time for a progressive dinner party with her golf buddies tonight. I snuck (sneaked?) into her house when she wasn't home and put it on her table. Wonder if she's noticed.....

Life's a Beach

Sunday, June 26, 2011 2 Comments »

My sister has a lovely vacation home on Ocean Isle Beach, NC. She rents it out during the summer, but makes it available to family members in the off-season. She gifted a week to my daughter and son-in-law in early June; they, in turn, asked if hubby and I would like to join them.

I’m not a beach person, I have issues with my skin and the sun, so frying on the sand isn’t a good thing for me. The opportunity to spend all day, every day with Kate, Paul and beautiful baby Alma, however, could not be missed, so off to NC we went. I took “Baby” (my featherweight), and a bunch of project packs to keep me busy while everyone else went to the beach. It turns out that Alma just loves to chill in her swing while her GG (Gorgeous Grandmom) sews. We had a lot of meaningful conversations, we sang “Sew, sew sew your quilt, merrily at the beach” for hours on end, and Alma kept GG from muttering those bad words when it was time to unsew. Again. Am I smitten? You bet!

A pea in her pod

I was amazed by how wonderful it is to be totally wrapped up in a little person. Not quite 4 month old Alma is at a very interactive stage: she pulls you to her with her eyes; she has “conversations”; she's discovered her feet; she reaches for things and grabs them; she watches everything. She especially loved the water and the beach.

Wish they had these Bumbos
when my kids were little!

One of her favorite activities was to sit in her Bumbo on the kitchen counter or on the dining room table so that she was smack in the middle of all the household action. I was also blown away by what wonderful parents Kate and Paul are. It is obvious that they are equal partners in raising this beautiful child. Spending the week with them was such a lovely gift -- we are all so blessed!