Not much quilting going on here...the middle two weeks of every month are my busy weeks with 5 to 6 evening meetings for work or volunteer organizations. I'm also preparing to go to a conference soon and then Mom's birthday brunch at my house days after I get back from the conference. Yardwork is calling but I'm not listening...

Last weekend was Val's birthday so Jim and I felt the need to celebrate responsibly! Ignore my funny facial expression - I must have been talking. And these are the new neighbors...with momma watching over them closely. They are still a little wobbly but their coloring, fuzziness and blue eyes are very endearing and a welcome cuddle during lunch break never fails to warm my heart.

First Garden Harvest of the Year

Yup - you read that right - I harvested my veggie garden this morning and look what I got! ;)
There's a few rogue onions I found but the rest are plants that I bought or were given with no place to plant them before the fall frost. Ignoring the green pot in the back (last year's leftovers), from the left:

• big round pot is a turk's cap lily which has yet to sprout
• larger square pot is a yellow wood poppy
• 2 small square pots are mini green eyes hosta and small rasberry sorbet hosta
• 2 small round pots are hostas from Michele
• large round pot kinda in the back is my giant Sum & Substance hosta - this baby will eventually be up to 31 inches high and 70 inches wide and I can't wait!
• root bound iris' from Paul's fish ponds

I think most of these will go on the side of the house when I get the sod pulled up and create a garden bed. In the meantime, the tractor guy will be coming soon to till the veggie garden. It's been warm out but not enough to plant veggies yet...

I love when the trees are this lime green color in the spring:

Design Wall Monday - 4/12/10

Last week I swore I was only going to start sandwiching and quilting table runners - I swear! I started by trimming the batting to the right size for each of the tops I have done, finding fabric to piece into backs, used 505 spray to sandwich some of them and tossed them in a pile. Too bad this picture doesn't show more than the top three...

However, after viewing a cool design somewhere in the blogosphere I discovered I actually had a runner pattern made in a similar way that I could use as a test. I find this charm pack a little blah with this background fabric but it's similar to a runner several friends were fighting over last year. These are charm squares, trimmed to 4 inches, with 2.5 inch squares sewn onto opposite corners. The great part is that I have 4 or 5 batik charm packs at home that I picked up in NC. I probably won't trim them down and they should make a beautiful quilt!
And I even double sewed the seems so that I can save the half square triangles...

Spring has Sprang

Yeah, it was 88 degrees last weekend but this weekend it snowed! All the poor little plants that are begininng to blossom had to hunker down Friday night for about an inch of snow. It seems that everything did ok but we shall see...

Here's the pear tree in my front yard and my bleeding hearts.

Design Wall Monday

I'm afraid today's picture isn't very exciting...I had plans of getting more of it done this morning before coming to work but sleep won out after a 4am rescue call. I hope y'all understand...

The pieces still under the presser foot and the black pieces in the front will be "sashing" between the snails trail blocks, which you can kind of see in the pattern above, and then black and white borders for a really cool...yeh, another...table runner! The back will be the red and the binding black. I've got about 5 table runner tops done now...time to sandwich and quilt them...