General update (what a lame post title)

Fall.

It's almost here.

Sure, most days last week had highs in the upper 80s and 90s. But the nights were cooler. Cooler than they've been all summer.

And the leaves are changing. The warm weather can't stop that. Though I thought it would somehow. I guess I don't understand science as well as I thought I did.

I've been sewing less and running dogs more.

Pre-run

Post-run

And baking. That's been happening a lot these days.

This bread went so fast I didn't have a chance to photograph it baked.

There was also tomato pie. Tomatoes from the garden!

I've never had or made a tomato pie before. It turned out good. Really, really good. Recipe here

I have done some sewing in the last month.

These linen blocks turned into...



... pillows!



They still need to be bound. But first I'll need to clean off the dog hair.

I made a pouch for laundry (NOT soda money for the office) quarters.



An owl and undies!



I also made a mini quilt.



I'm a big fan of the mini quilt. It's fast, easy and gives me a chance to practice skills -- appliqué, in this case.



The idea for this quilt came from here.

I got all the fabric from the scrap bin plus quarter-yard cuts of the brown and blue at a local fabric store for $10. I mixed in some other scraps from my stash once I was home and ended up with lots of leftovers.

It went together very quickly. I started by cutting out the vegetable shapes. I used fusible web and did two at a time because I knew I was making two quilts. (There's a second one, it's just not bound yet.) Then I selected what greens went well with each veggie and cut the top leaves, again with fusible.

I appliquéd the leaves first, using a zig-zag stitch. I used the same green thread for each of the leaves.



Then I appliquéd the veggies. I used the same burnt-orange thread for everything but the garlic.



I used 1-inch painters tape to mark my quilting lines and went vertical in the brown (dirt) and horizontal in the blue (sky).

I backed each with a fat quarter. I had an inch of overhang on each side, so these suckers are about 17 by 21 inches. I didn't plan it that way, but it worked out nice.

I added a hanging sleeve before I bound then up, so they don't have to hang by two little bluebirds.

But the birds are pretty cute, right? They came from Astoria this summer.

Eat it

Right now there are no fewer than 45 ideas and plans rolling around in my head. That might sound fun, but I've got actual stuff to do, and these little schemes are distracting me. I need to just eat it and get what I need to do over with.

It's also cool enough (just barely. BARELY) to run at night, so that's eating into sewing time. But quilting's feeling shouldn't be hurt, because I love running with Tom more than all other things. Really. Everyone should get to take at least one run in their life with a dog that makes this face.


He's SO happy.

So anyway. The biggest thing I'm not doing is binding this quilt. I have the binding strip half made, but I keep stalling out. I think it's because I'm intimidated by the hand-binding I have planned. Bah. Maybe I'll just machine it. Or I'll hand-bind it. And since that will take forever, what's the loss in putting it off a few more days?

I also have to sort photos from vacation and upload them to Flickr.

O! Looking at Flickr just reminded me that I have an actual quilt finish to share! A hand-bound quilt. It's wall-hanging size, but whatever. The backstory of it is here, near the end.

Please excuse the just-awful iPhone photos. I forgot to photograph this sucker until we were walking out the door to Boise. Actually walking out. Like my-real-camera-was-in-the-car-so-I-had-to-borrow-my-boyfriend's-phone degree of walking out the door.





It didn't start as a small quilt, but it ended that way after a night of me trying to quilt the damn thing and also pack for the trip to Oregon that started the next morning. A night that started at 1 a.m., when I got off work, and ended at 5 a.m. when we left for Oregon.

Things just weren't working out, and around 3 a.m. I made two decisions. One, I would make the quilt tiny and just finish the damn thing in a half-hour and two, I wouldn't try to sleep before we left. Both decisions turned out awesome, because I finished the quilting AND I ended up sleeping almost all the way to Portland. I'm awful at sitting in the car, so anytime I can sleep away a 16-hour roadtrip is a win in my book.

Anyway, this is how big it the quilt was over my dinner break the evening before we left.



Oh well.