Interesting Quilt Backs, a Business Relationship Story, and the Zucchini Report

I really like the border on this quilt - how it makes the whole thing 'float' on the background.

I especially like the BACK of the quilt.  Using some leftover patchwork and some leftover fabric hunks from the top always makes things just a little more interesting.

HOW TO RUIN A LONG-TERM BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP IN ONE EASY STEP

I've been going to the same hairdresser for over 30 years, with a very rare visit to a different salon.  Honestly, maybe three times.

She's self employed, works at home, and considering that she is a service provider - I know her really well.  I know her kids and her husband and I know all about her holidays.  I'm a good client, undemanding and uncomplaining.  I arrive on time.  Once she and I got our wires crossed and I was coming a half hour later than she thought I should.  Once I turned up, unknowingly, with no cash, and I dropped it off later that day. 

On my last visit, I walked in the door and she said "you're LATE".
First, my jaw kind of dropped.  I said "three minutes???"  (and I was a few minutes late after running an errand).  She argued that I was five minutes late, according to her phone and her clock.  I really hate confrontation, so I laughed it off saying that she could forgive me for those few minutes, right?  But I could see that she was really steamed.  Half way through my haircut she took a personal call and stood there chatting with whoever, about her upcoming weekend, and the bridal plans, and potato salad, etc, etc.  This call went on for quite some time.  She must have thought I had it coming to me.  I dunno.  There was no apology for the interruption.

After my cut, I paid her and I left.  And I'm not going back.  I feel like she totally disrespected our relationship.  She hurt my feelings.  Maybe she was having a bad day and I should cut her some slack, but that is a two way street.  Since I'm the one forking out the $$$ it is not my job to forgive her, unless she is willing to make nice too.  She has kept ME waiting plenty of times and never been terribly apologetic. 

In the back of my mind I know I am acting like an ass.  And then I think:  after at least 260 haircuts I deserve more love.  You know?

ZUCCHINI REPORT
Picked this week:    13
Picked YTD:           43

In other garden news, I am continuing to weed.  The soil out there got a bit dry, so we gave it a good watering.  Then, of course, it rained the next day.  There are a couple of ways I know of to make it rain.  One is to water the garden, the other is to wash your car.  That's ok though - the plants would MUCH rather have rain water than our horrid, iron-ey, mineral-ey, hard-as-a-rock well water.  I've picked a few raspberries.  This is my second summer with the ever-bearing raspberries, so I did a bit of research.  Apparently (according to the Gods of Google) the old canes bear early summer (now) and the new canes bear late summer.  There should be lots of berries in my future since I have lots of new canes.  And I will know to NOT cut down the canes in the fall.  I've also picked a TON of snow peas.  Plenty have been given away since we cannot possibly eat that many, unless we give up eating peanut butter, oatmeal, potatoes, chicken, and sausages.  I've been squashing potato bug larvae, since it seems a couple of the buggers got away on me and MATED.  Bastards.  I've eaten a few cucumbers from the vines, and I found a new recipe for  Cucumber & Blueberry Salad that I will be trying.  I have some frozen cherries from the June crop so I'll use those instead of blueberries, until the local berries show up at the market.

Hmm.  I guess that's it for now.  Enjoy this friggin' heat.  Today the temp is forecast to be 31c but feels like 42c.  Yup.  Hotter'n hell...

Red & Cream Sampler, zucchini report

This was the June beauty.  Only thirteen pieced blocks.

The rest was all empty space.  The request to use red thread gave me a slightly nervous stomach.  It shows every single wobble.  And every single stop/start.  I stared 'er down for a while, then put on my big girl panties and took a deep breath.

This was my first experience with a DOUBLE batt.  The bottom layer was Hobbs 80/20, then a Hobbs Wool was added on top.

This gives a gorgeous pouf to the quilting designs.

I am totally in love with that border design by Karlee Porter.

On the garden front, I got the rest of the redneck mulch put down (grass clippings on top of newspapers) so I have a path between the cutting garden and the veggie garden.  I weeded about half of the potato patch  but there is more to be done.  Woe is me, we have potato beetles.  I need to get out there with a bucket of soapy water and try to drown the bastards.  I have snow peas coming out my ying yang, so I've given away a bunch of those.  I picked four (!) raspberries this week and lots more are starting to turn red.  Yum, yum, yum.
ZUCCHINI REPORT
Picked this week:  20  (all small ones, man-finger size.  I gave away 14 of them.)
Picked YTD:         30
 

Mary Mary Quite Contrary... and the first ZUCCHINI REPORT

Maybe I should rewrite that so it goes:

Helen-Mary, never contrary (ha ha)

How does your garden grow?

With snail-filled shells

And manure smells.

And hoes-&-toes all in a row.

With the 2 1/2" of rain we got last Saturday, the garden has exploded.  And not all in a good way.

At least Mother Nature decided to plant DILL with the POTATOES.

Buried in amongst the volunteer cilantro and edible-but-weedy PURSLANE there are sweet and hot peppers.

The leeks and onions are ok in this pic, but lemme tell you.  I was out there weeding this last night and there was no brown dirt to be seen.

You will notice that I have kept the ZUCCHINI pretty clean.  The better to torment DH... ha ha ha.  I've already picked about ten finger sized fruits and tossed them in veggie stir fries.

To my credit, the newspaper/grass clipping mulch is doing an excellent job here. I will be back at this today to clean up a walking pathway between the cutting garden and the veggie bed.

The past several days I have been trying to thin out the phlox.  Oh.  My.  Lord.  It has taken over so much space!!!  In this pic I have already been working at this so I could at least find the Siberian Iris.

This is what I took out.  I had to ask DH to get in there with his manly size 11's and a big shovel to separate some clumps for me.  Otherwise I would still be at this in October.

Whew.  Some space. Now I can dig up some COSMOS that have seeded themselves in amongst the tomatoes and replant them here.

As far as harvesting goes, we have eaten a ton of lettuce.  Pounds of asparagus. The radishes that I planted for DH are rotting in a tupperware in the fridge. (why eat radishes when you can have salted peanuts?)  We've had a few feeds of snow peas - delicious when you lightly saute them in a bit of olive oil for maybe five minutes, then add a couple dollops of balsamic vinegar and cook for another minute or two.  And the zucchini, of course.  :-)  Ready in the garden but not yet picked are a couple of jalapeno peppers and at least one cucumber.  Yum yum yum.  I love summer.

ZUCCHINI REPORT
I am simplifying the report this year.
Picked   10
YTD      10

Bow Tie Quilt and UFO & Stash Reports

It's 2:30 in the morning - I seem to be having one of those nights when I cannot sleep.  That is a good opportunity to draft a blog post, which quite possibly will make no sense. But at least there are pictures. ☺
The UFO challenge for May/June was my Bow Tie quilt. 

This started several (!) years ago during a lesson at the Binbrook Quilt guild, when we learned how to make these cute 3-d bow tie blocks.
I really love the white with summer-beach-house-blues.  It has been custom quilted, using the IQ.

Now there is just the hand stitching of the binding to be done.

Here is my Singapore cutie-pie. (translation of cutie-pie:  great-niece)  Modelling the two outfits made by moi. Her head is lopped off in the photos as her parents like to keep strict control of her social media pics.

She is a total freak about FROZEN (the Disney movie) so this goes along with the pillow & bag from THIS post.  I  love making clothes for little girls.  They can be FUN and BRIGHT.

STASH REPORT
Used since last report  11.4 m
Used YTD                   58 m
Added since last report  0 - zero - zippo - yay
Added YTD                 35 m
Net YTD                     (-23 m)

Red Hat Day at the Grimsby Beach Cottages

The Red Hat outing this month was a trip to Niagara-on-the-Lake for lunch and shopping.  That is such a beautiful city.  A total tourist trap, but still... beautiful.

Afterwards, on the way home we stopped in Grimsby to check out the Grimsby Beach cottages.  I have seen these written up in the newspaper but I've never actually been to SEE them.

Oh.  My.  Gawd. 

I am pretty sure if you poked around some of the yards you would find the Cat in the Hat, and Horton the Elephant.

Talk about living in candyland.

How often would these people have to paint????

Maybe they hire someone to recoat one colour every year.

Like, maybe 2015 is purple year.

Then 2016 might be yellow year.

I've stared at this pic trying to figure out what the hell those cutouts are.  Anyone???

Many of the gardens are gorgeous too.

Oh.  Dear sweet God in heaven.

The fences have not been ignored.

Fishies and flowers and vines.  Oh my.

Hmm.  After all those, this one actually seems a little boring.  Awfully pretty though.

Here is a wee bit of history on the community.
And here are some interior shots by the Hamilton Spectator.

Jinny Beyer Moonglow Quilt, and All About Purple

You can see why this quilt is called Moonglow.

Mmm - look how nicely those fabrics play together!

I wanted to add some bubbles to contrast with the spikey star points.

Limited use of a variegated thread - only in the bubbles, the courthouse steps blocks, and the flying geese.

The s.i.d. (and there was A LOT OF IT), circles outlining the stars, and straight line quilting behind the geese units was all done with black thread.  Oh, so much fun to quilt on black fabric, with black thread, at my age.  Can you say "aargh!!!"?

And since we're all about purple today... If you were a three year old with jet lag, would this wee pillow & matching carry-bag (with a special pocket for your book) encourage you to lay down for story-time?  Anticipating a visit from the Singapore family.  Soon.

How to deal with Prairie Points on the INSIDE of a Quilt, and the crossover between PERSONAL and PROFESSIONAL

This little quilt has a row of prairie points on the INSIDE of the quilt, separating the body from the border. (Sorry, the row of flying geese is visually distracting here - but I'm sure you can see which are the prairie points.)

Stitch-in-the-ditch along the prairie points to make everything stay flat.  Try to stay on the LOW side of that seam.  Why did this photo decide to load sideways?  I have no idea.  Ask the computer gods.  Grrr.

S.I.D. done.

Now, pin all those little puppies out of your way so you can quilt the border.

Rocket science here.  Quilt the border.  Um, yes.  I am being sarcastic.  As you are choosing the border design, keep in mind that part of it will be buried under those P.P.s.

Release the dragons.  I mean the P.P.s   If you want to get artsy fartsy, these p.p.s make GREAT dragon backbones.

Moving on... quilt the body of the quilt.  This quilt also had a repeat of the prairie point border at the other end, so I did the same process at the bottom of the quilt. 

• S.I.D.
• pin the points out of the way
• quilt the border.

Here we go.  All done and ready for pickup.

Now, I'm going to give you a little peek into my married life.

Floyd is my quilting machine.  He works very, very hard.  But because he's a machine, sometimes things break or wear out.  I am married to a man who can usually fix anything.  However, he is afraid of Floyd.  Don't ask me why.  He's got about 200 lbs. over Floyd. 
Floyd has needed some wiring work for AGES.  DH keeps putting me off.  I had already replaced one of those little telephone jack things, but that didn't fix the problem.  So yesterday was the day that DH had to buckle down and do his thing, because we needed to replace the same plug on the OTHER end of that cable. 

He pulled the back cover off Floyd so he could trace down the cable, which is very challenging, since wires go into a track then up through the machine housing and around several corners where you CANNOT SEE, and of course there are three identical cables.  After every electronics tool and gadget in the civilized world came out, he finally (maybe) decided which cable had the other end.  So I replaced the plug.  But first we had to have a fight over the plug replacement, AFTER I had already cut the plug off.  sigh. So, I got the new plug on eventually after much hairy eyeballing and cursing at each other, then DH put everything back together.  Ha ha ha ha ha... (hysterical laughter).  That did not fix the problem.  Everything had to come apart again. 

More hairy eyeballing and cursing at each other over pins and copper wires and clampy-thingy-tools.  Put ANOTHER new plug on.  Now the wire has no extra play in it - if this doesn't fix it what do we do???  (insert hand wringing, aargh!!)  DH reassembles everything and I give Floyd a whirl.  Can you guess?  Yes.  Not fixed.  (insert curse words).  Well, at least at this point we know (or we THINK we know) that it's not the plug.  It's the wire.  With the constant movement of the machine back & forth and up & down, one of the wee copper wires inside the cable has finally bit the dust and broken.  So, DH takes the machine apart AGAIN and runs a jumper wire from one port to the other port, bypassing the bad wire, and that seems to have the problem on the run.  By now we are speaking to each other, but just barely. 

Somewhere in this timeline, friends had stopped in with coffees and green teas so we had a nice hour long break where we were pretending to get along for the sake of company.  Yeah?  Have you done that?  I'm sure you have.  Later, we went into town for 'senior citizen supper' (anything before 5 pm, in my books) because the food trucks were at the museum.  We both simmered down after some yummy food.  I stopped muttering about him being a stupid asshat.

Anyhow.  Now I will work on one of my own quilts to make sure the jumper cord is indeed fixing the problem.  If that's the case DH will fish a new wire through, that will be identified on both ends with pink nail polish.  I will put the new plug ends on. (for some reason, DH cannot do these.  Unbelievable.  He can do anything else.) 

In all honesty, I have no idea why we can both work with a million other people and get along.  But we cannot work with each other and get along.  Weird.  Is it because he's a middle child?  Is it because I am the baby of the family?  Dunno.  Kiss kiss.  Love you, honey.