I got up at 6 this morning and went right out in the garden by myself which has so many rewards. (But left two pouting dogs to do so.) Instead I had my shears with me on this walkabout and did a little snipping here and there. I disturbed three turkeys who I think must have overnighted somewhere nearby. I sat by the pond and reminded my body how important it is to relax. It is hard for me to sit and do nothing...by the pond like that early morning is the closest I can come. But even then I had to open the Merlin Bird Song ID ap on my phone to identify what birds were singing. Right away it identified the Red Eyed Vireo, Chickadee and Chipping Sparrow. Just awesome.
These late July days the showy Daylilies are blooming. I tried for a variety of colours when planting these. There are yellow ones and a paler peach about too.
Here's Ned and Petey on one of the more shaded trails later on this morning. Petey is twisting his head a bit and it is for a reason.
He had found and led Ned to a downed wasps' nest and they both got a little pinch before fleeing.
No worries...whatever they felt it was momentary as they were fine right away.
It had cooled down to 20 overnight in what has turned out to be one of the hottest Julys on record here. Midday yesterday it felt like stepping outside into an oven, reminding me of Florida.
In stitching news and attempting to divide my time equally, I got out my EPP Starry Hexagon tote and worked on those while we watched tv last night. Angela has said Aqua is August's RSC colour but we can dig back into dark blues if we wish. I do have a little aqua fabric but want to save it for another project. Anyway, meanwhile I stitched these with lighter colours for the starry centers and will use darker for the outside diamonds.
I also spent one stitching session last weekend on Basket Love laying everything out on the table to take a good look. I sorted more blocks for another border, machine stitching little 3 inch squares into patches which will set off the appliqued border on the opposite side.
I came across some interesting bits of fabric in my stash while looking for more to suit this project, things I forgot all about. I have no recollection of buying this but I seem to have fat eigth remnants.
These are autumn colours and it would be nice if I had this flimsy ready for fall quilting.
I'm almost finished this book by the Irish writer, Colm Toibin. This one is a kind of quiet story but with characters interesting enough to keep you reading.
I know not everyone enjoys stitching sampler quilts...the same can be said in the cross stitching world too. But this one is so special. I've been seeing folks working on this amazing quilt...Harriet's Journey by Jennifer Chiaverini. It features 100 beautiful blocks including different ones. I like how these quilts get attention again, usually on Instagram. Here at Amazon if you'd like to take a closer look.
We both love soups and it's always good to not have to use an oven in extreme heat, though with A/C not so much of an issue which I'm loving this year. I had a summer plan to make a homemade soup each week and I've not quite/almost stuck to it by making a soup every two weeks. So far I've made vegetable barley, split pea, chicken with variations, lentil and bean and minestrone- not that adventurous. I wish I had the tomatoes that some of you are growing in your gardens. We love tomato soup and the fresher the tomatoes the better for that.
I read this article, 10 Simple Ingredients to Give Homemade Soup OOmp and picked up a few tips like adding Worcestershire sauce or yogurt which I'd not thought of doing. Great ideas for ramping up the nutrition too. I made us a pork roast dinner on Monday and after another meal of hot pork sandwiches with air fryer fries, I still have leftovers today. I think I will use it in a rice soup. What's cooking at your place?
Hope your week is going well and you are coping okay with whatever is on your plate at the moment because we all know there is pretty much always something up, isn't there.
It is not just the Goldfinches that tackle those spikey Bull Thistles. I've noticed two different kinds of butterflies giving them lots of attention too. Here is the Canadian Tiger Swallowtail in it's July brilliant yellow.
And an interesting brown with blue spots butterfly that took me some time to find a name for and am still unsure but think it is a Black Swallowtail.
These poor three plants are doing triple duty as they are loaded with bees too looking for nectar.
I got waylaid from chores this morning but for a great reason. The garden was looking so lush and beautiful in the 8 am light, I had to go out and do a walkabout (it is also cooler then too). After all, these summer mornings are fleeting. There are a number of meadow like areas that are full of wild flowers this time of year. That's an outbuilding of ours in the distance.
The daisies, purple and violet loosestrife and wild salvia are blooming with butterflies flitting and bees buzzing. It all made me think of how much beauty this land holds for me that I would miss. I've loved being so up close outside pretty much every day of the year with land like this to tramp about. But then, nature, in all its forms, fascinates me so wherever I am plopped down, I think I would find outdoorsy things to enjoy...hopefully.
The shallow part of the pond has dried up - a sign of the extreme heat this year- so we will have to hook up the water hose to the well down there to run some water in it.
This exposed what I'm pretty sure is the muskrat's old den.
I finished my little walk back at the meadow on the side of the house. The Smoke tree there is blooming too with the hardy Black Eyed Susans poking through trying to reach the sun. It is much much taller than I am but so hard to tell perspective in this photo.
This week I worked on my G.Leger cross stitching piece- finished the letter "P", while catching up with YouTube super star stitchers like Kathy at Kathy's Quilts. Kathy also hosts the very popular Sunday Slow Stitching party so many of us enjoy. HERE is the link.
I took this photo in the sewing room of my stacks of String blocks and the partly hand stitched and wonky Propeller blocks -there are 40 of each now. That's 80 blocks for me in a relatively short time. And I'm especially pleased with these for the scrap busting aspect of the two blocks...so I tell myself.
I'm going to look up string block layouts. And can you see how my large cutting mat has gotten a wave in it. Any way to fix that?
LeeAnna's- Not Afraid of Color -conversation this week is about summer time foods. I make potato salad this time of year and we also eat more corn on the cob, strawberries and watermelon in season. When I found wild raspberries growing way over near the border with the neighbour, I uprooted several bushes and replanted them on the bank near the side entrance where there is good sunlight all day. That would have been about 6 years ago and after poor showings for a few years, they have gradually spread and are especially doing well this year.
The reason I did this is because it is Tony's favourite fruit...not so much mine as I'm not crazy about the seeds. These are the black when ripe variety of wild raspberries. I've picked a small bowl every four or five days for him. Wild berries typically have twice the nutritional value as farmed, a fact that surprises me.
Having a garden requires patience and time, I've come to realize, especially so for fruit growing. :)
đź‘ŤTony wanted me to tell you thanks very much for mentioning him and wishing him well in your comments and emails. We both appreciate the sharing and kind thoughts.
As I write this, I can hear the far off sound of a lawn mower and I'm thinking what a wonderful summer sound that is. Our closest neighbour, the one who shares our acreage, is fanatical about his lawn care. And it's not just what can be seen from the street that is always immaculate, but the back areas as well. He sometimes mows our front edging too and we feel badly about that like we are letting him down. However, we share the end of a cul-de- sac so very, very few people see these areas. Mainly the school bus drivers and the bin collectors, and the odd person turning around. It's so rare for someone to be there that the neighbour phoned us once to say a black SUV was parked out there and they wondered if something was up. By the time I walked out our long laneway to the road, they had gone. But it's good to have neighbours keeping an eye out and also keeping their property up too.
It has been very hot with heat wave warnings most of July so far, one night it cooled down to only 28C. It is definitely a good summer to have the A/C fixed. There have been showers though so everything in the garden is looking lush. We had another of those horrific summer storms that come on quickly late afternoon. In just a few minutes it went from sun to darkness needing to turn on the lights. There was crashing thunder and lightening and tremendously heavy rain which our old metal roof amplifies. A little scary while it was happening-they always make me nervous- but after 20 minutes or so, it was all over; the sun came out again. That one broke a record for how much rain fell in such a short span of time.
The Hydrangeas are so beautiful again this year. Our front walkway this morning...
Dinner plate sized mop heads...
Though they are out of place and some might say ugly, I deliberately keep the Bull Thistles that sprout up in my front flower beds. This year there are three of them. And the American Goldfinches are why. This is a female.
They are pretty much the last of the birds to nest and wait till the thistles are starting to go to seed. They eat the seeds and line their nests with thistle down which is very soft. And this is another female collecting the down.
The hearts at the base of the flowers are edible and I've read foragers say they taste like artichokes.
Male American Goldfinch on a Purple Globe Thistle bud which are just now starting to bloom.
The American Goldfinch is the state bird of New Jersey and what a gorgeous bird it is.
I've been cross stitching- a lot. Stitching scrolly letters is fun and easy. BTW, there is no J in this large alphabet. Many early samplers did not include a J or U as they were not in the Latin alphabet. ( My father had to learn Latin in high school and regretted our dropping it in Newfoundland as he always said it was the key to all languages...just his opinion I think.) This is a useful feature for identifying the age of some of those found samplers. The pattern doesn't point out this fact. At first I'd thought the I and J were designed to be stitched together as it is a very fancy I. Stitching one over two still and enjoying it.
But after three nights of stitching, I had to give my eyes a rest. So I switched to hand stitching propellers, the sewing of which does not put a strain on my eyes and I love how this is using up larger scraps.
Tony's hearing aids are on the blink and he has to go to the office for adjustments. I have a few negative thoughts about these hearing aid places. The price of hearing aids these days has become absolutely astronomical here in Ottawa. How are folks able to afford these necessary things!
If we'd started learning when I wrote this to him, we would be fluent now!
Oh I keep forgetting to talk about the new bread machine. It worked beautifully and had a very simple, easy start up. I decided to make Egg Bread for a little more protein for Tony. It made a dense loaf reminding me of the bread Mom used to make so unlike store bought bread. Below just the "heel" that is left. Here is the link to the Kitchenarm site. (Btw, I am not affiliated with anything I share here on my blog.)
I will be making more, of course, and this machine can also make baking powder breads which is a great feature- one I didn't know when I bought it. It can handle oranges, other fruits and veg too. Going to give that a try soon.
We have another appointment at a local hospital for himself to get a CT scan of his brain. About time, I told him, LOL. That should be interesting.
Hope these summer or winter days are going well for you. Take Care.
Well we celebrated Tony's 86th birthday in fine style. It was a hot, sunny day and the family took us to a restaurant in a nearby town. We had a feast of surf and turf, oysters, tuna tartar, shrimp and a bread choice I really liked. It was sourdough bread with whipped feta cheese and honey, a concoction I could make at home. It was all delicious.
And Beth made him a wonderful Black Forest Cake so the feasting will continue.
I planted these tiny little flowers for ground cover in a shady spot in the back garden, an area that doesn't get walked on. After a couple of seasons of little growth, they are finally making a much better show of themselves which pleases me no end.
This was a sentimental choice for me as Forget-Me-Nots were Mom's favourite flower. Also Newfoundland has a special connection to this little flower that grows wild there. It is worn on July 1 which is Memorial Day in Newfoundland, a day to formally remember the tragic losses at Gallipolli during the first world war whereby the Newfoundland regiment was virtually wiped out. Folks gather at the Cenotaph where the tomb of the unknown soldier from that war is interred. I took photos of it last year when visiting.
There are two Tombs of the Unknown Soldier memorials in Canada, one is the National Tomb in Ottawa and the other is in St. John's Newfoundland. Because we were still a dominion of Great Britain at the time of the Second World War, our soldiers signed up with British forces. That included my grandfather, Mom's father. He was a seaman and the ship he was on, the Europa, got torpedoed. He survived this and was taken to a hospital in England which then got bombed during the Blitz in 1941 and my grandfather was gone. My grandmother had first gotten a telegram saying he was injured but would be coming home so there was much jubilance in the house, then got the awful second telegram with the news of his death. My grandmother, to honour him, never remarried and got his British war pension all the rest of her life and she lived to almost 89 years. ( If she'd remarried, she would have lost it...for a number of decades, they would send a fellow out from England to check the status of these Newfoundland war widows.) So Mom grew up without a Dad and, while always very sentimental about many things, especially so about anything related to the war. Her wedding ring had a circle of engraved Forget-Me-Nots on it.
I've been trying to remember to swap out my small tabletoppers and mug mats. I have them tucked away in various drawers and it seems with me more and more, out of sight is out of mind. Here is one featuring the Disappearing Pinwheel With Arrow block, a pattern new to me.. A little wonky on the sides but not as wonky as it shows here. This was a rare thrift store find...I always look but have found real quilts only a couple of times which I hope means folks are enjoying and keeping them.
The fabric up close is so pretty. Anyone recognize it?
LeeAnna's Not Afraid of Color prompt this week was do we shop at thrift stores, flea markets, etc. Well I guess we all know by now my answer!
Becky at Patchwork Posse has a good video showing how to sew this easy block.
I'm making good progress with machine stitching more of the blue strings blocks. I need five more to complete the forty I need for a yet to be determined design.
The heat wave is continuing here. Very hot with high humidity making it feel like 40C or more at times during the day.
But, my how the garden flowers are just loving it. All the beds are looking lush and this may be why those Forget-Me-Nots bloomed so well. Here the Hydrangeas are overflowing and blocking the shed door in the back yard.
Just a glorious mess!!
Hate to cut them so I'm trying to figure out how to tie them back. Suggestions? This has never happened before.
Okay rambled on so long I've had to divide this post into two. So more to come soon. Hope I've not bored you to tears! And hope your week has gone well with more to look forward to. Take Care All!
The garden and outside in general does call to me these summer days which answers LeeAnna's at Not Afraid of Color question of hammock or digging when it comes to gardens. I get up close with my flowers as I do a little weeding almost every day. There are many beds here and there is usually a point each summer where they "get away from me". I'll start out with them very trimmed but mid way, the growth takes over, especially in the heat, and I will admit it all becomes unmanageable. But since it's just us looking at it, I don't really mind. I also enjoy veranda sitting many days as well. Below is a very hot Ned in the back yard. We have had heat wave warnings and high humidity both of which are hard on dogs. Those are the three dead trees on the list to be cut down this summer, before an ice storm takes them down.
Did I hear correctly that so many of you truly think I should finish the quilt top I shared in the last post? It's not that large so I think I could manage it. I'm giving it a good think. But I really need to get into the closet in the old sewing room and see if I have batting of any sort. I don't know why that sounds like such a big deal when it's just down the hall....
I'm making progress on my embroidery Floralies piece...this part involved filling in a few satin stitch areas. I love working on this.
With not enough purple to participate in another RSC month...that's two in a row, I picked up my Propeller blocks to work on. SO how did I get started with these???? Squirrel Alert!
Back in February I'd seen Samelia's Mum hand stitch a version of a propeller block that I loved. She's finished her quilt and you can see her very colourful start HERE. I think she used Jen Kingwell's pattern.
Up till then the propeller blocks I'd seen had rounded edges like this one that Rose Prairie Grass and Farms shared ages ago.
And that led me to search in Karen's, Quilts, etc. archives to find that she had stitched a Retro Air Ship Propeller quilt...to see her pretty blocks go HERE. Just gorgeous!
Some propeller patterns involved adding more blocks inside the block like this one free here at Quilting Daily...
But I wanted/needed something simple. While combing through so many scraps looking for blues to make strings, I realized I had scrap pieces that were just large enough to make four propellers. So I made my own template with longer propellers and started a rather wonky version of a propeller quilt. Each of the small four blocks is being stitched by hand and then joined on machine. I notice that last bit is speeding these up which is a good thing. Here are some of the blocks I've made to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. I'm trying for colourful here and it's nice not to be working with all blues plus a real bonus is using up more of those pesky smallish scraps. But I've just this minute realized I may be making a version of a Windmill quilt. What do you think? Oh dear, I can't go down another rabbit's hole...
A first for us here at the Wooden House! The Phoebe pair are raising a second brood in the same nest on the back of the house. What industrious little birds! Even Tony noticed their activity and wondered why they were still around. I read they can raise up to three broods a season if the nest site has been successful for them. Below is the view from my stitching chair. Their nest is on the sound box above the furthest light. Tucked away nice and safe. And they take advantage of the bird bath which is just in front of them there on the left of this photo. I make sure the water is changed and nice and cool for them.
A mosquito was buzzing around my head in the night. I slapped at it a couple times and went back to sleep. When I looked in the mirror this morning, guess what was plastered on my forehead. Tony said well, you do have a knack for getting those guys. It's good to be good at something!
Thank you all for the very kind comments and emails; I'm very sentimental and often read them with a tear in my eye. I had a poster years ago that said "Life is a journey, not adestination" and I believe that. I've always been open to change and, like so many of you, loved travelling far to make a home in different places. In this blog space, while living here at the wooden house, sharing my ups and also some of my downs is important for me. Putting things into words helps make aspects of this leg of my journey more manageable for me and hearing from you with your "along the journey" stories too is also really helpful to me. So, to all of you, a huge thanks for listening, sharing, commenting...
