Another Finish

My sweet neighbor sent me a text reminding me to help myself to the tomatoes from her garden, there were some escaping to our side of the fence! And she left me an eggplant too!

Yum! Hubs will make me something delicious from this!

Meanwhile I shopped my stash in an effort to make a neutral quilt for one of DD's work friends. 

I used the Transport pattern from Villa Rosa-same one I used for the Caitlyn Clark quilt. 

And I chose a swirly design for Freddie to quilt out.

I did a much better job -I might finally be getting the hang of it!

Here it is all finished.

It was a little breezy on the deck.

And Ringo helped.

It's OK, I'm not really excited about it though.

The back is the best part. 

I love this minky type of fabric with the wildlife scenes on it. 

The little squirrels, and hedgehog...sooo cute!

So all in all a pretty nice quilt. It will be cozy this winter, whoever gets it!

Labor Day Weekend Labors

 

Not really labor, but I went to the Labor Day Flea Market out at the Johnson County Fairgrounds on Labor Day Monday. I've been liking the looks of these metal picnic baskets for awhile and picked this one up for only $10

I also got a couple of pieces of that green jadeite that my darling daughter likes so well. I got a pouring bowl-or whatever they're called and also a D handle mug stowed safely in my lucky flea market bag.

There's a Facebook group that I see quite a bit-they are all gaga over this Pyrex stuff. I can do without any more of that kind of thing.

On Sunday it was Family reunion time. We had a very small turn out-only about 7 people, plus Mom & Dad and me.

It was nice to get together and visit once again. I was fine with the small turnout in light of the covid still going around.

Selfies with Mom are always good!

Hubs was home canning tomatoes. He's a sucker for anyone giving away produce and one of his legion pals gave him two boxes of tomatoes. Thankfully he gave away one box to another legion gal!

I had to locate the cans and the canner pot to get him set up. I'm thankful I keep all the canning jars and we had enough-I still picked up a couple of boxes of pints when I saw them at Menards.  They are a little bit hard to find in stores around here this time of year. 

Well I guess we're all set just like the pioneers with our pantry stocked with home canned tomatoes.

So Much to Do

 Look at these little tiny tomatoes! They are delicious little things. The full size plants just are not producing but these little fellas sure are! Some of them are as tiny as a bead, some are almost cherry size, but they are sweet like candy!

 My gardener reported that the string trimmer was not cutting the string and it was beating up her leg! YIKES> I ordered a new cutting blade part. The part was $2.99 but the shipping from the B&D folks was $6.99! Anyways....

 I got the new one put on while the gardener is on break!!

 I got some new pillows at Costco-I love them, they are flat and smooshy, just the way I like them! So I made new pillow cases for them. This cotton fabric is so smooth and cool! I love it.

Ringo is just beating the heat in the house. Me too!

Backyard Time

 Well we had planned to burn the wood pile, but it rained a lot, so we had hot dogs in the house and then went out and had smores and beverages with wood from the store in the fire bowl.

 These little pyromaniacs got the fire going....

 after a couple of false starts.....

 There we go! Nice dry wood from the store is the trick to a good fire today!

 It's always fun to have the kids get the fire going-kind of a science experiment for them!

 And time to relax for the rest of us!

I  Love to toast the marshmallows! Jean is a marshmallow burner I think!!

 Dannie and her friend John, Jean & Ben and the kids, and 5 dogs....just right!

 With the Covid going around it was good to see the family all at once-they are all over occasionally but hardly ever all at once. We are all well so far-hopefully we'll keep it that way!

 And lookie here, the little tomatoes are coming on like gangbusters! They are delicious to eat too!

The full size tomatoes aren't doing much, only about 4 tomatoes on the pants. We'll see if they make it to eating or not.

Bucket Garden

 SO we love garden fresh tomatoes in the summer. Who doesn't? They are so good, nothing like what is available in stores. In past summers we've planted them in pots on the deck and in the yard. This year I wanted to try something new. SO I made this highly detailed, perfectly rendered drawing of the bucket garden. Off to Menard's to get some lumber!!

 Look! I got Hubs a Mother's Day gift for me while I was at Menard's! I've been wanting a workbench for the garage,and it was on sale!

 So DD stopped by and helped out with the assembly. Following my detailed drawing, I cut and she assembled. She made fun of my old-school drill (it has a cord) but it works every time I plug it in and it doesn't run out of power. So there HA!

 It's been chilly, but I want to be ready to put those tomatoes out as soon as we can! It occurs to me I could have save a couple of bucks by making the corner posts shorter.....maybe next time!

 There! All done and ready to go!

 And now 3 weeks later I'm ready to pot some tomatoes. We drilled holes in the bottom of the buckets, and I dumped in some rocks before filling with dirt.

 Ringo is inspecting the work....

 He approves! We've had a ton of rain in the last few weeks and it has been unseasonably chilly! But the plants we bought have been sitting out on the porch and they really need to get into their new buckets.

 Look at the river we had in the back yard on Saturday!

 It's like the rain just won't stop!

 Well I'm glad the planting is done-we'll see what happens with the bucket garden.