Island Mama

Last August, I entered a simple quilt, my second ever, in the County Fair in August. It was fun to see it displayed, although it was folded and hung over a rail along with a lot of others. Some quilts are hung up from the ceiling, because you really need to see the whole thing to appreciate the design. I got a red ribbon (second place, although the entries are judged against a standard and not each other, so there are lots of each “place”). After the fair, I decided I wanted to do better this year.

My goal: I wanted to create and enter a quilt that needed to be hung from the ceiling.

I had almost a year, it seemed possible.

My husband helped me come up with a design within a month or two, based on a mathematical curve, the Sierpinski Curve:

I bought all the fabrics at Christmas, and started cutting them out in March.

I sewed in spurts over the next few months, always after the kids were in bed, working on sections of 4 x 4 blocks. In the week or two before the fair’s entry date, I finished the piecing (more than a quarter of it in a week!), and got the top all put together, minus borders, only 3 days before the deadline.

But there were still borders, layering and quilting, and binding to do….

It didn’t happen.

In fact, I haven’t touched it since, and that was three weeks ago. It’s not exactly out of character, leaving things to the last minute (right, mum and dad? ;-)) but usually I manage to pull it off. Not this time. Sigh. I’m disappointed, but I do still intend to finish it.

Maybe in time for next year’s fair.

A week ago, when it was hot, we decided to sleep in tents at the far end of our yard. Seems a little crazy, so close but so far from the comfort of our normal beds.

It was fun, though. I was in the big tent with Timothy, and opted not to put the rainfly on to start with, because it was such a beautiful clear starry night and I wanted to look up through the netting at the sky. Which was great and beautiful til I was woken at 5am by the rain coming in and we had to leap up and put the rainfly on in a hurry!

Eric and Ben were in the smaller green tent (Eric’s from his childhood). Don’t they look all cozy in there?

Still soundly sleeping, long after Timothy had dragged me up and out.

The boys really seemed to have fun. I think this is something we’ll have to do more of!

We’re at the point now where many of our meals are coming from the garden.

Two out of five potato beds are dug up, the last quarter of the second bed yielded over 10lbs of nice red potatoes. We’ve started eating carrots and parsnips, broccoli, green beans (but only the yellow bush beans are ready, so are they really still called green beans?), and zucchini (although I’m still waiting to feel overwhelmed and eager to give them away).

All five cauliflowers were ready in a space of two weeks, so three of them are in the freezer.

We’re still eating chard and salads regularly, and tonight we ate baby beet greens because the bed needed thinned. The herbs are all going crazy.

The first tomatoes are nearly ready. We have peppers and tomatilloes coming, pumpkins getting big and butternut squash starting to form. There are flowers in a couple of spots in the garden, just for a splash of color.

Oh, and the blackberries are ready! We’ve made one batch of jam so far, and I threw some in banana bread the other day. There’s a big bag in the freezer too. Lots and lots more coming.