Making progress

A lot of our "family time" the past two days has been spent getting the garden planted. The weather has been perfect for it...not too hot and just dry enough to dig. During the wet days earlier this week Paul and I made a couple of visits to the local garden centers where I was enticed to buy some beautiful plants of broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and cabbage. These are things I have never grown and which we do eat, so it's kind of exciting to try growing them ourselves. Plus they are good to grow now, and I've found that my enthusiasm for gardening wanes as the heat and humidity hit us during the summer. I've about decided that we'll just grow herbs, pumpkins, and green beans and flowers during the summer. Definitely not tomatoes or corn, since they are hard work and are so easy to buy at the local farmer's markets.

The peas are up!



Some of Paul's time has been spent reading The Diary of the Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney and writing and drawing in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid Do-It-Yourself Book. This one of the few times that Paul has freely, on his own, with no encouragement (or coercion!), read for fun and it's so great to see. While Paul reads for school and loves to have me read to him, left to his own devices he chooses not to read on his own. But he's excited about this series and happily reads it not only during our newly inaugurated "family reading times" but in the car and in bed as well.



The mess in my sewing room has evolved into sixty-one 9 1/2" quilt blocks. Whew! As I thought about sashing and quilting them I realized that I'd probably run out of steam and never finish on time. Plus this is going to be one big quilt and I wasn't excited about maneuvering it under my sewing machine to quilt it. When my clever friend Leanna suggested that I try a "quilt as you go" technique, I decided I would. I cut a strip of backing and batting and am applying the sashing strips on the top, with the sewing line making the quilting line. You can get a pretty good idea in this photo.



The trick, of course, will be joining the strips. And the trick to that, apparently, is not extending your quilt batting into the seam lines. Which, come to think of it, means my batting should have been nine inches wide, not the 9 1/2 that I cut. Well, I'll do that on the next strip and have great confidence that I can work it all out. I'm a great one for working things out as I go. I love to see how it all comes together at the end.