Lynn Carson Harris

Thoughtful Sunday

  "If one had to live in town, Miss Hickory had always said, take a house under a lilac bush."

Miss Hickory, Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, 1946.

Progress on the Cobwebs

Spring cleaning in the house has been mixed with bits of progress on other projects. I have finished the spider web quilt top.

The blocks ended up about 10 inches square. If I were to do this quilt again I think I'd try for larger blocks. Mine ended up this size because the triangle guide was made by cutting a forty five degree corner off of an 8 and a half by 11 inch piece of paper.

Also, some of the pieces on the triangle points were too small. By the time the triangles were all sewn together there wasn't much left of the fabric piece to see. This added a lot of extra seam allowance bulk where the eight points come together.

When it is flat on the floor it doesn't look puckery like it does hanging on the line. I think all those bias cut edges are a little stretched and saggy in the photo.
I am pretty happy with it. It is pinned and ready for quilting.

Kim suggested that I make this couch size so that is what I did. P now says she wants this for her bed. She says she NEEDS another quilt, and this one has pink in it!

After graduation I may fix a little tutorial on how I made the blocks. They are not foundation pieced.

Spider Web Quilt WIP

The spider web quilt blocks are made and ready to be pressed.

I had the quilt all arranged on the floor before the triangles were sewn together but it was too dark and the photo was no good. You will have to wait to see more.

P, however, was impressed with the stack of blocks waiting to be pressed.
"That stack is SOOOO big. It goes from the bottom ALL THE WAY to the TOP!"

She keeps me in stitches.

Stash Busting Crew Socks - or Bench Monday Socks

New socks on a Monday can only mean one thing, modeling the new socks while standing on a bench.  I got up this morning, put on my new socks Adele dropped off yesterday in a surprise visit, dragged out one of the new chairs I bought at the preschool garage sale, and took some photos.
The ground in the garden is very soft. Luckily I managed to stay on the chair for the timer count down.

The socks are quick crew socks in K2, P2 ribbing. The yarn is Trekking XXL from my stash.  They were an easy knit for hectic days.  And, again, Adele did a super job of matching stripes all the way to the toe! Thanks.

After the photo shoot I thought I had killed three birds with one shot as they say.
1. Photos of the socks for the blog.
2. Self portrait of the dayI
3. The Bench Monday shot of the week.

Well, P really likes Mondays. This is the conversation from last night.
me: "Do you know what tomorrow is?"
P: "no."
me: "Monday, what do we do on Mondays?"
P: "Take pictures of ourselves standing on things."

yeah, it's what we do.

Soooooo, this is what happened when P got up.

She stole my shot. You only get to have one photo a week in the Bench Monday group.

So. She got the Bench Monday photo and I got my photo shoot for the blog.

I hope you all had a great Monday

Thoughtful Sunday

"I know, up on top you are seeing great sights,
But down at the bottom we, too, should have rights."

"Yertle the Turtle," Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories, Dr. Seuss, 1958.

Tending the Gardens

The boys are off at the Alma Highland Festival this weekend. I think the House Orchestra has five shows plus the parade! M was also running in the 5K race there this morning. I am sure they will be tired when they get home. Since the weather was so nice and we knew the boys would be away, we worked last evening getting the black beans and corn planted.  It goes fairly quickly with three planters. B picks up these planters at garage sales.  The area at the far end of the garden is the black bean area. These rows are the Indian corn. 

P loves to help too.

This morning after dropping the the boys at school at the crack of dawn B did a lot of weeding in the fenced garden.  This evening we planted some sunflowers. P did a little cake and brownie making too.

We pulled a big bag of radishes that were marking rows of carrots, parsnips, and beets. P and I are the only ones in the family who eat radishes so we shared most of them with the neighbor who will juice them.  I have also read that you can pickle radishes. We may try that with the next batch just for fun.
Our lettuce is off to a good start and the first of our peas are flowering.

How does your garden grow?

42 Pounds

D's college choices this spring were University of Michigan, Oberlin, and Cornell. He visited and liked all three schools. Cornell was a favorite for all of us but was just not affordable.  The University of Michigan gave him a good scholarship so he will be staying close to home for college. He will live in the dorm but will only be a  half hour away.

I always thought he was pretty brilliant. But, you know, I'm his mother.  I guess some colleges thought he was smart too. Over the course of a year he got forty two pounds of college recruiting mail. Yea, he saved it. We weighed it. We're weird like that. We are a family of data collectors. We weigh our garden harvest. We just can't help ourselves.  Some of the brochures had really interesting pictures and nice papers. I saved a big box of them for crafty projects.

With all the information that is available on the internet now I am not sure that sending out so much stuff in the mail is a good method of student recruitment. Many of the letters and brochures were never opened. D could tell that many colleges outsourced the recruiting materials to the same marketing firms as many of the mailings followed the same format.  After the applications were submitted we used much of the mailings for starting fires in the stove this winter.
We opted not to order the terribly overpriced graduation announcements or invitations from the company suggested by the high school. (nor any of the other graduation souvenirs in the catalog.) So, I think you can see where I'm going with this... I made D's graduation announcements out of the college recruiting brochures.  I "fussy cut" to get splashes of color, texture, and bits of interesting things.  No one will know that they are from college brochures unless they are blog readers, but they make me happy.

I am glad that I didn't have very many to make.

Garlic Mustard

I may have mentioned before that B is the steward for a nature preserve in our area.  It is a wooded area and the trees and wildflowers there are different from what grows on our property. One of the jobs of the steward is to try to control the invasive species on the preserve.  We went out there on Sunday to pull dames rocket and garlic mustard that can crowd out the native plants.

Many of the spring wildflowers were in bloom.

Some areas were carpeted with large patches wild ginger and trillium.

We filled bags with the garlic mustard plants because if they are left on the ground they will continue to make seeds. 

The day seemed even more worthwhile because garlic mustard is edible.
Yesterday, we made pesto from one big bag of the weeds. It was quite good and we were able to freeze enough for five more nights.  After tasting the fresh leaves I thought the pesto would be strong but on the pasta it had a stronger smell than taste. 

I feel like we have gotten a two for one deal here. We helped free the native wild plants from an invasive weed and have gotten some good, nutritious mustard greens for us to eat.

I promise to have a non forage food post tomorrow!

Thoughtful Sunday

"Misery is when you heard on the radio that the neighborhood you live in is a slum but you always thought it was home."

Black Misery, Langston Hughes, 1969

More Morels

This seems to really be the week for morels! We have picked several times and had another  mushroom feast last night!

Today P and I went out again and found even more that had sprouted since yesterday.

P is good at hunting and picking them.

I think we need to look up some more recipes.