Dinner tonight

Gotta' love green beans fresh from the garden.  I've picked these over the past few days.  I didn't realize some had gotten so big so quickly!

Veggies on the patio

I've never been a big vegetable gardener.  I'm pretty good at flowers.  I love a cutting garden.  Shasta daisies, sweet peas, zinnias are all my favorites.   I love presenting bouquets to people.  My mom always tried to take a bouquet of home-grown flowers anytime she was invited to someone's house for dinner.  She could go out in the yard in the middle of winter and come back in with a gorgeous arrangement.

I decided to try a little vegetable gardening this year.  My only problem is that the only full sun we have in the back yard is on our huge patio.  The rest of the yard is shaded by live oaks.  So I've plunged into container gardening and so far it's working out somewhat.  We picked the first tomato this morning.  It's still a little pink, but I didn't want the mockingbirds to find it.

The beans are still pretty small, as are the green peppers.

Here's a picture of the whole garden.  There are cucumbers, several varieties of tomatoes, green beans squash (they aren't doing too well), green peppers, tomatillos, and of course lots of herbs, which I typically grow year-round.  I've already decided I want to double the amount I plant next year.

What's in the hoop?

I've got a couple of things on the design wall right now, but I think I've posted about both of them before, so I'm posting about what I'm hand-quilting today.

This is a Jo Morton/Jo's Little Women pattern, back when Las Colchas had a Jo's group.  I was a faithful attender of the group, but I got tired of just making little reproduction fabric quilts, as, I think, most of us in the group did.  We started just bringing anything we wanted to work on and pretty soon we were a non-Jo's Little Women group and then we weren't a group at all, which was ok.  The best part of the group was getting together with other quilters.  Francine at Las Colchas now has almost every Friday as a sit and sew day and you can work on anything you want.  I usually can't go because of work, but I'm hoping she'll continue in the summer because we do a 4-day work week at the College and I want to make time to attend.

Anyway, I'm hand-quilting, like I said.  Being an occasional rebel, I decided to enlarge the quilt.  I added two more borders, One is just on the top and bottom (where the Baptist fans are in the first picture), to make it rectangular, and then I added 6-inch pinwheel blocks all the way around.  Can't wait to finish.

You can see more posts by people who followed the rules and posted about what was actually on their design walls at Patchwork Time.