Category Archives: crafts

The Quilt Revealed

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(Warning to all skilled quilters: You might want to skip this blog post, as it will probably be too painful to see!)

Darling Daughter Pippin is expecting a baby soon, so a couple of months ago I decided to sew a quilt for this grandchild, using the simple pattern of two tied quilts I had done in the distant past.

But I couldn’t remember quite how those were put together, so it took some scribbling before I could remember the fundamentals of this design.


After I figured out how many colors to use, I went to the quilt store
with farm or outdoorsy theme in mind. We don’t know the sex of the baby.

I thought there would be a plethora of possible fabrics, but after looking for an hour,
these seemed to be the only ones that would work for me.

I washed the cotton cloth in hot water and hung it to dry…

…then cut the pieces out.

You can see how my initial design calculations were off! Also, I made a goof in measuring and cutting one of the fabrics. Methodical, I am not. Woe is me.

But in sewing I tried to fudge everything together. Two of my children said,
“Aren’t quilts supposed to be kind of folksy that way?”

I zigzagged the seam allowances to give me confidence
that things won’t fall apart in the wash.

Here is the top all completed.

It takes a lot of pins, held up by Chinese quints, to put the three layers together. I used polyester batting and Minky backing. Then I tied it with an orangey-brown embroidery thread, using all six strands. Before tying, I thought, “I bet there is something on the Internet about the proper knot to use.” And on my first hit, I found a short and sweet video that showed me how to tie my quilt with a surgeon’s knot.


After begging advice from several crafty friends, I ended up with binding along the lines of what my husband had recommended. I would have preferred something a little darker, but nothing else seemed to be “it.”

Mitered corners were my plan, but of course I didn’t want to take the time to study the online lesson of how to do them properly, so I did as I have done in the past: sewed fake mitered corners by hand, with mostly blind stitches.


Then sewed the sides with the machine.

Voilà!

What I did have left over was some of the binding fabric, so I made a gift bag from it. My intention was to make it a drawstring bag, but I ran out of time. It has a black-and-white checked bottom, with a cardboard insert.

Everything was finished in time for the baby shower this past Sunday, a few weeks before Baby is expected to arrive. All the ladies, and the dad, seemed to like the quilt.


I also like it, now that it is a quilt, and not a series of iffy decisions, a collection of design elements. Thank you all who helped me and gave encouragement!

Back at home, kitty Malcolm is already enjoying the new blanket!

What Am I About?

crafts, food and cooking, garden, home, housework, my garden, quotes, ,



When a man is in earnest and knows what he is about, his work is half done.   –Mirabeau

My trouble is, I don’t know what I am about. Or as we moderns would say, I lack focus. Some days the thousand details to be seen to, the hundred or so projects unfinished, don’t bother me. But today is another matter.

Maybe I am in transition from a heavy thinking period into a time when I need to attend more to housework and at least a couple of those tangible projects. The philosophical questions, and the writing projects–I assure you, just cranking out a few good paragraphs for this blog is a Project– can wait. It occurred to me that I should shut just down the computer for a spell, but then I remembered that if I write even a few words on the subject, it will help me come to grips with my “problem.” And in the process, I’ll share a few things from my week, somewhat haphazardly.

I recently started a new project, just to make things more difficult. A baby quilt for which there is a deadline, of course. Deadlines are just a facet of time, and time is not a bad thing. Christ sanctified time, if that were needed–and I don’t want to start thinking too much here!–when He entered it. So time, and deadlines, are all part of being human, and I mean that in a good way, as Christ was The Human. He had a deadline, the cross, but He never hurried or fretted.

This photo is one of two baby quilts I’ve made, both more than twenty years ago! I don’t want to show you the fabric for the current one yet, because I want it to be at least partly a surprise.

The photo of melon and blueberries is a beautiful image, yes? Those two just seemed to belong together. But it was an idea based solely on the visual sense, and failed completely when tested by the tongue. The honeydew was SO yummy by itself, and the blueberries were perfectly sweet and distinctive in that flavor that blueberries have. But together they clashed, or rather, the honeydew completely ruined the blueberries, and you wouldn’t know by that bowlful of color that blueberries were anything but flat and sour at the same time.

The fruit bowl surprise ties in to another somewhat philosophical point–about our western emphasis of the visual– that will have to wait. If I ever get back to that part of what I am about I’ll post the picture again. It’s pretty enough for a repeat.

There are two types of basil here. The green one is growing in my garden, and the purple-tinged bunch was given to me by K.

I washed it and spun it dry and did make pesto, though she wasn’t sure the flavor would be right. “Everyone” has a pesto recipe so I am not going to post mine. I got it about 30 years ago from a weekly very small-town newspaper, a recipe from a local woman who used sunflower seeds instead of nuts. Since then I have adapted and changed the recipe and switched to walnuts and then pine nuts and back again.

Pesto is infinitely variable. Depending on what you are going to do with it you might want to use more olive oil–or butter, as an Italian lady I knew used to do–to make it more runny. You might like to add some parsley or use toasted almonds as the last recipe I looked at did.

This time I was putting it on toast. We thought the flavor was outstanding. And just for good measure, I’ll show you the pan of zucchini I served that night.

I’ve lately noticed a phenomenon repeated from the past: one spends so much time cultivating the vegetables that it’s hard to get back in the house to cook them into the dinner. B. used to come out in the garden looking for me, asking if there was a plan for dinner that night?

Today I knew what I was about when I did my gardening in the morning! Tonight I will be ready.

I watered the vegetables and made a second picking of Blue Lake beans–wait! Do those look like Blue Lakes? You’re right, most of them certainly do not. A few, from last year’s seeds, are true to type, but my packet was mislabeled. The beans I am getting are mostly sticky, coarse and with a flat profile. They will probably have a bean-y taste, if they resemble Romanos across the board.

Hmm…another surprise in life. If you can’t get what you like, you have to like what you get. I’ll just slather them with pesto and everyone will love them.

Anyway, the green bean tower-tepee looks pretty, especially with that Celtic cross my friend H. gave me in the background.

This last picture is of my favorite flowers this summer, some nasturtiums and lobelia in a big pot that was a bargain at Food Maxx of all places. Year after year I try to get new varieties of nasturtiums to grown from seeds or plants in many places all over the garden, but they never take. Instead, the standard variety keeps growing in the cracks in the concrete around the pool pump where no one sees it.

nasturtiums+ 09

So this year I put two healthy starts in a pot, and with more TLC they are thriving. I’m wondering if I should place the pot over against the fence and encourage some seeds to self-sow in the ground…

Now for a closing thought, before I leave you to attend to the other kind of work–or toil:

Toil is man’s allotment; toil of brain, or toil of hands, or a grief that’s more than either, the grief and sin of idleness.  —Herman Melville


Old-Fashioned Correspondence

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To introduce the postal theme– and for a few moments just forget about the concept of mail that can’t be carried in from the mail box in one’s real hands–I show you this T-shirt we bought in Yosemite last month, at the post office. It was the best clothing deal in the park, and an unusual and historic design: a reproduction of a stamp that was issued in 1936, showing–Yes! my beloved El Capitan! If you have ever beheld that rock I trust you won’t find its frequent appearance here tiresome.

I mostly wanted to tell about postcard-writing, and the shirt isn’t very pertinent to that…though it just occurred to me that one might buy the shirt at the Yosemite post office and then write a postcard sort of message on the fabric before mailing it in its more personalized form. I don’t think I’ll run right back there and pick up a few more, though.

When I was a child, my maternal grandmother would send postcards to me and my siblings from wherever she was traveling. I recall receiving word from Turkey, Norway, Mexico, and Hawaii. She also wrote very entertaining letters from home. As she has been a major role model for me, it’s no wonder that I feel it a natural activity as a human being to share my life in this way with those I love.

It’s easy when on a journey, away from the usual housekeeping duties, to remember friends and family and take the opportunity to let them know I do think of them. A trip just doesn’t satisfy if I haven’t dropped a dozen cards in the letter-box.

This picture was taken at the Grand Canyon. When others in our party were hiking down into the gorge one morning, I walked all over the place looking for a picnic table with a view, from which I might write my cards. That was not to be found, but in a sheltered courtyard I did find a good spot, away from wind and next to a big stone with rain water pooled in a depression on the top. I didn’t notice this rock until I was startled by a raven who swooped down to drink.

Postage “just” went up again. It now costs 28 cents to mail a postcard. On those first envelopes carrying my grandmother’s address in the corner, the stamps on the other corner said “4 cents.” I can’t imagine that a postcard was more than a penny.

One thing I inherited from my father recently was the stamps from his desk drawer. There are some pretty old ones, from when a letter was 25 cents. If they still have stickum on them I use that, and if not, I apply a little Elmer’s glue and save my pennies by using these old stamps.

I also “inherit” stamps from my father-in-law, who gets them (less and less, now that he responds infrequently) from charitable organizations that want him to send donations. They come to him already sticking to envelopes, but I cut them off and glue them on to our own bill payments. Some of my collection are in the photograph above. If you want to see the stamps up close, just click on the picture and you can see an enlarged version.

In California it seems that every town is a tourist town. At least, I find postcards in all the stores. But in some locales, the market has yet to be discovered, and I have to make my own postcards, which I learned to do from Martha Stewart, who gives us this handy template and instructions for using it. I’ve made these one-of-a-kind cards with photos of someone’s backyard, or a lake that is small and unknown, or a town that is seemingly too plain for the professional postcard people.

But why restrict this fun habit to traveling days? I started sending postcards to the grandchildren and friends any old time. A postcard is small enough that I can find time to write a few words while the iron or computer is warming up or perhaps even in the middle of the night when sleep won’t come. I don’t think old-fashioned correspondence of this sort will ever become obsolete or unwelcome.

Joanna and the Beanstalk

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About this time in the last couple of years I was planting seeds of these large pole beans called Painted Lady. It all started one springtime when my friend L. asked me to come to her house and see the puzzling beans that had been growing there after having arrived from she-knew-not-where.

When I saw them, there was new spring growth of runner beans with large leaves and gorgeous flowers, and there were a few pods left on the vines from the previous fall. Inside the pods were large speckled dry beans. I had never seen anything quite like them.

I went home with a few of the beans for seeds, and searched online garden sites for plants that matched the description.

It didn’t take long before I found identifying pictures and information stating that these are the only pole beans with a bi-color flower. They are called Painted Lady after Queen Elizabeth I, who earned that nickname for wearing a lot of makeup. There were sites where one could buy seeds. One woman was selling a packet of five beans for a tidy sum. But I got mine for free! I planted them pretty soon, but it was too late in the season for them to do anything but make a few flowers before they were cut down by the frost.

L. had more beans again that summer, though, and she gave me more, which I planted earlier and more successfully, as you can see by the photos.

Not only did my second planting grow well, but the plants I had started too late the previous year sprouted again–they are perennials! These beans are too good to believe. Who ever heard of a perennial runner bean?

Everything about Painted Ladies is large. The flowers, the leaves, the pods, and the beans. The vines want to grow to the sky. I strung jute twine vertically along the fence, tied loosely at the base of each plant, for them to hang on to as they twisted upwards.

We never solved the mystery of how they got started. The seeds seem a bit large for a bird to drop in, and L.’s neighbors don’t garden. In any case, It felt magic. The fairy-tale seeds grew vigorously and rewarded me with the harvest in the top photo. I wanted to share the bounty and the adventure with my gardening friends, so before I cooked any of my pile I measured a bit more than five beans into packets to give away. I saw too late that I had accidentally named Queen Victoria instead of Queen Elizabeth on the packet. 😦

The beans when cooked have a typically mealy texture, and not a strong flavor. The skins are somewhat chewy. I’ve only used them in soup.

This week the rain or drizzle has been constant, and forcing us to put off planting the garden. I’ve been thinking a lot about how much work there will be when the ground dries out just a bit. But just writing about this happy gift makes me remember the surprises that make me glad to be out there doing my part to be ready for heavenly blessings.