Placemats and a tablet case :-)

I've been collecting coffee prints for awhile and this was the perfect project to bust out a few. I'm one of those fabric addicts that loves to "pet" my fabric! So cutting into a piece takes great effort!

I tell myself to "just do it" cut and use, isn't that why you bought the beauty in the first place!! So after I wrestle the demons on my shoulders, I get out the rotary cutter and slice, while a little tear rolls down my cheek. sniff sniff........moving on.......... the tablet case is my own design made with my needs in mind. The coffee cup print is a pocket with a zipper to hold my tablet charger and ear buds. The coffee bean print is padded and machine quilted with a double straight line stitch, with a key ring attached and not shown but added after the photo an elastic cord to hold the carrying case shut. It's just perfect for my needs and makes me smile seeing my coffee print fabric.

The set of four placemats are from my extra EXTRA large scrap collection! I just can't get enough scraps!!!  I have several quilt books devoted to scraps with great plans of cutting my collection into usable uniform sizes.....someday. (wink, wink) Really, I'm going to on a rainy day, we just happen to be in a drought cycle at the present!!!!! So these placemats are for DD and her husband, I think the colors will go well with her dishes and rustic wood décor.

In addition to my coffee print collection, I also collect chicken, sunflowers and Hawaiian prints. By Hawaiian I mean those fabrics collected while in Hawaii!!

 

Today is a sunny day full of promise!

It's the first day of Spring!!!!!!!!!! Bring it on!!

We're in for a treat today!

I'm going to hang our bed sheets on the line today! Sunny and 76!!! Oh boy, oh boy!

Here is the little table/counter topper I made for my daughter for February! Do you recognize any of the fabrics Jean? The inner strip sets are from you and the rest is from my stash. I'm trying desperately to use and not purchase fabric as I have so much! I also made a stuffed pink elephant for my granddaughter K but forgot to get a photo of it so when we are there (in less than a month) I'll get a pic and post it.

K's first birthday is coming up, April 3rd!! Our little sweetie is walking!

I'm almost done with the scrappy placemats for DD and her hubby. I'm so pleased with my usage again of scraps and some stash fat quarters for backing the placemats.

I made a case for my ASUS tablet last week! I've been collecting coffee prints for years now so I picked out a couple and crafted a case with a zipper pocket to hold the charger and headphones. I must get a pic of that too. With the sunny weather I hope to get some good pictures to post.

Hope it's a beautiful sunny day where you are!!!!!!!

 

 

Looking. Looking, Looking (for Spring)!

So very tired of winter, please "Go away"! Who does that sound like kids? We, central Kansas, are some of the sufferers of the endless cold and snow in the Midwest! We did get a particularly beautiful sight back on February 5th, a Sundog!

         

 

It is beautiful and so bright and means that it's pretty damn cold outside!

 Here is the definition from Wikipedia

Sundogs are commonly made by the refraction of light from plate-shaped hexagonal ice crystals in high and cold cirrus clouds or, during very cold weather, these ice crystals are called diamond dust, and drift in the air at low levels. These crystals act as prisms, bending the light rays passing through them with a minimum deflection of 22°. If the crystals are randomly oriented, a complete ring around the sun is seen — a halo. But often, as the crystals sink through the air, they become vertically aligned, so sunlight is refracted horizontally — in this case, sundogs are seen.
As the sun rises higher, the rays passing through the crystals are increasingly skewed from the horizontal plane. Their angle of deviation increases, and the sundogs move farther from the sun.^[8] However, they always stay at the same elevation as the sun.
Sundogs are red-colored at the side nearest the sun. Farther out the colors grade through oranges to blue. However, the colors overlap considerably and so are muted, never pure or saturated. The colors of the sundog finally merge into the white of the parhelic circle (if the latter is visible).

This was a regular site when we lived in North Dakota, but Kansas not so much and that's the way I like it!

I have been sewing and want to post a few pictures of my projects, so will have to work on uploading pictures and post about them very soon.
Here's to warmer days!!!!!!! With notes of Spring!!!!!

Happy Thanksgiving!

 

It's going to be a quiet turkey day here at Wandering Star Ranch, just TheManWhoHoldsMyHeart and myself. With grown children, distance (mostly distance), cost of travel, extended family and time off get in the way of everyone being able to come together for holidays. I should have known this day would come but it always seemed so far off, with all the daily hub bub of living. Since I am now on the other side of fifty and coming up on the golden years I realize the golden years have already passed us by...... They were the years when we were raising our children, dealing with day to day angst, but enjoying family dinners, teaching moments, reading books, discovering nature, dancing to oldies radio in the living room on Saturdays nights, making a mess in the kitchen mixing and baking cookies, crafting ornaments for Christmas, raking leaves and then jumping in the pile, cooling off (we adults always paid the next day for throwing our bodies on the ground) on the slip and slide out in the backyard, playing 500, and lots of board games, we got a new game every year for Christmas! Those times are GOLDEN! So on this day of giving thanks I'm so very thankful for all the family memories of the past and for the new "making memory moments" to come, especially with our granddaughter.

 

Family Fun at Wandering Star Ranch July 2013

 

I hear TheManWhoHoldsMyHeart waking up, so I think it's time to turn on the coffee maker and enjoy a cuppa with the person who help create all those wonderful memories. While I still think the golden years have passed, these are a ummm maybe the silver years to match my changing hair color, I'm really beginning to like my gray!!

I'm back and it's Autumn!

I think our pumpkin display looks "sincere"! So I'm expecting the great pumpkin to come on Halloween! Linus too! And Sally!! I love that Charlie Brown holiday special!  The three pumpkin vines did well this season, we got approx. 70 pumpkins.

I've been very busy with canning and it all started with that June post and just snowballed.

1. Strawberry Jam

2. Mulberry Jam and syrup

3. Strawberry rhubarb jam

4. Yellow tomato salsa and red tomato salsa

5. Canned tomatoes and juice

6. Concord grape jam

7. Pickled okra

8. Apple pie filling, applesauce, apple butter, spiced apple jelly

9. Green tomato jam

and lastly some pear honey as soon as the pears ripen!

  I'm ready to put the canner back in the basement and enjoy the fruits of my many labors!!



It's Strawberry Harvest Time!

Strawberry-Rhubarb Jam (on the left ) & Strawberry Jam
 

 

True to form our June bearing strawberry plants are bearing in grand style, due to very timely rains this spring and some winter moisture. We started picking on Sunday evening and have picked for three evenings straight, my knees and thighs can vouch for that! I've froze most of the harvest along with making these jams. We will probably have several more days, (I'm guessing 4) of productive picking until the harvest is exhausted. We didn't pick yesterday evening, because we received 2.25 inches of rain early (about 3AM) Wednesday morning, a timely break for my hips and knees. We will probably pick again on Friday and over the weekend. I want to make one more batch, or may two of plain strawberry jam. It seems the later in the harvest the smaller the berries so they make better jam. Strawberry jam along with grape are our favorites and the grape harvest shows promise to also be a good one this year. TheManWhoHoldsMyHeart is hoping for a banner mulberry harvest, he loves mulberry jam and mulberry syrup. I'm so-so on mulberries as the seeds are always stuck in my teeth.

This year's garden (knock on wood) is shaping up to be one of our best, all due to getting rain at proper intervals!!! We've had plenty of asparagus, lovely rhubarb, great salad greens of spinach & lettuce,  and spring onions. So can tasty tomatoes be far behind???? We shall see! Oh and my perennial herb plants, especially the lavender (it's blooming), look great! We've been eating the garlic chives and parsley for about a month now! The annuals of basil and rosemary, planted in the last week,  are flourishing and will yield pickings in a few more weeks.

This has been a cooler at times to near normal temps for spring so I know that has helped immensely. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the real heat holds off for another few weeks and the rains keep coming.

 

 



What I did this morning!!

 

 

I finished my obsession with Sookie Stackhouse this morning! While Sookie didn't end up with the Vampire/Shapeshifter/Were (I'm not telling which one) I wanted I guess I'm good with the conclusion. My addiction to the "Dead" novels began in the summer of 2009 and I've been a fan ever since. I've also watched the True Blood series from HBO, but my viewing has been on DVD from the library or Netflix.  The TV series takes a different road and veers away from the novel storyline early in the book series, but I've still enjoyed their direction.

When I needed a fix between waiting for the next Charlaine Harris novel I found another vampire series "Undead/Queen Betsy" by MaryJanice Davidson! Satisfied my need for....blood! LOL

I've read all the series through book #11 and book #12 comes out in August!