Summertime

Yesterday I worked on my sampler quilt. Throughout the fall and winter the Tacoma Lakes quilters worked on a sampler. Our homework for the summer is to finish the quilt for show and tell in September. I found the perfect fabric at Cottonweeds last Sunday.

I haven't pressed it yet and also need to trim the border on the right. I ripped the strips which worked quite well. I sewed shorter strips to the blocks, then added the long vertical strips. I had some trouble getting the blocks to line up horizontally. I had forgotten how annoying that can be!

For the second vertical strip and the outer border strip I got smart. I marked the spacing on the strips with chalk so I knew exactly where the blocks should be; that way I would know right away which block might be giving me trouble. Everything lined up very nicely after I did that.

Summertime in the garden! Here is the vegetable garden with a little bit of me in shadow. Onions, sugarsnap peas, swiss chard, brussels sprouts, three kinds of tomatoes, zucchini and cukes. Yummy! The "zucchini" seems to be summer squash, but that is fine with me.

I signed up for a quilt class on Sunday. I am going to take Roberta Horton's African-American quilt class at Maine Quilts. This is an all day class on Sunday July 27. Here is part of her description: "African-American quilts offer a wonderful opportunity for the average quilter to break out of the traditional Euro-American quiltmaking mold and do some growing." Yes, indeed. I am looking forward to this class and meeting Roberta. Some of the classes for Maine Quilts are full, but others are not. Check out the website and sign up!

You may have noticed that I have reading list in the sidebar. I am a librarian, too. I have really been enjoying How Green Was My Valley by Richard Llewellyn. It is about his growing up in Wales in a coal mining community and was written in 1941. I'm going to watch the movie soon, too. Here is a quote from the book...

"A fine night it was, with the moon pulling silver skirts behind her to brush the top of the mountains, and the wind humble to have our voices and saying only a little bit himself to show he had one still, and the Valley waiting quietly for us to fill it with song.
Fill it we did, for hours, sitting in the street, with all the windows open and people leaning out to sing, and Ivor conducting from the top of a chair in the middle of the Hill. " Lovely.