garden put to bed

It's been a long hot summer, but now everything's quiet. The annuals are out, the bulbs are in, everything is mulched, and the catalogs haven't arrived yet. I surf the web and make ambitious lists of veggies for next year.

The front flower bed did very well IMO. The butter daisies settled down -- i.e., one died and one never made much growth, but one became a giant and the other 2 did very nicely. The lantana also did very well, and lasted into several frosts. One lantana had a root stretching clear into Kansas. In late summer I planted some Salvia pitcherii and some Aster 'Monch' from High Country Gardens. The asters were horribly pot-bound and one never looked good (HCG will replace it if it doesn't make it through the winter), but the salvias just love it here and are still popping the odd blue bloom. A few weeks ago I added some specialty daffodils from RD Havens (aka Grant Mitsch), and Narcissus 'Mondragon', N. 'Hillstar' & Tulipa 'Antoinette' from Brent & Becky's Bulbs. Spring bulbs blooming in the lawn are so charming IMO, so I also planted N. 'Bahama Beach', Crocus 'Lilac Beauty', C. 'Romance', Scilla sibirica, and a grape hyacinth whose name escapes me, in a gentle curve echoing the driveway. All these also from B&BB. Some friends of mine went to a Korean wedding, at which they were given little favors of jonquil bulbs. They gave me a pair, and those are also now in the lawn.

The future is yet to come in the mail, but I have ordered, from Pickering Nurseries in Canada, 3 rose bushes for April 15. Kinda takes the bite out of Tax Day! I intend to plant Applejack, Dr. Eckener, and Alchymist in the front flower bed right up against the house, so A'jack runs up the side of the chimney, Dr. E tantalizes the kitten through the living room windows, and Alchymist wrestles me to the ground every time I go into & out of the carport. Bliss! I was in Phoenix for a workshop a few weeks ago, and happened to walk through a rose garden during some time off. Not much was blooming there, but the general rose perfume was still intoxicating.

The veggies are another matter. Next spring I hope to plant them all in a raised bed in the front yard, where I'm reliably reminded to water and weed. I have some large pots and hope to get boards & fasteners. Into the pots will go, I hope, potatoes from Ronniger's and leeks. In the 4x8' raised bed I would put globe artichokes, snow peas followed by tomatoes, lettuce, bok choi, swiss chard, and some plants that will repel the bad bugs -- marigolds and either feverfew or rue -- and some that will attract the good ones -- hyssop and dill. The idea is to grow myself stuff I like that either is too expensive in the store, or that tastes so much better fresh it's silly not to grow it, or that's so easy to grow it's ditto. I'll get 3 catalogs I've asked for (Ronniger's, Seed Savers' Exchange, and The Cook's Garden), plus lord only knows how many more, and will be in clover (New Zealand White from Johnny's Selected Seeds).

The situation is getting very elaborate, what with the raised bed frame, the soil I'll fill it with, where I'll put it, and tomato towers, seed starter kits, grow lights, and repairing the organ. Oh, yes -- the idea is, not having had any guests in the past year, I'll convert the guest room into the music room, swap the organ (currently in the living room) with the futon bed/couch, and also put in a table on which I'll have the grow light and tomato & artichoke seedlings. And have someone in to make the organ playable, and dig out some of my old organ music, and try to practice while defending the tomato seedlings from the kitten. My old organ teacher has already indicated she'd be happy to have me back. Somebody please remind me also to get the lawnmower serviced!

I even got a little something done in the sewing room -- but that's for another episode.

gaude, gaude

Well, today the quilt "Serendipity" is renamed to "Gaude, Gaude". I just cannot resist a pun, and whenever I describe the border to someone that's what I call it. May as well make it official! The border, btw, is colorwash, mostly red - orange - yellow - tan - cobalt - magenta - pink - mint. Actually much more attractive than the color list makes it sound. The darkest of the 28 fabrics curve in a vertical wave from edge to edge, and at the extremes I've inserted half-stars, fussy-cut. 8 2" squares will make a 12" border. I'll have some plain slabs outside the colorwash to frame it.

The butter daisies are drama queens: every day it's either "I'm dieing of thirst!" or "I'm drowning!" I'm going to plant lantanas in their place. This is a major change for me: I first saw lantana growing as the perennial it is in Sta. Barbara, CA, and ever since I left hardiness zones 8+ it has just seared my soul that they're too tender in the colder areas. Well. Now it's also seared my pocketbook. I may have to dig them up and try to overwinter them indoors.

Meanwhile, my first daylily has popped a bud; today there were two blossoms glowing a pastel terracotta and yellow. I have others, all different colors, but the first one is magic -- as all the first blossoms are. My tomatoes have laboriously squeezed out a single button that may become a fruit if the squirrels leave it alone. I've already eaten some of my chard, the victims of the first thinning. In addition to the lantanas I have baggies full of daylilies and irises, from the garden of a friend who wanted to thin out her plants a little. If it weren't so dang hot I'd transplant them tonight. But they'll keep for a little while. The rabbits and squirrels have gotten out of the habit of munching on the baby Cladrastis, so unless it gets buried in ice this winter it looks like it'll live. Gaude, gaude indeed.

with butter daisies all in a row

Front flower bed stretches across the front of the house from the front step to the carport. It's bounded by the step & driveway, and the house itself, and the brick paver walkway I laid by putting the pavers right down on top of the grass. Don't scold. I'm 54 and not about to dig up the sod, even things out, pour sand, tamp it, grunge up some concrete, lay the pavers, sweep more sand into the crevices, and then curse the whole mess because 2 pavers are in wrong way round and immoveable. Nor can I pay for someone else to do it -- the school salary isn't that much more than the church salary was!

Two weekends ago I dug out the irises and most of the weeds in the flower bed -- quite enough digging without laying the pavers! -- including the sod in the notches created when I laid the pavers diagonally. (It looks fantastic, btw, much nicer than laying them normal to the house would have been. And I had a purpose for those notches, too. Read on!) There had been two problems with the irises. First, they had grown together so tightly they were hardly blooming. Second, when they did, the flowers were white, which just disappears against the white siding. Rather than paint the house I decided to replace the old irises with younger, more widely spaced, and more colorful irises.

It wasn't just irises and weeds, either. A previous owner had edged this bed with limestone posts set on their sides, 10 1/2 of them, each one about 4" square by, what? 15" long? Something like that. A bear to pry up out of the ground, and then they left a trench. I filled it with what I had at hand: cotton burr compost for part of it, and composted manure for the rest. They're now on my useless sidewalk, getting the dirt washed off in the rain when we have rain. They're good for keeping pots off the concrete, so they can drain properly.

One evening we had a rain shadow -- cool air blowing westward from thunderstorms traveling east -- and I was able to get out there and dig out the last 15 square feet of wild violets, dandelions, bindweed, and grass. So the following Saturday, that would be last Saturday, I went to a nursery and got plants. I hadn't been to a real nursery in a while: there's one in Independence but they're odd -- they go through spasms of not wanting to sell me stuff. So I went to one in Liberty. I was shocked at the prices -- they seemed so high! But later I went to the local hardware store and their prices were almost as much and the plants were in wretched condition -- so I'm glad I paid the dollar more for a trunkload of healthy, robust plants.

I did get what was on sale, mostly: portulaca, thyme, potentilla, and melampodium. The potentilla is a low-growing version with the standard buttercup-yellow flowers, and they popped into those walkway notches very nicely. I got 4 varieties of thyme: T. serpyllum, T. praecox, wooly thyme, and silver thyme. The first 3 are also very low-growing, and also went into the notches beautifully. The silver thyme is a variety of T. vulgaris, so it grows taller, but it is so lovely, and very strong-scented, I just went ahead. Some of it is in the notches, some in a row behind the first.

A previous owner had sedum, a very large, compacted plant of large blue leaves, in a corner of the bed, and I had kept it as other things left -- a white rose, the irises, volunteer oak, maple, and redbud trees, and those weeds. Now that all the grunge was out, I also dug up the sedum, but instead of throwing it away I split it into 8 pieces and planted them, some in the notches and some behind, between the notches. Aside from one section which the mail carrier has a hard time not kicking, they've settled in well and look like they may be growing, too!

Behind the notches, up the middle of the bed, I planted 38 portulaca (I'd bought 40 on sale, but one cell was innocent of all plant life and I broke a 2nd when I stopped mid-planting to pull a violet and pulled the portulaca off its root instead). Doubled flowers, a soft yellow, a variable peach pink to rose, and a good strong reddish orange. They didn't like life in their cells and flopped around a lot during the planting ordeal, but we had 3 hours of a good, gentle rain and they couldn't be more pleased now.

A couple clumps of melampodium, common name butter daisies, add a little higher punctuation of yellow, and I'm promised that they will seed all over so they will join the wild violets as something I'll never be able to get rid of. Today this is a good thing! Ask me again in 5 years. All these annuals and crawly perennials join a witch hazel which I put in the bed next to the front step a few weeks ago, and 3 daylilies which were refugees last spring from a bed around the corner of the house, which would have a long row of them except I hit bricks where the last 3 would have gone. So they're out front. Add a layer of cedar mulch (and it needs another one, to cover the bare spots I missed because it was getting dark as I finished up) and you'll see a warm-colored nice little flower bed with lots of potential and a bunch of rather happy plants.

The irises are ordered, also daffs and tulips. The irises will add some blue and pink to all this yellow & orange, although I'm thinking of putting the pink irises & daffs off to one side, where there are currently pheasant-eye daffodils in sore need of thinning out, and dark irises. (Now, where's the sense in planting dark irises in the shade and white irises in front of white siding?) I wish to order some more daffs, and there's space in that bed for 3 roses. Oh, so many lovely plants! So little time, space, money, and energy.

Irises: www.suttoniris.com
Daffs, tulips, crocus, grape hyacinth, squill: www.brentandbeckysbulbs.com
Very special daffs: www.web-ster.com/havensr/mitsch/index.html
Roses: www.pickeringnurseries.com

futurequilt

Just wanted to get down on e-paper my ideas for future quilts.

- Feathered Star (UFO border round robin): put 1/2 Bethlehem Stars on the pillow end; add slabs to the other three edges and applique vines and 3-D flowers on them, the vines crawling up onto the top of the bed & blooming. Maybe some patchwork flowers and/or mini-stars in the slabs. Pixie may try to eat the 3D flowers; otoh, she's growing more sluglike every day, so by the time they're done, they may be safe. Broderie persed birds, too.

- Streets of Heaven (UFO block round robin): split the collection of blocks into 2 piles, sash and tie them for 2 baby quilts to raffle off.

- Tree Skirt (UFO block round robin): make it!

- Card Trick (DW (dream-work) block round robin): see how many I get and what colors; sash; maybe baby quilt(s)

- Balinese Roosters (DW): if the panel's colors are good for Margaret or Hugh, make her/him a bed quilt using it as a focal point. I see lots of triangles in bright red or blue with this but nothing more yet -- pretty good as I haven't seen the rooster fabric in person yet!

- Something with curved seams.
- A Log Cabin or Pineapple quilt.

Aside from Margaret and Hugh, I would like to make quilts for Deanna, Darrelyn, Dolores, and Judy, and baby quilts for Isabella and Amy's tot-in-progress.

serendipity

Yes, the newest quilt is still called "Serendipity"! The medallion, the part that lies on top of the bed, is completed, and it's a wonder how the two streamers, one mostly blue and the other red & orange, swoop around each other on it. I did draw it on graph paper, but seeing it in pencil with "red" written in one space and "blue" on another gives no real indication how it'll look with the actual fabrics. It's really extraordinarily cheerful, so the name is good.

I've now designed and started to make the borders, the part that hangs down the sides. I like to make the corners fancy; even my very first quilt, which has plain slabs of fabric for the borders, has little squares marching diagonally across the corners. What I'm putting together now for each corner is a fussy-cut star, edged with some other fabric, itself edged with the very pastel mottled fabric that on my graph paper I've labeled "white", and then the 12" square finished off with more of that other fabric. It looks like the f-c star has a white halo on it. My f-c stars are stitched all together, and now I'm adding the background fabric, squares and triangles, to square the blocks. It looks really cool.

The head of the bed, I don't put much of a border on it -- if I did it'd only get tucked down between the mattress and the headboard, if I had a headboard, or the wall, which is my current situation. So instead of working hard on something creative that won't be seen, I don't make a border at all. Well, just a little one, the bit I grab onto and pull when the quilt slides down at the foot, and what Pixie noses at when she wants to nap under the quilt just like her mom. What this has to do with the corners is, there isn't a corner to put a haloed star on! OTOH, I don't want the border to just run on and then stop, as if I'd run out of ideas! Heaven forbid anyone get that impression! So at the head of the bed, the border will start (or end) with a half a f-c star, with a halo. Between the two corners, on the 3 sides, I plan to scatter 1/2 f-c stars, without haloes, against the top or bottom edge, and between the f-c stars, a colorwash streak, really, in a curved flow. I've picked out 22 fabrics, including the 12 "colored" fabrics of the top, for the borders. I expect it'll look very nice, too, and a little heavier than the medallion, which seems appropriate to me as the borders' job is to anchor the medallion. The whole border will be about 15" wide, maybe 4" wide on the head end.

Meanwhile, outdoors it feels like someone is running a mondo enormous hair dryer -- hot, windy, and dry. Yesterday's high, 92, broke a record for 4/13 of 88 degrees that stood since 1935 or something ridiculous like that. The daffs are shriveling. I've mowed my front yard 2ce and back yard once, and run the sprinkler on the front 2ce already. I've ordered a Cladrastis and a witch hazel for the front yard, to be planted on Mother's Day weekend, but I have to keep watering if I'm to be able to get a spade in the ground at all by then. And it's way time for me to start the tomato seeds! They predict rain for tomorrow night, just when people are going to Easter Vigil services, but really if any is to hit the ground the air has to get a lot more humid. At this rate no one will need umbrellas tomorrow.

patchwork

The quilt heretofore named "Doppler Shift" or "O My Stars and Garters" is coming along nicely. All five fussy-cut stars are made, even the one that will droop across the border, which means that the border is also designed. Slices #7-19 are in the process of being sewn together. #17-19 actually have the first fussy-cut star embedded in them, and it looks just dandy. And I can't think of a name for the thing. I want a happy name that's neither flip nor gooey, and also doesn't indicate something that that kind of name would normally indicate. For instance, "Razzle Dazzle" implies a lot of metallic ink, or at least metallic rick-rack. Nope! Oh, well, the right name will come along.

In response to the warmest January on record, and a February that had its warm days, too, the daffodil blades are slicing through the earth both in my front yard and on the school grounds. I was reminded that I also have itty bitty crocuses along the side of the house, and if it doesn't rain this weekend I should go out and water them. We had our driest Feb. on record just now. The front yard is covered with leaves but the back is gasping -- and I should put up the birdbath, too, give my girls some entertainment, not to mention the birds.

A grove of trees grew on a hill, and someone found the shade, beauty, cool breeze, and singing birds highly conducive to meditation and prayer. Likeminded friends agreed, and the words, song, and movements they made to bring them into a meditative state evolved into what they considered to be a religious ritual. At some point someone decided that this ritual was what made the space sacred, and an equally beautiful, healing, and utilized grove on the next hill over was not because the ritual had not been performed there to this self-proclaimed authority's satisfaction. Then a tree died, undoubtedly of old age or disease. So the religious community replaced all the trees with a marble shrine, and the authority required that the ritual be repeated so that the marble tree space be officially sacred. Then the next hill over could not have a sacred grove even if the worship were ritualized, because the grove had to be made of marble to be sacred. Later on, someone from out of town took shelter from a storm in the marble shrine, and herded his goats into it so they wouldn't get soaked and catch pneumonia, and the authority declared that this un-sacred use of the shrine desacralized it and the ritual would have to be performed all over again. Finally, the religous community gave up on all this bumpf and moved away, and the authority looked for other people to hold power over, and the roof fell in and the birds flew in and out and the trees grew up through the floor. And romantics from far away came to look at it and exclaimed at the sacredness of the space.

We have two bishops at present, an Emeritus and an Ordinary. The Ordinary, well, I don't know if he requires the ritual, the marble, or both to call a space sacred. He has looked at the chancery's meeting space and declared it not sacred. This is a building filled with people who spend their days laboring, for very little pay, for the benefit of the greater religious community of this area. IMO that by itself makes the entire building a sacred space! The meeting room itself has seen many masses and other prayerful meetings, and IMO that by itself makes that room a sacred space. The Emeritus agrees. He, and the employees who were there with him, walk into that space, and for them it resonates with the sacred events it has housed. The Ordinary sees nothing sacred about the employees' devotion to the purposes and needs of the Church. He walks in and sees only a place to stable his goats.

Update on the quilt name problem. Today I'm liking "Serendipity."

a star is born

A week or two ago, after creating a transparent plastic template for 45-degree diamonds, I spent a few minutes putting the template here and there on the different fabrics of my bargello WIP, "Doppler Shift". I concluded that none of the fabrics was particularly good for fussy-cut stars. I considered sewing strips of two different fabrics together and cutting diamonds with the seam line down the middle the long way, but an 8-pointed star made like that, though spectacular, has 16 seams meeting all at a single point. Very bumpy. Or I could make just plain ol' 8-pointed stars. That was a disappointing thought, so I set the whole issue aside and watched skaters and skiers fall down for a while.

This weekend I decided on the plain ol' 8-pointed stars and sat down to start cutting. One fabric, however, observed that it'd be cute to put a single flower in each diamond and although it'd technically be a fussy-cut star, it wouldn't produce the elaborate kaleidoscope effect generally associated with the technique, so if it were the only f-c star it wouldn't make the others blush. So I did it.

I don't care how you define it, those 24 seams were ALL set-in seams. However, it came out beautifully! I ironed it carefully according to dimly-remembered instructions, and the dog-ears of the 8 seams meeting at a single point fanned out very prettily. The back is almost as cute as the front! So all 5 of the 8-pointed stars on the top of the quilt will be fussy-cut, even if not as gorgeous as what I remember seeing in QNM years ago. (Apparently they're no longer fashionable.) That was definitely 2 1/2 hours well spent.

Last night, while I watched more skaters fall down, and how about those Italian cross-country skiers, eh? hooray for them!, I wielded transparent template and pencil on a poppy print, putting two leaf designs into the frame 4 times each. It'll be lovely. There's a fussy cut awaiting a 3rd floral, and just now I thought of sewing two strips together and then cutting the diamonds such that the seam crosses the diamond diagonally, not straight down the middle. Still only 8 seams to fan out in the center, but nothing plain or even old about it.

Category: small things amuse tiny minds. The coolest thing about set-in seams is how you put the two fabrics together in a configuration that looks like the one fabric couldn't possibly fill the space. Sew the seam. Then rotate the one piece of fabric so that in spite of itself there's a raw edge meeting the raw edge of the other piece of fabric, and sew. Folded fabric everywhere, except right on the seam line. And then you open it up and press, and lo! The space is nicely filled, just as intended. If it weren't that sewing seams edge to edge were so much faster and less demanding of careful needle placement, I'd be tempted to set in seams all over the place, just for the pleasure of seeing the highly improbable come out perfectly.

Tomorrow I have the great pleasure of going to work for someone new -- yes, today's my last day working for my church for the ever-shrinking paycheck -- and my life in general seems much more delightful. This quilt is coming along so nicely (strips #20-35 (of 73) look real good sewn together, and I created strips #7-12 yesterday, too), and I'm feeling so good about the change in employers, that I'm thinking of renaming this confection "O My Stars and Garters". I acknowledge this is something my father might have said, or maybe his mother, but I'm feeling much too playful for the somber "Doppler Shift". And it looks like my fabric choices will make it quite a perky quilt.