All Jammed Up!

What a wild and crazy week! Honestly, I can hardly remember half the things I did or where the time went. But there were several highlights and lowlights. 

On the weekend, I was able to get some sewing done (photos below). On Monday, I visited my friend Ruby who is staying with her sister Cathy (who’s also a good friend). Cathy just had knee surgery, and Ruby jokes that she’s practicing her nursing skills on her sister so she can take care of me this winter. Haha! I took them a roast chicken and lots of veggies and salads, plus a succulent plant as a get well gift for Cathy. I challenged her to keep it alive longer than I would - about a month - LOL. Ruby and I also went out in Cathy’s garden to pick plums and blackberries. 

On Tuesday I went to Weight Watchers and it was good to see friends again. Lots of hugs going ‘round! That afternoon, Bruce’s older daughter Emily and the three kids came down from Idaho Falls and we got to take them to lunch, show them the condo, the grounds, pool and creek, and get a picture. Our son-in-law had to stay behind for work, unfortunately. Here’s a picture of all 6 of us. The kids knew how to set the timer on the phone camera so we could all be in the photo. 

L-R: Bruce, me, Gunner, Abbie, daughter Emily and Deacon

On Wednesday I made plum jam to go with the strawberry, blackberry, apricot and raspberry jams I’ve already made this season. Two batches of plum jam, and neither one set up. GRRR. I’ll be laid up with the knee stuff around the end of the year (depending on surgery scheduling), so I figured that jam would be a great food gift that I can make now and freeze for neighbors and friends for Christmas. No December marathon baking of biscotti like last year. 

Thursday morning saw us making a trip to Costco to stock up on all sorts of things, and then in the afternoon I played cards with my friends at the clubhouse. One friend had asked us a couple weeks ago (or whenever it was) if they wanted her brand new unused bread maker that had too many bells and whistles. Since mine is at least 35 years old and has long since seen better days, I offered to take it when nobody else wanted it. Woo-hoo! I spent that evening reading the manuals (yes, plural), and I understand my friend’s angst. It will be quite the learning curve, but I told her I probably would get into it this winter when things slow down. 

On Friday morning I had my final eye doctor happointment after having had my right eye cataract removed a couple months ago. The eye is now healed, and the doctor’s skilled incisions helped alleviate the astigmatism in my right eye. The eye exercises and drops, as well as the full healing from the surgery means I can now read again without double vision or “ghosting”. I still have the ghosting a bit while trying to read signs from a distance, but I don’t need glasses for driving or mid-range most of the time. Still, I have a prescription for eye glasses that will better match my eyes now, so I’ll get it filled and maybe it will make me feel more secure reading signs when driving. 

Anyway, after that appointment I went grocery shopping and spent the afternoon “fixing” the unset jam with a cornstarch slurry and boiling the jam in small batches. It’s soft set now, and maybe will firm up more. At least it’s a passable consistency, and it is really delicious. It *almost* reminds me of the amazing plum jam that we had in Kenya back in 2018. I keep checking that Kenyan company, but they still don’t export it to the States. Dang! And with the Orange Idiot levying tariffs on anything that moves, who knows how much a jar of imported jam from Kenya would cost, anyway.

Plum freezer jam with new bread maker behind

Aaand, that brings me to the meager sewing I did get done this week. These are all the RSC (Rainbow Scrap Challenge) blocks I sewed. 

Four flying geese 6” blocks (above) and 12 Switchplate blocks (below) at 3x5” (finished sizes)

Other than that, absolutely nothing was done in the sewing room. I didn’t even have time to sew on a button I need to! (But then, just about anything comes before doing mending, right?)

So, I’m linking up to Scrappy Saturday for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. This morning is the final round of jam-making for me: raspberry-peach. And then, I’ll clean off my big kitchen island, drag out the big roll of batting, and proceed to start pin basting quilts. If I have the energy. If not, I’ll just curl up and read. Sounds good to me either way!

Have a great week!

Is it Fall Yet?

Are we there yet? Is it autumn? Oh, wait … summer just started a couple weeks ago. Shucks! Being forced indoors by the extreme heat here in the Western United States is like enduring Pandemic 2.0. (But seriously, if the unvaccinated peeps don’t get their arms under a needle soon, the Delta variant will be forcing the real Pandemic 2.0 on us this winter. But I digress… ) Back to the heat. This born-and-bred California girl is officially stating for the record that I no longer have any desire to return to California. The “good old days” are gone. A summer at the beach and Disneyland don’t hold the appeal they did decades ago, especially when things are burning up around you and water sources are drying up. Oh my, I digressed again. Let’s just move on to something more pleasant, shall we? But first, share a chuckle with me.

Ok, so the best way I’ve found to stay cool is to stay indoors with the air conditioning running, sipping lots of Fresca mixed with Cran-Raspberry juice and sewing in my basement studio. That’s because I don’t fit in the refrigerator, and standing in front of it with the door open wastes energy. So, I sewed. And sewed. And sewed some more. In fact, I sewed so much that I’m going to save some of it (38 string blocks and counting) until next week.

But I do have two Spring Star blocks to share.

And a dark blue mama cat and her litter of five kittens.

And another quilt top from scraps that just needs two side borders sewn on. You can see the orange strips there, pinned along the sides. 

This was a fun little quilt to puzzle out with the scraps that I had. You may remember that these scraps are what I started with.

The plan for the coming week is to get this quilt top and the first scrappy blues quilt top (no picture except last week’s in-process photo) basted, quilted and bound this week. Then I can begin on the next set of scraps, the “bricks”.  I’ll also be sewing up more dark blue blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge’s color of the month. So there should be plenty to share next week. I just need to remember to photograph everything. I think my brain has melted in the heat.....

So I’ll sign off with this picture of Emily and the grands, Deacon, Gunner and Abbie. Emily’s husband Chad had to stay behind in Idaho because their air conditioning went out and he was waiting for the contractors to come to fix it. Hopefully he’ll be joining them later either this trip or another one later in the summer. We haven’t seen him in ages!

Have a good week and stay cool (or warm if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, LOL). Life is good.

Hot Fun in the Summertime!

So many fun things happened last week. Diane Knott, one of my favorite quilters and authors (Scrap Quilt Secrets and Strip Quilt Secrets) was in town for a Handi-Quilter seminar. She was there to learn lots of new things for several days. You might remember that Diane quilted my Lattice Birds quilt, and did a beautiful job. So anyway, we met up for some fun shopping and a photo op at Quilters Lodge in Draper, Utah.

Diane is so warm and friendly, and we just talked and laughed (and shopped) like we’d known each other for years. Truly, a nicer person you will not find! Quilters are such a wonderful group, aren’t they??  That was Saturday, and I was finally rested from two trips to Wheeler Farm earlier in the week.

**************

Wheeler Farm is a county-run historical working farm that is a block from our house. After I retired from my full-time job as a credit manager, I worked part-time at Wheeler Farm as a kids Camp “Cow”-nselor and then as a bookkeeper and docent for almost 4 years. Wheeler Farm is almost 78 acres of trails for walking and biking, plus lots of farm animals (and participatory cow milking), farmhouse tours, a machinery barn, wagon rides, summer camp, pony rides, teaching gardens (in cooperation with the county extension service) and so much more. I have a label (hashtag) on the sidebar for Wheeler Farm that includes all the posts I’ve written about it over the last 12 years of blogging.

So, on Wednesday, Cousin Kim and Bruce and I went walking around the farm just for exercise. And then on Thursday, the grandkids from Colorado visited with their mom Emily (Bruce’s daughter), and we had to show them all the new stuff. These pics combine both visits....

The restored Farmhouse, newly restored gardens.

Looking from the Farmhouse to the west

From the farmhouse you can look northeast to see pastures for cows and horses, old farm trucks and the machinery barn.

Beyond the farmhouse are the two duck ponds. That building below is the Ice House, where they used to store the ice cut from these ponds. It’s also the headquarters for Kids Camp. 

The two ponds above are formed by water diverted from Little Cottonwood Creek, which flows down from Little Cottonwood Canyon (ski resorts Brighton and Solitude). With the spring runoff, they are running at very high and dangerous levels.

Looks like some folks (picture below) are getting a tractor-pulled wagon ride. The little playhouse at the right is situated next to The Lightning Tree (a box elder), so named because it’s been hit twice by lightening. 

Here are some of the teaching vegetable gardens with the in-process Nature Center that’s being built in the background. It’s scheduled to open this fall, but the wet spring later means that it will be late fall instead of early fall.

And looking in the other direction, you can see more gardens.

We loved this little “skep” made of two-by-four chunks of wood. It’s in the center of the nature walk/teaching area for kids. 

Naturally, Cousin Kim and I had to sit in it on Wednesday.

On Thursday, Abbie, Gunner and Deacon rested in the skep and certainly look a lot cuter!

And here’s most of the gang walking along on Thursday. 

The County cleverly had wood carvers transform the stumps of dead trees into wood carved wonders along one of the main walkways of the farm.  Here daughter Emily poses with Abbie, Deacon and Gunner.

Abbie

Gunner

Deacon, Abbie, Gunner

Emily and Deacon

Not to be outdone, Alfie and Darla wanted me to show you their pictures too.

Alfie’s favorite “hang-out” is to sit on the back of the couch and look out the front window shutters to watch the neighborhood goings-on. He even naps like that sometime. 

Meanwhile, Darla sits on the ottoman and pretends she’s asleep. But we know her better; she knows exactly what is going on. 

And a final picture for the week, just because. My volunteer hollyhocks are huge. They were planted several years ago on the other side of that bed, but somehow these sprung up here for the first time last year (ish). They’re just getting started. This picture was taken last week too, and the apricots are almost ready. We’re thinking next week at the latest. If the propped up branches can hold on.....

A Quilt Finished and Gifted

Our son-in-law Chad has returned home for a month from a USAF assignment overseas. He will have to go back for 6 weeks at the end of the month, but for now we are all enjoying seeing him once again. Especially his wife Emily (Bruce’s daughter) and their three kids - our sweet grandkids Deacon, Abbie and Gunner. Although they were able to FaceTime daily while Chad was gone, there is no substitute for hugs in person!

Bruce and I were thrilled that they came over yesterday, Bruce’s last day home before returning to work today. Tomorrow is Bruce’s birthday - the big 70. Or as he likes to say, his dyslexic 7th birthday. Naturally, my card to him is going to be a “Happy Birthday 7-year old” card, with an “0” added in. He’s got it coming, ya know? hehe

So, I have no pictures of the happy visit. They gave Bruce a birthday present, we gave Chad his 2016 Christmas present (the quilt below). We played with the kids and then went out to dinner. Bruce and Chad had a lot to talk about. Both are/were in counter intelligence in the military with respective secret clearances and both are engineers. In fact, if you think of “Q” in the James Bond movies, that is what Chad does. Naturally, their talk was very general, but they had fun comparing places and equipment (1970’s vs today). And it was fun for us to hear about the lifestyle and foods of the place where Chad is stationed.

Anyway, here is a picture of the quilt that I whipped up in record time. Remember, it was a pre-printed panel from Pattern Jam, although I did get to pick out the fabrics before printing.

Look! We took the picture outside! The quilt finished at 62x75” and was quilted with straight (but squiggly) lines.  Chad loved it, and as they are moving to the greater Denver area later this summer, it will come in handy during the winter months.

This quilt is my third of my Finish-Along Second Quarter Goals. It is #7 on the list.

Hot Fun in the Summertime

Summer is here, and as if right on cue, the weather in Utah turned from cool to pleasant to HOT in a matter of a couple days.  

We were lucky to have a visit from Bruce’s daughter Emily, hubby Chad and our two grandkids Deacon (4) and Abbie (2 ½) about a week ago.  They live in South Dakota, where Chad is stationed at Ellsworth AFB.  

Deacon and Abbie loved our itty bitty pool

Bruce brought out a version of telephones (think tin cans tied with string) that he had made down in his laBORatory.  :-)  They are connected by actual phone wire - lots of it - and the kids enjoyed talking to each other on it.

Here, Grandpa Bruce and Deacon went to the utility area of the backyard so they would be far away from the speakers at the other end of the line.

Abbie (on her mom Emily’s lap) loved it and didn’t want to give up her turn so that her dad Chad could talk on it to Deacon.

But she got plenty of other opportunities, so she was a happy camper.  It was so much fun to see and play with them again!  They’ve now returned to South Dakota.

Here Emily and Abbie greet Boomer, and vice versa.  Boomer does a good job of meowing on cue, so  Abbie was convinced he was talking to her as I “interpretted”.   :-)

And my dear little London comes by weekly to play with Grammy, and every second I spend with her is precious!  She has enjoyed “her” pool and thinks I should get in with her.  HA!  Here she is splashing Grammy’s feet, which is about all that WILL fit in the pool!

What is London eating?  Her new favorite that she wants first thing every time she comes - peanut butter and strawberry jam, made by me. She won’t allow me to mix them or put them on bread or anything. She wants them plain, and SHE wants to mix them.

Oh, to be two again!!