Sew and Sow - Well, Almost!

It was a busy and beautifully clear spring week here in the Salt Lake Valley! Everything is greening up and the trees are bursting with pink and white blossoms everywhere. I got a few pictures and things hung on the walls of our new condo (“few” being the operative word), we got the internet and cable all set up, the title company and the HOA got everything cleared up and all funds applied, and we got busy setting up the garage (Bruce) and courtyard/garden (me). Pictures later in the post. 

And I got some sewing time!! This week I concentrated on sewing blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. I finished my 11 crumb blocks for RSC’s Purple March

…as well as the purple scrap column. I don’t think I’ve shown these before, but each column is roughly 4” wide and 58-60” long. I’ll just keep making these in various colors, and neutrals too, until I have enough to sew up into a decent-sized donation quilt. 

So then I moved back to yellow, April’s color for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. I got four 8” (finished size) blocks done. I have the stars blocks all cut out and ready to sew, as well as my yellow strings for the coming week. I’ll be in a good position to get more sewing time in next week as each week progresses and our household moving and settling chores lessen.

Our family contractor decided he doesn’t have the time or “bandwidth” to tackle our kitchen remodeling project. His late wife (our Cousin Carrie) passed away three months ago from cancer. We didn’t know if keeping busy would be a blessing or a hardship for him, so we totally support and respect his choice not to take it on. We do have a connection to an electrician, and we will start there, adding the necessary fixtures and lighting to the kitchen and two bathrooms first. It will give us time to research design professionals for cabinets and countertops. And then will come the painter, and lastly the flooring. All things in time. I hope we can be done by autumn. Time will tell.

I do have some pictures of our courtyard to share with you. It’s a much more manageable size for us than the old house was with a big patio, 8+ grow boxes, lawns, flower beds, etc etc. 

After collecting the necessary supplies early in the week, Bruce set out emptying his bins of projects and electronics and Stuff into the cabinets and built-in storage in the garage. He’s getting excited as his workshop in the oversized double garage gets set up!

Meanwhile, I worked on the courtyard. I trimmed down and dug out 3 barberry bushes (sticker-y things), with one more to go. I’m keeping two smaller ones for their color (dark red/maroon), but trimmed them nicely. I got my blackberry canes planted and the rhubarb and irises as well. Then I weeded and mulched the entire area, hung most of our metal art, and put out some decorations. But the biggest project (this all took 2 days) was filling the pots and Greenstalk vertical garden with potting soil, setting it up and testing it. It works like a charm! 

This first picture was taken through one of the living room windows, through the courtyard to the street. You’re looking east, to the mountains, which are more clearly visible when seated in the courtyard. The Japanese maple isn’t leafed out yet, but the pink blossoms are beginning to appear. 

This next picture shows the fresh mulch, trimmed barberry and garden decorations. There is drip irrigation along this side of the courtyard. Back in the corner there near the short wall is where I removed an overgrown barberry and planted the blackberry bush (bare root at this point). There’s a trellis standing along the wall there - hard to see - that will be home to a climbing rose eventually. And I’ll likely plant a few annual flowers along the front edges. 

This next photo was taken from the front door steps and shows the other half of the courtyard entry area. Yes, there’s an old bird’s nest (unoccupied this season) in the tree. Should I leave it or take it down? You can also see where I sawed off one limb of the tree that was sticking out (low and potentially hazardous) over the seating area. This side of the courtyard has sprinklers. In that front corner, I planted some iris rhizomes that I brought along from the old house. 

Next up is a photo of the seating area. We will definitely need to get an umbrella to shade this area. You can see our neighbor’s umbrella in red over the wall. The orientation of our place is such that we have direct sun in the courtyard until about 2:00 in the afternoon, at which time the house begins to create shade as the sun moves in the west. 

There was a big, bawdy barberry bush (awesome alliteration) behind the love seat that met its demise this week. It’s remnants, along with the limb trimmed from the tree, are slowly being chopped and broken up by me to add in to our weekly trash pickup. One more bush to remove - the red thing you see back in the corner. Good riddance! I don’t know what will go along that wall yet. I’ll take this year to study the light patterns and decide next year. But there is one sweet bleeding heart bush there, which makes me so happy because I had one at the old house. 

You can see the Greenstalk vertical garden there on its spinning base. There are five tiers of six pockets (10” deep) for a total of 30 planting pockets. I filled all the tiers with soil. What you can’t see is the white watering tray between each layer. The very top is the watering bowl that you fill with water. Then the water flows down to the five white trays on each tier. There are holes in those trays for the water to drip out into each planting pocket. So ingenious! I need to wait another couple weeks before it’s safe to begin planting, but I have lots of seeds - basil, cilantro, lettuce, CARROTS!!, spinach, rosemary, and more. And I’ll add some strawberry plants, and flowers as well. Our bigger Talavera pots will house tomatoes and flowers. 

Here’s a close-up of the Greenstalk. The base not only spins, but I can move the whole unit on wheels to chase (or avoid) the sun or foot traffic patterns. 

This will be an easy garden for us to maintain and scale down if necessary as we age. And the lady in charge of HOA gardening for our condo complex has already asked me to provide some of my (presumably planted) Talavera pots for the Cinco de Mayo dinner next month! 

Next week I hope to have some interior pictures to share. Many of them will be “before” shots - like my 1979 kitchen. But the process of making things our own is part of the fun, isn’t it? I hope you’ll be along for the whole process!

See you next week, friends! (And I’ll try to do a better job of answering comments next week! xo

Settling In

 We have moved from our house of 21+ years to the condo. Whew! It was a monumental undertaking. Bruce had been clearing out his workshop all winter, while I worked on the rest of the house. We made weekly trips to the thrift store, gave lots of stuff to family and friends, had two loads of junk hauled away - and that was all before the move. Since we have moved, there has been another trip to the thrift store with donations and another load hauled off by the junk dealers.  I’ll go into more detail later in the post so those who are here only for the quilting stuff can be spared! 😁

I’m woefully behind on my sewing goals, but I plan to take the rest of April and May to catch up. To that end, my first thing to share is the twelve string blocks I made in purple, which was the March color of the month for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge (RSC). 

I still have a couple other things in purple that I need to tackle - crumb blocks and possibly a column of purple coins. Oh, and a red crumb block too. Sheesh! Nevertheless, I began sorting and sewing yellow, the RSC color for April. 

First up - Color Stix blocks. The pineapple one was my prototype block made last fall. I’ve added another yellow and a gold to bring my count up to three of these blocks for April.

My plan is to hit the scraps hard this week to get caught up on all my RSC blocks. I’ve also got two quilts ready to baste and quilt, and eight (8!!!) donation quilt tops to turn into quilts. Yeah, that will keep me busy through May!!

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The Move

Well, we got through it. It was rather The Move From Hell, mostly because of the buyers’ real estate agent who, once the deed (or title or whatever it was) was recorded, was on our cases to hurry and get OUT. Our movers arrived before 8 am (there were 4 of them) and we were not done at noon, the goal time. She was trying to talk the buyers into charging us rent by the hour for the additional 2 hours it took to get everything out. To their credit, the buyers were having none of it. After all, we left them the refrigerator, the living room TV and remote (it was mounted on the wall), most of Bruce’s machine shop machines and work benches, a roto-tiller for the garden grow boxes, garden tools and a daybed and mattresses (their request). I was helping the movers and both Bruce and I were driving carloads-ful over to the new condo to help. The agent was really a downer for us and the movers. Plus, our friends and neighbors were stopping by saying goodbye or offering to help, etc. 

To add insult to injury, when the buyers and their parents went out to lunch, their real estate agent started going through Bruce’s workshop and saying “they don’t want this” and “they don’t want that” - stuff that we thought we’d agreed on previously. So a desk, a filing cabinet and two bookshelves had to be added to the stuff we were trying to cram into the already-full moving van.

And on the condo end, it was an unloading frenzy. We bought the movers lunch (pizza) and they threw in an extra hour of work for free because we “were the nicest people they’d ever worked with”. Ha! By 6:30 pm, they were able to leave. The cats were rather freaked out and skittish for the first day and night, but they’ve mostly adjusted and have seemed to enjoy exploring their new digs. And every night, as usual, Alfalfa is in Bruce’s lap and Darla is in mine.

We’re about 95% unpacked now and we found we didn’t get rid of enough stuff! Having to bring along those 4 workshop pieces, plus getting rid of a couple junky cabinets that were left here, means we had to call the junkers again this week. 

We had a flooring contractor over on Wednesday to check out the floors here in the dining/ family area, which feel uneven. It turns out the subfloor is fine but the unevenness is caused by a formerly nice, thick carpet pad having been worn down in high traffic areas. That was a relief! 

Today we’ll meet with our family contractor to rough out a kitchen/dining room process and timeline. There is NO lighting in the vicinity of the dining table area or over the kitchen sink. In addition to the kitchen remodel, we’ll put down hardwood floors in the dining/family room and down the L-shaped hall.  I’ve got to draft a design plan and start shopping for materials - cabinets, lights, a new dishwasher, etc. So much to do!

Here is just a sneak peek of my sewing cubby room. Small, but it works!

And the other priority for the day is getting our internet hooked up. We’ve been using our telephone hotspots, which are not dependable at high traffic times - hence this post not being published until late this morning. 

Talk to you next week, friends!