Flowers for the Hot Season

Hello,  everyone.  It is indeed the hot season for the garden. 

A year or two ago, we got some tiny Desert Rose plants at the home show. They had tags promising different colors but were obviously young seedlings. This year two of them are blooming.

This one had made a single bloom a month or so ago; now there is a whole collection of the ivory yellow double blossoms. 

This one has single blossoms  that start out dark and get a little lighter as they open.

The desert rose plants are happy in morning sun here. Unfortunately there is an ant colony nearby that is trying to raise aphids on the leaves. Fortunately the green lacewings have laid eggs nearby and I hope the lacewing larvae will chomp the aphids for me. Lacewings are fierce predators on aphids and white flies. 

Bonus Blocks!

Hello, everyone. There were bonus blocks leftover after the patriotic centerpiece was completed. They found their own purpose for existence. 

Several of these, on being stitched out on the white twill, proved not to fit into the petal template for the centerpiece. Also some are thematic in that they have lines from "My Country 'Tis of Thee" embroidered on them. (Not all the lines of the first stanza got embroidered. And one had far too dense of stitching in its test and has joined the scraps pile.) 

I had gotten the white cotton twill for making  Christmas gifts...still on the To Do list...it worked out reasonably well for this. The backing of these little flags is cotton from stash. 

Photographing something at the top of a window was tricky. I finally resorted to doing it after dark, using the room light for illumination. During the day the sunshine shone in and overruled the pennants.

Finished a new project

Hello, everyone.  I finished the Fourth of July project.

This began with a picture on Embroiderydesigns.com, which I looked all over the site and couldn't find it. I did find a similar shaped centerpiece with flowers. So began a hunt for directions and for suitable designs to put on it. 

This was all before they made the patriotic one available through their blog. The blog listing includes the suggestions for designs. The designs suggested are nice, but some of them also somewhat densely stitched. This seems to be a tendency in the "cute patriotic designs" category overall. I used two layers of stabilizer under most of them.

Oddly enough, this year the classic "spirit of '76" image has not been popping up.

It was fun to make this.

Grandma sewing workshop

Hello, everyone.  It's a lovely,  hot summer day today, perfect for a sewing project.

DGD has been learning to sew. Today she made a pencil pouch with an elastic strap. This is a blog post at Sulky.com. It came out really cute.

She picked cheerful colors for it. The blue zip shows well against both the outside and the lining.

Finished a UFO!

 Hello, everyone.

There is a UFO (UnFinished Objects) box in my sewing room. I pulled out something that was at least 80% done yesterday, after finishing the little oblong pouch, and now it is done too. I feel so liberated!

This is from the Sweet Pea online catalog: 

As y'all can see, the Spring table runner was made a while back. Today, after quilting the edges of the blocks and adding an "American Beauty Rose" print fabric binding, the Summer one is also done. It had only been sitting around for at least a year--the first letter was done in an embroidery class at the A Block Away quilt shop. 

I like the instructions that Sweet Pea includes with their patterns, they're clear and have pictures to help with anything confusing. I don't have to open the file in my embroidery software and "watch" it stitch out on screen to try and guess when to put a piece of applique fabric under the needle, and they also tell a good size--even a generous size--to cut the applique pieces out. I'm not likely to start stitching something with too-tiny fabric bits that way.

The one thing I differ with them a little is that I prefer not to trim the batting close on each of these rectangles until the applique is done. It seems to me that my machine doesn't quite stitch as straight going around the rectangle on the first fabric tack down if the batting isn't equally tall on both sides of the previous (batting tack down) line of stitching. It's not like leaving the excess batting there will cause problems, at the end of making each rectangle it comes out of the hoop anyway and that's a good time to trim extra batting away.

Beautiful flowers in May

Hello, everyone. It's early summer in South Texas, but the flowers haven't given up yet. I took some pictures to share with y'all.

Pony beads and Grandma Camp

 Hello, everyone.

These two weeks have been very busy with DGD and DGS visiting every day. 

There is a large stash of pony beads in the house, and we had some fun with them. DGS put them onto pipe cleaners. I had found some projects online and printed them out. He wondered about making a pumpkin, but it turned out to be in peyote stitch, and I couldn't figure it out at first. Later I found instructions in a video. 

He had lost interest by then, so I decided to see what could be done with straight lines. (Think of Ladder Stitch here.) And then tried my hand at making a rocket ship pattern, as the rocket keychain pictured in the Hobby Lobby pony bead ideas folder wasn't actually available at their web site.

The rocket ship, woven with crochet thread. I don't really have the correct cord to weave these beads  with, the crochet string is too soft and thin. And any yarn in the house is certainly going to be too soft.

The pumpkin at the top looks like it will be too floppy. I turned the page over and tried again on one without a nose, which looks less floppy, but am looking for the kind of string that Mr. Bennett uses in his Turbobeads videos. That is stiffer and will hold shape better. 

Larks' Heads for the win

 Hello, everyone.

What are larks' heads? you ask. Well, if you didn't spend formative years in Scouting, you may not know them by this name. Or may not know them at all. The knot is used in weaving and other things, with various names.

This is the table runner/wall hanging from the Sweet Pea shop. It's a machine-embroidered appliqué project. I didn't want to restrict it to lying flat on the table, and I wasn't in love with the stack of three pairs their pattern showed. Others of their table runners roll out in a line and I thought this would actually be better as a line than a double stack. So that's what got done.

But where and how to hang it?

The back side of the hanging. I used the ribbon and drapery hooks method from the zipper holder project a while back in Sewing Club. 

Then I went to hang the banner and discovered that the (vanity-style) rod in the dining room is too fat for the drapery hooks. 

I have previously used ribbons to hang things from the rod, and it occurred to me that it would be perfect for this. And, not wanting to spend forever tying little knots at both ends of ribbons, with attendant uneven lengths, I decided to go for the humble, but classic, lark's head. It's a simple loop, with one end pulled through the other around the rod, and then the drapery hook hangs from the loose end.

Not only was this much simpler than other methods, by cutting all of the ribbons at the same time and making sure the loops matched it was easy to get it to hang straight.

Happy Independence Day to all of my fellow Americans!