Memorial weekend retreat, fishing and yard work progress

My husband's birthday was the 25th.  

He and our son wanted a chocolate cake with ganache. So I made a chocolate cake from scratch with a ganache layer, then a raspberry filling and another ganache layer then topped with raspberry again and covered in chocolate frosting. Nothing fancy for decorations. 

Just extra amount of everything. 

I'll have to call this a MAN cake. 

It was jiggly and bulging in the filling sections.

Crammed full of yumminess.

Who doesn't love ganache and raspberries? 

I spent the first part of the memorial weekend with a couple of friends at a retreat.  We stayed at the Stitchin Tree Quilters Cottage.  There is a quilt shop attached to the retreat house. 

I fell in love with the blocks the shop had on display for the Judy Niemyer quilt Cabin Fever.

So I bought the pattern and some of the fabric.

I'll have to buy more fabric later. 

I didn't want to exceed my budget! 

The pattern I'll use is shown in the smaller pic on the pattern cover. 

I also brought a top which I wanted to enlarge. 

This is my design plan for the borders. 

I added the narrow border and then started working on the piano keys. 

Ugh. So boring. Sewing strips. 

Super ugh!  My math was wrong and my keys aren't big enough. It needs to start and end with a tan key.  Grrrrrr! 

2" short..

This is where I normally would put this project away and work on it a year from now. But I decided to start tackling the awful job of changing my seam allowances from 1/4" to 1/8".  I started re-sewing and then ripping out all of the original seams.   I felt like my retreat time was a huge waste of time. Like driving on a trip to a destination for an entire day and then realizing you drove the wrong way. 

So I kept pushing on and got 'er done. 

Success!  

Now it ends and begins with tan and it worked on all sides. 

One of the gals with me was on a mission.

She was like a machine. 

Cranking out the projects. 

She cut out and completed the prep of all of these blocks.

They are ready for hand sewing.

Then she cut out and prepped these for sewing.

I just love her wool work.

She needed to add baby quilts to her quilt gift stash so she whipped out both of these cute tops.

The other gal in our trio worked on the blocks for a quilt she decided would look better on her bed than on the guest bed.  Ha ha!  I agree. 

It's lovely and has restful colors.

Then after the retreat I went fishing with my nephew and my brother. Unfortunately my nephew only caught one fish.  I spent the day trying to will the fish to bite for him.  

It didn't work. 

I caught these 3 bass and then 10 more after my brother and nephew left. 

I spent the last day of the weekend working in the yard. We had ornamental grass that was not doing well because of all the shade. So a friend came by and helped me dig it out. I gave half to him and then had to replant my half.

My hubby wanted some of it around the gigantic grass he had moved to a new spot. 

Then I hauled rocks over to the drain for the dam. It's so steep it's hard to mow.  And it has been eroding. So we're hoping the grass will help with this. 

But I wasnt able to finish it. 

A storm cell quickly brewed up and it began to thunder and lightning so I rushed inside. 

Good thing. It became very windy, torrential rain and quite a bit of hail. 

Whew!  I'm done working outside for the day.

Time to go in, take a shower, relax and enjoy the last few hours of my weekend.

Crayon challenge done!

My irises are blooming and they are beautiful. 

These were given to us from a lady who sold her home. When we dug them up we had no idea what color they were. 

This is some of the Moss that is growing all over the pond dam.  It is so pretty!  Too bad the weeds are growing too. It's a pain to get them out. 

I decided to quilt the crayon challenge quilt on my old bernina. I wanted to mess with the stitching tension and didn't want to cause any problems with the new machine. 

Here is my "bleeding fabric" mishap.  

I wanted to include this and when I tried to make it bleed it wouldn't!  Who ever heard of batik fabric that wouldn't bleed?

I used watercolor paint.

Ha ha!

I made a Quilt of Valor quilt for my dad and it was presented to him on Saturday along with 7 other veterans. One was a WWII vet!

The Daughters of the American Revolution gave all the Vietnam vets special certificates, a sticker and some buttons as well as this very nice pin.  

Back to the quilt. Once it was quilted and bound, I added the final touches. One was to have a glue gun dripping on it. Oh that would not be fun to have happen!  

Here is the finished front.

Can you see the "dog chew" spot?

(My husband did that with a power drill.

There is a hole cut in one of the blocks. 

You know, when you snip a thread and accidentally snip the quilt?

See the miss matched corners, cut off points and same colors next to each other?  

Here is the back. 

The most obvious is the section that didn't get quilted. The fabric pattern is crooked. 

You can't see the poor tension spot or the awful corners. 

My favorite is the 2 year old drawing on the quilt.  In a sharpie. 

Oh, that was a good idea from one of the quilting gals. Ha ha!

I finished the quilt on 5/21 which was Saturday. 

I spent 8 hours working in the yard on Sunday.

I finished the lower strawberry bed. 

I couldn't get the tractor out with the trailer so I had to carry the 15 retaining wall blocks one at a time from the old location to the new. Then I had to get compost to fill it a 5 gallon buckets at a time. Ugh!  Not fun at all. 

Then I dug the weeds and filled in the holes in the old bed. It is ready for grass seed. 

My compost bins are empty!

I need to fill them up this year. 

It waseems really nice compost this time. 

Maybe due to all the rain and snow we had. 

I was just glad there weren't any garter snakes living in them. 

Ugh. Here is another big project. 

Weeding the stone path. 

I have creeping thyme growing between the rocks. I'm thinking of filling it with concrete. 

Less weeds. 

The peonies are perfect this year. 

Such a nice addition to the white garden. 

My poor columbines are fuzzy with cotton from the cottonwood trees. Kind of cool. 

Ugh!  Cotton fuzz everywhere. 

It sticks to your face, gets in your nose and your eyes. It piles up like snow. It's awful. 

This is one of my favorite late spring flowers. 

Such a fun plant. 

Looks like fireworks. 

Now on to working on my son's quilt and quilting in the mountains. 

Not sure how to quilt the paws. 

Will have to think about that. 

Probably just echo quilt around the entire print.

Raspberry challenge done!

What a wild two weeks it has been. It is definitely spring.  On my way home from work we had a tornado warning. Traffic was stopping on the road. Nobody wanted to drive towards this!  Fortunately I was able to exit and head home. This did turn into an EF1 tornado that touched down.

The skies remained ominous all the way home. 

These are the clouds I saw while waiting at the light close to home 

But spring also brings flowers. 

This is the earliest blooming iris in my gardens. 

It is very short. About 12".

I really like the way this ground cover is spreading.  

It is so bright in the rock garden.

I'm slowly getting enough grass to put on the veggie garden. 

Die weeds die!

Last week I finished the raspberry quilt. 

Here is the butterfly.

The markings for the images iron away. 

I added a hummingbird. I don't think they go near raspberries....

But this one does. 

My first attempt at a meandering stipple!

It was actually kind of fun to do. 

(I did have to remind myself to breathe while I was doing it.)

It is a little hard to see the bird with the stippling 

but it will be fun to see people find it. 

I did have to look up butterfly images to draw this.

I wonder if anyone will find the caterpillar.

Binding on. Done.

(Except for the sleeve and label)

I have to remember I finished it a week ago today.

The other challenge quilt I'm doing is based on a free pattern. 

I found this one online a long time ago. 

The other part of the challenge is to select 4 crayons and base your colors on them. I was lucky and pulled a light orange, dark orange, brown and gray. 

(I wish it had been blue, white, yellow and green)

You can add other colors and use your stash fabric but you have to buy some of the fabric. I had to buy all of it. 

I didn't have any of these colors, that worked together. 

I like using freezer paper for the pattern and starch to turn the edges.

Starch is my friend. 

I love how stable it makes the fabric. 

I took some vacation and had to get some yard work done. 

I had to weed the raspberry patch and turn it from this.....

To this.....

I ended up with a bunch of plants to give away.

We had some extra bricks which dear hubby stacked in the raspberries to get them out of the way.  Unfortunately they were in my way.

So I moved them by the fire pit to create a path.

I also took the blocks from the strawberry bed and built a new strawberry bed. 

This one is çloser to the house. 

Maybe it will help keep the deer from eating them. 

The original bed was like a buffet for them. 

Plants, roots and all. Grrrrrr....

My day ended with seeing a hummingbird on our feeder!

We have them but they always eat when we aren't there.

A great way to end the day. 

The lily of the valley look so pretty. 

(But they are trying to invade the yard)

Grrrrrrr........

So here is the crayon challenge quilt. 

My take on it is to do six blocks, each one worse than the previous one. 

It goes from good to bad. 

I'm going to call it "a good day gone bad."

The first block is good and then the errors or mishaps begin.  

I'm trying to include as many as I can think of. 

It is supposed to be fun and kind of like a "where's Waldo" thing.

See the burn mark on the left?

I did want to include a burn mark but this one was done by accident!

Ha ha ha ha!

Then the crazy weather returned. 

The tornadoes returned. 

This one hit about 50 miles from us. 

They also got monster hail!

They sunk 6" into the ground on a golf course. 

The hail looked like snow!

Then another tornado hit the same day south of us.

Then north of us they had FEET of hail!

That's not snow!  It's hail. They had to bring out the snowplow to move it. 

We had tons of rain. 

We now get the Willy Wonka chocolate river thru our yard due to the construction uphill from us.  The bad thing is that it goes right into my veggie garden.  Grrrrrrrr.......

Progress on the quilt. 

I hate matching up all those seams. 

Fortunately I didn't have to on the yucky section!

This is my bad applique. 

It also has buckling.

It hopefully will mess up the quilting and create a fold.

This weekend I added a lower strawberry bed and planted the upper bed. 

Thank you Jane and Bob for the rocks. 

I used them to terrace the upper bed.

I just have to pull out the remaining blocks from the defunct strawberry bed and finish the lower wall, add compost from the compost bin and plant the remaining strawberries.  I suppose I should mulch them too. 

A friend gave us these irises. 

They make me think of orange and raspberry sherbert.

Marigolds planted around the garden

I just hope the river doesn't return and wash them out.

The top is done!

Now to get backing and quilt it. 

And add the last errors/mishaps.

Hmmmmm.... where to find a dog?

I need the bottom edge chewed off.