Making Jam 2012

 

Yes!  It’s that time of year!

                

The fruit trees are laden with fruit!  This is one of my plum trees …….

        

Yum.  I picked a 2 baskets of these yesterday and look at all the plums I have left!  My neighbors are going to be happy happy today when I share them!

                

It’s not quite apple picking time yet, but you can tell it’s going to be a good year for golden delicious!  The branches are already touching the ground with fruit still growing. 

My poor poor peach trees………

 

This is my June peach tree above.  I have 2 peach trees.  One of then ripens in June and the other one ripens in July.  So I call them my June and July peach trees.  I have long forgotten what varieties they are, but they are both freestone and delicious and that’s all that matters to me!   I picked a huge basket of these yesterday and took them to my neighbor and then came home and picked a bowlful for me and came in and baked a peach cobbler for supper last night.  No picture of that!  LOL.  The tree is still laden.  I will be picking peaches for the next 2 weeks.  Time to make peach jam!  And plum jam!  Busy, busy, busy!

Oh and that July peach tree?  Well, a huge thunderstorm blew through here 2 days ago.  I was shocked to see the damage ………     

           

The bad news is that big broken limb!  The good news is that only one limb was broken.  The limbs were already on the ground because they had so much fruit.

I need to figure out a way to prop the limbs up off of the ground.  I just don’t know how.  Do any of you have any tips for dealing with this problem?  I am open to any suggestion!  In the mean time……

I’ve got jam to make!

 

Enjoy,  Merry Gay

Not Much to Show…..

I know it’s been a long time.  I’ve been busy busy busy, but can’t show you any of the fruits of my labor.    I’ve decided that I want to submit my Dresden Flower Garden for publication, so I can’t show you.  But there are other things ……

I’ve been prowling around on Pinterest.  Have you done that?  I have never seen so much eye candy in my life!

                             

This was up one day last week and I had to paste it onto my desk top for future reference.  I love it!  And I want to make it.  I don’t know what this one is made of, but I’d make mine out of cotton gauze.  There is lots more over there too!  Food!  Oh my goodness.  If I made everything that I saw on Pinterest that looked good to eat, I would get too fat to leave the house!  And tutorials for making all sorts of things …… pincushions, pot holders, hair bows, pillows …… and the list goes on and on and on.  All kinds of neat things.  If you haven’t been there, you should go ….. NOW!

I also now in possession of the box set of the first season of “Game of Thrones”.  (I’m too lazy to get up and take a picture of that, so you will have to visualize it. I’ve been reading the books and can’t seem to put them down.  I wish I could sew and read at the same time.  Have mercy!  Anyway, so now that I’m well into book two, I can watch without ruining the book.  I always like to read the book before watching the movie.  To tell the truth, I enjoy the book more than the movie just about all the time because the movie inevitably cuts out some parts of the book that were really really good; and I’d miss out on all of that if I didn’t read it.  So, I am reading book two and watching book one.

                                                                                                

My cherry tree produced a bumper crop of cherries this year.  I managed to pick a bucket of them before the birds raided it and got the rest.  I went out there one afternoon last week and picked cherries until I had my bucket full.  Then I decided that I would need a ladder and would get it out and pick some from the top branches the next morning.  So I got up and went out onto the front porch the next morning and looked at my tree and ALL THE CHERRIES WERE GONE!!!!  ALL OF THEM!!! NOT A SINGLE ONE LEFT!!!  The birds must have been watching me pick them and decided that I was not going to get any more.  LOL.  I got some jam and some cherry crisp made with the bucket that I had though.  Next up will be plums.  I have an orchard in the back yard with peaches, plums, apples and pecans.  The pest I have to fight back there are the squirrels.  I want you to know that I have 2 pecan trees back there and have yet to collect any pecans off of them!  And I have seen the squirrels carrying off peaches and wondering how they can carry something so big in their mouth up the fence and into the trees!  I’ve thought about getting one of those sonic transmitters like I’ve seen on tv to drive away the little beasts, but I don’t know if they work or not.  Have any of you had any experience with them?  I’d really appreciate any advice you can give me. 

So it is off to my beloved sewing machine for the afternoon.  Janice, I still have not finished that little flannel baby gown that you sent me the bonnet pattern to go with it.  But it is half finished and I’m thinking that I may work on it today since I’m sick of applique right now!  Maybe I will have a blog post about that next week!  I hope so. 

 

Enjoy,  Merry Gay

A Place of Her Own

               

I have to apologize to all of my readers.  I promised this post at least 2 weeks ago.  Sometimes life just gets in the way.  Sorry .  Anyway, here it is.  I made this bed for my sweet puppy, Sophie, a couple of weeks ago.  It wasn’t hard since all the hard work (the quilting) was already done for me and all I had to do was cut it out and stitch it up.  This is an old quilt that was on my oldest son’s bed when he was LITTLE.  It was pretty much worn out.  In fact, it had a hole chewed out of one corner by another puppy which is sadly not with us any longer.  In spite of the hole, I decided that someday I might find a use for it, so I packed it away in my ‘junk room’ JUST IN CASE!  LOL.  I have a whole room full of ‘JUST IN CASE’ upstairs, so I need to get busy!

At any rate, back to the dog bed.  I eyeballed the size and decided that 4 quilt blocks x 3 quilt blocks would be just about the right size for the bed, so I cut 2 of those pieces out for the top and the bottom. 

              

Notice the pretty edge.  The quilt had those fancy edges and I didn’t want to waste the opportunity to use them.  I knew I wanted the edges to extend out from the edge of the sides of the bed, so I cut the edges measuring about 4 inches from the top of the fancy edges.  Then I started sewing.  I sewed the cut edge of the side to the perimeter of the top.  Once that was done, it gets kind of tricky because I inserted a zipper into one side of the bed so that it would fall underneath the fancy edge,  But once that was done, it was a piece of cake to sew the bottom piece to the sides. 

             

Oh, sorry for the bad picture!  Anyway, I did not make an insert for this dog bed, but rather filled it with cedar bedding that I purchased from the pet store.  It smells heavenly.  And when the bed needs laundering, you can just take it out in the back yard and dump it out,  wash the bed, and fill it again with fresh cedar.  It’s working out really well.  At first, Sophie could care less about her new bed, having grown accustomed to the sofa.  (Did I mention that she is spoiled?)  But now, after having it for a couple of weeks, she has warmed up to it.  Now I need to dig out another ‘treasure’ from the junk room upstairs and make her one for the sewing room!

 

Enjoy!  Merry Gay

Meet Sophie!

Meet Sophie Belle, my new puppy.  She is a German Shepherd mix that we adopted.  We have now had her for about 6 weeks and she gets sweeter, and BIGGER, every day.  The picture above was taken when we first got her.  Just look at how big she is now…..

                 

She is about 4 months old, and my constant companion.  Every bit my dog, she loves to sit in the sewing room and watch/guard me while I stitch.  I don’t know how I ever thought I could live without a dog after Alison passed away last October.  Having Sophie has made me realize how much I missed having one.  I just finished making her a new dog bed.  That will be my next blog post.  Until then…..

Enjoy,  Merry Gay

While I’m waiting…….

                

I have come to a complete standstill with my Dresden Flowers quilt.  I have completed all of the applique on all of the blocks.  And I have designed some fancy pieced sashing to go between them.  I am chomping at the proverbial bit to get busy with that portion of the project, but ………. “Houston, we have a problem!”   I had to order more fabric.  So while I wait for the arrival of said fabric at Casa de Merry Gay, I am cooling my heels by making some of Martha Stewart’s heart shaped pot holders.

             

I am making a whole bunch of them so I can share them with my girlfriends, so I have the assembly line thing going on.  First I sandwiched several fabrics.  Then once that is done, just pin the patterns on, cut them out and pile them up waiting for the bias trim.  Fun afternoon!

 

Enjoy,  Merry Gay

In Bloom!

                
                 
The lack of anything new to show you from my sewing room (still motoring along on Dresden Flowers) has left me in a pickle ……… what will I show my blog readers?  So, I took a walk around my neighborhood and am going to show you the show that our April flowers are bringing us this year.  This is a picture taken from my front porch.  I haven’t got it ‘dressed’ for warm weather and lazy days on the porch yet, but that’s another post.
 
Isn’t this lovely?  Dogwoods all in bloom.  But you can see that the jonquils have already come and gone from the fence.  Isn’t it a shame that everything can’t bloom at the same time?  I should have gone out and taken pictures when my orchard was blooming, but I didn’t so we have missed those beautiful trees too.
                 
                 Dogwood blooms are so pretty!

  
Azaleas and Peonies …………….
                             
                 
All this makes me smile !  Back to the sewing room…..

Enjoy,  Merry Gay

Miss String!

             

I finally have a finish of some sort to show you!  This is what I have been calling “Miss String”…… a string quilt of course.  And it was surprisingly easy to do!  Yay!

  

It is sewn to a piece of paper and then cut to size using the paper as a guide.  You simply cut a bunch of pieces of paper ……. I had a 10” square template, so that is what I used ……… and then cut a bunch of strips.  The strips don’t have to be measured or sized or anything.  Look at mine.  See, the strips are all varying widths.  Anyway, you will place a strip (right side down) on one of your cut pieces of paper diagonally and sew it.  You don’t even have to be picky about your seam width.  Just sew the strip onto the piece of paper.  Then you can either iron or finger press the strip so that the right side is up.  Place another contrasting strip on top of the strip you just sewed (fabric right sides together), and sew this strip to the first strip AND to the paper.  Finger press this strip like the last one and repeat this process until your paper is filled.  Then cut your block to the size of your paper and remove the paper from the back and you have your first block done.

            

I hope I was clear on those instructions and didn’t gloss over the steps too fast.  I was not thinking about this post when I was working on it, or I would have taken pictures as I went along.  Sorry.  But if you need help, there are lots of tutorials on the internet.  Type ‘string quilt tutorial’ into a search engine and it will give you choices.

Anyway, back to Miss String ……. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to embellish my quilt with applique.  I sewed on my borders and then added flowers and ladybug to opposite corners.  That just seemed to give this quilt that little something extra that it needed to finish it off.  Now I only have to sandwich it with batting and backing and get it quilted!  I’ll probably get that done in a month or so.  I have another project under my needle now.  Remember Dresden Flowers?

              

 

Enjoy!  Merry Gay