Mother on a Broomstick Talks

  It's been ages since I wrote anything here and it turns out that I've missed it.  This last year has been one of chasing around trying to catch up and guess what?  It's possible that I'll never actually catch up.  Does anyone actually catch without full-time staff?  I'm still working on it, but not worrying about it so much.  It's so much more fun to quilt. Summer here was a bit unusual.  It was cold and rainy through much of May and finally turned summery in June.  Then we had a heat wave at the beginning of July, which the hydrangeas hated.  The vegetables might have been okay had it not been for the deer.  The veggies are in the front as we don't have enough sun in the back and even though there were onions planted among the tomatoes and I used deer spray, the deer came in the night and pruned them back several times along with my front yard rose.  We had some tomatoes, but not nearly as many as usual. They also will pick one t...

  We've enjoyed a lovely, mid-80's kind of summer.  Warm enough for summer squash and what promises to be a good tomato crop.  At least until now.  It's currently 105 degrees out, with a few more days of high temps promised.  It's being compared to the summer of '81 when we had four or five days of 105 and 107 degrees.  I remember this well because I was about 8½ months pregnant and we didn't have air conditioning.   A few months ago I signed up to have my small quilt group to lunch with the idea that it would be mid 80's and we could sit outside and enjoy the late-summer breeze.  Instead we lunched in the house and ate Grasshopper Pie and ice cream for dessert.  No matter what, it's always great to spend time with these good friends. My Wanderer's Wife quilt is almost finished.  The binding is on and I'm hand sewing it down this week.  I did buy a stitch-in-the-ditch foot for my machine and it was so worth it.  This quilt is s...

It's been so long since I sat down to just write.  I'm finding I've really missed it.  So it's time again to reach out to the world again to see how we're doing. First, there's the quilting.  That, of course, never stops.  Still hoping to catch up on UFO's (not the kind featuring little green men) and a few got done.   I love this gal.  Bought the pattern several years ago at a quilt show and started it only to have the late Ella chew up the directions.  Rebought the pattern and finally finished.  Sometimes this is the perfect picture of me.  (There is a reason the children used to call me Mother on a Broomstick.) This one is from a kit called Cozy Throw.  I love the look of it but must admit that with a couple of starts and stops, the white fabric got a bit grimy, which I just had to live with until I finished the quilting and binding. Couldn't get it into the washer fast enough. I really wanted the quilting to be one with the strips of...

The Last Rose of Summer The Northwest has been gifted with very unseasonable sunny weather for the last couple of weeks. And it is glorious. We've also had a bit of wind so some of my favorite colorful trees are mostly naked now. There are some stubborn holdouts. The other great thing is that I can hear kids outside playing. Never mind that their parents probably shoved their post- Halloween sugar high selves out the door and locked it! Later today I'll be doing the great Halloween put-away. As I was walking Billy the other day, I took this picture of the last rose of summer. There are still a couple of buds that think they're going to make it, but given that it really is November, they may not. I love the colors of strawberry plants in the fall. The one below made strawberries this summer for the first time in years. Sadly, it didn't really get enough sun and the berries were kind of terrible. And now it's beautiful. In a moment of possible insanit...

I'm having trouble dealing with the fact that it's already October.  This is actually one of my favorite months.  I love the colors and (usually) the warm days and cooler nights.  There are still fresh fruits and vegetables and I have dahlias blooming.  I want to quilt, knit, craft and paint it all.  I'd really like an extra day in the week where I didn't have to shop, or cook or clean.  I could just do all the fun stuff. A girl can dream. While the Southeast is setting heat records this week, it's been cool and a bit rainy here.  It seems colder than it should be, but as Sweet Husband reminds me, it IS October.  I put away my summer clothes in the hopes that it would bring back some warmer weather. But no, it definitely didn't work.  My tomatoes didn't do much this year, partly because of the weather and partly due to my being out of town a lot.  Still, they're pretty colorful.  Also, home grown is so tasty. Barb an...

It appears that fall has come to stay.  Naturally, I have about a million green tomatoes.  My plants took forever to get going.  There will be a bunch of fried green tomatoes in our future.   I started putting my summer clothes away this morning and then the sun came out.  Now it's cloudy again.  I'm so confused.  On the happy side, the little rose I thought I killed off last fall survived and is still blooming. The last three weeks have just flown by as I took two trips to Southern Oregon.  I went with Barb the first time and saw a play at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, visited my mom and messed with getting her house ready to hit the market.  The second time Sweet Husband and I went to check the progress on the house, which is going ever so slowly.  It seems that it's a challenge to keep everyone who's working on the house on task from 300 miles away.  We also got to celebrate Mom's 90th birthday. ...