Back to the garden

The weather has finally turned balmy enough to make it pleasant to move on from the planning to the doing phase in the garden.  Last weekend we divided and moved several clumps of daisies and black eyed susans.  Ornamental grasses will soon join them in a new flowerbed my husband dug me for mother’s day.  I’ll wait to share pictures until things fill in a bit.  A couple of the black eyed susan clumps are looking very sad and wilted but I keep telling myself they will eventually settle in and perk up.  I hope.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying looking out at my new tipsy pots in the back garden.  My daughter helped paint the pots, stack them and plant them.  We’re quite happy with the result and we’re looking forward to what they’ll look like once the plants get larger.

Now if I could just figure out what to do about the front yard…

Step away from the piecing…

Why is it that when I have carefully measured everything, and measured each unit at each step along the way to make sure everything is still on track, that is when the final result isn’t the size it should be?  There must be quilting gremlins kicking around here somewhere.

After gnashing my teeth at finding that my carefully paper pieced border (I didn’t have enough fabric to change tack after all) was 3/4” too long on all sides, and checking my math again and again and again, I took in several seams just a smidge until all the smidges ate up the extra length.  I couldn’t just cut off the extra because I needed the pattern to match at the end to turn around the corners.  I then added an outer border to stabilize the bias edges on that pieced border and ta-da!

I’m waffling about the width of that last green border.  I may make it about a 1/2” narrower, but this is where it stands now.  I also wonder if I should have used a different scale for the pieced border, but I’m not changing it now!  I have no idea how I want to quilt this so one of the other two flimsies I have on my shelves will push ahead of this one for quilting.

This makes three unquilted flimsies waiting in line, plus the Canada quilt only 1/3 hand quilted.  I know that isn’t very many by some standards but that’s more than I usually have so I need to step away from the piecing, move on to deciding how to quilt the flimsies and start basting.

On the other hand, I have 1100 1-1/2” scraps that want to be joined into 10” blocks…I know just how I want to set them too…

Grrrr!!! Error…

Grrr!!!  Despite all my proofreading, an error slipped into the pattern for my String of Diamonds placemats.  Anyone who downloaded the pattern from Craftsy after I moved my patterns over there should have received an email from Craftsy about the pattern update in late March.
I made the change in March but forgot about downloads which may have occurred directly from this blog before I made the switch. So, if you downloaded directly from the blog, grab a pen, scratch out 3-7/8” and replace it with 3-3/8” for the size of the square A.  Or you can download the corrected version for free here.

If you ever have a question or concern about my patterns, please let me know.  My email is in my blogger profile.  Thanks!