Of grandsons and jeans and hurricanes

Just dumped on the table, there doesn't seem to be much sewing, but he had five pairs!

 

Our grandson Lane, came for a visit last Friday. You know what they say, "They only come when they want something"? Well, it's sort of true. He gave me a hug, after informing me that he needed some jeans hemmed. Sure. Not a problem.

Let's see, clean and thread the machine, put in a new, extra-heavy duty universal needle (twice), replace the rotary cutter blade or at the very least sharpen it, spend 45 minutes cutting and sewing new jeans. He's a working man now, so he needs to dress a little better than he did for hanging around the house. Every change seems to affect me somehow.

I'm kidding, of course. Having them over is a joy. Not that I spent much time with him or Adam or Rory. They were all outside helping Richard set up the greenhouse. A project started out for me, but Richard can't do anything in a normal fashion. We need, at most, a 10 X 10 space. The old greenhouse has an 18' width, so okay 10 X 18. Of course, my country boy is making it 18' X 20'. Almost four times larger than my original request. I'll let him figure out the heat/water and whatever else it may need.

Why a greenhouse? Mornings are dipping to 45 degrees. Afternoons can be a warm as 80 degrees. I learned last year that succulents and other pretty plants can't take extreme changes in temperature. And those babies were expensive. All I had to do was put the idea of a hothouse in hubby's head. Don't you know he ran with it. I love that man!

In other news, we had a little, tiny catastrophe here. A tree fell during one of the hurricanes. (There have been so many, but I think it was Delta.) That it fell was not a problem. No, the real problem was that it fell on top of several of my favorite pots! The plants survived. The pots did not. So I have no choice but to replant them in a container of some fashion. Then off they will go to the new/old greenhouse. New because it was just put up. Old because the metal ribs are about the only thing left from when we owned the nursery. The country boy saved the metal ribs, so here we are with a fancy greenhouse, lots of plants, and no pots.

Louisiana's heat pays off and two stinkers

One of the wonderful advantages of living in Louisiana in the summer is that, if you don't mind watering, plants do really well. 

Extremely well. I have to regularly peel it off the door and bricks because it roots itself to everything. The older leaves are huge and the vines are easily five feet long, from where they touch the floor. I haven't figured out what I'll do with them in a few weeks when it becomes really cold.

Also on my back porch is this beautiful peace lily that Richard's mom gave me after his dad's funeral. It was in a basket, but that rotted and fell apart so we're down to the black nursery container. I've been considering re-potting it but I need a larger pot. There's probably one around here somewhere. 

                                 

Next to the peace lily are these three pots on what is perhaps the cheapest stand ever. I have to be careful when I move the pots so that the weight of one doesn't tip the whole thing over. It's crazy, I know. But they look great stacked up in that corner by the back door.

At the end of the parking area I have a couple of huge pots around a crepe myrtle tree. The tree just came up on its own and grew really quickly. It does not match the other white crepe myrtles on the other side of the drive, but anything that finds a place, plants itself and grows beautifully gets to stay right where it chooses.

So this plant is a pink bleeding heart. It's doing really well. It bloomed profusely in the spring when I bought it, got a bit exhausted during the heavy heat, but is picking up energy and put out a few blossoms.

 I'm trying again to build a succulents pot. It won't be completely filled by the first freeze, but I've gotten much closer than I did last year. I had labels on all of the plants but they've been lost, along with a couple of really unusual plants. 

 On each side of the very ugly front door to the studio I have these concrete planters with dalia, penta, verbena, and lantana. They are also coming back now that the heat is abating just a little. The one thing all of the plants have in common, besides being able to handle the heat, is that they all have some shade of reddish/orange. Last spring they looked great when everything was blooming.

And finally, these two ferns that Rich and I bought to place on the altar for his dad's funeral are hanging out on the ligustrum shrub, which is a really small tree. Occasionally we set them down on the ground to water them. They've lost lots of leaves and are beginning to look scraggly but I'm hopeful that they will recover before I have to bring them in.

Speaking of bringing them indoors, I've decided to put them on a table in the studio close to a window that gets morning sun. I want to bring them into the house but the babies are here too often and Ryder put everything in his mouth. I don't know if any of these are poisonous but I am not even considering taking a chance that he might eat one. 

Here are two of our three little stinkers. Ry on the left and Meme on the right. See that look on her face? That is her you've got "one shot at this picture" face. 

Sunday Quilt Inspiration: cacti

Oh my poor cacti. The little succulents that couldn't fill the pot. The ones I tried to save by putting into a terrarium and wrote about here. Those cacti.

They aren't doing well. I will likely have to start over in the spring if I ever want to see that pot spilling over like my inspiration from the International Peace Gardens. Thus, an ode to my pitiful cacti. (I can't show them to you. It's too pitiful.) Inspiration for cacti of a different description.

So you get the idea. There are some succulents that do not look like my own. Well, I may have to resort to something more like these.

DRAWN

QUILTED

PIECED

PILLOWED

AND MORE!

One pillow or two?

As promise earlier in the week, I want to show you the pillow I made for a customer. Her sister lost a child recently and she had a couple of his favorite tee shirts, which I quilted and made into one pillow. 


I used the backs of the shirts because both had beautiful wing motifs and challenged myself to use the wings for the quilting.  

The backing is this green/beige knit that was in my stash. It worked quite well and didn't pucker at all despite having a good bit of stretch to it.


The background has a simple but small stipple so that the wings and crosses would be the focus. I started out by quilting the entire back of the shirt and, once that was done, measured the usable quilted area so she could decide what size pillow she wanted--20" square. 

So the red shirt became one side of the pillow and the black shirt became the opposite side, giving her a pillow with two usable sides.

The red shirt was much easier to quilt since much of it had stippling and the wings and cross were less intricate. Following the lines was not as difficult as I'd feared. I wish you could see or feel the texture of the wings, especially on the red shirt. I found myself just rubbing my fingertips up and down the wings. Very textural and soft. 

Now the black shirt was another story altogether. Look at the intricate detail of that Celtic cross and those gray wings were difficult to distinguish from each other. There was no get-in-the-zone-and-go kind of quilting! I had to go slow and steady always looking for the next turn or corner and trying to not stop. Stitches lose their pretty, even lengths every time I stop, so the key is to just not stop. Once I did one area, I had to go slow enough on the next to replicate the design. I couldn't quilt every line because that would have messed up the texture. So slow, and steady, and slower it was.

But the end result is stunning! Considering that the end result went to a grieving mother, I am honored to have been the one asked to undertake such a special job. 


What have you done lately that was extra-special?

Potted and terrarium-ed

In April I decided that this huge pot in the yard needed something, other than grass and weeds, growing in it. So I spent about $25 or so on some pretty succulents and planted them thinking that they at least had a chance of surviving in this Louisiana heat. 

You know, that kind of money doesn't go far in the world of plants, but I figured they'd grow fast. Like the weeds, maybe? They don't. I added more plants but they didn't fill in the open space much. I was out of money so I had to figure out another option.

My inspiration: from the International Peace Garden
in the Northwest (July 2017)

Not quite enough plants

Eventually I tried to give them a prettier look and added some sea glass I discovered in the studio. (Left over from a project that never took off.) I wrote about using the sea glass in this Sunday Quilt Inspiration post. And summer came and went, we had two days of fall weather, and suddenly the succulents were almost freezing at night and sweltering during the day. Not a good thing.

I had to work fast but there were quite a few plants in the pot and I didn't want to lose them. I also didn't want to deal with several pots of finicky plants. Then I remembered this old terrarium I've had for years. I've tried growing plants in pots in it but well, let's just stick to this story.

 I decided that because there were so many plants I'd just put them into the terrarium without pots. Instead I lay down a heavy sheet of plastic, added enough sand to hold it in place, and started digging up plants. It was cold, really cold outside, so I made a huge mess inside but eventually all of the plants were in the terrarium.

 Some may have been smushed and a couple may be buried under other things. But they all got in there. A bit of water, then I closed the lid. It sat in the way on the counter for a week while I tried to decide whether the enclosure would leak.

Today my concern is that the plants will outgrown the enclosure. What will I do at that point? I don't know, but I'm open to suggestions. 

A pot of gold

This pot sits in my back yard and has had some of the same plants in it for two years.  I bought this black and white hanging pot from Lowe's and re-potted it into an old terracotta pot that I put under one of the catalpa tree.  To make grass-cutting easier, we moved the pot as close to the base of the tree as possible.  

That may be what is saving the plants.  For two winters we've gotten freezing temperatures and I have done nothing to help the plants.  In fact, I've assumed that the freeze did them in.

Last spring I was pleasantly surprised to see that the verbena and Dusty Miller survived and was doing well.  It turns out that the heat is much worse on some plants, and the Dusty Miller didn't make the summer.  My forgetfulness at watering may have had some fault in their demise.

I must say, however, the white verbena is glowing.  I really hope it continues to do so well.  I'm really liking not having to purchase new plants every spring.  Maybe if I do a better job of watering them, I'll be able to enjoy them again next year, but I know my habits and I tend to plant myself as close to AC as possible when the heat of summer digs in.

I have another pot--an empty one.  While I like verbena, I've heard that succulents are more tolerant of my bad watering habits.  Do you have any suggestions for plants that might make more than one season?