I have been neglecting my blog lately.  It has been sooo hot around here, all I want to do is lay flat on the cool floor and do nothing… but I have been keeping busy.  Starting off with my garden; venturing out into the unbearable heat, I am rewarded with a bumper crop of American concord grapes – so yummy!

On the quilting front, I stumbled onto a very nice quilt blog Little Island Quilting, where there is a wonderful project going on –  Soy Amado.  I am participating, and here are some of the blocks I made:

Now, I just need to package them and put them in the mail.

This month, I am featuring my vegetable garden.  For the amount of care I give, I am always pleasantly surprised with the results:

And for Vickie, I did two rows; the second and fourth from the top – both are paper pieced.  Here are the links to the two rows:  Flying Geese and Tippecanoe.

So happy… Passion fruit vine is making a comeback:

And I finished another row by row.  This one is for Tina.  Her theme is “Fish & Sea”.  I didn’t piece, but appliqued an under the sea world filled with colorful tropical fish, bubbles, seaweed, & coral:

I went out to my garden, thinking what I wanted to plant, and beheld this beautiful sight. My artichoke plant from last year had flowered! So beautiful!

And there are more on the way. Not sure if I should harvest them, or just let them flower:

And, I have  been very busy sewing away.  I have two days rental of a long arm machine coming up.  Here are some scraps from my current projects – gifts for some very special people:

I have been so neglecting my blog lately… But, I really want to keep up my monthly garden updates.  So, spring is here (It seems like we missed winter altogether) and this photo best describes what’s going on in our garden. Our grove is filled with the wonderful scent of orange blossoms!

I also  worked on our group row by row quilt projects.  Ellie’s is the blue winter scene, and Kandi’s is the red/white/blue patriotic row. I found the ideas for both rows on Pinterest? and also in a book I own:

And, dear daughter home for spring break got a new Thinkpad.  She asked me to make a cover for it.  After rummaging through some fat quarters, she picked this pretty pink fabric:

It seems unimaginable that the rest of the country is having such severe weather.  Here, it’s like spring/summer.  For this months garden post, I took a few shots of my front yard and spliced them together.  My gardener is helping with a lot of yard clean up.  Today, I went to several nurseries to find some plants – more on that later.

I also went to my very first Quilt Show, Road To California, which took place in the city of Ontario, not too far from my house.  It was an amazing experience! The crowd got to me a bit, but I found some really nice things.  I took dear hubby on another day to see my latest madness passion.  I also wanted him to see the long arm machines – planting the seed for possible future purchase… He actually found the machines, especially the computerized ones fascinating, the quilts, not so much.

I also met a very nice woman demonstrating one of the long arm machines who turned out to be an author of quilt books.  Dear hubby bought me two of her books, and she even signed them for me!

And finally, I had to add this photo – only at a Quilting Convention, attended by mostly older women.  All the men’s bathrooms converted temporarily into women’s bathrooms 🙂