Friday....hand quilting and banana bread

This is a photo of the a quilt my daughter made it is her first attempt at quilting. She sewed strips of scrap fabric of all different widths on to six inch squares of telephone book pages (makes them easy to trim to the right size. When all the sewing is done you trim and tear the paper away. She then sewed these to calico squares across the diagional (twice) cut down the middle between the stitch lines and opened them out to have a square made of a plain and a pieced triangle this method is fast for kids because you get two squares at once!! Then she helped me sew them altogether to form rows then the rows together and voila a quilt top is born.


Over the holidays I have been reading some of the Elm Creek novels and I really wanted to do some hand quilting so I picked it up and the stitches you see are what I got done in an hour or so. The stitches are big because I have used a piece of pola fleece that someone gave me for the batting (it washes really well in kids quilts).

I was having a wonderful time and was really enjoying the process and could feel myself relaxing when she came in and announced that she would rather have it machine quilted!!!!!!!!!!


So yesterday when my quilting buddy arrived I was telling her about it, as we looked at what we had completed or started over the holidays, as I was walking back out of the sewing room I spotted the corner of another quilt top I had finished at retreat last year - the perfect hand quilting project!!!! We chose some border fabric and backing (from the STASH) and I sewed them on yesterday now all I have to do is machine quilt daisygirls quilt so I can use the pins to pin my hand quilting project. This will keep me sane it is such a relaxing rewarding thing to do.


And then there was this other friend of mine who runs one of the fruit shops in the village...he walked into work and gave me a box of bananas...they all had brown spots on them but were firm and perfect for eating or smoothies - apparently people won't buy bananas with brown spots on them so he either has them sitting there getting browner with 99c a kilo on them or he gives them to me and I (with all my spare time) turn it into banana bread - some of which goes back to him for his staff morning teas.

Normally the box of bananas is a box but not full this week (becasue I have so much spare time) it was FULL!!!!





So here are some I baked earlier .............................
minus half of the ring one we had for morning tea.......








Here is the last batch inside Gloria being cooked and there was another containter of 2 dozen muffins already in the freezer......













Can you believe people won't buy bananas with a brown spot on them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So breakfast this rainy day (the water tanks just started overflowing) will be a pot of freshly brewed coffee and warm banana bread.

daisymum

Back to the Garden

It seems like a lot of my posts lately are about cleaning and sewing, maybe that is just the rythm of my life one week for sewing, one week for cleaning, one week for the garden......although I do a little of each every single day!!

Yesterday I planted out a whole bag of potatoes (5kg) that someone had given me - they were all shooting in the pink plastic bag they were bought in from the fruit shop - I have only ever used seed potaotes before so not sure what these will do if anything. But after asking advice from Stewart over at "my veggie garden" we decided that although it may be too late to plant out another crop now I had them, they were free, so I might as well give it a go. If they do happen to crop well we will have HEAPS of potatoes!!

Today I bought some seed raising mix while I was in buying some chook food - so later today I am going to have another go at planting seeds. I read every week about everyone elses success so I figure I can't give up yet. This time I am putting them in the toilet roll tubes and then placing them in box and I will put plastic over it and see how we go with that. I ahve some bean, tomato, and carrot seeds left i may even ahve time to pop in to the organic shop and buy some more they stock the Eden seeds range.

Other than that I am off to do some hand quilting on my great nieces quilt and the usual, washing, cooking stuff.

I really love these days at home and the best bit is I get to stay home tomorrow as well. Might even ahve tiome to take some more photos.

have a lovely day

daisymum