Slow Sunday Stitching -- Tulip Table Topper

The binding is being stitched on the Tulip Table Topper:

I do like the look and feel of this tulip table topper!  I really like the stiffness of this table topper due to the iron-on batting that someone gave to me.  I did not iron it onto the fabric.  I just loaded it onto the longarm as normal.  It's fun to run my fingers over the ridges of the straight line quilting.

I'm linking up with Kathy's Quilts for Slow Sunday Stitching here.

 

Rail Fence -- RSC26

 I pulled out another RSC set of blocks that is ready to be put together.  I have 900 rail fence blocks.  They measure 3.5" (3" finished).  

I was a little overwhelmed how much area I needed to layout this quilt.  I didn't wait to take up the living room floor for days.  I decided to do one section of a time.  Each section will be 15 x 15 blocks vs. the 30 x 30 layout plan.

I made another row of progress on my January (2026) RSC project with blues.  It's called True Blue. One more row and some borders to go before the flimsy is complete.

I'm linking up at Angela's blog, SoScrappy, for the RSC26.

Hamilton Gardens

 One of my little scrap bins is overflowing.  I made a Hamilton Gardens block (Bonnie Hunter design.)

I haven't checked my block size to make sure I have the right 1/4" seam setting.  It doesn't look like the white strips are matching up exactly how I want them.  Better check the setting measurements.

I finished eight projects this (spring) quarter.  This is a new project.  I also have a lot of twosies already sewn together because they were cutoff ends from making strips for Bitcoin (another Bonnie Hunter quilt.)

I'm grabbing pieces of miscellaneous white scraps such as above to iron and run through my strip dies.  Better pull out those beige pieces.  I have plenty of those to use on another project someday.

There... that's better.  I now have a stack of solid whites that I can work with.  This summer while sewing I am watching ALL of the seasons of Grey's Anatomy.  That should take me some time.  I am only on season 8.  I have not see the most recent season.  I'm realizing how many episodes I have missed over the years.  It's keeping my interest.

Hourglass Crib Quilt Complete -- Female Zucchini Blossoms!!!

 The hourglass crib quilt it complete.  It measures 40" x 45".

The fabrics in the hourglass pieces were left over from another project.  I didn't want to waste the pieces left over that were from a bundle gifted to me.  I went out of my comfort zone to use them in a baby quilt.  I don't think the colors are soft enough for a quilt for a baby.  I'm sure someone will like it.  It will most likely end up on the charity quilt pile.

I backed it with this weird fabric that I don't think I would use anywhere else but had enough of it.  The binding was three different left-over binding fabric sewn together.

It doesn't lay completely flat.  I wasn't a big fan of the quilt flimsy.  I used a piece of fleece as the batting to use it up.  There are bright green frog faces on a blue background inside this quilt that I figured I wouldn't use anywhere else.  I made our son a sleep sack out of the fleece years ago.  This was the scraps.  It will be nice and warm but not heavy.

I learned today that there are male and female blossoms on a zucchini plant (and many other plants!). The female blossoms are where the zucchini are.  There are four little zucchini on this plant (and many more blossoms forming).  Of course they are on the side of where they could grow too big and make the plant uproot and fall to its death...  Don't worry.  I'll keep a close eye on them and pick them as soon as they are usable.

I'm fascinated how fast zucchini plants grow.  This was two weeks ago:

This was yesterday:

8 finishes this (Spring) quarter

Here's my Spring 2026 Ravelry UFO Club Projects:

1.  Bit Con quilt -- Needs more rows of strips sewn together -- size yet to be determined

2.  Rail Fence 3.5" RSC block -- 900 blocks needed/need arranged

3.  Piccadilly Circle -- Need a few more circle blocks

4.  Kite Girl --finished 5.28.26 -- 6th finish

5.  Folk Art Birds -- Need more birds and alternate blocks

6.  Hourglass Mini -- Changed mind to crib size -- finished 6.25.26, 8th finish

7.  Maroon Sampler -- Needs two more blocks

8.  Dicey -- Blocks need sewn together with sashing and cornerstones

9.  Fireflies Wall Hanging -- Blocks need appliqued

10.  Red/White basket crib quilt --finished 5.15.26 -- 5th finish

11.  D9P Red/White -- finished 5.11.26 -- 4th finish

12.  HST -- Needs more blocks made and sewn into rows

13.  Red/White House in Center baby quilt -- finished 5.2.26 -- 2nd finish

14.  Fish -- a 12-block RSC26 project

15. Scarborough Fair -- Needs more blocks made

16.  Random Blue Blocks -- Hand Quilting -- In the hoop

17.  Acorn Harvest -- Quilt top needs assembled

18.  Horsen Around Crib Quilt (Dinner Party pattern)-- finished 6.17.26 -- 7th finish

19.  Horsen Around Scrap Quilt -- needs blocks cut and sewn

20.  Pink Houses crib quilt -- Needs blocks made

21.  Lupine and Laughter (Bonnie Hunter 2025 mystery quilt) -- in the piecing process

22.  Christmas Memories 4-patches sewn, need more

23.  Dinner Party (school print blocks) blocks cut, needs blocks sewn

24.   Layer Cake Lattice -- pink blocks cut -- needs blocks sewn

25.  True Blue Sew Along (started 1/15/26) -- needs corners sewn to blocks

26.  Zip It Sew Along -- finished 5.1.26, 1st finish this quarter

27.  Classic Meets Modern QA from 2014 -- block complete, need sashing

28.  King Rosebud embroidery quilt --finished 5.5.26, 3rd finish this quarter

29.  Kathleen Tracy Mini #1 (pinwheels)

30.  Kathleen Tracy Mini #2 (squares)

31.  Kathleen Tracy Mini #2 (HST and a Square)

32.  Cheddar Jack crib quilt -- cat blocks are sewn, some 2.5" squares are sewn

You can find the 2026 Spring Ravelry UFO club here.

Rainy Day Sewing!!!

Finally, a soft, gentle rain came down yesterday.  My plants look so lush and refreshed.  I had time to look out the window and watch the rain for a few hours.  I worked on sewing Bitcoin pieces together.  Bitcoin is a Bonnie Hunter pattern.

I thought I would work on this UFO because I need to get something on the longarm so that I have a quilted project to finish a hand-stitched binding.  I sewed and sewed.  I even put columns together using the leftovers when I made Baby Bitcoin.  After all that sewing I realized that I am about one third of the way done.  Sew... the sewing continues.  

I posted about my topsoil pile plants yesterday.  My husband likes a medium-hot yellow pepper on his cheeseburger once in a while.  He has successfully been growing peppers in buckets on the porch for years.  He and our son are responsible for this area.  LOL.

They seem to be very happy there.  Our son likes to water them.  It's okay for him to weed them because he can easily distinguish the plant from the weed.  BUT when he helps me weed he tends to pull EVERYTHING.  Looks like he has some weeding to do...

There are only about three medium-hot pepper plants on the porch.  The rest are bell peppers, those cute, crinkly red  sweet peppers, snacking peppers, and what I call my science project peppers that I don't really know what they are.  I buy a lot of my plants off of a trailer at the end of a local guy's driveway.  He has a green house that he plays with as a hobby.  He sells them for a donation at the end of his driveway.  It seems that he likes to experiment with different things each year too.  The fun thing I got this year is pumpkin on a stick.  (It's an orange eggplant variety that looks like a bouquet of pumpkins.). I'll get a picture of those when I weed that flowerbed hopefully this week.

Here's a little bed in front of the house.  It got a late start.  The marigolds in there are from the local guy with the greenhouse hobby.  There's a grape tomato plant there because visitors like my sister-in-law love to grab a handful when they visit.

Another fun thing my sister-in-law and I do is rescue plants from the almost dead rack at local stores.  Below is a miscellaneous potted plant, three yellow blanket flowers, and the sad tomato plant is the tomato in the above photo already snapped back to life.  I bought these all dried up on 5/30.

The mixed potted plant above bloomed on Sunday.  It's this pretty, coral flower.  I'm hoping the petunias that are also dry that I got last week cascade over it.  We shall see.  There's a marigold in the top.

As I drove the four-wheeler around I discovered our kid digging in the yard.  He loves to search for treasures with his metal detector.  He just happens to be hunting in a place where my husband's grandpa used to have a dump and then covered it with dirt to make it smooth.  Smooth no more.  LOL.

The Topsoil Plants

 If you've followed my blog for a while, each summer I post about some sort of new thing I try in the garden or with my plants and perennials.  The experiment for summer of 2026 is my topsoil gardens.

When my husband dug the hole for our house in 1997 he saved the good topsoil to various piles on the property.  This is one of the good piles.  Our local library gives away free seed packets in May of most years.  Of course I go get a paper lunch bag of seeds for free.  I scattered them back in May -- NOTHING came up!  I don't always have luck with seeds and am almost always better at planting plants.

Since I had extra seeds because they were free, I waited a couple weeks and tried again.  Woohoo!  Where you see one of the nine posts, something is growing.  Some of these will have vines.  We'll have to deal with that when we figure out what they are.  I had seeds for yellow squash, zucchini, watermelon, cantaloupe, and a weird white squash I never heard of.

I realized that what you mostly see in these photos are weeds.  I will take more time and pull weeds for an hour in the mornings.  Some of the best watermelon, pumpkin, and cantaloupe I have grown have come from areas like this.

Below is another area of what I call "good dirt".  When I sold my house when we got married in 2003, when I moved my things I also took my dirt from my compost pile.  The two acre lot had 100 trees.  I actually picked up the leaves every year with my lawn equipment and piled it on the huge swampy pile in the back of the property that butted up against a golf course.  We took three dump trucks of dirt out of that area and the dozed it flat like nothing happened.  These three stakes show me where the plants are growing.  I'm guessing it's watermelon and cantaloupe.

I had some left over zinnia seeds in a bag a friend gave me.  I'm pretty sure that's what these below are.

The library didn't have any flower seeds this year.

Below is the crazy wildflower area.  I have tons of wild daisies and these yellow things.  My husband said enjoy them for now but he will be spraying weed killer all around.  Don't worry... they will still come back next year.

This is another wild daisy area.  I'm hoping this area gets spared by the weed-spraying husband.  The pinkish purple flowers sprinkled in is crown vetch.

This weekend I moved plants out of the protected area (in a fence by the chicken yard to keep the deer from eating them).  I know it's not the right time of year to move the peony, hosta, or little blue iris, but they were taking up too much space in the protected area and I needed room for the other plants.  The peony didn't bloom well there anyways.  I don't think it was getting enough sun next to the other coop and had poor air circulation.

This is a new area this year for plants.  I decided to plant in the ditch or around the poles where I can't mow.  The yucka are going to bloom this year.  I moved them a couple of weeks ago.  The buttercups bloomed.  I'm hoping the bee balm does okay.  There is also sedum, crocosmia, and blanket flowers growing in this weedy area.  Again, don't worry about those weeds for now.  We shall see what establishes here.  The soil seems to have some clay in it.  It is close enough to the house that I can get the garden hose to it.

The deer seem to really like this variety of golden-edge-leaf hosta.  

I found a bag of this stuff for $1 at the bin store.  After I watered it I sprinkled a dose of it on it.   I guess I should have read the instructions.  I was supposed to sprinkle it on the ground around the plant.  Hope i didn't burn the leaves with it or kill it.  This plant is pretty hearty.  It'll come up next year if I mess it up this year.

On a happy note, look at my strawberry planter that was started this year!  The pool ladder has cucumber vines on it.  There is also one of those crinkly sweet red peppers in the space where the 50 strawberry plants didn't fill the container.  There are petunias sprinkled in here and there for color.  I just planted the baby plants this week.

Here's the second planting of the two zucchini seeds that came up from the whole second pack.  I typically can't grow zucchini from seed.  Two plants is definitely all that I need.  I hope the zucchini doesn't grow off to the wrong side and weigh down the plant and rip it out of the ground overnight to its death.  I'll have to keep an eye on that.  This was the old kettle that my grandparents used on butchering day and to make apple butter.  The white stuff in the planter is egg shells.

Slow Sunday Stitching -- Making progress on THREE projects!

Currently I'm working on finishing the binding on this left-over hourglass block crib-sized quilt:

I only have to bind where the clips are for it to be finished.  This is definitely one for the charity pile.  I'm using three different binding left-overs for the binding.  Can't wait to run it through the washing machine to see how it crinkles.

I finished the Horsen Around quilt that I was working on last week:

I've attached the binding for my tulip table topper.  I can't wait to stitch it!

I do like the look and feel of this tulip table topper!  I used the last of my stiff self-adhesive batting.  I didn't think that it needed to use my good Warm & Natural batting scraps.  I had a scrap of the green dot binding left over from another project.

I'm linking up with Kathy's Quilts for Slow Sunday Stitching here.