Sparklers for everyone!!!

Wishing you all a Safe and Happy 4th of July!

Scrap Busting - Blue

For Anna Maria Horner's Rainbow Around The Block project.

Tired of the garden yet?

No?

Good, because I have more to show you. :)

This is what I harvested tonight:

Thirteen more zucchini. That monster on the top of the pile was hiding under a rather large leaf. I think he'll be grated up for zucchini muffins.

(Total zucchini count: 55)

And a pile of fresh basil, which was made into some incredibly yummy pesto sauce. I took a photo of the finished product, but honestly, who wants to look at pictures of green paste? Luckily, it does taste much better than it looks. If it weren't so late, I'd whip up a bowl of warm pasta and top it off with pesto. Mmmmm....maybe for breakfast.

Random Catch Up

Here's what we've been up to:

Cleaning desks at school with shaving foam. (messy and fun!)

I made this sign for the reading teacher to hang on her door. The reading clinic is right next to the playground and the teacher can't eat her lunch without numerous kiddos stopping in to say hello. I thought the sign might help. And if not, at least it's cute.

Yes, I made another Teacher Tote. This one is for Nathan's teacher.

I made a fabric covered plastic insert for the bottom. This makes the whole thing washable. Very handy for a 2nd grade teacher.

And now onto the garden update:

My zucchini patch is doing very well. That stump in the foreground is about 12" across and stands about 3" tall. Some of those leaves are huge!

There are plenty of blooms and baby zucchini. I've been harvesting for about a week and have collected 30 already. My plan is to give some away and grate/freeze some for zucchini muffins.

This is one of our baby artichokes. We've never grown artichokes before, so this is a really fun thing to see in our garden.

The corn is waist high and starting to tassel.

And the sunflowers have gone a little crazy. We planted a variety of sunflower seeds, so we have smallish pale yellow sunflowers.....

mediumish red sunflowers......

And some ginormous dark yellow sunflowers.

Really, they're huge! I'll be trying to harvest some of the seeds to plant next year.

Garden Update

The garden is growing and producing a few things already.

Our first broccoli. It's amazing how quickly a head of broccoli that is ready to harvest will go to flower.

One lonely sunflower. There are many more buds, two of which are starting to bloom. Some of the sunflower plants are nearly as tall as Nathan!

Broccoli in the front, tomatoes in the back and some brussel sprouts off to the right. (Oh, and our non-working tractor. Makes a nice garden decoration, don't you think?)

This is the hodge-podge bed. You can see artichokes, green onions and a monsterous cilantro plant. Luckily, I harvested and froze quite a bit of cilantro before it bolted. The flowers are dainty and white.

I did take pictures of some of the other beds, but after looking at them, I decided that they're pretty boring. I'll try to take some more creative pictures next time.

Ssssssurprise!

Nathan found this little guy sunning himself on our driveway this evening.

Just a "common" Gopher Snake. Isn't he cute?

He is about 3 feet long.

We took him to a nature preserve area not to far from our home.

Oh the joys of living in the country......skunks, possums, and now snakes!

Hope he has a happy life in the wild.

Lookie what I did....

Some actual sewing!
One of my teacher friends is having a birthday this weekend and she loves Mary Engelbreit. I found this M.E. fabric on Etsy and knew I had to make something for her with it. This bag is similar to the Teacher Tote that I made last year.

The lining is made from some Robert Kaufman fabric that I had in my stash. And I fussy cut the pockets to feature the "Bloom" and "Heart" mottos.

I delivered the bag yesterday. She opened it in the teacher's lunch room, which was fairly full. I got a lot of compliments on the bag. Such a nice feeling!