Yesterday was Alli's 29th birthday - and she celebrated all day!  Her day program got her a Dutch Bros coffee, a hamburger and fries for lunch (she didn't eat the hamburger, just the fries) and I baked 14 dozen sugar cookies Monday night and took them in for her class to decorate and eat.  Needless to say, with all that, she did not eat her real lunch, and crashed from her sugar high about 5:00.  Waiting for her birthday pizza was almost too much for her.  After pizza, she calmed down enough to enjoy her chocolate creme pie though.

There was a local quilt show in town last weekend, and Meredith and I oohed and aahed our way through it.  We had a bit of lunch, saw some beautiful quilts, and then stopped for a bit of shopping with the vendors at the show.  Luckily for me, they were closing up not long after we started shopping.  I did buy some fabric (what a shock!) and some patterns - they are all "3 yard quilts", meaning only three yards of fabric are needed, and the fabric goes with the theme.  The pink and gray will make any of the patterns.  I love the tree quilt, but probably not in pink and gray.... 

Meredith even got into it and got some Highland Cow (or Coo as she pronounces it) fabric - a panel for an apron and a panel and coordinating fabric for a quilt or wall hanging.
 

The garden is taking off!  I have peppers, baby tomatoes, and flowering beans.  The eggplants, zucchini, and cucumbers haven't started blooming yet though. 

 

My tie-dye adventure is in!  We did some tie-dye at book club the other day, and my original plan was to do a tank top, but Emma grabbed the wrong size (there is no one in this house that can wear a medium!!).  I ended up doing a purse/bag and it came out pretty cute!  

This is the tank tops that Robin made - super cute!!

 

Random rose picture -

Mystery solved....or at least half a mystery solved.  I was missing a couple of my dryer balls, and I found one!  Ripley and Jessie both get stuck in the garage, and one of them seemed to have found one.  I walked out this weekend and saw something on the floor....

I followed the trail of fuzz...

Aha!!!

I don't think it will work well as a dryer ball anymore, but at least I know what happened to it.  Now to find the other one.... 

 

The water lilies are blooming int he koi pond.  They are so pretty!  I need to do some work on the water quality of the pond, but the lilies hide a bit of that for me at least. 

I took a quick sunrise shot the other morning - Mt. Lassen from the back yard.

The "babies" are out with the "big girls" now, and everything seems to be going well.  There's always a risk that one of the older chickens will bully the smaller ones, but so far they seem to be coexisting just fine.  I still have to put the babies to bed at night - they insist on roosting outside the coop and I pick them up each night and put them in the coop to sleep.  Eventually they will get the idea where they need to sleep.  

 

My latest quilting effort - Formation.  Super easy and quick - I needed a full quilt to do, since all my other projects are the "block a week/month" type.  It was very satisfying to put this one all together at once (at least relatively - it took a couple of weekends to make all the blocks).  I got it as far as sewing these vertical strips together.  Next weekend should see it put all together, and then off to the quilt store to find backing fabric. 

The garden is coming in nicely!  We have a few days of rain, which will soak the ground and then should have some nice weather for a while.  I'm hoping for a bumper crop this year after adding new soil to the boxes.

My (mis)adventures in quilting....did you know reading ALL of the instructions is important???  I made 8 pieces that looked like this: 

 Instead, I was "supposed" to make 4 pieces that were opposite of each other:

  

It really does change how the whole block looks, lol! 

Here's the progress on the Riley Blake Challenge quilt - 11 of the 16 quilt blocks done. 

Some of the petunias I planted yesterday - now to remember to water them!!!