Day: May 20, 2020

My Indoor Vegetable Patch

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Last week my sister shared an idea with me – she’s been growing green onions on her window sill for several weeks. She suggested I try doing it myself. You buy a bunch of green onions, cut the greens off (chop them and use them) but put the white bulbs in a glass of water and, lo and behold, you’ve got green onions growing you can harvest for a salad as you need them. She tells me they grow for weeks.

Green Onions & Lettuce

Why not lettuce, too? On my last grocery shopping trip I bought a pair of hydroponically grown green lettuces, roots still intact. So instead of chopping them all up (and throwing away half) I plunked each in a planter with some water – I’ve got lettuces growing. I can harvest a few leaves from each as I need them for a small salad and the plants keep on growing, looks like.

What fun! I bet I can get some dill to grow that way, too. I must look for some dill seeds to germinate.

I don’t like tomatoes well enough to start an outdoor pot for tomatoes – I buy a single tomato every so often if I think I’m going to use one in a meal.

It’ll be interesting to see how long my lettuces will actually grow like this. When these two poop out, I’ll just pick a couple more.

Crossroads – Quilt Finished

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Well, the quilt is almost finished – I still have to hand stitch the hidden binding on the back – at the moment the binding is just pinned in place.

I elected to do a hidden binding because I wanted the contrast strips to reach the edge of the quilt without the interruption of a conventional binding. Using a hidden binding adds a “modern” touch to the  piece.

Crossroads – Quilt Top

The back was pieced from four leftover blocks with large segments from remnants of some of the grey fabrics. None of the three pieces I had were large enough to use without piecing. I added contrast elements to join the grey blocks in an asymmetric layout.

I was fortunate, when I trimmed the quilt, to have enough leftover fabric from each edge to use as binding. That has allowed me to match the binding to the back so the pattern layout is continuous. A nice surprise.

Crossroads – Quilt Back

To quilt the quilt, I had to mark the quilt top into 250mm squares because the actual “blocks plus sashing” were larger than my largest hoops could accommodate. I figured the colour detail of the quilt top was strong enough that the fact the quilting block was smaller wouldn’t be obvious. So a 4 x 5 quilt layout was quilted using a 5 x 6 + 5 x 1/2 blocks. The top row of half blocks blends in – the quilting appears continuous.

Quilting In The Hoop

The quilting blocks can be seen on the reverse but the more open structure of the back panel accommodates that.

I’m actually very pleased with how this quilt turned out.

Now to hand stitch the binding and label – this evening in front of TV.