Twenty Five!!!!

I have officially finished my twenty-fifth quilt!

I finished it last week before I got sick but didn't take pictures until recently.

I loved working on this baby quilt which will be donated.

It was quick, easy, and very thrifty.

I may have spent a whopping $5 on all of the materials.

This was the first time I had ever made pinwheels.

I learned a new-to-me technique for making the pinwheel parts.

It looked easy so I gave it a shot. I will most definitely be making more.
They were so much fun!

The color is off but I wanted a close up of one of the pinwheels.
I was so happy with how they turned out.
Almost all of them had great points!

This photo makes me chuckle.

I pieced the back with two different fabrics.

I attempted to center the seam as best as I could.

It's not as easy to do as it sounds.

The back is upside down, covered with batting, and then covered with the top.

That makes it quite difficult to see the back when you baste the quilt together.

Even with the quilt basted fairly well, it can still shift some while its being quilted.

It wasn't until I was halfway done with the quilting that I realized the seam was exactly centered.

Sometimes I surprise even myself.

 The back shows the quilting quite nicely.
Very geometric.

Purple Pinwheel Quilt
39" x 39"
machine pieced and quilted
low loft Poly-Fil polyester batting

Miscellaneous Monday

In no particular order, here's a few random photos.

These two were playing keep away with a back scratcher.

Connor felt the need to put on a few hats.

It was so he could look like that dude on Space Balls with the helmet around his Afro.

I'm not making this stuff up.

He said that was the reason for the excessive amounts of stocking caps.

It was quite funny.

That's Connor in a nutshell.

Never a dull moment. Ever.

Sorry, but you can't escape a post without something quilty.

If all goes well, I'll be quilting this today.

Pepper really wanted someone to come out and play.

That poor deflated ball is her favorite ball.

She has a few others but apparently they're not as good as this one.

Gigantic chocolate chip cookie.

No explanation needed.

We (I mean Dwayne and myself) enjoyed a nice fire yesterday afternoon.

It was 38 outside.

I wore my Carhartts.

We burned up the last of our firewood for the season.

And sadly, we were out of hot chocolate.

Yesterday we moved a few ducks in with the chickens.

The chickens were not thrilled... which is fine because I don't care.

The ducks are not fond of any change whatsoever.

(They were scared of the blue heated bucket when I first brought it out this season. They drank out of it last year but have forgotten.)

It will take a few days for them to get used to the new routine.

They're such silly creatures.

Why the move?

Well, we think there were too many in the other coop.

We began to have problems with the duck bedding.

So we thought we'd try fewer ducks in that coop.

As soon as I opened the window to take the previous picture, there was a stampede for peas.

They were sleeping in the front yard and I tried to open the widow quietly.

I was spotted but I remained very still hoping they wouldn't come running.

Didn't work.

So I fed them peas like a good duck owner.

By the way, we've trained the ducks to come when they hear the chuck wagon dinner bell.

I didn't even have to call them last time. They came running all on their own.

It's so cool!

One of these days we'll get it on video.

Yes, it looks like we segregated our ducks by color.

This is just a coincidence.

The first flock of runners we had were all fawn and white.

The second bunch were all dark colors.

They bonded with the groups they started with.

The drakes each have a "harem" aligned accordingly.

Although they all miss each other we figured that was the best way to divide the group.

We'll see how it goes. It may not solve our bedding problems but it's worth a try.

500

I noticed the post count the other day and realized that 500 was approaching.

That's really hard to believe.
We still plan on keeping the blog.
It is hard sometimes to come up with a post that's not quilting.
Several times I have thought about starting a quilting blog.
My thoughts always end up with no.
So y'all are stuck with the overload of quilting stuff.
I can't help it and it's easy to share!
Aren't y'all lucky?!

With the boys being older and in public school, it seems harder to put interesting posts here.
They are both continuing to do really well in school.
We're proud of their achievements thus far.
Connor has his first robotics meet coming up in January.
It should be interesting.

We live a simple life and we're OK with that.
We prefer simple.

Oh look, it's a bean field. Yippy. Actually there were four different crops on our road this year.
Soy beans, corn, mint, and sorghum.
I love smelling the mint fields.
I wish I had taken a picture of the sorghum field across from the house.
The heads turned a beautiful dark amber color as harvest approached.
It was nice to have something different to look at.

Although I personally love the mountains of Tennessee more than the fields of Indiana.

I don't want to sound ungrateful for where we live.
Indiana has its beauty too.
Look at that spectacular sunrise!

Irony Things

You may remember that we acquired several pieces of cast iron during our vacation this summer.

If not, you can read about it here.

Some of them were in desperate need of deep cleaning and seasoning.

The little corn bread pan I did right away as it was in good condition.

The two big pieces, however, would require several days of elbow grease.

I decided to wait until fall when the outside temperatures would be

more conducive to several hours of oven usage.

This pan was quite gross. I knew it could be cleaned because I've done it before.

I had one once that was so bad it stunk up house for several days!

Thankfully this one wasn't smelly, just icky.

I alternated from boiling water in it to scrubbing it with rock salt.

Boil, cool, dry, scrub, dry, repeat.

I eventually got some steel wool.

It took a couple of days but I got it clean. :)

This is how it came out after only two seasoning sessions in the oven.

All ready to use!

We could not wait to use this one.

It's probably one of our favorites.

I can fix a lot of hash browns at once!

This one required a lot of scrubbing too but not quite as much as the deep one.

We use this frequently as well.

Now we have two double burner griddles.

:)

I finally tried cookie dough in the skillets.

 They turned out really well.

We did let them cool extra long so they would come out clean.

We cut the big ones like a pizza.

Dwayne promptly nicknamed them pazookies.