Hollyhock Season!

 This summer my garden has a beautiful volunteer hollyhock.  I tried for years to grow these, and they were always puny and bug-eaten, so I gave up and chopped them all down and planted tomatoes there.  Apparently they reseeded and grew where they wanted to grow, because they are about 10 feet from where I planted them and doing great. 

They are huge - several inches taller than me.  We are enjoying them, and it will be interesting to see if they want to move themselves again next year!

I haven't blogged in awhile - I've been too busy doing things to write about them, I guess!  A few weeks ago, I got to attend the Grand Old Flag event at Country Sampler. It was a lot of fun, as usual.  I really enjoyed sewing with the same table full of eager stitchers I met last year at this event.  We started a number of projects, but I didn't finish anything there at camp except for this pincushion.

Paula Barnes taught us how to English paper piece, and we made this one afternoon.  It's cute, but it seems like I should have gotten more done in a full week of sewing!  We started several projects, and I've made some progress on them since I've been back.

Carol Hopkins taught us this project, which I believe was called Patriotic Logs.  It's not as big as it looks - only about 32" square.  I've gotten the top done and pin-basted, and hope it get it finished this week.  I had high hopes to have it done for the 4th of July, but I guess it will be ready for next year instead.

Carol also taught us this table runner, which is also put together and pin basted.  I really like the fabrics in this one, too.

Paula Barnes taught us her Civil War Crossroads wall hanging, which is on my design wall.  The blocks are finished, but nothing is sewn together yet, and the cornerstones and borders are still missing.  Jeanne said this was a "fussy little block", but each 7" block has 53 pieces, so I don't think "fussy" even begins to describe it!  We used the Star Singles again for the half-square triangles, so the blocks did go together very well, but they are sure tiny.  The half-square triangles finish at 1".  Did you notice that this is basically the same block as the Carol Hopkins table runner?  They didn't know what each other was planning, and ended up with the same block!

Linda Lautenschlager of Chessie and Me taught the cross-stitch portion of the camp, and we started this Civil War sampler, as well as a padded box with needlework accessories in it.  I've been working on the sampler, and enjoying it very much.  The box is not finished yet, but I'll get to it once this sampler is done.  I've really gotten back into cross-stitch, although I need a lot of magnification these days.

I enjoyed all the teachers again, and we even had time to go antique shopping and shoe shopping, so it was a great week altogether!

Yesterday was a fun day - Donna and I made our annual quilt shopping trek.  We managed to hit Primitive Gatherings, Piece by Piece, Going to Pieces and Keep Me In Stitches, as well as a gardening store, the bread store (for a peace offering to distract our husbands while we brought in our purchases LOL), and a place for lunch.  We know how to power shop, but it's probably a good thing we only do it once a year.  I ended up with a whole bunch of new projects, as did Donna.  We'll see how many of them we have done when we do this again next year!  You might want to follow her blog - she has some pretty neat stuff lined up to make, and I can't wait to see some of it finished.

It was a very fun day, and I'm ready to tackle some of my projects.  The weather has been too nice to get a lot of stitching time - I usually do that when it gets too hot outside and I want to stay in with the air conditioning.  This summer, there has been a lot of time outside instead, but I'm not complaining about that!  I've been working on my Summer Block of the Week - I'll show progress on that next time.  We got to see the finished SBOW yesterday at Primitive Gatherings, so I'm newly inspired to get to work on it - it was beautiful finished!