According to my old posts, I planted the second crop of beans/peas in August. The purple hull peas now have slim 4"-long pods on them. Butterbeans and crowder peas are blooming their heads off. I'm crossing my fingers for about 3 more weeks of frostless night, but I have clear plastic sheeting on hand, just in case.
The carrots in the trough are growing nicely. The beets at the other end of the trough are having their leaves disappear as fast as they can make them. I suspect there's a deer in the neighborhood with beet green breath, and it burns me up that it doesn't even have to bend its head over to eat.
The tomatoes and okra are reluctantly still producing, but not much.
Turnip and mustard greens are growing well; the kale and the collards barely made a showing. We had our first meal from them a couple of weeks ago, but I was unimpressed. I planted these greens in mid-August instead of mid-September because a 90+-year-old gardener said that's when he plants his greens. Figuring that he ought to know when to plant greens, I got busy and planted mine. The greens seem tougher and less flavorful. Plus, they're more bug-eaten. Next year, I'll be reverting back to mid-September plantings.
It's been down in the 50s here for a few nights in a row, maybe even in the 40s for the past couple of days. Yesterday, it was cool and damp all day. Time to crank up the indoor hobbies.
I've been working on a quilted Christmas wall hanging for the past few weeks. The pattern is in the November/December 2013 issue of McCall's Quilting magazine - the candy cane & Christmas ornament quilt on the cover. This is an appliqued quilt. I'm not so good with hand-done applique, so I digitized the pattern so that I could do the appliques with my embroidery machine. Because I'm still learning how to digitize, it took me forEVER to get the designs right. It took me another forever to actually sew the blocks and assemble them. This past week, I finally finished the quilt top, then spent another couple of days decided how to quilt it.
I wish I could have made my embroidery machine do the quilting. The problem is that the blocks are 8" x 8", and the largest hoop I have for my embroidery machine is 7" x 5". If I were better at this, I could probably figure out how to split the design into 4 parts and actually have the parts line up in the hoop, but given my current level of expertise, I know better than to try it.
I did have one rather cool idea for transferring my quilting designs onto the quilt. I'm doing a repeating clamshell quilting design in some of the blocks. The individual elements of a repeating design like this need to be a consistent size/shape. I did the design with my embroidery program, telling it that I have an 8 x 8 hoop (even though I don't). Then, instead of sewing the design, I just printed it onto lightweight tear-away stabilizer. After printing, I sprayed the backside of the stabilizer with quilt basting spray and stuck the stabilizer onto the quilt blocks. It will be a little bit of a pain to tear out all those little pieces of stabilizer, but I think the effect will be worth it.
Meanwhile, there was another problem: I already had a queen-sized quilt in the quilt frame. I tried doing the quilting on my regular sewing machine, but it was a huge pain. Finally, I un-did the pins on half of the quilt in the frame and pinned the wall hanging beside it. It will be a little bit of a pain to get the big quilt pinned back in, but not as much trouble as it would be to pin the whole thing back in!
