It’s Summer, Isn’t It?

By all appearances, I must be in crisis of some sort. It is 93-degrees here, the sun is shining and my son has a baseball game tonight. It must be summer. But I just finished proofreading a pattern with snowmen and barren trees. The pattern before that had snowflakes and Christmas trees. Lying on a chair in my office is a project with Halloween fabric. It’s a good thing I have a calendar on the wall so I can assure myself that it is indeed the middle of June. No matter what projects I’ve been working on, it IS the middle of June. And projects are flying right now. We are putting the final touches on Best Christmas Quilts 2012, a special issue that goes on sale August 21, and have begun working on the October/November issue of Quilters Newsletter.

Now, back to summer. Over the weekend, I had fun playing in the garden. I did a few hours of weeding, cleaned the ponds and watered like crazy. It is so hot and so dry but everything is looking really good, and the heirloom tomatoes I mentioned a few weeks ago are blooming. I keep chuckling about the amount of food that is soon going to be coming out of our garden. What do you think the chances are of teaching my husband to freeze zucchini and summer squash? I’m pretty sure he can handle the tomatoes. I just wash them and throw them whole in freezer bags. But the other things like summer squash, zucchini and peppers? I’m guessing he’ll pick them and I’ll have a whole refrigerator full of produce when I get home on the weekends. Thank goodness for my food processer. It will make short work of grating all that produce.

So what else is there to do on a hot summer afternoon? Sunday was hot from the get go so it was time to play with my sewing machine and quilt a throw. I do a lot of free-motion quilting and have been challenging myself to learn to do different styles of free motion. I can do stippling, meandering, outlining and writing so this year I’ve worked on flames, feathers and now, loops. I can’t show you the loops today but I will show you the feathers that I worked on earlier this year. I just gave this quilt to my sister. I call it “Where’s the Bird?” because with all the feathers there has to be a bird nearby.

Uh oh! I see more snowmen headed my way so I’d better get back to work on the Christmas special issue.