Gardening news

My Silver Fox !

The squash plants just exploded with growth after a week of flooding rains.

They put out TONS of baby squash, and then about 3/4th of the babies rotted !  But we have picked 7 or 8 or so beautiful big squash and shared them already with family and neighbors.

I'm having trouble getting my fried squash to stay crisp this year, though.  By the time I get them onto my dinner plate, they're soft and floppy and I have trouble swallowing them.  If they were crisp, they would break up better with my teeth, and swallowing would be easier, I think.

The cucumbers don't look great AT ALL, but they're covered in blooms, and I did pick one that was about 6 inches long today.   I couldn't chew it, so I hope to pickle some and give some away.  I also picked one of the MANY bell peppers that are covering those plants.   The tomato plants are loaded, and have yielded one red small one and one nearly red medium-sized one thus far.  The okra plants are slow but steady.

I tried to use the alphabet characters on the new sewing machine to write something on a t-shirt, but I guess that solvy stabilizer was not the right choice for backing it, because the machine's throat plate ATE the t-shirt.   Very disappointing, but difficult to get much information on procedure online.

Otherwise, the only sewing I have done is to make a strip and flip style toilet rug for my little bathroom.

 I used a towel as a backing, and started with a half-block (these were all from my scrap basket).

Then I just started adding a strip at a time to the two sides of the half block, working my way up the drawn outline of the shape that I wanted to finish with.  After all of the piecing, I cut out my final shape and then bound the edges with bias binding.  I used my old dependable Singer machine as this became quite thick in places.

I hope to be able to make a matching rug to go in front of the tub.