farm girl vintage - vegetables and fruits

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Hi everybody! I hope that you had a great weekend! I've been enjoying the (very slightly) cooler temperatures here in Southern Indiana and the (barely) less humid air. I know that fall is supposed to be coming! I see plenty of leaves falling from the trees. But what's strange is that they aren't turning all those pretty colors that I expected to see. They go right from green on the tree to brown and crunchy on the ground. Where's the yellow? Where's the orange and red? I go for a long walk several times each week - I'm able to walk to Target and the grocery store, and there's ALWAYS a stop at DQ for a burger or ice cream, or usually both. Anyway, I love to step on as many leaves as I can while I'm walking. And when I step on a mushy leaf, well, that's just a wasted opportunity!

I had plenty of time to sew this past weekend. I've finished some of those blocks-of-the-months and sew-alongs (but I do have a Maggie quilt finish to show you in early November!) and I just wanted something "quick" to sew RIGHT NOW. I thought it was the perfect time to return to those Farm Girl Vintage blocks by Lori Holt. It's been months since I've worked on them, and I really want to get that sampler quilt done! First up, Garden Carrots and Shelling Peas blocks.

These blocks make me laugh. I use carrots in cooking all the time. But peas, not so much. I absolutely hated peas when I was a kid (why, oh why, did my parents insist that I eat them?!) and I still avoid them. But oddly, I love sugar snap peas and I can eat them freshly washed or tossed into pasta with basil pesto. And lately, I've started to add baby frozen peas into risotto, soup and creamy pastas.

Betcha didn't know you'd be getting a cooking lesson here today, right?!

Next, Summer Peach and Cold Watermelon blocks.

I'm using a mix of mostly Fig Tree along with Brenda Riddle fabrics for my blocks. I think that they complement each other really nicely. There are two really tiny mistakes with the peach block that I've decided I can live with, but you wouldn't even know it unless you compared the block to the pattern. It's a deliciously imperfect peach, just like the peaches that resulted in this summer's yummy cobbler (recipe here) and a disastrously icy ice cream (recipe in trash).

And next, Scrappy Strawberry and Pie Blueberries blocks.

I tried to do an ombre effect with the strawberry, shading the reds into a pink center. I love anything ombre, including the sound of the word :-) And I ate plenty of unripened strawberries this summer - the kind that look great until you bite into them and taste nothing. (I'm using frozen strawberries cooked with a bit of sugar and crème de cassis on tonight's cheesecake.)

Next... a Patchwork Pumpkin block!

This block sure gave me a chance to use scrappy orange prints! Many of these prints are several years old and had never been used. I unfolded those fat quarters and was really surprised to see that most of them were still intact. Now they're just fat quarters with a tiny 1 1/2" bite taken out of them! I added a small 2" heart to the center of the pumpkin just like Lori showed on her blog awhile ago.

So the fruits and vegetables section is now done. The pumpkin, strawberry and blueberries patterns are in the Farm Girl Vintage book. The other patterns are all add-on blocks and are sold separately. I bought just a few patterns at a time but now I have the whole collection. You can find links to the book as well as the individual patterns in the right hand column of Lori's blog here.

I have just 8 more blocks to make! I think I'll sew up some animals next: cats, cow, turkey, maybe a pig, maybe a sheep.

Finally, I'd like to chat briefly about comments on my blog. I love comments. And I love my readers :-)  I often reply to you by responding to your comments right here on my blog. I hope that you are receiving an email from me with my reply. Unfortunately, my blog host (Squarespace) does not provide your email addresses to me. I've complained about this to them several times... after all, isn't part of having a blog the ability to open up a conversation with my readers? I've been tempted to move to Blogspot, but I now have almost three years of blogging history right here. (I do have the addresses of several of my long-time readers, and I'll reply to them directly by email.) I love my blog because I get to say so much more here than on Instagram... although I do love Instagram too, where I am @greydogwoodstudio. So just please know that I appreciate ALL your comments, and I really hope that you receive my replies.  

happy birthday, farm girl vintage!

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Welcome to the birthday party! Look at the cute cake I baked for the birthday girl! Lori Holt's book Farm Girl Vintage is celebrating her first birthday. How much do we all love this book? Lori's patterns are always fun, and they come with very easy to understand directions. I want to make everything that she designs.

I'm still farming my blocks for the cover sampler quilt. I've completed over half of them, and I've added in a few of the bonus blocks that are available for purchase separately. Like the corn and tomatoes block. Oh how I love that corn block!

My blocks are 6" square. Now if only I could find nice juicy corn and tomatoes like this at a local farmstand. And the book also has a perfect flag block that you can make for the Fourth of July - it has a single friendship star.

Meet the mama hen block with her light blue wing. (Yes, she's missing her little embroidered eye. I'll add it later!)

I'm sewing with fabrics from Brenda Riddle and Fig Tree Quilts. I love how Brenda's pale Bespoke Blooms prints mix with my large Fig Tree collection.

I am having so much fun working on the blocks. They're like little gems, and every time I finish one I have to just step back and say "isn't this the cutest block." Luckily only the cats can hear me talking to myself! For the postage stamp below, I cut 36 different squares and hoped that it would be cute instead of a mess.

And while you might know me as the town mouse from NYC who packed up and became the country mouse in Indiana, would you believe that my mother grew up with a chicken coop in the backyard? I remember always seeing that coop behind my grandparent's house in Connecticut, and I was afraid of those clucking sounds. Here's 9 year old Bunny, my own original farm girl, with her baby brother and their pet rooster Whitey.

Just look at those chicken feet!

So I had to ask mom to tell me about Whitey. Well, he was the family pet until he pecked her. And then Whitey became Sunday dinner. Oops! But my grandparents always had fresh eggs from their chickens, and that was where I first saw brown eggs. And with those eggs, of course, my grandmother baked amazing cakes, which always had buttercream frosting, and often raspberry or lemony custard filling. That's what inspired the colors of my layer cake block. (I'm lucky to have several of her frosting recipes.)

Would you like to bake your own cake block? The pattern PDF is a free download at Fat Quarter Shop, and it comes in 6" and 12" sizes! No need to preheat your oven or sift the flour! Just visit the Jolly Jabber blog here for more information. The Farm Girl Vintage book can be purchased here, and the corn and tomatoes block pattern is here. And Lori always has something fun going on at her Bee In My Bonnet blog, too.

Finally, I'd like to invite you to see the cake blocks that many bloggers have "baked" for the birthday celebration. Feel free to visit their parties. And don't forget that you can see my daily sewing updates by following me on Instagram (I'm @greydogwoodstudio).

farm girl vintage again!

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Happy Monday! I hope that you all had a great weekend! I finally had a chance to pull a favorite book off the shelf, dust it off, and start sewing. It's Farm Girl Vintage by Lori Holt.

So let me tell you about my experience with this book. I was so excited about it LAST MAY. I picked out my fabrics...

They're a blend of Ambleside by Brenda Riddle and Aloha Girl by Fig Tree. I happily sewed the first 19 blocks...

And then you can probably guess what happened. I found out that we'd be relocating to Indiana, and my focus became all about finding a place to live, buying some new furnishings and then the fun drive here from NYC with the cats in the car (anyone with a cat knows that I'm kidding about that!) I brought my sewing machine with us in the car because I was afraid that something bad might happen to it in the moving truck! But I didn't bring any fabric or projects to work on. So of course, by the time our stuff was delivered and my sewing space was set up, well, I had completely lost interest in the Farm Girl Vintage quilt.

But then something happened. I saw everybody posting their finished quilts on Instagram and I thought WAIT, I NEED TO FINISH MINE! So a few days ago, I pulled out all my blocks and started to sew. First, I made Grandma's Quilt block, and then the Kettle's On block.

I kept going and made the Haystack and Kitchen Window blocks. Would you believe that I spent two hours choosing these fabrics? The blocks took just minutes to sew.

The partial block lineup! I love how they look together so far.

half done!.jpg

But I could see that I was running into an obstacle. There are several blocks that almost need an orangey fabric. Yes, I could substitute... but you need orange prints to make a pumpkin! And I really, really wanted to make the Homemade Pie block. Of course, pie crust isn't grey or pink. So I asked my Instagram friends about if I should add orange prints. The comments came in quickly, and it was unanimous - everybody told me to not be afraid of orange. I'm now adding the more pale Fig Tree oranges - the butterscotches and softer pumpkins. (I'm adding a few prints from other Brenda Riddle and Fig Tree collections, too.) So here is Homemade Pie! And I needed the Pie Cherries block, too.

I actually finished the Homemade Pie block on Saturday at 1am (yes, 1am) and the fork tines looked bent. Ugh. That would never do. So after a few hours of sleep, I unsewed the block and fixed it. It quickly became my very favorite block.

l'm going to keep sewing blocks from the book, and I'll add in some of the extra bonus blocks like the hand mixer and the pig.  I even bought embroidery floss today for the electric cord on the mixer and the tail on the pig. I'm serious about finishing this quilt!

The Farm Girl Vintage book is available from many retailers, but I got mine here, and the pie block pattern here. There are also several other companion blocks, such as the mixer, a cow, a barn cat, a honey bee and more. You can find all of them here.

Thanks so much for stopping by today... see you soon... probably with more Farm Girl Vintage blocks!

i'm off to the farmland

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I'm back on the farm again with the Farm Girl Vintage sew along. Wow, I had a lot of catching up to do! If I miss out on making two blocks each week I can get behind quickly.

You probably know that I'm a little addicted to gingham. I try to put some gingham into every quilt if possible. So how perfect that last week's project was to make a "gingham" block! I even used gingham for the medium-toned print, so it's Gingham Squared. Or Gingham Gingham. Or Double Gingham. Now, of course, I want to make a whole quilt full of gingham blocks.

And yes, I just used the word gingham nine times in the previous paragraph :-)

The Fresh Pears and Feed and Seed blocks are fun, too. Ah, fresh pears. My friend Judi has a pear tree in her backyard and there's always a plentiful yield of green pears for everybody to take home. They're often hard and sour, but there are lots of them!

And finally, the egg basket and crops blocks. Who wouldn't want to fill this basket with farm fresh eggs?

The Farm Girl Vintage blocks might even have inspired a short trip that I took last week to the real farmland. 

Can you guess where I went?

I was in Indiana looking for a new home! Can you believe it? Paul and I are leaving NYC for greener pastures... literally. We're trading Metropolis for Midwest! It was a quick decision, but after living in NYC for 30 years I'm ready for a change. And this will be a BIG change for sure. Imagine how excited we were to find an apartment that's three times the size of my current place, with all those "modern" conveniences that I lack in my current apartment - stuff like a full sized refrigerator, dishwasher and garbage disposal, washer and dryer, sliding door and balcony. And a walk-in closet. Plus green leafy trees and cute birds that chirp instead of big, ugly pigeons. Crazy, right? There are even THREE quilt shops in town (but none of them carry Moda fabric or Aurifil thread... what's up with that?) and one of them can service my sewing machine. We'll move at the end of July, but I intend to keep on sewing right up until the last minute. The movers will deal with our furniture, and we'll pack the cats and my sewing machine into the new car. I'll share my farewell message to New York with you soon. The move is now just three weeks away. EEK.

Now back to the quilty stuff. The Little Joys sew along starts this Wednesday with that cute fabric by Elea Lutz. (Remember Elea's first fabric collection Milk, Sugar & Flower? She's back with a terrific Christmas collection.) The patterns will be free for a limited time only. I've got all the details for you in my previous blog post, or you can click on the Little Joys button in the right sidebar. See you back here on Wednesday!

farm girl friday - farmhouse

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I'm so happy to be your cowboy tour guide for Farm Girl Friday, week 8! Or as I prefer to think of it, it's Farm Boy Friday!

We are using the Farm Girl Vintage book by Lori Holt for the sew along. And today we are building a farmhouse block!

The farmhouse is my favorite block in the Farm Girl Vintage book. I've always loved house blocks. They have that classic, vintage look, and they can be playful or sophisticated depending on your fabric selection. I've blended Ambleside by Brenda Riddle with Aloha Girl by Fig Tree & Co, both by Moda Fabrics.

First, turn to page 27, then cut and sew, preferably with country farm girl music. I was super happy when I finished the 6" block for my sampler quilt, and I didn't want the fun to end. So I made another block, this time 12" and using Mistletoe Lane by Bunny Hill.

Humm, I think it looks bare. How about if we add a topiary tree?

But why stop there? Let's make another farmhouse and another topiary!

I LOVE them! The two large houses are the beginning of the Farmhouse Lane quilt. The pattern is in the book on page 128. You'll need nine of the 12" houses, six trees and sixteen 6" blocks.  I think it will be the perfect Christmas quilt full of gingerbread houses, ice skates (never mind that I don't skate, even though I stalk the Rockefeller Center ice skating rink every Christmas) and little Christmas trees. But wouldn't it also be a spooky fun quilt in Halloween colors? Or summery with red, white and blue?

I really wanted to make a striped roof. It took me a few minutes to figure how to get the stripes all oriented in the same direction. So now let's talk about how to use stripes on your roof.

The roof is made in four sections. You will need two half square triangles (HSTs) for the left and right portions of the roof. Lori's pattern shows you how to use my very favorite method for making HSTs. But when you make your HSTs using the method shown, the result will be one HST with vertical stripes and one HST with horizontal stripes. You'll need to make a second set using the exact same method, and this will give you a second HST with vertical stripes. (You'll have two leftover HSTs with horizontal stripes, but I KNOW that you can find a creative use for them!)

Thanks for joining me today! I hope that you share your farmhouse blocks on Instagram. Be sure to use the hashtags #farmgirlvintage, #farmgirlfridays and #farmhouseblock when you post your blocks. And you can see all the fun projects that I'm working on, too. I'm @greydogwoodstudio.

Now hop on over to Lori Holt's blog to see her Farm Girl Vintage blocks, and check out the other guest bloggers, too. The full schedule is on the Jolly Jabber blog here.

Until next time, happy farming!

farm girl friday - baking and canning

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I've been doing some "cooking" this week with the Farm Girl Vintage sew along. I "canned" the seasonal fruits and vegetables. There's strawberry and raspberry preserves, green pickles, yellow summer squash, and... blue stuff. Uh, blueberries? Blue cheese dressing? 

And a chicken foot block. Me and the chicken did not get along. This block gave me trouble, and I did the rubber chicken dance when it was finished!

I forgot to show you last week's blocks! The baking day block was fast and easy. I even have a matching mixing bowl from Cath Kidston!

And the butter churn block just might be my favorite block so far. It's that electric jolt of blue that wakes it up.

If it wasn't for the weekly quilt along, I'd probably just sew every block in the book as quickly as possible - they're that much fun.

For more details on the sew along (and some block inspiration!), check out Lori Holt's blog today here.

And Happy Memorial Day weekend to my friends in the USA!