Sunshine at last

The last few days have been busy around here.  Sorry to have been absent so long.  Remember the trees that were giving me too much shade to have a garden?

Well a big part of them are gone.  I now have enough sunshine to plant a small raised bed garden.  There will be enough sunshine during the day that plants can actually grow.  I traded the making of two memory quilts for getting these cut down and several branches cut from the others.  I wish I could get all of them cut down to the ground so I could plant some fruit trees.  You see how the builder dealt with the trees when the house next door was built?  His solution was to build a bump out in the fence around them and leave me with the ugly mess.  I have the chain link fence and the young girl next door has the wood fence.  I hope to have the memory quilts finished by the end of this month to finish my part of this trade.

I need to deal with this stuff though.  The smaller branches will be shredded.  I thought about using it for mulch around my raised bed garden but have decided it would be too much temptation for termites.  Now that I've gotten rid of those pesky critters I don't want to invite them back.

A neighbor will be taking these to burn in his wood stove.  I'm sure glad someone wanted these so I don't have to deal with getting rid of them.  I also had the cherry tree topped out.  It was supposed to be a mini tree but turned out to be a tall tree.  Now that it's been topped out the side branches should fill out more making it easier for me to pick cherries closer to the ground. 

I was working on this quilt and taking pictures to do another tutorial about working with wonky on point quilts.  I was really unhappy with how the quilting was turning out so I took it off the machine.  I'm going to frog stitch (pick out) all the stitching of the three borders and do those over before finishing the quilting.

I put this one on the machine to work on until I finish the frog stitching of the other one. 

The cancer spot that was removed from my face is healing.  It looks quite ugly with a dark scab right under my nose and was pretty painful for a couple of days.  The three places on my back are healing as well.  I also have a new printer thanks to another trade.  How do I find trades? 

Well, with the memory quilts, while we were talking about his wife's clothing being made into memory quilts for his daughters he mentioned what he does for a living.  When he mentioned his work I simply asked if he wanted to trade.  We both feel it's a fair trade.  The trade for a new printer came about because I had posted about my printer quitting.  A reader contacted me about trading a new printer for some quilting work.  I'm very happy with the printer she had and hope to make her just as happy with the quilting I'll be doing on her quilt. 

I don't do trades all the time.  I do have bills to pay that can't be done by trades.  But, trades like these are great when they happen.  Back in the early days of machine quilting, when customers were very hard to find, I traded for lots of things when I couldn't afford to pay cash.  In those days I traded for finished quilts instead of machine quilting services.  I could spend a whole day talking about the trades I made back then.  A used refrigerator and a set of tires for my car.  A coat and shoes for my daughter.  Flooring.  Yup, I could spend a whole day talking about trades.  Hmm... I even wrote an article for Unlimited Possibilities magazine about trading for quilting.  Gosh, that was a long time ago. 

Mom is behaving herself for now.  She has a birthday next week and I'll be visiting her this weekend.  I'm trying to get my sugar under control, my blood pressure back down, and to lower my cholesterol.  Which is why a garden is so important to me this year.  Healthier eating, exercise, and plenty of sunshine all at the same time.  This is just the next step in my journey back to a simpler life.  I like it!