out standing in the field

This is the best time of year to take a trip in my little area of the country.  It's many shades of rich green, crops thriving, everything's growing in the sun.  I love the long views whenever I am on a little rise.  Sometimes the best viewpoint is on a bridge at an interstate exit!  I was out at "the farm"-- it was owned and operated by my grandparents when I was a child, then my dad, and now my brother and his wife, Mary.  They do a wonderful job of maintaining and improving the land with their forward-thinking farming methods and conservation.  I caught this picture of the soybeans and the area set aside for wildlife.

And the roads are set out in neat grids, so they are often straight.  In this picture, I can see the trees way down the road that are a couple miles away.

Mary loves roses, and has developed a nice rose bed with several varieties, these are just 2--

They have to be very hardy to survive the wind, storms, snow and cold!

On another note, this is a quilt that my mom just finished.  It's about 80" square or thereabouts, made from 5" squares.  It's for her great-granddaughter, Aurora.  She has hand quilted it, with a shape or letter or number or object in each square.  The dark pink in the star and border is a paisley, which she quilted following the lines of the paisley shapes.  Now she just has to get it out to Washington for Aurora!

And I've done a little hand-stitching, too, working on a UFO that I wrote about here last year.  I basted the whole works to a background fabric, and I have been stitching the outside edge to the background, like an applique stitch.  I'm over halfway around.  Then I need to decide what to do.  I think I want it for the center of my dining room table, so I might put a very thin batting (or heavy flannel) under it with a backing fabric, then do some big-stitch hand quilting to hold the layers together.  I'm in no rush, so I will give it a bit more thought before I land on what I want.  The directions for the hexagon design were part of a sew-along from Sue Daley's blog over at suedaleydesigns.com.  It was called the Forget-Me-Not Sew Along, and you can get the instructions there at no charge.  I only did a portion of the sew-along, deciding that I didn't need a huge project!