PARSLEY & PINWHEELS

There are several potted plants on the back patio: lots of pots of flowers but also four pots of veggies and herbs--Sweet Million tomatoes, lettuce, kale and parsley.  Yesterday I harvested the parsley.

I cut just about half the parsley in the pot which was quite a bit, washed it several times and pulled the leaf bunches off the stems.

Spread the parsley on a baking sheet and put it in the oven at 170º and let it dry for about an hour and a half.  This shows the parsley before drying.

 

When it was dry I put it in a jar for the cupboard.  A nice full jar of somewhat crumbled parsley to use this winter in soups, stews, and sometimes (with butter) on boiled potatoes.

 

In June I did a "demo day" at the LQS showing how to create a Disappearing Four Patch in which all the seams "nested."  It was fun and well received.  With the fabric that was left over and a meter of beige for the background I made a lap quilt using the pattern Pinwheels.  This is also a pattern for which I created a technique that insures "Practically Perfect Pinwheels.  This quilt will be displayed in the LQS (our local drugstore which has an excellent fabric section) as a preview of a "demo day" in September, showing my technique for creating practically perfect pinwheels.  (Nothing is ever perfectly perfect!)

This quilt did not turn out as well as I would have liked.  The background beige did not set off the pinwheel colours as well as a black background, which was used on the second Disappearing Four Patch quilt.  Also, the batik border, which echoes the colours of the pinwheels very, very well, does not blend well with the pinwheel fabrics.  It is just too different a fabric design from that of the pinwheels.

 

Ah well!  I will consider that a learning experience.  When I look at this completed quilt I get another idea about how to make this.  What about making "Hourglass" blocks and alternating the direction?  That would put the difficult intersection where the four points come together outside the blocks.  Maybe I'll try a few blocks that way and see how successful that approach is.