Rain, Rain, Go Away, Come Again Another Day - A little bit of sunshine put to good use

It rains alot here from November to March - pretty much nearly every day it seems. So its pretty grey and soggy. Its really beautiful weather in the summer - not too hot and usually sunny all day. But right now its wet Wet WET!

One little bit of sunshine has been poking around the living room and has really burst on the scene today. We bought a meyer lemon tree (bush) in a pot that was in flower. It lived on our little balcony this summer and the flowers turned to tiny green lemons (baby finger nail size) but now I have 10 good sized lemons - bright yellow and two green ones working on turning yellow. The fruit is very pretty - smooth skinned and perfectly lemon shaped.

What do you do when life gives you lemons - you make lemonade!! Here is my recipe made up on the spot:

Ingredients

1/2 lemon
3 tsps sugar
1/4 cup water
6 small ice cubes
extra water

Method

Squeeze half a lemon so that all the juice and as much pulp as possible is captured in an 8 oz glass. Add squeezed out skins and ice cubes to fill glass. In a small dish add 3 scant teaspoons of sugar to 1/4 cup of water along with a bit of lemon zest - a few grates is all and microwave on high for 30 seconds. Stir hot mixture to ensure sugar is dissolved. Pour hot mixture over ice cubes, add water to fill glass, stir to mix ingredients and ENJOY!!

Pat and Ian were both surprised how good this was and how much better than our usual frozen canned lemonade. It felt like we were drinking stored summer sunshine in the lemonade.

This brightened up my day - hope it brightens yours.

Flossie's Scrap Fabric Swap

Flossie wants to make a scrap string quilt using all the colours of the rainbow. It uses a lot of different fabric so she organized a swap with 8 others and by sharing we get a greater variety of fabrics.

Here are my scraps to swap. Most have been tossed into a bag and have been there for awhile - I thought at the time "Ohh this is too big to throw out- may come in handy someday" - well today is the day!



I was really surprised to see how much "scrap" fabric I had squished into a plastic grocery bag - there are enough to make well over 100 6" square blocks!!!


I hope to use the scraps I get for the string blocks in my circle quilt for round 4 of the ORBCQA.

Millefiore Quilt

This is the fabric I am using as the inspiration for the circle quilt of the ORBCQA. It is a Kaffe Fassett fabric called Millefiore and is in the pastel colourway. It has a 1000 colours in it or at least 11 - pastels with attitude!!!.

The colours include:a mauve, lavender, periwinkle blue, soft spring green, lemony yellow, a salmon tone, an aqua, pure pink,a purple grey, a very light grey and tiny tiny sparks of crimson. It reminds me of coloured swirled glass.

I am participating in a fabric swap hoping to get some of these colours to make the string blocks which use a lot of different fabrics.

This photo is from Hancocks Paducah online fabric store as I still have not got my camera cord fixed.