House and Home

Things have been a little crazy around here.  We have a graduation coming up.  We found out yesterday, Lola is the valedictorian!  She has worked sooo hard to accomplish this.  She has way more driven than I ever was at that age. She has 1  A- for her whole high school career.   She will be attending school in Indiana, about 5 hours away.  We have been busy trying to get the house ready for company.  Nine family members from out of state will arrive starting on Friday.  We have gutted the kitchen and reworked the landscape for the event.
Today is a beautiful day in the neighborhood.  Here are a couple pictures showing the new status of the beds.  The house is 14 years old and lots of plants were overgrown and needed to come out.

The magnolia tree shown here probably still needs to come out….it has very little growth on the lake side.

We reworked the step area with these stones.  The larges stones on the left side are over 250 lbs. each.  See the stain touch ups that still need to be done before the party.  The staining took about 3 days last fall.  The bracket on the side of the deck is for an old satellite dish, works works great an umbrella fits in there to shade us while we cook on the grill, so we kept it.

What do you do when one of the established plants die?? Stick a decorative stone there and hope it looks like a design feature.

The quilts for the graduates are coming along nicely.  Here is the latest finished one.  The is the “Brown Quilt” by Judy L. over at the Patchwork Times.  I did a little manipulation to use a cake layer that DH had purchased on one of his travels.  I love how this turned out, it is for my nephew.

See the pot on the right….my leaf lettuce.  The garden is in and 2 pots of leaf lettuce are starting to produce.  We have had a long cool spring so it took a while before I dared harvest any of it.
Soon another quilt will be done (over half quilted) and the first one to get handed out is possibly Saturday.  I can’t decide whether to have a sleep over for all the girls or gift wrap them and take them to the open houses.

This is the one in progress.  Name suggestions from all of you helped me choose, "Caribbean Blue Sea".  Thanks for the help.
Happy Quilting,
Just Another Quilter