Sawtooth

     I finished all the tops I had in progress and now have 9 tops to quilt.  Oh fun.  As I have mentioned before, I hate the quilting part, but it isn't a quilt until it's quilted.

      I looked at the Sawtooth pattern and saw this huge 12" center square that needs to be filled with quilting.  This is a great space for those of you who love the quiltng part and you can use some of those oversize designs you have.  But I kept trying to think of a way to shrink that square to something not quite so time consuming.

     My daughter put in a request for a quilt some time ago, and I though, aha!  I can run off pictures of her dogs and fill the square with those.  I could then get by with minimal quilting in the square.  I ran the idea by her and we both agreed that this particular quilt was better suited to pictures of children, because of the bright, scrappy colors.

 

 

     We agreed that for her dogs the half square triangles should be in shades of brown and black. 

 



       This is still a little bright, but the colors in my graphics program are pretty vivid.  You could adapt this idea to feature family members, using their favorite colors to form the half square triangle frames.

     Another treatment for this square would be embroidery or red work.  The redwork would be truly stunning.  It doesn't show up well in the photo above, but I quilted  each of the squares using a different design in blue thread.  It looked really good.

February Garden To Do

Things To Do This Month

     Order seeds and plants if not alredy done
     Clean up winter debris
     Continue dormant pruning
     Aply dormant pest controls to fruit trees
     Take cuttings of geraniums
     Sow indoors seeds reuiring up to 12 weeks to transplnt

     Every seed packet tells you in which zones you can plant their particular seed.  For example on my packet of chives it tells me that the plants will grow in zones 3-9.  Also on the seed packet is a map of the US divided into 10 zones  

 

 

 

 

                                                                  

                                                                     Date of Last Spring       Date of First Fall

                                                                                Frost                         Frost

                                                                      Zone

                                                                     

                                                                         1      Junw 15                August 1

                                                                         2      June 10                 August 20

                                                                         3      May 30                 September 25

                                                                         4      May 20                 October 1

                                                                         5      May 10                  October 10

                                                                         6      April 30                October 20

                                                                         7      March 30              November 10

                                                                         8      March 10              November 20

                                                                         9      January 30             December 10

                                                                      10      No frost                 No frost 

 

     To use this information, I live in Zone 5.  I would count back 12 weeks from May 10, which would be about February 10 to sow seeds indoors for any seed requiring 12 weeks to transplant size.

 

       To determine fall planting dates you must take into account that the days are getting shorter and extra time will be needed for plants to reach maturity than when planted in the spring.  This is known as the short day factor and amounts to about 14 days.  In other words, if the packet lists 50 days to maturity, you would add 5 days for germination, plus the 14 short day factor, for a total of 69 days from date of first frost.