Hello Summer

This morning I sewed my first project in ages, a zipper pouch made of canvas from Rifle Paper Co.'s Bon Voyage collection that will be a gift for a friend. It felt so good to sew again. I never realize how much I miss it until I come back to my fabric and thread after some time away.

My sewing room is in a state of total chaos at the moment which is why there has been neither sewing nor posting around here for some time. In the fall, my sister and I will be teaching enrichment classes to our girls every other week, so I'm trying to reconfigure my setup ahead of time to have classroom space as well as work space for my own projects. I'll be teaching music and sewing, my sister will be doing cooking and art, and my brother in law will be giving the girls pointers in martial arts and self-defense. It's going to be so great, and I'm excited to get into the planning stages over the next month. Once I have everything looking somewhat put together again, I'll show you pictures of the finished space. 

After months of work, my husband's garden is in full swing. With all the craziness at the supermarket this year, we decided to go big here at home, so the garden is about four times larger. The photo above was actually taken a few weeks ago, and at this point we've got a lot more growth happening, especially in the watermelon patch in the lower right hand corner of the picture which is now wreathed in vines.. Keeping it alive during this Texas heat streak has been a challenge, but so far it's working. My husband has already harvested all the sweet onions and some of the herbs for my cooking, and they taste amazing. My youngest loves to go out every morning and snag a few raspberries from the berry bushes after breakfast along with a mint leaf or two. It's her favorite morning treat. 

Now that we've wrapped up the school year, I'm thinking about projects for the summer. Most of them involve cleaning and organization, but I'm also hoping to finish the quilt I've been slowly working on as well as the EPP pillow I started years ago. After that, I'm going to open up some favorite books and see what looks like fun.

But summers are mostly for family, and I'm happily storing up the memories from every minute of time I get to spend with my favorite people in the world.