Biking in the Neighborhood with Tiny Tiny Trees

Lake side of weir

River side of weir

The first bike ride of the year with the group of biker friends.  Sounds like we are motorcycle tough guys, huh?  LOL.  We are actually only bicycle tough guys!  The ride took us through White Oak and over one of the lakes outside the area.  There is a weir connecting the lake with the Amite River.  The weir controls the lake level and thus keeps the beautiful houses from flooding.  We have to cross the weir over a neat wooden bridge.  This is the first time in several years that I have seen the water so high.  I am going to try to find an older drier picture to compare.

We biked 11.8 miles in about 2 hours with a really stiff headwind!





Then we treated ourselves to lunch at Magoo's.  Magoo's is the new favorite of the guys particularly because they have Hot Dogs done 5 ways.

This is my dinner


This is Frank's dinner (Hot Dog with bun under a ton of french fries covered with chili and cheese.



I wanted his, but ate only mine!

Then yesterday afternoon I was letting my muscles recover and I cut out another quilt called The Neighborhood from the vast amount of scraps I have stored in various places around the house.  And today I cut out Tiny Tiny Trees to shade the Tiny Tiny Houses!

Sashing blocks notwithstanding, I have several options to lay out the trees.  They can be interspersed amongst the houses and offer them some shady respite from the sunny days.

Or they can be used as a border around the entire quilt or even just blocks of houses within the quilt.   I only have two made so it is difficult to see, you just have to imagine.

Inventing the Tiny Tiny Trees for the Tiny Tiny Houses was a work in frustration.  I tend to design my own stuff, which means I have to invent it from scratch rather than letting someone else work out the bugs.  Some of my bugs were small but some were big.  Like I had the method of cutting 30 degree trees down, got a phone call, and got lost in the methodology!  And I sewed the test tree patch on backwards to the foundation paper.  And when I sewed the sky sides on the tree one time, I sewed both of them in one patch and searched and searched for the other one in frustration.  I made a replacement, and found the original when I went to sew that new one on.  Sigh.........

house block pieces

These are some of the fabrics I used for The Neighborhood quilt.  It is a 20 block quilt, 10 different houses and 10 off blocks that connect the houses like roads and gardens.  Each house is a unique combination of 16 patches that change in color and position.  Well, you will just have to see it when I get the blocks working.  Each block is clipped together with its components since there is no way I could ever get the right piece

garden blocks pieces

 back to the right block.  I had to draw complicated diagrams and use mathematical algorithms to figure out how many of what went where.


You can see my drawings over here. I was quite pleased with the way I worked each block out.  They will be fairly simple to put together, so I will do them at retreat.

I have a number of quilts to get quilted so I am thinking to spend the rest of the week on doing that.

Maybe.  Maybe not.

glen