Summer doings

Lately I have been busy with my weekly dose of the Between Charming Friends quilt along. This week I have assembled the blocks together for the quilt center and have about one day to finish the inner and outer borders.

What kept me from doing that was another project, with a strict deadline on June 30th, so naturally the strings had to be attached first. Here is a handbag for Stephanie's challenge, sewn with donated strings from my endless stash. I bought some black linen for this when I couldn't find my linen stash, but looking for something else I happened to dive  into a plastic bag with linen scraps and an almost 2 m piece of black linen! So the handbag is completely from stash fabrics after all. I used here the grommets Stephanie sent me some time ago, using the instructions on the back of the packing, Stephanie's tutorial and the encouragement of Suzie.

The other side is also stringy. I took the bag picture with my not so early peonies, but only a few can be seen there, so here is another view. Yesterday they were all just closed buds.

My vegetable patch has changed a lot in 4 weeks, but the only harvest so far can come from the herbs we bought in pots and some lettuce I planted here after using the big leaves for salad. The radishes (two first rows from left) are about 1/4" thick.

I feel heroic after having cleaned the living room windows, finally! The new fireplace caused a repair work on the parquet, and the whole floor had to be treated so there was no colour difference between old and new boards. When this dusty business was over (yesterday), it was so necessary but also so easy to clean the windows. If we had empty rooms with no furniture and especially no "stuff",  cleaning the house would only take a few minutes. But now we are slowly returning to normal life with carpets on the floors, chairs and tables in the room, and I might even hang the curtains some day.