Pancake Tuesday

Pancake Tuesday and I have nothing in the food line that I can show you.  My pancakes are gone.  DH made a load of them this morning and we ate them right up.  I prefer waffles, but hey, when someone else is doing the cookin' you just eat and say nothing.


Its getting time to be thinking of summer!  I know its only February, but summer hangs on my kitchen walls all year long.  I like perennial flowers cause once they are planted you are done.  We have a bed beside the driveway and here you will find Black-eyed Susans, Daisies and Cone Flowers.  Black-eyed Susans used to grow wild along the roads in Quebec when I was a child, along with chickory and wild daisies.
Daisies I just like!  No reason, course there is the old saying....."he loves me, he loves me not".......most times he loves me! 
Cone flowers I first saw growing in the ditches along a New Jersey turnpike along with Cosmos.  We were quick to get those in our garden.
I found the patterns I wanted to use from patterns I already had.  I had done them before in two McKenna Ryan wall hangings that I have.

The daisies are featured in her Storybook Farm piece.  I did that one in honour of my MIL and FIL a few years ago.  It represents their old farm in Denmark so well. 

You can't make too many mistakes when you do daisies.  Pick a white fabric and go for it.  Before I cut the fabric though, I fuse fusible interfacing to the back of it.  Then I fuse the web.  That way you won't be able to see the background fabric through the white fabric.  You usually have to stitch down the pieces as they tend to separate a bit.

Sunflowers.  My husband grows these and yes in this colour.  I took a petal of the flower up to the quilt shop to try to match it.  They didn't have anything that even came close.  I came home and when going through my stash I found it!  I was thrilled.  When I dropped into Sewing Machines, etc., to find matching thread, Jane suggested that I embellish the flowes.  Heck, I'd never done that before.  I bought the "crystals"  and then went back and let Jane put them on.  She did a good job.

Of course, there are some seeds falling out of the flower.  The squirrels can find those on the ground and have a little treat.  We have had the little devils chew the whole head off and run away with it.  They don't seem to care for the more colourful ones like they do the yellow sunflowers.  The goldfinches love them.  We get quite a gathering in the summer of those beautiful little birds flitting in and out through the rows.

Cone flowers are not one of my husband's favourites.  He tolerates them.  He can't see anything in them at all.  I don't know why.  I think they are rather pretty and give us another colour in the garden that we don't normally have.  The petals are rather delicate and the butterflies sure like them. 

I have done one other wallhanging from McKenna Ryan.  I'm going to save that until another day and I'll feature both of them.  I don't think I will be doing too much more of her work.  There is a lot of tracing and many, many little pieces.