Berry Picking & Harlequin Progress

It's been a good, productive day...

This evening we went up to the campground at Fremont Lake and picked Oregon grapes. They are tiny berries that grow in clusters on plants that are no taller than 6 inches or so. It takes a lot of stooping and bending. We will be making jelly out of these. They do not taste like regular grapes. They are tart and not good to eat alone. The jelly is a lot like grape jelly though.

There are lots of places where they grow in thick patches and you can reach 10-15 plants without moving. The good patches have double clusters on each plant and the berries are big and plump ... well, relatively big compared to the scrawny berries :)

If you look closely there are three plants loaded with berries in this picture growing at the base of some Aspen trees.

This will give you some idea about how big the berries are - and how juicy and red.

Not a bad haul for just an hour's work. By the time all my daycare kids went home and we got up to the lake and had dinner with my in-laws, we only had about an hour of daylight to pick them. We're hoping to get some more picked Saturday morning, but this is really quite a lot, so even if we don't we'll have plenty.

We ended up with about a third of a Walmart bag full of berries.

Now for a quick harlequin quilt update...

I again had a chance to do a little stitching while the munchkins rested. It's one of those "sew a couple minutes, check on the kids, sew a couple minutes, etc." situations, so I don't get things done very quickly and my sewing time is limited, but at least I do try to get some in each day if possible. That may change soon as I'm taking on a one year old in September who naps on his own schedule. If his nap times don't line up with everyone else's, my sewing will be very limited.

I did learn about the importance of pinning though, as you can see from the picture above. I have to confess, I almost never pin anything. It's just so much faster without the pins - both putting them in and taking them out. I don't usually have any problem with not pinning things, but this little bugger slid as I sewed it. I had already done 3/4 of the quilt top without any problem, but once I did this one, they all seemed to want to slide, so I gave in and pinned them.

I may not like to take time to pin, but I hate taking time to rip out seams. So, I only made that mistake once.

The middle sideways pin was the one I put in yesterday when I was making my rows. I thought that would hold it well enough, but I would have been faster just to put two pins in them to start with.

I wanted to see what the finished product would look like, so I laid the rows out on the floor to see. These are sewn in diagonal rows, but the rows are not connected to one another, and I didn't put a lot of effort into making sure they all lined up just right on the floor. Clearly, I still haven't cut out my edge pieces, so like it or not, that will have to be done tomorrow. I love to sew, but don't love to cut, so if there's something to sew, that always wins out.