Three things: Quilts, blueberries, and social inclusion

Two quilts.  The one in the top pictures is one made by my mum for my eldest.  His middle name is Kuaka, after a migratory bird that flies between New Zealand and North America, where he was born.  So kuaka feature in the quilt, as well as many moments from our last trip back to New Zealand, like finding the one ripe fig on the tree before the waxeyes devoured them.  Both my kids love this beautiful quilt and I often find one of them inspecting the details.  I’ll give you ten points if you can match the tree in the background to one in the quilt.  The other quilt is one I made from a Kaffe Fassett pattern called “Mitered Boxes”.  I actually finished it on my mum’s machine on that same trip.  If you use his fabrics, it will come out looking more like this (second picture down), but I made mine mostly from old shirts.  I bought the shirts as I needed them, and I can tell you which I found on a trip to New Orleans, which came from Indiana when we lived there, which came from Chicago, which were sent to me from Dad’s closet when he wasn’t paying attention…

I planted a hedge of blueberries a few weeks ago with five different varieties of blueberry which will hopefully give a good spread of berries through the season.  Just after I planted it, I heard this this podcast about how to get the best from your blueberries.  So helpful!  The tip I appreciated most was using soy bean meal or cotton seed meal in the Autumn as a fertiliser that offers different things to the plants as it breaks down.

Finally, I just listened to this amazing podcast episode, an interview with Kim John Payne, who wrote “Simplicity Parenting”.  The podcast is about bullying, or social exclusion (the term he prefers to use), and I picked up a lot of helpful information that one day, I am sure, in one way or another, will become useful.  Sigh.