Recent Makes: Five on Friday

During September my heart is drawn away from the garden into our home. It's still summer, according to the calendar, but darkness falls earlier and earlier. I find myself pulling the blankets tighter in the wee hours of the morning. 

The garden delights with tomatoes galore, and we still pick raspberries and zucchini. The pumpkins (just two) are growing fat and round. And the dahlias put out flower after flower. 

For today's Five on Friday I'm sharing 5 things I've made recently. The first is the bouquet on the mantel, a small arrangement of dahlias and plant trimmings. 

I've been admiring project bags for awhile now - there are some very pretty ones. On a rainy afternoon, I set my mind to thinking of dimensions and fabric combinations. It didn't take too long to stitch up a lined and zippered bag to hold my ...

knitting. I'm not very adept at knitting, but there's a craft club once a week at school, during lunch hour, and another teacher has offered to teach me how to knit socks. We'll see how that goes. I enjoy having something portable to work on, and the rhythm of knitting is very appealing to me. 

Third is a work in progress. I'm making a quilt with hexagons. Small ones. It's a project that gets put away from time to time and brought out again on the same schedule. Progress is being made, slowly. 

At first I joined the hexagons in rows, but that became tedious, so I did patches of them. Now I'm more orderly and I'm putting them together in sets of seven. Scraps, old shirts, linen napkins, and some new fabrics meld together in my favourite shades of blue and white.

For number four, here's an apron I stitched up recently, using a pattern from an old magazine that had a very small diagram and rough dimensions. I played with it and will likely make it again with some modifications. 

And lastly, here's a bit of early autumn in a teacup. The teacup is from my aunt who passed away in January. It's called Knotty Pine, by Royal Albert. I gathered bits and pieces on a walk and tucked them into the teacup. 

I'm sneaking in one more thing - not a make, but a READ! Oh my, it's a good one! Multi-layered, rich with human foibles, grace, hope, and good eating. I pre-ordered the book and picked it up on the release date, August 30, but held off until the weekend (Labour Day) to read it. So satisfying. I'm still digesting it and will definitely read it again.

Joining Amy for Five on Friday, a fun link-up of blogs from here and there.