Life keeps racing right along. Fall has definitely arrived with chilly dawns and cool, bright days. The cats have taken to sleeping on my bed at night and waking me up about five o'clock with enthusiastic bounds from my bed to the fabric stash by the window to the ironing board and back. They want their fresh can of tuna, even though they have their favorite dry food available to snack on at will. All that bounding just helps to work up their appetites for the good stuff.

As to the race between USPS with the seed order and UPS with the fabric order, the winner is . . . USPS with the seed order. It got here on September 20, delivered to our back door because it was too big to fit in the mailbox. I got Baby's load emptied onto a new section of the garden beds and had it about half refilled when the package arrived. So, now I've got more greens and some onion seeds planted in the garden, and Baby and Rapunzel got lots of old plants and weeds added to their loads so that they are pretty full again. Their loads are already a nice dark brown and are cooking right along despite the cool nights.

The tomatoes are doing well and I've picked twenty-one tomatoes with dozens more on the plants. There are more just about ready to pick now. They've been joined by some volunteer tomato seedlings from seeds that didn't get killed in the composter, but those young plants look so strong that I'm leaving them there and hoping they'll have some good fruit before frost. It has gotten too late to plant much more before frost would kill the plants, but I'm still planting some cold hardy crops in case we have mild fall and early winter weather.

Sadly, I must report that my melon plants got nailed by mildew and the crop is lost. They did do better in the areas with compost around them, but the stress of trying to set fruit apparently was too much. They were doing so well with plump little melons setting here and there, and then they succumbed and wilted.

The winter squash plants did set a few fruits and they are nearly ripe. I planted some butternut squash, the kind that makes the tan fruits with a long neck above a rounded seed cavity. I like them because they make good pies and custards much like pumpkins but they aren't quite so large. The pumpkin plants haven't set anything and may have been too shaded.

I'm now cleaning up the garden as fast as the tumblers have room to put the old plants and leaves being removed. The trees are turning a duller green and a few leaves are scattered on the grass. I'm planning to mulch the fallen leaves into piles under the shrubs and get them into the tumbler or mixed into compost mulch to get the garden as cleaned up as possible going into the winter. The soil that got some compost mulch on it from the first loads has a nice rich brown layer of fine compost over noticeably darker soil beneath. It is so much better than the bed areas which haven't gotten any compost yet. If I can get the garden cleaned up and mulched this fall, I should have a lot easier time planting next spring.

That ought to free up more time for crafting in a few weeks. Ha ha, dream on! My projects are all piled up waiting for more time to do them. The fabric order arrived with a big square ruler to check how well a large block was constructed. I put it down on my cat blocks and discovered that they weren't nearly as well sewn as I thought. In fact, many will have to have seams removed and resewn before they can be used, and some may have to be replaced. I couldn't see how well the whole block was going together with the narrow rulers that I had. That explains why my corners don't always match so well when I'm assembling the bigger sections of my blocks.

The process of checking and trimming each sewed section is called "squaring up." It is especially important for novice quilters who haven't developed their sewing skills sufficiently to accurately sew the seams straight and with the proper seam allowance. You put the sewn piece under your clear ruler and see if it is the right size. If it is crooked or too small, you have to rip out the seams by gently removing the threads holding the pieces together while trying not to actually rip them to shreds. Then you resew the pieces and hope that you do better that time.

If you are lucky, your block should turn out the right size or perhaps a tiny bit larger. A little trimming will take of that. Some of my blocks will do with a little trimming, but the rest will have to be fixed. Chalk up another lesson about being too cheap to get the proper tools and use them in the first place. My narrow rulers didn't cover the whole section once I got up to pieces bigger than about six inches, so I couldn't see all four corners to make sure they were all square and the proper distance from each other so I didn't have a crooked side.

Quilting is fun but the piecing is pretty unforgiving about even small errors, since they add up as you sew together each section to make the larger sections which eventually grow into the quilt top. The setback is not disastrous but is going to delay the completion of the quilt. It also meant that I missed out on getting a fabric assortment that I was greedily eyeing at fabric.com, since I had vowed to get more of this backlogged crafting done before I bought more than the backing fabric for a quilt that I could make mostly out of my stash. Now the assortment is gone and probably won't be back.

It looks like I'm going to have to do some squaring up of my time as well. I got more library books on painting, but I can't squeeze in the time for painting lessons. I can read the books since my chronic illness means that I have to stop and rest occasionally, but getting everything done that I would like to do is another matter. The latest painting book said that one should practice for two to three hours a day, and that the best Japanese artists practiced their brush strokes for three years before they tried to paint their first picture. Okay, they must not have families wanting hot meals and clean clothes.

Diva night at the pottery studio appears to be out of the schedule unless I can work in more practice time when the garden is slumbering through the winter months. Of course, I could practice painting and then start painting fabric for quilts if I got good enough. I wonder if I can get the lady who organized diva night interested in that.