November Winds

My unofficially adopted son, Matthew's  windshield got replaced today, right in our lower driveway.

He was so very happy! Safelite did a great job.
Then, later in the day, his new headlight assembly arrived from San Jose, California, that he had been very anxiously awaiting.

Please note that those lower fenders are a nice newly painted black instead of all rough and chipped like before!

Our weather has been capricious with a seesaw thermometer. The kittens saw their first snow!

They really don't trust it yet, LOL! They were afraid to walk on it, and when they did, they shook off their little white paws. The dogs, on the other hand, loved it!!!

On the quilty side of things, it has been busy, too.

Whenever I am the least bit unhappy with a quilt's progress, I tend to run away and start something completely new. This is a very undisciplined approach, I realize, but as it is a hobby, I usually get away with it. It may take me two or three years to get back on track with the cast aside project, but I do.

This time, after all my struggles with assembling Milky Way into a center, I was bemoaning how poorly the contrast between my lights and darks looked. The design hardly shows! Whaughhhhhh!

So, Sunday, I set it aside rather than putting borders on it and I played nicely with some Paintbox Moda charm packs instead.

I sewed them randomly. I sewed them furiously. I had a ball! There are 42 five inch squares to one charm pack, and I had two of them. The day was cold and snowy. I hid inside and sewed!

Above you can see that the charms were randomly joined into big four-patches which I laid out on my bed. Then I joined them into rows and added borders. Here I was auditioning the very dark tealish green that was planned for my final binding.
The border fabrics were a Warmth Collections For A Cause by Moda. The first is the inner border of a light grayish blue.

The outer border is Cocheco Mills from Marcus Brothers. Here is a closer look:

I was so very happy with myself for getting something to a stage of completion that it really energized me!
The top was 48"x58" after the borders, so I found some pretty light creamy nondescript floral background fabric and cobbled up a backing. Next I grabbed my big roll of batting and measured out a 54" piece of the 90"+ Pellon "Nature's Touch".

Hey! I was ready to quilt!!!! And it was Monday, Veteran's Day, so Ellen Peters' said to com'on over!
I forgot to bring the camera, but as it was a small quilt, I was done in about 45 minutes.

Yahoo!!!! I brought it home and slammed a binding on it, and started hand hemming it.
I finished it this morning around 9am. Wow. Never did a quilt so fast!

When I quilted it on the longarm, I used a heart and loop design that some say looks like ivy leaves. I learned this from my dear friend Linda Monasky over at The Bear Paw Gallery in Alton, New Hampshire, link is here.

 It was challenging to make both sides of the leaves or hearts look evenly matched side to side.

This is the first time that I have quilted this design, so mine all go in one direction, but I love how it came out!
Inspite of it being so cold and very windy today, I got photos of it in the orchard Rose Nectarine tree.

What a great feeling to have a quick finish!

Happy sewing!

Houseflies

Have you ever noticed how ordinary houseflies turn into guerrilla warriors during Indian Summer days?
They don little ninja suits and hang out right beside your screen door just waiting for you to use that door so that they can cunningly slip into the house!
Then they land on you when you are trying to take a nice nap. Miss Raven is fighting back!

And Miss Emma-Lynn is helping out, too!

I have been busy quilting this past week, but it is all on a secret project that I choose to not blog about yet. What I can show is that I am all ready for the Red & White swap that I'm hostessing for Block_swappers. I now have a stack of 14 all done and pressed!

Those are twelve inch blocks all done with Moda Red Robin. I am very pleased that when I prewashed those reds in the bathroom sink that absolutely zero dye leached out in the water!

I have another stack of blocks that I haven't counted yet, so I'm not sure but I think that there are 48. I need to find my missing mojo to get them all sliver-trimmed to a consistant size. Right now they are a very uneven 11 and 1/2". I love the look of them!

I'm so bad at assembling quilts and love to just make blocks, LOL!

This week we had one evening with a really beautiful sunset that I just wanted to share with you, too.

God makes the very best color schemes!

Happy sewing.

The Riches in my Life

What a glorious busy week! I have so many blessings. My mailbox at the end of the driveway was more than once overflowing with swaps.
Yippee! I received a few of the blocks for the Red & White swap that I am hostessing through Block_swappers on Yahoo. And the squishies kept arriving!

The men's cotton shirt sleeves swap arrived with my twenty different and beautiful plaids and stripes. Since I harvested and sent in only the sleeves of my twenty shirts, I still have plenty of my original fabrics in the form of the fronts and backs of the deboned shirts from thrift shops.

What fabulous variety! And to top it off, many players did not want their cuffs, so when I spoke up and asked for them, I got a huge batch of cuffs and just a few collars.

I will spend some pleasant TV time harvesting the buttons and cutting these apart to salvage the two good strips of fabric from each cuff. I did a few of them already, see?

Then there was the washed red 2 1/2" strips swap that came in. God, I love all the reds! They are so cheery, warm, and energizing. I have no idea just how I will use them yet.

Each one of those snack sized baggies contains 10 all-different strips that are about 20" long, for a hundred all told.

Then there was a gal from Connecticut who was interested in a private swap of colors for the newest Bonnie K. Hunter mystery that starts on November 29th at Quiltville.
I had asked her for some yellows and oranges to trade for my bunch of greens and blues. Just look at what she sent!  Aren't they magnificent????

Wow, thank you, Shelley!

I'm also very glad that little Miss Emma is learning to NOT chase the kitties. Emma is still in the pink bandana and Raven is in the purple one.

But Emma still has moments when she is tempted to chase them. Here is one of my most precious photos of a kitty-kiss with Miss Tanner the kitten.

Stay calm and quilt on!

The Last Tuesday Of The Month

The last Tuesday of the month is becoming a special day for me as it is the meeting of The Farmer's Wife sewing group. A few of us have bought the book and are promised to do hand sewing only with templates and scissors. It's quite a change of pace for me!

Laurie Aaron Hird's book, "The Farmer's Wife Sampler Quilt."

Instead of being alone sewing pieces on my machine, I'm in a nice group of gals chatting and hand sewing around the table of Camille Arnone's Evergreen Country Primitives Quilt Shop in Milton, New Hampshire. We are sworn to go at our own pace and not feel pressured by any deadlines.

I've been working on the Basket Weave block and finished its last seam today. Then I realized that I hadn't paid close enough attention to the placement of the four units. I assembled it wrong. But I like mine and it's going into the quilt!!!!

My "differently assembled" block is on the left.

I started a second one of the same pattern, the basket weave, and got one half of it done. This time, I'm being more careful with the placement of the pieces.

As I worked on the careful process of marking the wrong side of my cut fabric pieces with a graphite mechanical pencil, Camille very nicely offered to let me use a "sandboard." I had never heard of these but it was quite a help to me!

So I decided to buy one to take home with me to accomplish maybe a little more in the upcoming month than I did this time.
With my guild discount, Camille charged me less than $15 and I was honestly able to tell Felix that I had been in a fabric store all morning and had NOT bought any fabric!! Yikes, that's a first for me, LOL!

The black side is the wonderfully gripping fine sandpaper and the flip side is white laminate for drawing or tracing. It is made by Becky Goldsmith and Linda Jenkins from Piece O' Cake Designs.

I like the 11"x 14 5/8" size, but I do wonder why they made it such a funny length. Why not 11"x14"? Go figure. Anyway, it's a great new toy!

This is the end of the quilty part of this blog entry and I have something else to report that is NOT for the squeamish or those that are easily offended. So you are forewarned.



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Two nights ago, something very disturbing appeared on my lawn and it was only 9 feet away from the nose of my car where I park every night.
It was a big pile of crap, literally. I took this photo with our two safety cones on either side of it so that you can see just how close it was to the house.

Felix inspected this and especially due to all the yellow millet birdseed and all the black oil sunflower seeds, and the size and shape of the stool, he believes firmly that we were visited upon by a large black bear.

It is more than a little un-nerving to have this bear sign so close to us!

We will continue to stay alert and only allow the dogs to run in the fenced dogyard. City folks need to watch out for muggers; country folks need to watch out for bears.

Stay calm and quilt on!

Bookends

There is a good reason that I have been so very quiet for a few days. All week we were hoping and praying to be considered as the new adoptive home for a second black labrador. We have filled out paperwork and applications, taken Raven over to the shelter for a "meet & greet" introduction, paid hefty adoption fees (to my budget, $250 is a lot, but I know that some rescue agencies are even more), and spent lots of time being interviewed.

The Concord chapter of the SPCA

Raven in her red bandana during the meet & greet interview.

Hello to "Emma"

At last, the four year old spayed female named, "Emma" came home with us! She is delightful and just as sweet-tempered as Raven. I kept Raven in the red bandana and I put a light blue one on Emma.

The two dogs are getting along very well! I have taken Emma outdoors into the fenced dogyard on a leash only to ensure that she is polite to the 3 kittens. At first, she thought that she was supposed to chase them, so now we are doing some meet & greet with the kitties, too.
Emma must have come from a home that did not allow dogs up on the furniture because she is loathe to get up on the futon with Raven.

For now, I created a new bed for her over by the door that is rarely used and she fell right asleep, exhausted by all the new surroundings.

I love her to pieces already but I'm very careful to give Raven lots of extra pets so she doesn't feel displaced. Now I may need to read the 1815 Jane Austen book, "Emma,"  LOL!

Emma likes to follow me around the house and she can zip up and down the cellar stairs like lightening.
Speaking of going downstairs to my Quilt Cave in the cellar, do you remember that I had managed to misplace about 150 four-patches? I looked everywhere upstairs through all my stacks of rubble and no luck! I looked there because that was where I had last recalled seeing them.

Ahaah! I was too organized. I had placed them all into neat stacks inside plastic ziploc bags and put them into a basket right on the shelves DOWN CELLAR!!!!! Groan. Soon I'll be ready for the home, LOL!
Well, at least I found them, but I sure did feel foolish.

So having found them, I began working with them.

I am assembling them into the rows of a Fons & Porter scrappy throw called "Milky Way" that appeared in their June/July 2012 magazine. The units are very simple; 4 1/2" unfinished four-patches made from 2 1/2" strips or squares, and 4 1/2" HST's and a few plain 4 1/2" squares.

Now, doesn't that sound easy? Making the units was a snap. Ahhhhhhh, but assembling them into a tessellating design is quite tricky!
There are no instructions for assembling other than a referral to the diagram. Sigh. I posted the diagram on the wall in front of my machine and I need to squint at it to see it because it is so tiny and cramped. Ugh!

It goes incredibly slowly to make one 13 unit long row, and there are 17 rows to the center before the scrappy borders. But I'm making some steady progress and so far I'm able to do about 2 rows a day. It is important to join up a newly completed row onto the body of the quilt's center so that it can't get turned around or reversed!
Here are the seven rows that I have so far.

I just hope that my values of lights and darks are far enough apart so that the pattern reads well. I fear that those dreaded mediums will muddy things up!

So I leave you with one last picture of my beloved new "bookends," LOL!

Emma in blue; Raven in red.

 Happy sewing everybody!

Forbidden Love

Due to my Husband Wonderful's allergies to cats but not dogs, the feral kittens that were born this May in my messy garage are not allowed into the house.
Tipper, the largest and boldest kitty decided to test that rule one day when the door blew open. So Raven was giving kitty-kisses  to Tipper while on her rumpled blankets beside me in the office.

Forbidden love!

Tipper has bonded to Raven ever since the mother cat disappeared and he follows Raven all about the fenced dogyard.
Over the weekend, we picked up what may be an abandoned dog who was found locally. As Animal Control Officers, Felix and I chose to bring this dog to the farm rather than to the shelter due to his very emaciated condition. We hope that his owner will call in to claim him, but if not, he will be adopted by a loving family. He sure likes the futon privileges with Raven!

Also, over the weekend, I completed an individual swap of some homespuns that were hanging around here for a nice bunch of Civil War pieces, most of them 1/4 yard or more. They are beautiful, Joyce, from Connecticut, and thank you!

I felt guilty that she sent me more than the 6 yards, I think, than I sent her, so I made up a couple of potholders and mailed them out to her.

Then, another package arrived that I was not expecting at all. A birthday box from my blogging/internet friend, Debra in Massachusetts filled with yummy fabrics. Wow, thank you, Debra!!!!

There were a dozen Civil War fat quarters and some 5" charms and a few die-cut applique hearts, too.
These are already in the washing machine to get them ready to use in The Farmer's Wife hand sewing project. Thank you so very much!!!

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Lastly, I confess that I usually do NOT care for any kind of fish to eat. But my personal chef and partner in grime, Felix, came up with this recipe that is delicious!

 Fish Chez Felix

1. Make up a batch of Herb Stuffing on your stovetop.

2. Spray an oven-proof dish with cooking spray, place the raw flaky fish in it and pat the stuffing on top of it to cover the fish. We used 2 lbs of Haddock, but Pollack or Scrod would've been great also.

3. Pour a whole 15 ounce jar of creamy Alfredo sauce over the stuffing.

4. Mix some breadcrumbs with shredded mozzarella cheese and sprinkle very generously all over the top of the Alfredo sauce and garnish with parsley flakes.

5. Bake uncovered for about an hour at 350.

It was really good! We had some freshly steamed green beans on the side with a sprinkle of Parmesan cheese on them.

Bon appetite!