Sew Fine

It's my favorite kind of day...a little bit of everything.

This morning, I did some embroidery, and then got right to work making blueberry chutney.  I picked up the blueberries last week on my way home from the dentist.

I did a little tutorial last year showing you how I make it, and giving you the recipe I'm using.  You can see it right here.  I pretty much stick with small batch canning.  This year, I'm mostly canning for our own use rather than making extra to share.  It takes four cups of blueberries along with other ingredients and about 45 minutes of cooking time to get the blueberries to their chutney goodness.

Then it's ready to ladle into jars, lid them, and process them.  For today's efforts, I ended up with four half-pints, which will last us about a year.

I'll be making plum chutney once the plums are ripe, and so this should do just fine.  

I still had plenty of blueberries left, and so I mixed them with the raspberries we picked yesterday and made a rustic fruit tart.

I did a little tutorial about that once before too.  You can find that post with a link to the recipe from Fine Cooking right here.  I didn't have the whole milk I needed for the crust, and so I added a little more butter to make up for the loss of fat.  It made my crust to soft and melty, so I ended up with a very rustic tart, indeed.

It's not the most beautiful dessert I've ever made, but you know what?  Our taste buds won't know the difference.  Besides, it will look a lot worse after we've eaten it.

I still had both blueberries and raspberries to spare, and so I froze the remainder.  And when freezing berries, did you know this trick?  I had to become a fan of the Food Network to learn it.  Lay your berries out on a baking sheet and spread them out so that they are separate from one another. That way, when you freeze them, they won't stick together and turn into a big ol' berrycicle.  Once they're frozen, you can scoop them into zip-lock bags for permanent storage...as permanent as your appetite will allow.

Updated to say I'm linking this post to:

So I finished processing the berries around noon, which left me plenty of time to head into the sewing room. I'm still working on quilting the Hello Sun quilt.  I feel a need to repost a picture of the whole thing so that you can see what I'm doing with it.  Notice how the sawtooth stars create a secondary pattern of white squares and white diamonds.

It was good to take a few days off from this because it gave me a chance to figure out what to do next.  I decided to quilt suns into the white squares and diamonds.  The diamonds are just slightly smaller than the squares.  For them, I used a medicine bottle cap for my circle template.

I'm using a Clover Hera Marker to mark the circles.  The tool I'm using is essentially a stylus and it "creases" the fabric so that I can quilt over it without putting colored marks onto my white fabric. 

This is the one I'm using.

For the larger suns in the squares, I used the top of a container that I keep my hot fix nailheads in.

Then I quilted around the circles and put rays extending out into the corners of the diamonds and squares.

For the half squares, I made half suns.

Unless I'm struck blind with some other inspiration, my plan is to stitch in the ditch around the "teeth" of the stars and around the inner border.  Then I'll stipple in the outer border.  

It's taken me a while to figure out how I wanted to quilt this, and so now that I'm on my way, I feel it won't be long before I have the quilting done.  Then I'll bind it and finish it.  Just maybe I'll get it finished by the end of the month after all.

Tomorrow I'm going in for my annual big squash.  And may I just say that this has been an absolutely fabulous week on the health care front.  I've been to the dentist and now I'll be going to get the big squash all within a span of just five days.  I'll just bet you're envious, aren't you?  As long as I'm driving into town, I need to run a few errands, including taking my sewing machine in for an update of its software service pack. I can wait while they do that, so the sewing machine won't be staying overnight.  And since I have a rather large store credit at that quilt shop, one never knows what might happen.  But one could probably guess.

So I was taking a break from quilting while I wrote this, but now I think I'll get back to it.  It's amazing how much more inspiring the work is when you have an idea in your head about how to proceed.  

I hope you're having your favorite kind of day too.