This and That

My feet hit the ground at 5:00 a.m. this morning. There is lots to do today, and so I'm getting an early start on my blog post. It's a little of everything today, so try to stay organized.

Yesterday morning I took this picture to show you that I'd turned all four corners on the Intel Underneath quilt.

Then, I had such a short distance to go that I finished it up after dinner last night.

I traveled 384 inches to finish this one. It turned out great, and I'm excited to take a good picture of it so I can show you. It'll be about ten days for that. It's too large for just one person to hold up. When Mike and I try to take a picture of a large quilt, we have to stand on chairs, and we have to set up the camera on a tripod and use the remote shutter release, and it turns into quite a production. I think waiting ten days for the family to show up is a better way to go. Don't chew off your fingernails while you wait, okay?

Then yesterday afternoon, I quilted the green block on the "We are the World" quilt. You can see the quilting a little better this time around.

It didn't take quite as long to pull the paper off this time. I did it a little more systematically, and maybe I'm just getting better at it. In any case, it's going to take a while to do this whole quilt, mainly because it takes so darned long to remove the paper from the quilted block. That's okay though...lots of time left in the month. 

Let's see...oh yes. My thanks go to Katy at Lethargic Lass for sharing a tutorial with me. Remember when I showed you the vintage hankies for my little Mom Cats quilt? One of the hankies I showed you was this one:

and I wondered about how those little holes are made. Quite a few of you offered up information about this technique called "hemstitching", but I thought this tutorial that Katy shared was especially informative. Take a peek. Maybe you'd like to give it a try. Thanks, Katy!

And let's see...what else? Well. I'm a day late in linking up to: 

If you visited Val's blog yesterday, then you know that this week's categories are Cats and Charity quilts. And Val very sweetly featured the Love Me, Love My Cat redwork quilt I finished last year.

I can take credit for making the quilt, but I can't take credit for the blog post Val featured. Smitty and Gracie wrote it. You can read it right here. 

But I didn't want to let the linky party go by without telling you about the quilt I wanted to share under the "Charity Quilts" category. I've done several quilts for the Downy Quilts for Kids program, but my favorite charity quilt has to be this one:

It's not a very good picture of it...so sorry...it was one of my earliest quilts, and I hadn't yet learned how to take a good picture of a quilt. In a nutshell, I started this quilt as a challenge for a guild I was attending at one time. The goal was to choose a children's book and make a quilt representing the book in some way. I was making this mystery quilt at the time. It was published in three parts in American Quilter magazine. With its floral fabrics, I chose The Secret Garden as my book title. The goal was to donate both the quilt and the book to a charity to benefit children. I left the guild, and none of that happened, but I donated the quilt anyway. 

This quilt was finished at the time tornadoes devastated the city of Joplin, Missouri, and Judy Laquidara put out a call for quilts to benefit those who had lost everything. She promised the quilt and the book would go to a teen or pre-teen girl. I have no knowledge of who ended up with the quilt, but it always gives me a warm feeling imaging some young girl left homeless by the tornado, living in a shelter, wrapped in her quilt, and reading her book. You can read my blog post about it right here.

So today a pest exterminator is coming. With the warm weather last week, we were alarmed at the number of carpenter ants and termites we saw. It happens every year at the first sign of warm weather, but there was an especially large number of creepy crawling pests running around last week. Time to call in the big guns. That happens early this morning.

Today is Mike's birthday, and so I'm making him his favorite prime rib dinner, garlic mashed potatoes, and roasted asparagus. The asparagus I picked up at the grocery store yesterday was especially nice. He also requested one of our favorite desserts, these little Apricot Cherry Upside-down Mini Cakes:

I make these little cakes every year while apricots and cherries are in season at the same time. The cherries I got yesterday were the first of the season, and quite expensive, and so we'll have to enjoy these to the max. They are so pretty and yummy and easy to make. You can find the link to the recipe right here.

And I think that about covers it. Despite the pest guy coming and all the cooking I'm doing today, I'm still going to try to get to my Zumba class this afternoon, and I'm also hoping to get another quilt block quilted. Have a wonderful Wednesday!