Starting on Saturday

My little furry friend always helps me out by giving me an early start to every day whether it's Saturday, Sunday, or any other day of the week. When the sun cracks the horizon, he wants out. He stays out for all of about one minute, then he comes back in to take a nap. Of course, I'm wide awake by this time. Those early mornings do make for productive days, and so I guess I can thank him for that. Or not. Maybe today, not.

Yesterday, I came home from the Northwest Quilter's Guild quilt show and went straight to work on creating last night's Baking on Friday dessert, a Tin Roof Cheesecake. The recipe is on Christina Lane's website, and so you can click right there to see it. I chose it because it used the 4-1/2 inch spring form pan, which was the last of the new baking tools I purchased along with Christina's book. The recipe actually says to use a 5-inch pan, but my pan worked perfectly.

First, you bake the crust made from chocolate wafers and peanuts and a few other little things.

While you bake that, you mix up your filling. Yum.

Then you pour that into your crust and bake it off.

And, in the meantime, you make up your little chocolate peanut clusters...and I'll just say that these are good enough to eat without the cheesecake. But we didn't. We piled them on.

Oh. My. Goodness. (Goodness, being the operative word there.) It was very rich...again, you could cut it into tiny fourths and have dessert for four. We each tried to devour half, and it was more than we could stand. Dee. Licious.

Also yesterday, I finished off my Irish chain blocks. There are 13 of these.

Then, I sashed the door blocks and laid all the blocks out on the floor.

And look at that! It's almost there! I'm getting so excited!!!!!!! In fact, I need more exclamation points, don't you think? !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Today I'm hoping to get all the blocks sewn together, but I have a busy day on all fronts. The kids are coming up tomorrow for dinner to celebrate our May birthday people. I'm going to make a couple of dishes ahead, and I need to clean the place up a little. After so many years of telling them to clean up their rooms, I can hardly have them show up to a house that is a complete wreck, now can I? On the other hand, a quilter lives here, so how much can any reasonable person expect? 

But you want to see the quilts from the quilt show, don't you? I have a few to get you started. I haven't gone through all the images yet, and so I'll show them a few each day until I get through all of them. But, first, you'll want to sit down for what I'm about to say because it's downright shocking. Okay, are you ready? Ahem: I didn't buy a single thing from any of the vendors yesterday. (Sucks in breath at the thought of it.) I KNOW! I went right home and took my temperature to see if I was feverish or something. 

So now I really do have to show you some quilts to help you recover from the shock of that previous paragraph. I tried to be better this show about taking pictures of the tags accompanying the quilts. That way, every quilter gets her due. Yesterday's show included Marjorie Post as the "featured quilter". You can see Marjorie's website right here.

I was kind of taken with this first quilt. This is the tram that goes from the Willamette River waterfront offices to our Oregon Health and Science University (a medical school and teaching hospital) on Marquam Hill in Portland. I used to work as a social worker in the emergency department there, and my own daughter-in-law works there now. Anyway...the tram was fairly controversial when it was built because it goes above a neighborhood, and the residents were none too happy about it. I always thought it was a made-up controversy, but that's just me. These days, it's kind of cool to be driving into downtown Portland from Interstate 5 and see these bubble-shaped tram cars crossing overhead.

Here are some detailed shots:

Also, these:

This next one gave me some ideas about how to do my Sonoran Desert sky when I get ready to start on it.

There were lots of Marjorie's quilts on display, and I only took pictures of a few, although I admired all of them. They were exquisite. 

The rest of the quilts I'm going to show you are from the quilter's guild. I loved all of the quilts, but only took pictures of the ones that caught my eye for some particular reason. I loved the idea the next quilter had about using buttons to embellish embroidered flower stems

This next one is on my cat quilt to-do list. I like how she used polka dots for all of the cats.

Here's the quilt back:

I like her wiggly spiral for the cat blocks, and how it looks on the back of the quilt.

And this one because it is a cat. Not that I care about cats, or anything.

Love these quilted kitty paws.

So lots more to show you in the days ahead, but now...gotta get on with my day. Lots to do, and I really want to get those Irish doors sewn together. Also, I need to keep up with my blocks for Lisa's quilt. Before the weekend is up, I'm hoping to get Jeffrey's block finished: