Crabby Appleton

Who, like me, was born during the 14th Century and remembers Tom Terrific? Actually, I think Tom Terrific might have originated as early as the 13th Century because it gives me great pleasure to say that I only barely remember the characters. The most memorable for me was Crabby Appleton.

If only I had grandchildren to share these little tidbits from my past. Even my mind's eye does eye rolls at the thought of it. For now, I have you, my bloggy friends. Thank you for being here.

Yesterday I finished as much as I could of the "Best of Show" section for Wind in the Whiskers. This is as far as I can take it until the whole quilt is sewn together.

When I had it that far, I hunted down the directions for putting together the whole quilt, which consists of seven sections plus borders. The whole quilt directions are included with Section 4. Go figure. But then, I should have known better because this is a McKenna Ryan pattern. I love her quilts, but her patterns suck. 

If you're reading this, McKenna Ryan, I'm sorry to be so blunt. Since you charge an arm and a leg for your patterns, you could at least print them a little less cheaply. Let's start with not using huge sheets of newsprint that are impossible to work with. Then let's stop printing on both sides of the already unwieldy sheet so that it would be possible to use a lightbox when tracing out the complicated (and tiny) pieces. Then, get the instructions right, for goodness sake.

This last parts bugs me most of all since at least one of the sections has a number of errors in it, which I enumerated right here. Then, I wrote a nice email (meaning, no four-letter words) to McKenna Ryan to advise her of these errors. As I recall, I believe I even specifically used the words "please" and "thank you". Did my corrections ever appear on her website? Did I even get an acknowledgement of my email? No. Just thinking about this puts me in a crabby mood. Can you tell?

My good friend Lynette from What a Hoot is making this quilt too. She put it perfectly when she observed that she knows she's going to love this quilt when it's finished. Yes, yes, yes! It's going to be fantastic. But working on it is a royal painus in the anus.

There is a point to this rant, which is this: when I looked at the whole quilt directions, I realized that I can't really sew only the completed sections together because parts of those sections extend out into the borders of the quilts. That means I need to finish the bottom (as it turns out) TWO sections before I can start sewing it together. The next section I'm going to do is on the bottom left: Kitten Kaboodle.

And, frankly, that is just fine with me because every time I work on this, it puts me in a bad mood.

So now I'm shaking it off...moving onto something a little less complicated. For one thing, I'm going to do the November block for the Block Lotto.

blocklotto.com

Thankfully, this month's block is straight piecing because I don't think I can take any more complications in my sewing room for the rest of the week, at least. We're making this  "X and Plus" block. This is the one that Sophie made:

Looks simple enough, right? That shouldn't take too long. Then I'm going to make the next block for the Chicken Buffet quilt. This also happens to be my Let's Book It project for the month

 from this book:

Sharon told me I could use it for my project every time I made a block. Thank you, Sharon. Obviously, someone needs to give me a break before I throw some kind of a temper tantrum. Whoops. Too late. (Ahem.)

Well, this month, I'm making the Chicken Divan block. Aren't these funny? They should serve to lighten the mood considerably.

I've only made one other block for this quilt, this "Chicken Gumbo" block:

Each block comes with a recipe for the dish it represents, which makes it even more fun to work on.

I'm getting caught up on my many UFO's slowly but surely, and I think I'm going to have more time to devote to my WIPs in 2016. For now, I'm just plugging away, adding more projects from the back burner and getting some of these oldest of the old moving along.

That's only my sewing wish list for the day and the weekend. Today I'm going to spend some time in the kitchen. I'm getting an early start on dinner, which is going to be this Creamy Roasted Red Pepper and Cauliflower Soup. I'll serve that up with some slices of baguette spread with some of last year's Apple-Pear Chutney and sprinkled with gorgonzola cheese. Yum. Most of my cooking these days is designed to use our CSA veggies, and right now I have my sites set on the two heads of beautiful cauliflower hanging out in the vegetable bin, smoking cigarettes, and generally making a mess of things. 

There were enough green tomatoes in this week's share to make another batch of green tomato salsa, such is surprisingly delicious, especially on eggs. And finally, I'm going to try a new dessert recipe for these Baked Apple Roses for two. They look easy and they're so pretty! I'll let you know how it turns out tomorrow.

So that's a pretty full day. Better get after it.