Memorial Day

Yesterday I had some time to work on the 4th of nine blocks for It's Raining Cats and Dogs. This is the block I'm working on. Sorry for the blur. It's the picture from the pattern.

You can see that this one has a fair amount of embroidery in the ribs and handles for the two umbrellas, panes and flowers in the windows of the house, and the collar and eyes for the cat. I'll use hot fix nailheads for the cat's eyes, and I'll do some of the embroidery by machine. Some of it will need to be done by hand.

The first task with these is to create the background piece. Fabric selection is tricky on this one. Its colors are pastel, and I end up using the wrong side of fabrics more often than I'm using the right side.

By the time I needed to stop for the day, I had finished all the fusing. Now I need to do the top-stitching and the embroidery, and this one will be finished.

After that, it was time to start dinner. Of course, I'm continuing with my offensive on the vegetables. Last night's victory was celebrated with a Spinach and Garlic Scape Risotto to which I added a leftover chicken breast from our chicken Caesar salad of a few nights ago. 

The recipe for that came from a website called Cook with What you Have. It costs $35 per year for a membership, but if you're someone who frequents farmer's markets, I can recommend it as being worth the cost. The recipes are nicely indexed by veggie so that you can quickly find a recipe to go with whatever vegetable you're attempting to devour. We ate our risotto with some slices of baguette slathered in a kale pesto and draped with prosciutto. Seriously good eats.

This morning I turned the third corner on the Yard Art binding. I should be able to finish this by tomorrow easily. It'll be good to put this one in the finished column.

While I was doing that, Mr. Smithers enjoyed a morning sun bath. We ordinarily only get this morning sun through the living room windows in the summer time, and he'd forgotten how luxurious it is to sun himself there.

For the first several days after Maggie went missing, he searched for her when we came downstairs in the morning. Our bedroom was the one place he wouldn't allow her access, and so she usually slept downstairs on her favorite quilt. They played a little bit in the morning and then went outside together. He's been searching for her outside too, and it's still very sad for all of us.

Mike has purchased the plans for an outdoor catio and has discovered he can get all the materials he needs at our local Home Depot. He'll probably pick that up tomorrow, and we are both feeling an urgency to get it finished.

For today's tasks I'll be repotting the tomatoes into their largest pots of the season. It always feels like a big job until I get started on it, and then it goes pretty fast. I'll be removing the slats from the elevated shelf in the greenhouse and setting the big pots on the ground to give the tomatoes room to grow. This year's Roma variety is a determinate plant, and so it won't get as tall as the Super Marzanoes we've planted the last two years. We're eating our last jar of salsa, and the tomato jam was consumed long ago. There are still four quarts of pasta sauce left, however, and a number of jars of tomato chutney. Those tomatoes have got to get GROWING! When we're out of salsa, we can't go on living...it's that bad...or good, depending on how you look at it. After the tomatoes are repotted, I'll be able to get back to the block from yesterday.

It's Memorial Day in America today, a day to honor those who have died in military service. Please pause for a moment today to remember and give thanks.