On the Mend

Thanks to all who sent their well wishes to Mike and me. We're feeling quite a bit better this morning, although still taking Tylenol to keep our fevers down. Mike actually went into work this morning, but I don't know if he'll stay the whole day. My own fever was elevated just slightly when I got up this morning, and so I took some Tylenol right away. Already I'm feeling much better, and also breathing easier. The illness had my asthma symptoms taking their toll.

Despite feeling under the weather yesterday, I managed to get a few things done. For one thing, it was time to take the chive blossom vinegar out of its jug and put it in bottles. It always looks so pretty, and it amazes me how much color the chive blossoms add to this plain white vinegar after just two weeks.

I've made chive blossom vinegar several times over the past five years or so, but didn't make any last year. Actually, I wasn't sure how popular this item was until my dear daughter-in-law Mae asked me recently if I was planning to make some this year. Well...since you ask so nicely, then of course! And it's so easy, why not? If you want to give this a try, you can read how it's done at this old blog post. It's so pretty and chivey. I use it in vinaigrettes, but you can use it any way you'd use red wine vinegar or other flavored vinegars.

That only used up about five minutes of the day yesterday, and so I decided to get a start quilting the Yard Art quilt. I'm just doing simple quilting on this...outlining the appliques and the edges of the blocks, and then I'll do a piano key sort of thing in the outer border. Outlining the appliques gives them just the slightest "poof". (That's a technical quilting term, so try to keep up.)

For the flamingo blocks, I'm taking my cue from something I found doing a Google images search (a good source of ideas for quilting). Here's the image:

(image source)

It's not quite as effective, I realized, where the flamingo's foot is showing, but I still think it gets the point across.

There are four rows of five blocks to this quilt, and I managed to complete one row of blocks before resuming my position as a couch potato for the remainder of the day.

This morning, I made some more progress of the 6th Hocuspocusville block.

And now I've hooped the last of the design. This will probably be finished tomorrow or the next day.

With that so close, I'm going to spend some time today getting the Written in Thread piece ready for its next round of stitching. Here's where I left off:

I need to stitch the middle embroidered border next. You can see it all around the edge of the quilt in this image from the pattern cover.

I've been considering how to do this, and I think I'm going to trace out the embroidery design, but leave the border several inches wide until it's all stitched, then trim it and add the final pieced border. This will all become easier to understand once I've had a chance to get it ready for stitching. I'm afraid that it will fray too much if I add the pieced border right away. Nevertheless, I need to have enough fabric to hoop the design too. This one has been as much a mechanical challenge as anything else. Also, I'd like to quilt at least one more row of the Yard Art blocks. 

Later on today, I'll be picking up the first week's share of CSA veggies. It occurs to me as I'm writing this that the lack of CSA veggies over the past several months might explain our sudden illnesses. Veggies to the rescue! Having done this for a year now, I feel much more ready to deal with the onslaught, and having a spiffy new freezer with lots of space to store things will be a big help.

The poor birds haven't been fed in a couple of days and their feeders are empty. I guess it's time to gird up my loins and take care of business here at the Three Cats Ranch.