Happy Fourth of July!

It's one of my favorite days of the year. I spent most of yesterday getting ready. It was a kitchen day, and at day's end, I'd made a 7-Layer Salad using my mother's recipe, a 7-Layer Dip, and some Chocolate-Chunk Oatmeal Cookies with Pecans and Dried Cherries. I've linked to the cookie recipe there, but I made them the way Cook's Illustrated makes them. Use dried tart cherries instead of cranberries. I've made them using white chocolate before too. It's a very versatile cookie recipe, and it's the last recipe you'll ever need for baking cookies. They're so good, you'll never want another cookie.

Also, I made some overnight Chinese Daikon Radish Pickles. If Daikon radish is new to you, they look like this:

They only became familiar to me a couple of years ago when I started buying Daikon radish kimchee at the Portland Farmer's Market...which is delish, I might add. Here's a little blurb about their healthy properties. I'll say this for them: Daikon radishes are stinky. I tried the pickles this morning, but I'm not prepared to tell you they're good. I think their pickling solution needs a little something. There will probably be more in future CSA shares, and so I'm not finished experimenting with them yet.

This morning I just need to slice up some veggies for hamburgers. Erik is bringing his barbecue down to the river, and he'll grill up some burgers to go with all that other stuff. The temperature is nice and cool this year, and so it should be a great day.

In between timers yesterday, I managed to stitch up Block 7 of the Bee-utiful Quilt-A-Long. This block is called "Bee Charming".

When I took it down into the sewing room for pressing and photographing, my kitty helpers trotted right along with me.

Smitty is hoping I never get around to making the backing for the Baby Birds quilt. It's a comfy place to lie. Uh-oh...what's that expression on his face?

Looks like there's about to be a rumble.

These two are pretty good playmates at this point. It's good for Sadie, but it's also good for Smitty since he's never had a kitty companion who would play with him. Gracie was too old. Maggie never quite found her comfort level with his kind of play. Sadie, pipsqueak that she is, can hold her own against him.

This morning I took one more stab at practicing my FMQ feathers...

and then committed them to my sampler. I had a little bit of a mess up there in the upper left corner, but all-in-all, not a bad try.

Here's how my sampler looks so far.

Up next: McTavishing. I'm really enjoying this sampler, and I'm learning a lot. If you've missed my previous posts about this, I'm participating in a sampler quilt-along on a Facebook group called the Sit Down Free Motion Quilters. Anyone can join in. Just go to the group and ask to join. It's one of the more helpful groups I've found on Facebook. And if you're not on Facebook, you can still join in. Just create a page for yourself, keeping it completely private if you like. You don't need a public page to join in the group fun.

And that's about all I have for you today. Better go slice those veggies. Fourth of July fireworks wait for no quilter.