Barn Free

It ended up being a busier day than anticipated yesterday. Before I could do any sewing, I had an outing to attend to. First, I picked up two dozen eggs from the farmers. Since I was already out, I decided to do my week's grocery shopping. Now I get to stay home for the next two days. Today will be an easy day. There's just one short housekeeping task to do, and Mike won't be home for dinner. That means I have the whole day to myself.

Since I got home later than anticipated yesterday, I spent all my sewing time on the Poinsettia Sampler. First, I finished off a little bit more on the flower center...

Lori Kennedy suggested switching to a red thread for the background to make the flower pop out a little more, and so I'm using this leftover red variegated thread. I used this in a baby quilt a while back.

It's a 40 weight YLI cotton thread...love that name.

This quilt is very difficult to photograph in any given light. The best I could do was laying it on the floor in the living room and using ambient light.

Well, there are other reasons it's difficult to photograph. For example, there's this:

So I tried taking its picture in sections. 

In the southwest there, I've used a pebbling motif with some swirls mixed in. I'm thinking of using this in the background for Gingerbread Square. It makes me think of swirling snow.

In the northeast section, I did the lines and swirls. I really like this motif.

In a different corner, I used some other of Lori's motifs.

In the southeast is a variation on her Oyster Shell motif.

This one is her Starry Night motif. I used all of these when I did the Sunflower Sampler as well.

There are still four sections remaining for the red background, and I haven't decided what to do there. I'm considering a motif from Leah Day's site, but I'm still mulling it over. Also, I have quite a few on my Pinterest page, and I haven't looked there at all. I'll figure something out.

There is a one inch border around the outside of the sampler, and I'm planning to stitch some holly leaves and berries there. Today, however, I want to get back to the barn quilt. I'd like to get all the pieces in place so that I can move along to the stitching before day's end. It's the last thing on my to-do list in November, and so I'd like to finish it up.

Also on today's agenda, I'm going to do some baking. The next bread in the Bread Baker's Apprentice is a Greek celebration bread called "Artos". For that, I needed some rye flour. I ordered it from King Arthur online, but it won't arrive until tomorrow. After that it will be four days getting a seed culture started, and another two days for the "biga". With that in mind, it will be at least a full week before I can get down to the actual bread baking. That leaves me wanting to bake something, and so I'm going to bake a Crusty Cranberry Walnut Bread that I baked a few years ago. The dough rises overnight and then is baked the next day in a preheated very hot cast iron Dutch oven.

Here's the loaf I baked a few years ago:

It's pretty on the inside:

All I can do today is to mix it up. It'll be baked off tomorrow.

Also, I'm doing to debone our Thanksgiving turkey and make some stock, and then I'll be ready to make some turkey noodle soup tomorrow as well.

Finally, I tried a new recipe for cranberries over Thanksgiving. That turned out great, but just in case it didn't, I brought home an extra bag of fresh cranberries. Now I need to do something with those. I could just freeze them, but where's the fun in that? Instead, I'm going to bake a Cranberry Crunch, which is really just an apple crisp made with fresh cranberries. In my recipe wanderings, I was disappointed to find that most of my recipes for cranberries used dried cranberries. The ones that used fresh were, most often, not for baking.

So there's plenty to do today, but I'm determined to get the barn ready for stitching today. Tomorrow's blog post will be entitled "Barn Again". And who doesn't need to be ReBarn once in a while?