Comfortable Sunday

Today is going to be a day of my favorite things: quilting and baking. While I've always dreamed of baking beautiful loaves of bread, this marks the first year I've really embraced the art. You'd have to use a liberal definition of the word "art" to describe anything I've baked so far, but I'm having fun while I zero-in on the best method for my particular kitchen, and the particular yeast and bacteria that live there. Today's adventure is the Artisan Whole Grain Sourdough I found on the Breadtopia website. When I found the recipe, I printed it off. It wasn't until I started trying to follow the recipe that I realized I should have watched the accompanying videos on the website. Oh well. We're off to a good start in spite of ourselves.

When I left the bread yesterday, it looked like this:

After sitting in the refrigerator for the past 24 hours, it looks like this.

This being a whole grain dough, it's rather dry and stiff. The whole grain flours absorb more water than other types of flour. The recipe called for "rye flour" and I used "pumpernickel," which I'm told is the whole grain version of rye. This dough might be even more dry because it. It came out of the bowl without deflating, and when I tried shaping it onto a boule, it didn't want to adhere to itself. I got rid of the bottom seam as much as I could. When I placed it top-down in the banneton, it looked like this. I'm hoping that with its next rise, that will all disappear. Even if it doesn't, it won't matter because this will be on the bottom when it bakes.

From here, it will rise for at least five hours. When I checked on it just now (two hours on), it was beginning to rise, and that seam is looking better already.

Just now I noticed that bread-baking and sewing both involve "seams." It "seems" to me I'm onto something there. (Ha! I'm so punny.)

During the two hours the bread was rising, I was working on the big-stitch hand quilting. Recall that my goal is to finish the areas inside the border before moving onto the next project. You can see that I'm almost up to the corner there. There's just a little bit to the left and a little at the quilt bottom before I've quilted the entire quilt center.

Whoa! Wait a minute...did you just lay a quilt on the floor without me?????

I've been watching all of this going together, and I've noticed there's a cat on this quilt.

Do you see it? It's right here.

Its furs aren't as beautiful as mine though, so I'll just cover it up. There...now you've got a cat on your quilt that you can be proud to show off.

Just take a good look at these tummy furs. I have terrific tummy furs, by the way. Everyone agrees there are no better tummy furs than mine. With tummy furs like these, I could run for purresident!

Humility. That's what I like in a cat.

Also yesterday, I came ever so close to finishing the quilting on Stars and Stripes. Just this corner is left. As I go, the diagonal rows get shorter and shorter, and so the quilting is going to be finished on this today. The binding strips were cut long ago, and so I'm hoping I'll be able to get the binding on it today as well.

Bread and Binding. Those are my goals for this Sunday. What're you up to?