Cooking with Wine

Oh, I'll bet you thought I was going to share a recipe or something, but no...I'm just getting on with sewing the Wine Country quilt blocks together. The iron-on transfers for Wine Country were a pay-it-forward gift from my friend Marei, and I started embroidering the first block in May of 2016. It's good to be finally sewing it together.

I'd say it was a lazy day yesterday, but actually, I did quite a bit. First, I finished the 7th of 12 of the Sundress blocks.

With that one finished, it was time to trace out the next block for Heart & Home. This is the 8th of nine blocks, and so it's coming down to the finish line.

This one looks as if it will be fun to stitch. Now it's hooped up and ready to go.

When I had that finished, I indulged my kitty foot fetish by messing with the fuzzy feet of my furry friend.

We really need to find you another hobby.

After that, I had grocery shopping to do. Surprisingly, I didn't murder anyone in the grocery store yesterday, but it was a close call for a few people. When I got home, I needed a nap. Restraining myself from killing certain aisle-blocking-and-slow-moving fellow customers takes a lot of energy.

Okay, so let's talk about the Wine Country quilt. This was set to become a flimsy months ago, and I had purchased certain fabrics. When I laid them out with the idea I had for them, it left me kind of cold. That cork fabric was all wrong as a sashing, and so the blocks went back to the "thinking board" until now.

In my thinking process (which usually sets off the smoke alarms in the house), I came up with a plan to make red and green four-patches for cornerstones and to use that same metallic gold for the sashing.

By turning the four-patches in different directions, I have green touching green and red touching red. (And I suppose I could do it in the opposite orientation, but that's not what I'm doing.)

When I had the first row sewn together, it looked like this.

Then I went ahead with the second row and sewed it to the one above it.

It's turning into a more elegant quilt than I originally pictured, and that's okay. I have the prettiest fabric to use for the outer border.

Last night I laid out the border fabric next to the quilt blocks and decided it needed a narrow red stop border to really make it pop. If I have time today, I'll take a picture of the layout so you can see it too. As for the cork fabric, I doubt I'll have enough of that border fabric to use on the back, and so I'll piece together a back using the cork fabric. There should also be some leftover red and green to use for the back and binding, and I'll come up with something.

This morning I'm going to the farmer's market with Erik and Mae. I'm on the hunt for tomatoes and tomatillos today, and there is salsa in my future. We have tomatoes ripening on our own plants at home, but not enough yet. Since we've been out of salsa for months, I'm getting itchy to make some. Salsa is serious business here at the Three Cats Ranch. Salsa cannot wait. Salsa starvation is imminent. In other canning business, there is zucchini relish on this weekend's agenda, and so there's plenty to do on the home front. With all that going on, I'm only hoping to finish up the Wine Country flimsy this weekend, but it might have to wait.