Blocks and Bread

Yesterday's sewing time was taken up making blocks for the CTC Sew-along. My first task was to finish up the remainder of the Regent Star to make a 12-inch block:

That one was fairly time-consuming, but I like the design. The next one is called Wrapped Up. It seemed like a good time to use that flip-flop fabric since I had a nice big center block for the large scale of the print.

There are 25 blocks in this series from Moda, and the goal is to make all of them by the end of the year. One will be left out of the final quilt. It would be good to start making these two per month, and so I decided to make one more. This next one is called Reindeer Games. I really like this next one. Imagine a whole quilt of these and the secondary patterns that would emerge with multiple blocks sewn together.

With those three done, there are 19 remaining. If I do two per month, I'll finish easily by the end of the year. Of course, any job worth doing is worth doing under the snoopervision of two cats.

Here are the six blocks I have so far for this quilt. If nothing changes between now and the end of the line for these blocks, I'll probably leave out the one in the upper right-hand corner.

Edited to say I'll be linking up to the party at Mama Spark's World.

This morning, I did the inchy for the morning. This one is so pretty. I like the colored pencils so much better than crayon. Their sharper points and harder "leads" make it possible to do more detailed work when coloring the fabric. You can see how this one has some vertical pink lines in the background.

These are so much fun, I'm going to be sorry when the month is over.

Also, I finished up the right sided hooping of Friendship's Garden.

I've been following the bee's flight path on this one, and so the Northeast section is next.

This being Sunday, I'll link up to:

Also, I mixed up some bread dough this morning. Please get yourself a cup of coffee and allow me to expound on the bread for a moment. This is the same dough recipe I used last time around from King Arthur Flour. When I mixed it up this morning, it looked like this.

I'm just using a dough whisk for this, but you can use an electric mixer if you're not up for an upper body workout during your baking events. Here's what I like about this recipe:

1. First and foremost, it makes a very tasty loaf. The longer the dough waits for baking (maximum 7 days), the more you'll get that tangy sourdough flavor.

2. It has a moderately crusty crust with a soft, airy interior.

3. It's easy to make.

4. It can be made ahead and sit in the refrigerator to be used over the next week. I was able to get three loaves from this one dough.

After you mix it up, it sits at room temperature for two hours, and then it goes into the refrigerator for a minimum of 2 hours and a maximum of 7 days. When I checked mine after an hour, it looked like this:

The one thing I didn't like about this bread is that I'm still not getting the big beautiful loaves I'm shooting for. It doesn't matter as much as the taste, however, and so I'm still experimenting with the dough. The recipe calls for 6-1/2 to 7-1/2 cups of all-purpose flour. And my first response is, so which is it? 6-1/2 cups or 7 1/2 cups? And I should have written this down the first time I made it, but I suspect I split the difference and used 7 cups. The dough was really slack and floppy, and so this time I used the full 7-1/2 cups. It was quite a bit harder to mix it up with a dough whisk, but I got 'er done. (And I built some shoulder muscles while I was at it...a bonus!) When I checked it after two hours (just now) it looked like this:

So now it's gone into the fridge. I'm not planning to bake any bread until tomorrow. In winter, we eat a lot of warm soups and stews. Last night, I made one of our favorites, Spanish Daube, which was really good with some bread dunked in the broth. I didn't take a picture, but here's the one from the website. So tasty, and it's even on the diet.

So, anyway...all of that to say that there are leftovers, and so I'll be baking more bread tomorrow to have with our second round on the Spanish Daube. 

We got a little dusting of snow...or maybe it's something like freezing fog...last night. The deck outside was pretty darned slippery when I let the kitties out this morning. 

Today I'll get back to my quilting. I know now exactly what I want to do in the embroidered blocks, and so there's nothing stopping me. I'm hoping to get through 4 of the 12 blocks today, and I have no idea if that's overly optimistic. As always, time will tell.