Food and Cats

What could be better than food and cats? Smitty says I have it the wrong way round. Cats should get top billing. And I had a whole load of cats when I tried to sew the binding onto It's Raining Cats and Dogs yesterday. Sadie has claimed this quilt as her own, and she's not ashamed to say so.

Yes, and the binding strips too. All mine.

She was a little put out at coming face to face with a woofie, even if it is just fabric.

Smitty to the rescue.

Don't you worry, little lady. I'LL save you! 

(He's been watching Dudley Do Right videos on YouTube.)

Sadie was put out enough by the woofie she decided to leave the area. I had only Smitty to help me with the rest. He was extremely helpful as I pinned the end of the binding strips together.

I found him a new job holding down the quilts to be sandwiched pile.

And with so much help, how could I not be successful? One binding...sewn on. Hand-stitching to follow. I'll get started on that today.

Between that and housework, I'd used up most of the day. But Mike and I had a fun evening planned. We attended the 1st Founders Dinner at one of the local wineries where we are members.

The evening started with some delicious appetizers and a solo guitarist playing classical music. The appetizers were flowing freely, and eventually, we waved them off. Dinner was to follow, after all. This one was a crostini with some duck pate with an onion jam. So crunch and tasty.

This one was some golden beets roasted and diced up with some creme fraiche, then piled onto a beet chip. I really liked this one. I'm a beet lover.

Ply me with enough wine, and I'll let you take a selfie.

Here's the dinner menu. I hope you can read it.

The first course, soup, was so tasty. The "broth" part of the soup was made from roasted fish that had been pureed, so that it had no butter or cream in it, and yet, it had the same creamy texture. That little "log" lying across the top was a sort of savory sweet biscuit-type breadstick. The soup had some razor claim and Dungeness crab. Yummy.

I totally forgot to take a picture of the second course. It was fish with the most interesting watermelon radishes...so named because they were red in the center and green around the edges. I'm most sorry I didn't get a picture of them, but I found this one on Flickr.

(image source)

We also had our first taste of sunchokes (aka Jerusalem artichokes). When I'd eaten everything on my plate, I realized I'd forgotten to take a picture. For a moment, I considered walking around to some total stranger to see if there was anything left on their plate. That should have made me popular, don't you think?

Okay...so moving on...third course was this sort of ravioli looking thing. It was layered pasta and filled with stinging nettle. No stinging though. The stinging part is neutralized in the cooking, and it was really tasty. It was foraged from the fields at the winery. The little greenery on top is bittercress. It grows in most gardens in the spring and causes the worst weed problem. Once it goes to seed, it explodes when you try to pull it up, spreading its seeds everywhere. I've talked about bittercress in the garden before. You can read just one of my blog posts about it right here. Before it goes to seed though, it is edible, and rather tasty. And it's gratifying to be able to pull it up and eat it alive.

Then we moved on to this little salad. That's a type of goat cheese in the front there. The salad was made up of frisee and radicchio with some bites of delicata squash in the mix.

Finally, this tasty chocolate pots de creme. It was made with both dark and milk chocolate, and it was delicious. It has some candied blood orange peel and pomegranate seeds on top.

And that was our evening. I love these kinds of dinners. Mike made the reservation as soon as the announcement crossed his email threshold. He didn't even ask if I wanted to go. He knew I would love it.

So today I'm going to start sewing together these little heart stitcheries. I've been calling this project "A Year of Hearts," but I'm thinking of calling it "Hearts A-Plenty."

Here's what I have in mind for it. First off, if you look closely at the June heart (second row, on the right), you might notice that I cut it wrong. There's enough at the top for a quarter-inch seam, but if I decide to leave them as is, I'll need to sew a little "mercy strip" at the top to get it centered in the block a little better. On the other hand, I'm thinking of trimming them all that way and making them square. If memory serves, they are cut to 5-1/2 x 4-1/2 inches. I could cut all of them to 4-1/2 inches square and no one would be the wiser. Except you, of course. You won't tell, will you?

Okay, and then, I picked up this little Itty Bitty Hearts pattern when we visited the Quilted Owl near New Orleans a couple of years ago.

It was a moment of insanity. This little pillow I saw there was so darned cute.

I don't usually make pillows, but I figured I could make a little quilt from it. And it's paper-piecing, so you know I was blinded by cuteness when I bought it.

Fast forward to today, I figure these little 2-1/2 inch hearts would make cute little cornerstones in the Hearts A-Plenty quilt. It isn't so much a "pattern," as it is a container for 60 of these tissue paper-piecing templates.

I need 20 for my project, and so I cut out enough of them yesterday to get the job done. I figure a block at a time won't be too painful. The plan is to make hearts in colors that coordinate with the embroidered blocks that are adjacent. It will all become clear to you soon enough. And I'll use this long-time resident of my stash for sashings and borders.

It occurs to me that this kind of turns it into a Valentine's Day quilt, but hey...it's hearts. What else am I going to do with it?

Okay...so I have pretty much an NBS day ahead. Let's just see how far I can get with this.