Here's What's Cooking

Smitty has developed a strategic plan to deal with his free-loading housecatmate. Their morning routine has always been to wake up the people, chomp on the morning treats conveniently dispensed by the now-awake people, beg to be let into the clubhouse (that's their space between the basement and main levels of the house), take a morning nap in the clubhouse, come back upstairs and beg for more treats. Only, since we've been home, Smitty has worked out a new plan. He first begs for the clubhouse to be opened and lures Sadie down there too. Once Sadie is asleep in the clubhouse, he sneaks back upstairs where all the laps belong to him exclusively now. Pretty smart, huh?

So here he is taking advantage of Mike's lap.

When Mike got up from his chair, he came and took up my lap while I did my slow-stitching. Generally, Sadie has this job. It's one of the best jobs a cat has in this house.

Slow-stitching time was over though, and so I went back to work on the Guacamole block. I needed to finish the top-stitching and stitch in a few more details. When all of that was finished, it looked like this:

By machine, I stitched some white thread to lighten up the ends of the onions, and I stitched in some roots. Also, some lines on the garlic cloves, and some ribs on the tomato.

Bits of tomato were stitched by hand into the guacamole.

After that, I needed to hand stitch the fringe on the table cloth and add borders, and the whole thing was finished.

The fringe was kind of a bugger. The pattern instructed me to cut 40 4-inch lengths of 6-strand embroidery floss and to tie a knot in the center of each length. Well...does anyone know a way to get the knot to land in the center? Because I don't. I got better at it as I went along, using my fingers to guide it to where I wanted before pulling it tight. Then, I was to use a needle and thread to make two loops around the knot, thus fastening it down. I worried those would pull out, and so I took my first stitch through the knot, and then made a loop over it before moving on to the next one. The whole process took about two hours. I'm happy with how it turned out though.

Menacingly, there are still five more blocks of the 12 total that will require stitching more fringe. That will have me dragging my feet on an otherwise fun project. And since several of you mentioned you were hungry for guacamole now, I'm including the recipe that was included with the pattern. Each of the blocks in the quilt has an associated recipe.

When I make my way into the sewing room today, I'll be starting on another new project...this City Bank quilt. I'm hoping to make a dent in my blue and green scraps. The one pictured here is done all in solids, but I'll be using what I have in my scrap bins. I'll probably get a mix of prints and solids.

This pattern can be found in this book by Cherri House:

I've made several quilts from this book. It's a good book.

When I fed my starter yesterday, I added 1/2 cup of whole wheat flour and 1/3 cup of water. It about half filled the jar when I was finished. When we went to bed last night, it looked like this:

Whoa! I think it's ready! So I've gone back and forth about which loaf to make, and I've finally settled on an Artisan Sourdough No-Knead Bread. I've made it before with good results.

It uses both whole-wheat and white bread flour. This morning I mixed it up and left it sitting at room temperature.

Now it will sit until around 3:30 this afternoon when I'll take it through the next steps. I'm hoping we'll have some fresh bread around dinner time.

So that's what's cooking today. What's cooking at your house? Hint: It doesn't have to be edible.