Happy Easter, Everybody!

Happy Easter Morning, my friends. We're having a quiet quarantined Easter here at the Three Cats Ranch. It will be just the three people who currently live here along with a spiral-sliced ham, maple baked beans, coleslaw, and deviled Easter eggs. Here's a picture of the deviled Easter eggs I made several years ago. They're kind of fun. You can read how to do this right here. My only addition to the instructions is to be sure to remove all the membrane when you peel the eggs so you don't end up with white spots.

So, yeah...a small and quiet Easter feast.

Yesterday, I started my sewing day with a mending project. You might remember this hoodie Matthew brought back from his trip to Guatemala last year.

Those woven fabrics tend to fray apart, and the hood on his hoodie had separated from the rest of the jacket in one spot. He asked me if I could fix it. And, as a mom, how do you say no to that? So I trimmed it up and gave it a liberal application of fray check.

Looking through my smallest scraps, I had a perfectly-sized piece of homespun used when I made the Quiltemala quilt. This one:

I was actually kind of surprised to find this piece because I thought I'd used of every last scrap in the making of that quilt.

So, I just folded over the short ends, and then folded the rest like a quilt binding, and then shored up that frayed edge before sewing the hood back to the main part of the jacket. It worked out great.

Then I gave Matthew stern instructions to only wash this on gentle cycle. That didn't take long.

Now...do you want to see something scary?

Yeah...that was my cat walking around on my carefully placed scraps, awaiting their turn to be sewn together. Fortunately, he's not like Sadie who would have needed to rearrange things. Smitty is more of an admirer...not a designer.

There was just enough of that red and black polkadot fabric to make some setting triangles. Sewing all of this together took up the rest of my sewing day.

If there's time for sewing today, I'm going to add four borders to this to bring it up to snuggle quilt size. As it stands, it is 22 x 30 inches. I've already calculated how much fabric I'll need, and I have some cute ones for finishing it off.

You might remember I had bread dough rising downstairs when I wrote yesterday's post. Late in the afternoon, it was ready for baking, and look how pretty this turned out.

It's a Sourdough Cinnamon Raisin Bread. I'm linking to the recipe with the caveat that I made a few changes. When I made this the first time, the oven was too hot, and so I've reduced all the oven temperatures listed in the recipe by 25°F. The other change I made was to reduce the amount of water to 300g. The dough was very wet the first time I made it, and difficult to work with. By reducing the water and folding the dough throughout the day, I ended up with a nice elastic dough that baked off beautifully. Here's how it looks on the inside.

It's delicious, sweetened with a little maple syrup and the raisins, and made with whole wheat flour, it's a relatively healthy bread too. We had it along with the tortellini soup Matthew made for dinner.

So that was a nice way to end a productive day. Later, we all settled in to watch the last of Ozark...a program we've been binge-watching. Yikes! Surprising ending!

Obviously, today I'm doing some cooking, and I need to get out and clean up my culinary herb garden today. Once that's finished, I'll get back to sewing the scrap quilt together. I need to finish it off because I'm going to leave it to start quilting the Pansy Mosaic tomorrow.