Canning Season 2020 Begins

It was a busy day yesterday. Surprisingly, there was still time for sewing. Taking first position on the to-do list for the day was to start working with the cherries. Yesterday's goal was to can some cherries in syrup. I used most of the cherries we'd picked the day before to process eight pints. These are good over ice cream, or else in my recently-rediscovered recipe for skillet cherry cobbler.

It was late in the day by the time I made my way into the sewing room. My current mission is to sew "And On that Farm" into a finished flimsy. I started on this quilt in September of 2016, and so it's high time, don't you think? This is a McKenna Ryan pattern. I swore I'd never do another one, and I'm taking the same oath as I'm finishing this one. And that will hold me until the next one comes along. But no. (Smacks hands with a ruler.) No more McKenna Ryan patterns. Here's just one reason.

The first section I made, way back when, was this largest of the panels. The background was cut to pattern specifications, and then the applique covered nearly the entire background. And the problem with that was that with infinitesimally small placement errors and shrinkage from the applique itself, my panel ended up just slightly too small to fit within the rest of the pattern measurements. The borders and sashings need to be certain sizes in order to fit with the rest of the sections.

I spent some time squaring it up on Saturday. The applique goes clear to the seam-line on three sides, and so any background fabric peeking out at the edges had to be cut off and the piece squared up. It was supposed to be 30-1/2 x 30-1/2 inches. Mine ended up at 29-1/2 inches in width...

and 29-1/4 inches in height.

As I pondered how to make up for this, my furry furriend showed up.

What purroject are we working on today?

Oh this is just purrfect! I always wanted to be a barn cat!

Okay, so each section is sashed, and I calculated and calculated and calculated (using my calculator, of course) to figure out how much adjustment to make with the sashings. I ended up cutting a half inch in width from the sashings for the sections below...the chickens. And then I sewed them together.

And if you remember what the whole quilt looks like,

then you remember there is a garland applique around the outside. And that means I need to make adjustments in order for the border pieces to fit properly. So when I cut the sashing to connect the chickens to the bottom, I made an adjustment for length there by adding a half inch (I think...my memory is hazy on this, but you get the idea). When it was sewn to the bottom section, it looked like this:

So far, so good. Next, I needed to sew that to the two sections to the right, and there were more adjustments for length there. Fortunately, the rest of the sections of the quilt are all the right size.

First, I sewed the two sections together.

And then sewed them to the rest of the quilt.

And that was where I left it for the day. Smitty would have helped, but he was plum tuckered out from all the canning we'd done earlier.

You go on ahead without me. I need some serious shut-eye.

Okay, and so to end a busy and hot day, I used some of the leftover syrup from the cherries in place of the honey syrup and made some Cherry Bees Knees for our evening cocktail. Tasty and refreshing!

Today is going to be another busy day. We have a badly-needed grocery shopping trip to make. Last night's dinner was scraping the bottom of the bacon barrel to put together some BLT's. Now we really are completely out of food. So there's that. Also, we need to make a couple of stops along the way for bird seed, to return a shipment from Amazon, and the liquor store. Our neighbor has kindly encouraged us to pick the pie cherries from her tree. (Whoa! Really? Pie cherries? Count me in!) And she has raspberries as well. Mike can't have the raspberry seeds, but I'll use some to make raspberry-infused vodka. Yum. And then, I'll be doing more canning. 

We may need to wait toward the end of the day to pick the cherries, and so I don't know if I'll be making cherry pie filling or hot cherry pepper jam. It will be one or the other. Our weather has turned hot, and today is going to be the hottest day so far. Picking cherries in the heat of the day sounds very unappealing, but the evenings are nice. Time will tell. I'm hoping to get back to my sewing too, so there's lots on the agenda. My jars are clean and my spirit is willing. Feet, get walking!