Chickening Out

Well, if the day had been any busier yesterday, I'm afraid I might have been done in. Today will be much the same. Thursday I'll get a pedicure, which will be salve for the soul. 

It started out easy enough. We hung the Summer Holiday quilt on the 2nd floor of the Mewseum. That makes three quilts on the second floor collection.

The quilt on the far wall isn't a cat quilt, but oh well. Mike likes it, and so it stays. It's this Happy Village quilt I made some time ago. No doubt there are feral cats wandering around there, don't you think?

So once we had that hung up, I did some slow stitching on the "I Believe in Snowmen" piece. That one will be finished by this morning, and so I made up the final block for the Snowflakes quilt. This one will be stitched in blue and metallic gold. There will be a little blue bead everywhere you see a black dot.

And that's when the trouble started. I went through a bucket of apples to produce 12 pints of applesauce. I'll do this all again today with the apples I have left. 

I have more apples than I need, and so we'll give the rest to our neighbor. His horse and mule will appreciate them.

After that, I made some coleslaw for dinner. I had bunches of cabbage in my crisper in red, green, and Napa varieties. It was a good way to use it. I don't have a picture, but I can highly recommend this Asian Coleslaw recipe. It's a lot of chopping if you do it by hand, but a food processor will do it in no time at all. Also, I buy the julienned carrots at the grocery store. It's truly the greatest thing since sliced bread.

And then, I figured I needed to stand on my feet a little longer, so I made this cherry pie for two. The filling is from the cherries I canned last month. 

This is a Pillsbury pie crust. If you've ever worked with them, then you know they come two to a box, one for the top and one for the bottom. With pies for two, I only need one crust, but it's always a question how to make the top crust...and then what to do with the scraps leftover from the bottom. So I'm trying to get a little fancier using them. And sheesh...quilters know their way around scraps, don't they? So that's my laughable pie art. Kind of fun.

And then, I really was done standing for the day, so I sat and finished stitching the binding for Chicken Buffet. I started this quilt on February 27, 2015, and it was my second-oldest WIP. (The oldest is still Mulligan Stew.)

I started this quilt as a part of Sharon V.'s "Let's Book It" challenge, where we were challenged to make something from one of the books languishing on our sewing room book shelves. I think I'd had the book pattern for this quilt for about five years at that point. Here, you can see the chicken wire quilting that surrounds each block.

And here, you can see my chicken foot "feather" in the border. You can also see the big chicken foot in the cornerstones.

The back fabric was a gift from Sharon. I was trying to recall our conversation to Mike yesterday. I think we were talking about a different fabric, and Sharon allowed as how she had this one she didn't think she'd use. And I said something like, "I have the PERFECT pattern for that fabric." And, thus, the Chicken Buffet WIP was born. And, thank you, Sharon.

Can a quilt really be finished without first being kitty tested and appurroved? I don't think so. Smitty likes this quilt.

Okay, so it's back to the applesauce for me today. I need to harvest more beans too. I'll do that first before the sun gets too high in the sky. And there are a lot of other little things on my list for the day. Canning season keeps me hopping. I didn't think I'd be doing much canning this year because we don't have a CSA share to deal with. Silly me. I'm way over 100 lids used so far this season with more to come.

So there's no time like the present. It's time to get going on the day.