A Winner and a Busy Day

Good morning, my friends. The day has come to announce the winner of my Blogiversary giveaway! I've spun the dial on Mr. Random who came up with:

#117--Anne!

Anne, I've sent you an email, so check your inbox. Thanks to all who entered. Your kind and witty comments were very much appreciated. It was nice to hear from so many of you. 

As for the rest of the goings on here at the Three Cats Ranch...Phew! There was too much to do yesterday. Dinnertime found me rushing around watering the flower pots and filling birdfeeders. I'd ventured into the sewing room and completely forgotten the other things I needed to do. I'm back on track now, but I'm afraid it will be another busy day. As I've mentioned to a few people, a camping trip and ripe cherries on the tree make for a level of behindedness (yes, I just made up that word) that is difficult to catch up from. I'm getting there though.

It was a grocery shopping day yesterday, but I still took some time for slow-stitching in the morning before we left. (It's better for my fellow shoppers if I ground myself with some quiet time before going shopping.) I filled my hoop and then moved on to the next position.

It's a little difficult to tell what's going on here, and with those lines blending in on my grunge fabric, I'm constantly referring back to the pattern as a guide to my stitching. Sorry for this pixelated image. I cropped it from a much larger picture. The section I'm stitching is the bow tied around the witches hat.

We ran a bunch of errands on our trip into town today, and it seemed to take forever. It was around 2:30 p.m. by the time I made it into the sewing room. I was tired by then and decided to bag my canning project for the day. I'll get back to it this morning, and I'll be in a much better mood. Canning is best done with a light heart. 

So, as I've mentioned, I'm going to be working on the last block for the Dancing Chickens and Flying Pigs quilt. Finishing those blocks will open a spot on my embroidery dance card. I'm always jumping the gun to see what I'll be working on next. There are about 40 projects on my to-do list...all patterns I've purchased with good intentions. Some of them even have floss kits included. And since I can't decide among them, I've assigned each project a number, and I use the random number generator (yes, the same one that chose today's winner) to choose my next project. This time, it selected this Love Covers quilt from Tricia Cribbs.

It'll be a great quilt to use up some scraps. If you've been following along for a very long time, you might remember that I made her quilt, A Day in the Life of Mr. Bear, several years back. It's one of my favorite quilts ever. It was one of the quilts I rehomed after our fire evacuation scare last year, and it now lives with a sweet little girl in Arkansas.

It was beautifully quilted by the talented Marcia Wachuta. You can see close-ups of the blocks and Marcia's beautiful quilting at this old blog post. 

I loved that quilt so much that I went in search of more patterns by Tricia Cribbs, and I can believe this new pattern has been in my collection for nearly ten years. Now, its time has come. It has a cute story behind it that you can read at the link I provided a couple of paragraphs ago. It has a religious bent that makes me a little uncomfortable since I don't know where it will end up. I'm going to secularize mine in places, and it will be of a more generalized theme of love.

Having selected my next slow-stitching project, I got distracted from my original intent of top-stitching the Dancing Chickens block. It took time I really did not have to spare, but I selected floss colors from my stash of floss. For this, Miss Sadie couldn't have been more, um, "supportive." She helped me keep my stash of floss bobbins arranged as I pulled the ones I could use.

And she helped me decide on color substitutions as I read over the DMC conversion chart. It was quite a time-consuming and confusing task, but my little cat made it so much more, um, "expedient."

When we were finished with this, Sadie was 'zhausted and needed a nap.

Here's the bundle of floss I pulled from my stash. Embroidery floss scraps stack up as high as fabric scraps.

Okay, and then, I went to work finishing up the top-stitching on this last block. I'll finish off the embroidery when I've finished with Calendula Patterdrip.

We're making our way through the piles of cherries. I had a salad recipe in my database that I'd made only once before. This image is from the internet. I took my own picture, but it wasn't as pretty as this one from Epicurious.

This is a Bibb Lettuce, Chicken, and Cherry Salad with Creamy Horseradish Dressing. It's a tasty salad, easy to make, and it used 2 cups of cherries. It was a nice salad for eating outside yesterday evening, and a nice way to finish out a busy day.

Today I'll be canning the last of the cherries, although we still have a big bowl for just plain eating. And I'm still catching up from our camping trip. If I can finish up the tasks on today's list, I'll be pretty much back to what passes for normal here at the Three Cats Ranch. Today I'll be shipping the Beary Patch quilt to its new owner, and then I have one housekeeping task to do. There are more cherries to can and a garden to hoe...all in all, a busy day ahead. I guess I'll get after it.