Another Trashy Quilty Finish

Good morning, my friends. It's another dark and overcast day here this morning, but things should brighten up later in the week. Sunshine is forecast for at least part of the week. We even saw a small patch of blue sky yesterday. Mike and I ended up driving into town to look at paint chips. We're going to paint two of our bathrooms at some point in the next several weeks, and so we needed to choose colors...a pale blue for one, and a pale gray for the other. Our house was built during an era when dark paint colors were in vogue. Several small rooms in our house are painted in very dark colors. I've never liked it, and so we're going to bring some light into those rooms with some pastels. I'm happy to be moving that project along.

Yesterday, I moved my embroidery hoop to the extreme right of Calendula Patterdrip's Cottage. When this section is stitched, the embroidery will be finished! Yay!

Recall that I was unable to see the pattern when I traced the tree branch beneath the crows. As I've stitched along, I've added some lines and skipped over others. There are a few areas where there are marks, but no stitching. When I spread it out yesterday, I was hard pressed to find those areas. Also, I couldn't see anything that just plain didn't look right, and so I think possibly, this project has been salvaged with my free-hand effort at the embroidery.

When the embroidery is finished, the only thing left to do will be to make a border from pieced blocks, and then it will be ready for quilting. I've been working on this quilt for just over two years, and so I'm happy to be moving it to the next stage.

When we got home from our trip into town, I went to work finishing off the quilting on the Chicken Feed quilt. I'd decided early on to do feathers in the outer border. They're chickens, right? They need feathers. But I didn't want to make a straight row of feathers all around. I wanted it to meander back and forth across the border. So, I stitched big loops, and then smaller loops riding over the backs of the larger ones. Then, I just moved back and forth across the border until I'd rounded the whole thing.

When it was finished, I laid it out on the floor for its picture.

Here's how it looks from the back.

My quilt inspectors let me down this time around. Sadie was busy with her lap-warming duties.

She joined me in the sewing room when I went to work on my challenge piece. She turned on her lasers to alert me to the fact that the quilts to be quilted pile is getting dangerously low on cushioning. There are only two quilts left that are sandwiched for quilting.

And she was very concerned when I spent most of my day standing at the ironing board and not sitting at the sewing machine.

What she doesn't know is that there are eight quilt tops waiting to be sandwiched. We never run out of quilting projects at the Three Cats Ranch. Nothing to see here, and nothing to worry about.

My challenge piece is moving along. The secondary subject is complete. There's still one small area that will be a little tricky, but then it will be all large pieces to finish it off. Here's your peek.

It was time to make dinner then. We had Lion's Head Meatballs. That's the English translation, anyway. It's a Chinese dish known as Shīzi Tóu. 

I first saw this talked about on social media, and people who'd made it were raving about it. You can find the recipe right here, but know that this is from America's Test Kitchens. You'll need a subscription to access it. If you can't get access to the recipe, and you really want it, just email me (in my right sidebar), and I'll send it to you.

The meatballs are from ground pork and some other seasonings. I made the full recipe, which included 2 lbs. of ground pork. It was mixed up using my electric mixer, and then I made the meatballs by taking big handfuls of the mixture to form 3-inch meatballs. They're braised in a broth for an hour, and then some napa cabbage is added before the last 30 minutes of braising. (I couldn't find napa cabbage on our last grocery shopping trip, and so I substituted savoy.) The rice vermicelli noodles are cooked separately, then added to the bowls, and the soup and meatballs are ladled over the top. It was a yummy way to end the day.

Today I'll probably spend most of my time on my challenge piece. However, I'm going to need some more embroidery to work on if I want to avoid a stitching emergency. I'll make up the next block for the Domestic Affairs quilt. These are the blocks I have for the quilt so far.

It's been a while since I worked on anything other than Calendula Patterdrip's Cottage, and so I'm looking forward to something new. Also, I'll need to machine sew the binding onto the Chicken Feed quilt. My sewing room is a disaster area right now with scraps for the challenge quilt lying everywhere. I'd like to clean things up a bit before I attempt to do something like squaring up a quilt and sewing on a binding. The challenge piece is taking up nearly the whole of my ironing board too, and so you can see it's quite a space hog. Time for me to force it to clean up its act.

Mike volunteered to make breakfast this morning, and I hear him getting started downstairs. It's probably time to wrap this up. I hope you have a good Sunday's worth of sewing planned today.