Brisk

Good morning, my friends. What's that saying about the month of March? In like a lion, out like a lamb? Let's hope it works for winter too. These are our temperatures for this first full day of winter. I know some of you are colder, but this is pretty darned cold for us here in the Pacific Northwest.

It's a walking day for me, but I think I'll stick with the treadmill for today's walk. Even our local newspaper is warning folks about going out with exposed skin. Frostbite isn't on today's agenda.

As for yesterday's agenda, I'd missed my slow stitching the day before, and so I spent a little extra time on Bernie. At one point, I started stitching the mittens in black. It was an easy fix, but I decided to go ahead and stitch them so there'd be no confusion going forward.

A few days ago, I opened up his right eye, but it doesn't show up very well in pictures for some reason. It's a fun little stitchery.

I had some housework to do, and I started the week's laundry, and then I made my way to the sewing room. Laundry and sewing are very good companions. I started by fixing two more of the Shop Hop blocks.

That's four down, and I'll finish the last two today. Then, we shall never speak of this again.

After that, I was ready to start making tiny quilts for the next section of Purrfectly Pieced. The kitties have very strong opinions about any quilt that contains a cat, and this one is no exception.

I had not just one, but two kitty helpers yesterday. Lucky me.

So, if you remember the picture of this section, there is a stack of quilts with a cat napping on top. Here's the picture to refresh your memory.

I'd done all the cutting the day before, and so yesterday's sewing goal was to make all the little quilts. I started at the top...

and then just worked my way down.

This one is applique.

Beside each leaf is a row of three buttons in gradually smaller sizes. When I had the vine fused, I went in search of some appropriate buttons. I wish I could have found smaller ones, but this is the best I could come up with unless I wanted to go shopping...which I did not. The smallest of these are about the diameter of a pencil eraser, and you can see that one is just slightly smaller than the others. They'll be spaced far enough apart on the quilt that it won't matter. That is, unless some smart aleck wants to get out a ruler and measure, in which case, I will smack their hands into next week. Don't say you weren't warned.

And then, finally, this quilt will be on the bottom of the stack.

Before I could sew them together, I had to round out the corners with a little one-inch square of the gray and white polka dot background fabric.

From there, I made the sign at the top and traced it for embroidery. I'll sew the three pieces together when the embroidery is complete.

It's easier to work with a smaller piece. It was supposed to be stitched in black Perle cotton. I don't have black, but I have several spools of this dark brown, and so I'm using that.

When I had it this far, I stopped for the day. I should be able to finish this easily today. I'll spend today's sewing time finishing the background, fusing the cat, top-stitching, and then sewing on the buttons. When that's done, this section will be finished.

For dinner last night, I completed a two-year experiment. Actually, I didn't expect it to take two years, but out-of-sight and out-of-mind sometimes thwarts my best laid plans. Last week, I found a zip-lock bag of some stuffing I'd made two years ago. It was left over from a dinner of Roasted Delicata Squash with Wild Rice-Cherry Stuffing from some time back. We actually had it first as a stuffing for some Cornish game hens, and then I used the leftover stuffing in the delicata squash a few days later. There was still stuffing left over, and so I tried freezing it to use at a later date. I wasn't sure how well it would do after being frozen, and that was the experiment. And then, as so often happens with things that go into the freezer, I forgot all about it until I discovered it last week. It still looked good, so I picked up a delicata squash and used it for last night's dinner. And voila!

The bread cubes were a little soggy, but otherwise, it tasted as good as it did the first time around. I'd do this again, but I might wait to add any bread cubes until I'm ready to use it. If you've never had delicata squash, it's one of the softer squashes. It still takes a stout knife to cut the thing in half, but it isn't as difficult as, say, an acorn squash. (Sometimes we have to go looking for a Samurai when we want to cut an acorn squash in half.)

Okay, so I'm going to start some Chicken and Dumplings in my Dutch oven this morning. The recipe was originally for a slow cooker, but my slow cooker doesn't get hot enough to cook the dumplings. I've adapted it to be done in a 250°F oven. It needs to cook for 5-6 hours before adding the dumplings, and then I just follow the recipe as before. When I planned this dish for tonight's dinner, I didn't know we'd be facing such cold temperatures. Now, it's sounding pretty darned good.

We're watching the weather like hawks. Originally, the forecast called for warming on Saturday morning, but now that's been put off until Sunday. We're supposed to head down our hill for dinner with Erik and Mae on Saturday evening. We might have to change our day to Sunday. Erik is a very good cook (Mae is too), and he's all set to roast a prime rib. We're looking forward to that, and so we're hoping the weather will cooperate.