Whole Hearted

Good morning, my friends. 2022 is in its final throes. I can't say I'm sorry to see it go, although plenty of good stuff happened during the year. I'm afraid it will always go down in our memories as the Year of the Plumbing Catastrophe. We'll still be dealing with that at the beginning of 2023, but I do believe we're in the home stretch. We're just waiting now for some custom baseboards to replace the ones that got broken. When those are installed, the project will be finished.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves before the year even gets started. There is yesterday's sewing to talk about. I took the first stitches on April's block for the Joyful Journey quilt.

There was one little kitchen task I wanted to take care of while I was thinking of it. I'll be trying a new recipe for a Peanut Fish Stew tomorrow evening. One of the recommended condiments for the stew is this Spiced Pickled Celery. It has to be made two days ahead, and so I got that going yesterday.

Celery is not one of my favorite foods, cooked or raw. I like it when it's stuffed with cream cheese or peanut butter. Otherwise, I'm kind of lukewarm on it. Nevertheless, I've seen recipes that were vastly improved with the suggested condiments, and so we'll give this a try. It was pretty simple...dice up some celery and onion, add in some fresh dill sprigs and then a pickling solution made from white wine vinegar, water, sugar, salt, and pickling spice. The pickling solution was boiled and then strained before it was added to the jar. Now, it's sitting in the fridge working away at pickling itself. I'll say more about this when I've actually tried the Peanut Fish Stew recipe.

Moving into the sewing room, I was working on the Stitches from the Heart mini. I had the first section finished, and so I went to work on the second section. When it was finished, I sewed it to the first section.

There was just one more section to finish off the whole heart.

When the three sections were sewn together, they looked like this.

I added some large triangles to each side, and the mini quilt top was finished.

From there, I rifled through my stash looking for an appropriate back. I'm using the same bright red used in the quilt for the quilt binding.

Now, it's sandwiched for quilting, and ready to go. Today I'll do some simple quilting and sew on the binding. I'll take it along on next week's camping trip for hand-sewing. With two embroidery blocks, a hanging sleeve, and a quilt binding, I should have plenty to keep me occupied over our three days away.

So let's just talk about what comes next for a minute, shall we? We have a large ham that remains from a pork share we split with Erik and Mae earlier this year. I've never actually done a ham that wasn't already cooked, but we're going to do that for our New Year's Day celebration. I'll be making some baked beans, skillet corn bread, and a seven-layer salad. Of course, I'll be baking something for dessert as well. Erik and Mae will join us to help eat it. The ham is huge!!!

The next day, we'll be leaving on our camping trip. I happen to know there is no internet or cell signal where we're going, and so I'll be forced to take a few days off from blogging. Tomorrow, I'll be posting a year-end review, but then don't expect to hear from me for several days. Of course, I'll be back to show you whatever sewing progress I've made, and I'll tell you about what happens on our trip. We've visited Cape Disappointment many times. It's one of our favorite campgrounds along the Washington/Oregon coastline. If you're desperate for something to read, you can read a couple of old Cape Disappointment posts right here, here, and here. We're expecting a lot of rain while we're there this time around, but as you can see in those previous posts, sometimes we get lucky.

So, after tomorrow's post, I won't be blogging again for at least a few days, but I need to ready a post for linking to January's OMG. 

I said I was going to start this quilt earlier in the month, but then I finished up my challenge quilt, and I didn't need it for respite sewing. Now, it has moved to the top of my whiteboard workflow chart. (I run my sewing room like a business. Too bad the money only flows in one direction.) January's OMG will be to quilt and bind the next quilt in my trashy series: Waste Not Whatnots. I'm looking forward to getting started on this.

I'll be linking up when the goal-setting party gets started. Actually, I'm only assuming this will continue into 2023. If not, I guess I'll be the only one at the party.

I've been writing this post from my laptop using my iPhone hotspot. Our internet is out again. We have pretty good internet most of the time. Our internet service here in the boondocks is wireless, and so bad weather can cause us problems. We've had almost more rain than I can believe in the past several days. We're hoping for better weather ahead, and now we're hoping even harder for our internet service to be restored. I only mention this because my luddite self was able to use a thumb drive to move pictures from my desktop computer to my laptop. Yay me! (Living with engineers allows one to become lazy technology-wise. If he doesn't outlive me, I'll be in trouble.)