Sew Tedious

Good morning, my friends, and welcome to Tuesday. It's my day for a monthly pedicure, and so it's going to be a relaxing day, even if it does require traveling out among The English. There are no other planned stops coming or going, and so it should work out okay. I'll get in a little slow stitching to calm my nerves before I go. 

As for slow-stitching, here's yesterday's inchy. We're off to kind of a slow start. I keep waiting for some fancier stitches. This one was all backstitch.

From there I did some housework, and then went to work on the blocks for the Whimsical Garden quilt. I'd already fused Block #5. Block #6 is one with applique extending into the border, and so I first needed to trim the background and add the border. I did both blocks at the same time.

Then I went to work fusing Block #6. When it was finished, it looked like this:

I love all the colors in these.

It might have been a mistake to top-stitch both blocks together, but I was trying to minimize the number of times I had to change thread colors. Block #5 was finished first.

And then Block #6. It took the whole live-long rest of my sewing day to do all the top-stitching.

Many years ago, I wrote a tutorial for applique. You can find the tutorial right here. There, I explained how I take a few straight stitches at the beginning and end of a row (or round) of buttonhole stitch to secure the threads. With so many little pieces on the leaves and flower pistils, it was quite a tedious process getting through both blocks in a single day. 

Miss Sadie showed up just in time to be of no help whatsoever. She was smacking her lips for some catnip though. There's always time for catnip.

When both blocks were finished, I laid them out with their brethren. Here are all the blocks I have so far. 

There's at least one for each iteration of the four border arrangements now, and I like that scrappy appearance.

Okay, and after all that top-stitching, I was happy to move on to making dinner. I tried a new recipe last night, and this turned out to be a winner. This is Mini Meatball Soup with Broccoli and Orecchiette. (I cannot see that word, "orecchiette" without hearing Giada De Laurentiis telling me it means "little ears.") So, this was pretty quick to make and very tasty.

It uses the whole "tree" of broccoli, including the stems which are chopped up. The florets are cut into small pieces and added toward the end. It also uses hot Italian sausage. We liked the added spice, but it would be just as good using mild sausage. The one adaptation I made was to add the pasta directly into the soup. The recipe from the New York Times had me boiling the pasta separately, and that seemed a silly extra step, not to mention another pot dirtied unnecessarily. So, I added the pasta when I added the sausage. Also, I used a melon baller and just dug straight into the bulk Italian sausage, plopping the "balls" directly into the soup. After that, I simmered the soup just long enough to cook the pasta al dente. The meat cooked through in the same amount of time. 

So I made a few adaptations to the recipe, and I can share a screenshot of it with you. It's worth a try, and a tummy warmer for cold weather. We had it with some crusty bread.

Okay, so it's time for getting on with my day. I'm hoping I'll have some time to stitch today's inchy before I need to leave. There should be some time for sewing this afternoon, and I'll get to work on Tiny House #4. I like to do all the tedious sewing in one big chunk. We all need more tedium in our lives, don't we?