Catching Up

Good morning, my friends! We have some catching up to do. Since yesterday's post was the reveal post for August's art quilt, I have two days worth of activities for you today. You might want to fill your coffee cup, and then we'll get started. Go ahead. I'll wait.

My morning slow-stitching had me filling up the first hoop on the Fall Harvest piece.

It's a rather large piece embroidery-wise and then, of course, there is the little mini quilt to paper-piece for the middle.

So, I've decided to designate finishing this piece (minus borders) as my goal for:

The "minus borders" part of my goal is because I haven't decided yet how I'm going to sew all four seasons into a quilt. I'll burn that bridge when I come to it.

My first stop after slow-stitching was to hoe the garden. Now, here's something interesting (to me, at least). These are the Procut Gold Lite sunflowers I showed you a few days ago.

If you look at the image below, taken a few days ago, you'll nice the green in the centers. This is my first year growing this particular sunflower, and so that green center seemed unusual. Now that I've seen it for a second time (image above), you can see the green is all gone.

And when you see it from the side, you can see that the center bulges out from the surrounding petals.

I have an idea the birds are going to love those seeds. In the image below, one of the giants is nearly opened.

Here's another new flower. This one is called Ring of Fire.

The one known as Joker (below) has a lot of flowers now, and more are coming.

I'm looking for more giants on the way.

This one is called Floristan. It will be red when it opens.

Gazing out at the bee garden, I didn't see any new flowers, but I noticed this leafy thing growing on the far side. It looks like lupine. I'm hoping it will bloom because I love lupine.

In other garden news, Fuzzy Wuzzy has two flowers now.

Checkers has three, and more are coming here.

After helping me in the garden, Smitty needed to cool his tummy furs. He was also trying out new poses for his next centerfold in Cosmeowpolitan magazine.

He's channeling Burt Reynolds, thinking his own nude photo would be supawrior.

Okay, so let's catch up on our sewing, shall we? After finishing quilting for the day on Monday, I noticed some purple embroidery floss showing through from the back on the block below. Rats. My friend, Kate, would never have let this happen. Kate is a champion at cleaning up the backs of her quilts. I used to be better, but sometimes I forget to look. 

Okay, so what to do? What to do? I'd already quilted all around the embroidery, and I'd also quilted the blocks surrounding this one. Well, I have a teensy weensy crochet hook that I can slip under the fabric and pull out loose threads. Sadly, the embroidery floss seemed to be too thick, and so I couldn't hook it with the crochet hook.

After thinking about it overnight, I decided to try taking out just one side of the quilting. This was done very carefully so I could preserve the thread tails and bury them.

And that gave me enough room that I could reach inside with some small scissors and snip these two culprits. After that, I just added in the line of quilting, and nobody will be the wiser. You won't tell, will you?

Okay, so I finished off the rest of the blocks and then, I wanted to switch to this pretty Rainbow thread. This is one from my quilting fairy godmother, Ila. Thank you, Ila.

It has the colors of my quilt border, and so I thought I could make it work for quilting the rest of the quilt. I amused myself just now because when I started out with this thread, I was using a 90/14 quilting needle. Right away, the thread frayed and broke, and so I switched to a 90/14 top-stitching needle. It has a bigger eye. Now, as I'm seeing this spool again, I see that was the recommended needle all along. Duh.

So anyway...isn't this pretty?

I was still undecided whether to continue with white thread or whether to switch to the rainbow thread. Laying it out on both dark and light borders, it looked good to me. I decided to switch.

I was still keeping white thread in the bobbin, and so I needed to make sure my tension was correct. Stitching a practice piece, the straight line in the image below looks pretty good.

Looking at the back, I decided to tighten the top tension just a smidge, and then I was ready to go.

So I stitched another straight line around all the embroidered blocks.

I wanted to use one of the fancy stitches on my machine for the sashings. I sampled three different ones. You can see them in the image below. I rejected the one on the left. I didn't want that pretty rainbow thread backtracking over itself. The one in the middle was okay, but I liked the one on the right best.

This is stitch #698 on my Bernina 750QE machine.

So here we go...and I like the looks of that. The trick with using these fancy stitches for quilting is not to lay too heavy a hand on your quilt. Your hands should simply guide the quilt to keep it moving straight, rather than pushing or pulling. Also, I have to keep the excess quilt from dragging across the edge of my table, and so I tend to let it rest on my, um, boobs. Yes, they come in handy for sewing.

Here's how that looks on the back. I can see a few little dark dots coming through from the top thread, but it looks pretty good. I was adjusting it as I went.

After stitching that one bit of sashing, I ended my sewing day. 

So now, we're onto yesterday. My first stop of the day was to do battle with the Z force. I used about half of these. I've seen reinforcements in the field, and I'm assuming they are on the way.

From these, I shredded enough to bag up 2-cup portions for five loaves of zucchini bread. Those went into the freezer.

Then I made this Blueberry Zucchini Cake with Lemon Buttercream. It's not much of a looker when it's finished.

But oh my goodness. This was delicious! It looks like this on the inside when you cut into it.

I've linked to the recipe above. The recipe makes a huge cake in a 9 x 13 cake pan. I made only half the cake and baked it in an 8 x 8 pan for 35 minutes. Also, I used 1 whole egg and 1 egg white in place of the 3 eggs. For the frosting, I started with 2 tablespoons of lemon juice and I added 2 teaspoons of lemon zest. The lemon buttercream frosting is to die for, and if you couldn't see the green flecks, you would never guess you were eating zucchini. This is a winner. If, like me, you're overrun with zucchini, I suggest this as a starting place for your battle with the Z force. If you're wounded, at least you'll have something good to eat. Life is short. Eat dessert first. Think of it as a vegetable in cake form.

All of that took up most of the morning. I was boiling and skinning beets for canning too. When I was able to get some sewing done, I finished quilting the rest of the sashings, and then started in on the outer border. There, I did a looping motif. I've done this once before. It seemed a good choice to go along with the stitching in the sashing.

It's pretty hard to see anything from the back, but I'll show you anyway.

From there it was ready for binding. I gave it a bright yellow binding.

After that, I spent most of the afternoon stitching on that. Smitty snoopervised from the chair beside me.

By the time I stopped for the day, I had turned three corners.

We have grocery shopping to do today, but I should have no problem finishing this up when we get home later this morning.

For last night's dinner, I tried a new recipe for Rice Noodles with Egg Drop Gravy. It was pretty darned tasty.

Those carrots are from the garden. Whoo Hoo! Two small carrots. That's all I needed! It's supposed to be made with baby bok choy, but I couldn't find the little ones. I ended up using about half of a full-sized one, and simply slicing it cross-wise into about half-inch pieces. I doubt it made much difference, and it might have made it easier to stir-fry. The recipe is from the New York Times. I've linked to it above, but you probably need a subscription to open it. If you really want the recipe and you aren't able to open it, email me, and I'll be happy to send it to you.

After dinner, the tomato-eating deer paid us another visit. They were probably disappointed to find we'd moved the tomato plant back into the greenhouse and away from their nibbling, thieving mouths.

So, I have one more picture to show you and then we'll be all caught up. The baby quilt has been received. Is there anything sweeter than seeing those big smiles with a gifted quilt?

Erik and Mae attended their baby shower over the weekend and Mae sent me this picture.

Okay, so I mentioned it's a grocery shopping day. When we get home, I have some beets ready for canning. They're pretty quick to do once the beets are cooked and skinned. There should be some time left over for sewing. I want to finish up the two tiny houses that are waiting their turn. When I've spent my hour's time on them, I want to turn this little stitchery into a very small quilt. 

It shouldn't take long. After that, I'll be back to working on my list of WIPs. There's always plenty to do in the sewing room at the Three Cats Ranch. 

Next up...breakfast. And then I suppose we'll be on our way to the grocery store. Maybe I'll get dressed first. Have a good day, everybody!