Busy Day

Good morning, my friends. It was good to be feeling better yesterday. It's almost like the whole thing never happened. The kitties were 'zhausted after spending all their time keeping the household up and running. Besides, they've been working hard trying to convince me that my quilt blocks are arranged all wrong.

Sadie has worked especially hard on this. She keeps rearranging them. Then, she comes back and they're all put back the way they were. It's so exaspurrating! She needed a day off.

Smitty decided to join her. You might say the kitties embarked on a day-long work stoppage. Besides, Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest, right?

I spent the morning filling in what remained inside my embroidery hoop.

There are no color suggestions for this little stitchery, and so I've been spending a lot of my stitching time trying to decide on the colors for the Christmas lights, the ornaments, and the presents under the tree. Now I know what I want to do, and so I expect to have this finished within a day or two.

It means I need to be making up the next two blocks for The Story of My Day. Here are the ten blocks I have for this quilt so far. These are fun to stitch, and then they are fun to piece together when the stitching is finished.

After that, I did my workout (Yay me!), and went to work making last night's dessert. Some of y'all were very worried we might not follow through with dessert, but you know me. Dessert is a very high priority. I made an Apple-Brown Butter Jalousie. It's a dessert I haven't made for a long time. It turns out looking so pretty, and I wanted to make another. 

It's made with frozen puff pastry. The apples are first cooked, and then allowed to cool. While the filling cooled, I took a shower and then came back to finish baking it. We had it for dessert last night with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I think it would be illegal to eat it any other way.

This can also be made with mixed berries, in which case, it's called a Bumbleberry Jalousie. I've linked to an old blog post there. It was written before our days of just saying no to seeds. We were younger and still living on the wild side back then.

So, anyway...it's a bit of a production to make it, but worth it when you want to make something pretty and tasty. We have leftovers for tonight too. By the way, I wondered about that word, "Jalousie." It's French, and it means: "a blind or shutter made of a row of angled slats." I'm assuming it's named for the cuts in the top crust, but it's really just a giant-sized apple turnover.

After lunch, I got busy quilting the Time to Stitch piece. This is 2023's "stitched inchy" piece. I've added borders and sandwiched it for quilting. Also, I had a length of scrap binding I could use to finish it off.

The finished piece will measure 14 x 15 inches. I'm turning it into a little wall-hanging because I think I noticed a microscopic space on my sewing room wall that isn't already covered with a quilt. Since it will be hung, I wanted to do a little quilting in the center to keep it from sagging. After studying it for a while, I couldn't really think of a good way to quilt where the embroidery is. I could do straight or wavy lines, but there is really too much going on in the design for that. I decided to use a single tacking stitch wherever I could fit one. For that, I chose Stitch number 749 on my Bernina 750QE machine.

I stitched them randomly over the design wherever I could fit one. Here's how that looks:

Then, I wanted to do a line of stitching inside the stop border. With the floral outer border, I was looking for a tulip-shaped stitch. I chose stitch #104 for this.

It takes a little figuring to turn the corners or end a line. I can tell me machine to stop when it finishes the current stitch design, and then I use the machine's handwheel to guide me to where I want to start again. Here's how that looks.

Finally, I wanted to stitch a line of leaves around the outside of the stop border. For that, I chose stitch #119.

It's a little hard to see against that background fabric, but it's functional, and that was my mission.

Then, I squared it up and sewed on the binding. Now it's ready for hand-stitching. I'll probably finish this off today.

Here's how it looks from the back. 

That backing fabric was a gift from a friend who passed away a few months ago. It had me thinking about her. She died from a particularly aggressive form of cancer, and she was ten years younger than I. I was wishing she'd lived long enough to see that I used her fabric in a quilt. And that brought me to the end of my sewing day. 

Mike and I were sitting in the living room yesterday evening when we heard three short whistle-like chirps from another room. Neither of us had any idea what made the sound. It wasn't our smoke detector, nor any appliance. We finally decided it was the weather radio we purchased to warn us of storms, especially when we travel through tornado country. There was a big black cloud hanging overhead, looking very threatening. We heard the chirps for a second time. The cloud never did anything other than pass us by. Still, nothing has proved us wrong, and so we assume it was some sort of warning about a potential storm. The weather radio is supposed to tell us what it's doing, and on this, the weather radio is holding on to its secret. 

On the other hand, Halloween is coming. Possibly it's some sort of poltergeist on the loose. One can never be too careful at this time of year. I suspect kitties will be the first to know if the house is haunted.

So today I'm making a quick trip into town to deliver a package to the post office. I need a few things from the grocery store too. Aside from that, not much is going on today other than sewing. Tomorrow, however, I have a dental appointment. (Sigh.) It's practically the worst day of the year. The dentist would be bad enough, but the drive to downtown Portland makes it even worse. And all of that to say I'll probably take a day off from blogging tomorrow. I need to leave the house early, and I'm sure I'll be too traumatized by the outing to do anything when I get home. You understand, don't you?

Right now, it's time for breakfast. I'd better enjoy it while I still have teeth in my head. And, I'm not expecting to lose any teeth, but at my age, anything can happen.