Twelve Makes a Dozen

Good morning, my friends! Saturday morning. What could be better than that? Well...I'll tell you what. It's Saturday morning, and I have a finished quilt top to show you. Ta-Da!

It ends up at 46 x 65 inches. I'm happy to have it finished and in under the quilt sandwiching extravaganza deadline. 

We were home from yesterday's grocery shopping trip before 11:00 a.m. I really like getting out early for that task. It might actually become a habit. We can be home and have everything put away, and it feels as if we have the whole day ahead. It's almost like it never happened. 

Well. Don't you know Smitty was jumping at the chance to help finish off a quilt top. Especially leafy ones like this one. If you play your cards right, you can sometimes find mousies hidden amongst those leaves.

Sadie was less enthusiastic. She'd seen the error in the stop border from the day before. She has strict standards of purrfection to uphold, and so she was reticent to lend her paw to this project.

So I fixed that first...just to assuage her concerns.

And then I sewed the outer border on. From there, I had enough length of this barn fabric to use it as a backing. I just barely trimmed off the center fold from my yardage and sewed the two sides together with a 12-inch wide strip of green to give me enough width.

Then I cut binding strips from this dark brown, and the whole thing went into the quilts-to-be-sandwiched pile.

Ordinarily, this would bring me to the "Small Quilt Tops to Finish," and then the "Small Quilt Tops to Quilt" section of my white board. As we've already discussed, those sections of my board are clean for the first time in a long time.

Okay, so we'll just move along to the WIPs section. When I finished the last block for Ruth's Legacy (When Quilters Gather), it opened up a spot on my WIPs dance card. I've decided to start this Merry, Merry Snowmen quilt. If memory serves, I saw this online and fell in love with it at some point. It's a pattern from Bunny Hill Designs.

I've done a couple of quilts from Bunny Hill Designs. You might remember "It's Raining Cats and Dogs."

And I Believe in Snowmen.

They're nice patterns, and easy to work with. This one has its own button packet. (I can't remember if it came with the button packet, or if I purchased it separately.)

So I'll be starting with Block 1 for this quilt. I'm going to follow the color schemes from the original quilt, but I'll be pulling scraps from my stash for the fabrics. One thing I like about these patterns is that they come with a heavy sheet (think card stock) showing each block close-up. It also gives ideas for how to quilt it when the time comes.

Okay, so that was a good sewing day. Dinner was made ahead yesterday. I tried this recipe for Peanut Chicken Soba Salad, and this was really good. We liked it a lot.

This was a recipe I saved from the Cooking Light Diet when Cooking Light ceased publication and the diet was discontinued. (😞) It has just 256 calories per serving, and it's super easy to make. I found the cooked soba noodles in the produce section of our grocery store. They come with a seasoning packet, which I discarded. I just wanted the noodles. Since they were precooked, I simply ran them under hot water and separated them with my fingers. Then I added some chicken from a rotisserie chicken I picked up at our deli, added the fresh veggies, and voila! Dinner was served. 

So I've linked to the recipe back there, but hear this: Make twice as much dressing as it says. If you read the reviews of the recipe, almost everyone liked it, but most said the same thing...it needs more dressing. That was our take on it too. I'd read the reviews ahead of time, but then forgot to make more dressing. It was good as is, but it would have been better with a little more moisture and more forward flavor. We added toppings to ours. I used Mae Ploy, which I would drink from the bottle if no one was watching. Mike added a bottled peanut sauce to his. We liked both, and I'll for sure be making this again.

Okay, so there's no use putting it off any longer. Sandwiching quilts starts today. We'll set up my plywood and sawhorse tables in the garage, and I'll aim to do four quilts per day until they're done. (I just hope I have enough batting.) There should still be some time for sewing each day, and so I'll get started on the first of the Merry, Merry Snowmen blocks. 

We have hazy skies today from the fires, but not as bad as we've seen it at other times. I hope y'all are staying safe and breathing easy. I didn't get to do any slow stitching yesterday, and so that's where I'm headed next. Have a good day, everybody!