Low Energy Day

Good morning, my friends. First off, let me just say I'm glad I'm not going anywhere today. Yesterday's blood-sucking debacle cured me of most anything I wanted to do yesterday. I ended up spending a good part of the day under a quilt snuggled up with my Warmie. Frankly, our weather is moving into the season when I'm cold all the time. Thank goodness for cats and Warmies. But, honestly, when I got home yesterday, I wrote my blog post, ate some lunch, and then laid down for a long nap. When I woke up, I felt energized enough to start on the day's baking project. 

It was a good day for a dessert, and so I tried these Tiny Apple Tarts for Two from King Arthur Flour. They weren't hard to make, but there were some wait times that stretched the project out over a couple of hours. When they were finished baking, they looked like this:

The crust was the real draw for these. It was a light and crunchy pastry crust. My only complaint is that I had more apple than crust. I probably started with a too-large Honeycrisp apple. I rolled out the crust to the proper size, but it was hard to stretch it over the apple filling. I only used about 3/4 of the filling I had. So, I'll make these again, but I'll probably use a smaller apple and increase the crust ingredients by 50% (to make the math easier). Also, I didn't do what the recipe said in the Step 7 on the crust. I didn't make the cuts. Instead, I just folded the dough over the apples and pleated it. I'm suspicious those cuts would make holes where the hot filling would leak out. Mine had no leakage.

Okay, and that was all well and good, but Smitty wanted to know when we were going to do some sewing. Cats are not fond of sugary desserts.

My motivation was severely lacking, and so the only sewing I did was to make a little more progress on the Phenology project. When January is completely finished, I'll have it halfway done. 

The designs on this piece are so tiny, it really should be stitched with one strand of floss. I'm using two. I don't like stitching with just one strand, and so it's a little harder to stitch those little tiny sections.

And as you might guess, a low-energy day requires two naps. I took another nap later in the day. I finished a book I was reading, and then it was about time for dinner. We had leftovers, and then we enjoyed our tiny apple tarts with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. It was food for the soul.

This morning, I feel as if my energy level has returned. I'm going to check outside and see if it's dry enough for some weeding. We've had two days of relatively heavy rain, and so the ground will be nice and soft. Nevertheless, I don't want to be out in the mud. If it looks good for weeding, then I'll do that. If not, I'll substitute in a housekeeping chore. Also, I want to get in a Bow-flex workout, and I want to try out a new muffin recipe. When all that is finished, I'll get back to my thread work. 

The "Spices" quilt has been challenging insofar as the thread work is concerned. My subject isn't popping out at me the way I hoped it would, but I'm still only about halfway through. I'm hoping today's sewing will help. Fingers crossed.