Phinishing Phenology

Good morning, my friends. Yes, I'm working on "phinishing" Phenology, but it isn't phinished yet. I just couldn't resist using those words. I'll tell you about my progress in a minute, but first, I wanted you to see the view from my window as I'm writing. We're still enjoying lots of fall color in our part of the world.

If I look out the window where Eliza sits, I see this:

There's no color editing on those photos. It really looks like that.

So my first stop yesterday was to do some slow-stitching. No matter what is going on at our house, slow-stitching always gets a spot on the agenda, and the earlier the better. When I'd spent enough time on that, I went to work on this bottom shelf of my pantry unit. Mainly, I dusted things off and got rid of some things I never use. It gave me space for more canning supplies, and I was able to get those remaining boxes off the floor. I'd like to find a different place for that souffle dish. There are still more shelves to do, and so maybe a space will open up for it somewhere else.

Today I'll tackle this top shelf on the one remaining shelf unit. I'll need to enlist Mike's long arms to reach the stuff in the far corner. I'll probably get rid of that fan. It's leftover from my "hot flash" days. Fortunately, I've moved past that, and I haven't used the fan in a long time...years. The rest is table decor stuff and candles. I'll probably hang onto some of it, but some of the candles will probably find new homes.

It was after lunch before I made my way to the sewing room. Smitty was napping there, and he was none too happy when I disturbed his slumber.

My first task was to make up a new embroidery piece. I'll finish up the second block for "The Story of My Day" this morning. That means, I'll start with the first block for "A Year in the Garden." This will be the first of twelve blocks for this pattern from Jenny of Elefantz.

With that finished, I turned my attention to the Phenology wheel. As I've mentioned, I wanted to do the borders with mitered corners, and I had to reteach myself how to do this. This is the source I've used both times I've attempted this. It's among the first books I bought when I learned to quilt.

I'd already trimmed my piece to 11 inches square. I wanted to do a narrow stop border on all four sides using the same floss color I'd used when I stitched the name of the season; i.e., orange for autumn, yellow for summer, and so on.

My book told me to add twice the width of the borders to the length I wanted. In this case, I wanted a half-inch stop border, and a 2-1/2 inch outer border. Subtracting seam allowances, my border would be 3 inches wide. And so I needed to add 6 inches to the 11 inch length. So, I sewed together the two colors of borders, and then finger-pressed the center of the strip. I placed a small pencil mark at the halfway point of the embroidery piece, and pinned outward from there.

Okay. The first side was done.

And then, I continued on the same way for all four borders.

I was so involved in this process that I neglected to take a picture of the ruler placement. I lined up the 45 degree line at the raw edge of the border, and then lined up the ruler's edge with the corner of the top border piece and the inner corner seam, and then drew a line. From there, I switched the top and bottom ends and did the same thing on the spring border.

Then, I matched up the two lines and pinned them before sewing the seam from the inner corner outward. Before trimming anything, I pressed it to make sure it would lie flat. Okay so far.

And then I trimmed off the excess.

I've only done this once before, but I felt the same way about it this second time: It's easier than it looks. The one thing I would do differently would be to add a little bit of width to all the borders. In the image below, you can see how the summer fabric pulled up a little bit, making it uneven. It probably had to do with how I sewed that diagonal seam. Whatever the reason, it required trimming a quarter inch all the way around to square it up.

When the borders were all added and trimmed, it looked like this. (Thanks for those solid fabrics, Ila!)

Before ending my sewing day, I selected this fat quarter to use as the back. No reason, except that it's one of those mystery fat quarters, and I have no idea where or when it came to be mine. I can't imagine what I'll ever use it for, and so it will make a good back for this piece.

The piece ends up at 16 x 16 inches, and I cut two strips of binding from the fabric shown on the right side of the image below. I like a fun binding, and this one had the right colors.

Okay, and that was the end of my sewing day.

Dinner was made earlier in the day. We had Ina Garten's Grown Up Mac & Cheese, which might just be the perfect comfort food for a cold rainy day.

I tried something different with the topping, though. Some weeks earlier, I tried a recipe for a homemade Shake and Bake chicken recipe. The coating was made with unsweetened shredded wheat cereal. We liked the shake and bake, but now...what am I going to do with the rest of that box of shredded wheat? Well...I used it for the topping on my mac & cheese, and this worked out. I used two cups of cereal ground up in my food processor, added a teaspoon of granulated garlic, a teaspoon of granulated onion, and a half teaspoon of salt. It added the nicest crunch to the mac and cheese. Definitely, I'll use the shredded wheat in place of bread crumbs again some time.

All right. That's all I have for you today. For my next trick, I'm going to spend some time working with the blocks for Ruth's Legacy. Its time to be sewn into a quilt top has come.

I'll measure and figure out which block is the largest, and then bring all the blocks to the same size. How this will happen, I have not worked out yet. Hopefully, inspiration will strike soon. My friend Mary C has already given me some ideas when she pointed out she thought this "I'm a Maker" fabric from Art Gallery fabrics as a possibility. 

Great idea, Mary. I'm thinking it over. If nothing else, it will be perfect as a back.

All right. We slept in this morning. With sunrise so late and a dark bedroom, it's getting harder to wake up in the morning. We haven't even had breakfast yet, and so I'm on my way to save a life. Have a good day, Everybody!