Stitching with Kitties

Good morning, my friends. We're just a few days away from Halloween. Are you ready? Halloween is a non-event at our house. This will be our 23rd Halloween in this house, and we've never had a single trick-or-treater. It used to be fun when the boys were younger, and we figured out costumes for them. We also had a pumpkin carving evening, but no more. I miss those days.

My yesterday started with slow-stitching. As expected I finished up the first of two blocks I'm making for "The Story of My Day." It still needs borders. This is the 19th of 25 blocks for this quilt.

And then there was time to take the first stitches on Block 20. I doubt I'll finish this today, but probably by tomorrow.

My next stop was to clean and organize the upper pantry shelf in the image below. Aside from giving things a badly-needed dusting, this shelf doesn't look so different from before. The cat cannister on the left (a gift from Erik one Christmas) holds my baking chips. I went through all of those and found four open packages of white chocolate chips. Oy. Two of them were discolored and old, and so I discarded those. For the others with multiple open packages, I consolidated them, and that allowed me to close the lid completely for the first time in a while. I've switched some things around, and now this shelf is dedicated to baking supplies and equipment.

Today I'll tackle the bottom shelf of this unit. A couple of those things fall under the category of "it seemed like a good idea at the time." There's a four-cake bundt pan there. I used it once many years ago. The cakes stuck to the pan, and so I never used it again. 

There's also a 48-muffin mini muffin baking pan below that has never been used in more than a decade of ownership. Those will get packed off to the Goodwill and they can be someone else's problem. The rest is all legit. It just needs a good wiping down. On the left are lids for mason jars. I might be able to make space here for more boxes of mason jars, and I can get the boxes still on the floor onto the shelf.

Okay, so that took about 20 minutes. All that baking stuff put me in the mood to bake the Pumpkin Spice Breakfast Cookies I've been looking at. I posted this same picture to Facebook yesterday afternoon, and one of my friends opined that she hoped they tasted better than they look. And, yeah, I guess they aren't exactly lookers. 

It's an interesting recipe. No flour. No sugar. No leaveners of any kind. They are sweetened with maple syrup, and they contain all kinds of good fiber in the form of old-fashioned oats, pecans, dried cranberries, and pumpkin seeds. The only fat comes from some olive oil and the two egg yolks. Also, they're mixed up in a food processor rather than a mixer. They get a little bit of sweetness from the maple syrup and the dried cranberries. We liked them. They're definitely a "breakfast" cookie. If you want something sweet, this isn't for you.

Okay, and with all the non-sewing stuff finished, I went to work hand-sewing the binding for the Shop Hop 2.0 quilt. Smitty took the first shift as my stitching cat.

Sadie, always the purrtector, kept a lookout for any invading forces.

It is purrfectly safe. You may purrceed.

Then, when Smitty's shift ended, Sadie took over the stitching cat job.

With so much help, I was able to turn all four corners.

And that's a finish! I started this quilt on May 23, 2020. It ends up at 67 x 67 inches. The fabrics are from quilt shops across the country, and they are selected for their representation of the region, the shop, or something that happened along the way. They’re fun to make. Every block tells a story.

Here's how it looks from the back:

Okay, and I'll be linking up to

So today I have to get back to some housekeeping chores. I managed to shove them over on the calendar a few days ago, but it's time to get busy with the one chore I've assigned myself for the day. Also, I'm going to finish off that one section of pantry shelves today. That will only take a few minutes. Tonight's dinner will be Grown-up Macaroni and Cheese, and I'll make that ahead of time. When all that is finished, I'll get back to my sewing. 

Today I want to sew the Phenology piece into a small quilt top. I've had this on my mind ever since finishing the embroidery. I've already switched out the bottom fabric shown in the image below. I wanted something with more contrast from the summer sun fabric on the left.

And I've been so focused on how to finish that I got my projects out of order. By rights, I should making these blocks for Ruth's Legacy into a finished quilt top. Like the Homestead quilt, this is going to take some figuring since the blocks are all different sizes. Probably I won't get past the "figuring" stage today.

So there's plenty to keep me busy. It's a gray and rainy day today. Good sewing weather. I've read from a few of you that you're already getting some snow. Hopefully, we'll hold off on that for another couple of months at least.