Taking Cuts

Good morning, my friends. We're looking at a decent day of weather ahead. There's one more somewhat urgent clean-up job in the garden, and I'm thinking today is the day. I've pulled the worst of the weeds and  deadheaded the shrubs that needed it. The last task is to clean up the culinary herb garden. I cut a huge amount of sage from the herbs last year, and the ground is looking a little barren at the moment. I'm waiting to see now much of it will fill in with chives, and then I'll probably add some things that I'm missing. We're expecting rain the rest of the week, but a nice weekend. 

Yesterday's weather was good for sewing. It drizzled off and on all day, keeping everything wetted down. The kitties mostly spent their day inside. I spent some time on my slow-stitching in the morning. I've finished all the little quilt blocks now.

It's been fun so far. I've done some stitches unfamiliar to me, and I've looked up quite a few to figure out how they're done. Next, I'll need to stitch the line around the outer edge of the quilt, and then I'll be ready to stitch the flowers at the bottom. There are still a few more days of work on this.

When I made my way to the sewing room, I started at the top of my list of WIP's. Next up...the Stair Steps quilt. I'm making this one row at a time. There are six rows altogether, and I have three rows done.

It took me a while to figure out what I was doing. Happily, Sadie was there to help. She's very good at understanding patterns.

The first step was to cut the "stair steps." These are done in neutral colors. For some of them, I'm using the wrong sides of my fabrics. I'm making this quilt one row at a time. For a single row, I needed ten of each of these.

Smitty helped me with that.

If you look at the image of the quilt above, you can see there are diagonal lines of color running through the quilt. The first one has a yellow stripe. I needed eight yellow squares and 32 scrappy ones to finish it off.

When I had them all sewn together, they looked like this:

These are large blocks...about 16-1/2 inches square. Before stopping for the day, I laid out the pieces for the next block. This one will be purple.

And I'm continuing to work on my leaders and enders project of sewing together all my bonus triangles. I remember to do them a little more than half the time, and so my remembering has improved a little bit. I'm trimming and sorting them by size into sandwich bags. These are from yesterday's crop.

And that was a good day of sewing. When my gardening is finished today, I'll get back to making more blocks for the Stair Steps quilt. There are five blocks in each row, and I'm hoping to get two more done today. 

Aside from that, there isn't much going on. The latter part of the week is going to get a little busier. Matthew has a birthday this week, and so we'll celebrate with a family dinner on Friday. For that, Mike is going to roast a turkey. It's one I've had in the freezer for a while...one of those freebies they give out at Thanksgiving sometimes. We're not having a Thanksgiving-style dinner, but mashed potatoes are a must. Also, I've seen some fresh asparagus at the grocery store, and so I'll probably roast that as a side dish. For sure, I'm going to make some Thanksgiving Slaw. I made this for the first time when we had a "Friendsgiving" dinner with our friends in southern California. We liked it a lot. And just FYI, I'm using bagged coleslaw mix, rather than buying a head of cabbage. 

Also, Matthew requested creme brulee for dessert. It's one of the privileges of being the birthday person in our group. I've made creme brulee before, but just to bone up on my skills, I made a recipe for two a while ago, and it worked out great.

So, I've renewed my confidence about the creme brulee. And since Easter is on the horizon, I'll make some deviled Easter eggs as an appetizer. You can read how to do this right here.

Dinner is Friday. We'll do our grocery shopping on Wednesday. I can make the deviled eggs and the creme brulee on Thursday. And then Friday, Mike will do the turkey in our Traeger grill. It'll be an easy dinner, and it'll be good to get together to celebrate Matthew's 42nd birthday. Yikes. He's my youngest child. When did we all get so old?

Okay, so slow-stitching is next. Mike is walking on the treadmill right now, but when he's finished, I'm going to snag him to help me mop the floor. Sounds like fun, huh?