A Little More Sewing

Good morning, my friends. A little more was accomplished here at the Three Cats Ranch yesterday. Have you noticed how there haven't been any pictures of cats lately? I blame them for the lack of progress on things. They've been outside a lot with this nice weather. Clearly, they have not developed a reliable work ethic. Oh well. We soldier on, don't we?

My first stop was in the kitchen to bake some zucchini bread to take to our neighbors. There are almost as many zucchini bread recipes in my collection as I have zucchini. Think of them as armaments. In this case, I used this recipe that originally appeared in Cooking Light magazine in April of 1996. It pains me to be using a recipe I found 30 years ago, but there you go. I was so much younger then...like 30+ years. Yikes. It’s a miracle I’m still alive, isn’t it?

Alright, and with so many recipes, how does one decide? Well, I decided on this one because it uses *two* cups of shredded zucchini, instead of the one cup required by most other recipes. Also, it uses 3/4 of a cup of applesauce. Usually, I’m stocked with homemade applesauce, but recently, I had to buy some for a recipe. The only container I could find was HUGE. So, I’ve had this enormous jug of applesauce taking of space in my refrigerator for a while. Making the bread from this recipe was a no-brainer. Zucchini and applesauce. And if you missed it, I linked to the recipe in the paragraph above this one.

The bread took some time. It had a long baking time, and then I had to wait 10 minutes before I could remove it from the pan. Still, everyone has to do their part, and I figured gifting the neighbor with bread was better than foisting off a bag full of zuchini, right? But don’t give me ideas.

When the bread was safe to be left on its own, I headed out to the garden. There, I took the picture I mentioned yesterday. These are the giant sunflowers, shown in their full height. Impressive, no?

Also, I discovered this newbie to the bee garden. My phone tells me this is Baby Blue Eyes.

This next one is flax. It’s been hard to get a good picture of this since it’s so bright it blows out the saturation in the images I’ve taken in the past.

Okay, the hummingbird feeders were empty again. After I finished up in the garden and took care of the hummers, I was able to get back to quilting the Girls’ Getaway. All the large embroidered blocks in the center are finished now. I outlined much of the embroidery…enough to make the quilting functional, and then I quilted the same meandering feathers to fill in the background.

Today I’m ready to start on the pieced blocks. I’ll aim to quilt a side each day until it’s finished. I left it needle-down in the middle of the bottom border row.

The only other “sewing” I did was mainly dinking around on the computer. Considering what to do with the Cozy Quilt stitchery, I had an idea to make it the center of some other quilt block. 

My first thought was to make it like one of the inverted star blocks, but I needed a center that was at least 5-1/2 inches. The inverted star centers are just 4-1/2 inches. And, yes, I could have done the math, but when you're old enough to be making bread recipes that were published more than 30 years ago, you're obviously too old to do math. And that's all I'm going to say about that.

So...anyway...I went in search of something that would work, and I came upon this tutorial for a Sawtooth Star. I'll need to decide on what fabrics I want to use still, but having a plan is the first step.

The plan for today will look a lot like yesterday, sans hoeing the garden. Baking more bread is on the agenda. I’m going to bake the same bread from yesterday, but in three mini loaves, instead of one large loaf. Matthew and I are getting together for a walk tomorrow, and I want to give him something to take home with him. (I really love spoiling my little boy who was age 42 on his last birthday.) Since it’s just him eating it, three mini loaves will be better. He can freeze two and then eat them whenever he’s in the mood. Also, and like the neighbors, it’s better than handing him a bag full of zucchini. No one visits here without taking some zucchini with them when they go.

The flowers need watering, but mainly, I’ll focus on sewing. I’m hoping to finish off one side of the pieced blocks on the Girls’ Getaway quilt. And then I’ll get a start on the Cozy Quilt project. Also, as I mentioned, I’m baking bread. There’s one other housekeeping chore on the day’s calendar, but it should be a mostly sewing day.

How is your Sunday going? It’ll be pretty relaxed around here. I hope you have a relaxing day planned for yourself too.