Three Near Finishes

Good morning, my friends. It ended up being a very busy morning yesterday. My morning to-do's took me well past lunch time, and so it was late in the day before I could get to any sewing. No matter. The goals I'd set for the day were accomplished despite the lack of time.

Of course before I could do anything else, I did some slow-stitching, finishing the final embroidered block for Le Jardin.

When I was able to get into the sewing room, I added borders.

Here are all the blocks I have for this quilt. It’ll go on the Quilt Tops to Finish pile now. Mainly, I just need to sew the blocks together, and then give it a border.

When my stitching was finished, I checked the garden. There, I found about a dozen pickling cucumbers. It had been two days since I’d been in the garden, and I was surprised at how things had grown. I’ll make more pickles next week. For now, I decided to tackle the accumulation of zucchini. It was all shredded and frozen in nine 2-cup portions. That should keep us, our neighbors, our family, and our friends in zucchini bread for quite some time.

We had zucchini fritters and zucchini muffins on last night’s menu, and so it was a good time to do the shredding. My next task was to bake the muffins for last night. Originally, I found this recipe on the King Arthur website: The Shipyard Galley's Zucchini Muffins. It comes courtesy of the Shipyard Galley food shop in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. Here’s how they looked straight from the oven. We had a couple for dinner last night. The rest will be for breakfasts.

Okay, and finally, I was able to get to my quilting. I had just the narrow sashings between the embroidered blocks to finish. For that, I stuck with the “loop de loop” motif I’d used in the other sashings.

And then…the quilting was finished! I’ll endeavor to get the binding sewn on today.

In the sewing room, Smitty was urging me to finish off the Cozy Quilt mini.

It was pretty quick to sandwich and quilt. For traditional blocks, dot-to-dot quilting is easiest for me. Also, I quilted a red line around the embroidered center.

Here’s a look at the back. Try as I might, I couldn’t get those lines perfectly straight. Oh well. It’s the best I could do, which, by my definition, means it’s good enough.

This lower-angle shows off the quilting a little better.

Then, I sewed the binding on, and it’s ready for hand-stitching. It should be easy to finish this today.

Okay, so I didn’t cross off everything on my list yesterday, but I got most of it done. Today I need to hoe the garden. I’ve been avoiding anything physically strenuous after my Moh’s surgery (as instructed), but I think it’ll be okay at this point. 

Also today, I want to bake some cookies. I have a recipe to test for America’s Test Kitchens: Sweet Potato Snickerdoodles. Sounds interesting, no? The recipe calls for mashed sweet potato, but it says I can substitute canned pumpkin. Well, I don’t have either, but I did have some frozen mashed acorn squash. Technically, I’m not supposed to make changes to these test recipes, and I don’t think I ever have. Nevertheless, I’m going to make that one substitution this time around. My kitchen, my rules.

There are a few more things to do today, but mainly, I’ll be hand-stitching. I’ll take the first stitches on the new Quilter’s Retweet project, and I’ll sew the binding on the Cozy Quilt. The only machine sewing I’m really determined to finish is to get the binding sewn on the Girls’ Getaway. It’ll be nice to get that to hand-stitching stage.

That’s about it from me today. Pancakes are next, and then I’ll get a start on my new project.