Rainy Day

Good morning, my friends. It rained most of the day yesterday. Watering the flowers is officially off my to-do list until next week sometime. We're expecting more rain today, and possibly tomorrow. It's fine by me. You might remember several years ago when we took a fall trip and ended up cutting our travels short to return home because of a wildfire threatening our neighborhood. Happily, things are getting a good wetting down as we anticipate this year's fall trip. This rain will go a long way toward greening up our field.

My day started with chopping, chopping, chopping and mixing, mixing, mixing until I had a pot full of apple-pear chutney fixings.

It took two hours to cook it down to chutney consistency, and then about another half hour to fill, lid, and process the jars. When it was finished, I had seven pints of Apple-pear chutney. You can find the recipe for this in yesterday's post.

As I've mentioned, this is good with pork...pork chops, ham, ham sandwich...but it's really good spread on a toasted slice of baguette with a sprinkle of blue cheese. I'm kind of mad at myself because the mixture included two cinnamon sticks that were to be removed before I ladled it into jars. After the jars had been lowered into the canner, I realized I'd forgotten to remove the cinnamon sticks. Doh! Oh well. It won't hurt anything. Someone will just find a surprise. Perhaps I should post some sort of reward for whoever finds the first one.

While that was cooking and processing, I went to work hand-sewing the binding for the Tulip Time quilt. This was originally a free pattern from Inspired by Fabric. I turned it into a little kit when we traveled south last winter. Now, it's a finished table topper, 26 x 28 inches.

Here's a peek at the back. This will make a nice little table topper for next spring.

It was getting late in the day by then. I wasn't really feeling like doing any more sewing, but I took the time to square up the Santa Quartet and decided on some fabrics to finish it off. I'll give it two borders, and I'll use that same green from the inner border for the binding. 

That shouldn't take long, and I expect to finish the top by day's end.

For my next quilting project, I'll quilt this little "Bunny Bait" quilt. It's another of the projects I kitted up to take south last winter. This was another free pattern from the Sewing Loft. It was intended to be part of a larger quilt, but I just made this one block. It shouldn't take long to quilt it. Already, I have some ideas about what to do with it.

Okay, so let's talk about this mystery trip I keep hinting about. We're still more than a week away from our departure date, but here's where we'll be going. As I believe I've mentioned before, we've lived in Oregon since 1978, but we haven't spent a lot of time sight-seeing in Washington. We’ve visited Washington’s national parks, and we spent a few days in Spokane. Usually when we're traveling in Washington, we're on our way to somewhere else. We decided to stay close to home this time and see more of the sights located within the boundaries of our neighbor to the north.

We're going to do quite a bit of hiking for this trip, and we’ll spend some more time exploring Olympic National Park. We'll also spend some time tide-pooling at one of the beaches on the Olympic peninsula. LaConner, Washington, is on the itinerary at the recommendation of a friend. There's a quilt shop and a quilt museum there. We'll visit some state parks we haven't seen before, and we'll see the Grand Coulee Dam. Mike has seen it before, but I have not. 

There are a couple of other sight-seeing spots on the map, but we'll talk more about those when we reach those destinations. This, of course, is all dependent on the availability of fuel. It seems no one is talking about shortages at the moment, but anything could happen. Also, we'll have to make adjustments for wildfires and poor air quality. The worst fires I've heard about in Washington are well east of where we'll be traveling...for now. Hopefully, the weather will cooperate. At this time of year, anything could happen.

All right. So, it's a new day. It'll be another rainy day, and that's just fine with me. It means any to-do's on my list will be confined to the indoors. Sewing will get a lot of my attention today.