A Little More Sewing

Good morning, my friends. It's a rainy day today, and we're expecting rain for the remainder of the week. Possibly the Big Dark has arrived. We're not planning our usual Rainbird trip south this year, and so I guess we'd better get used to it. It's good sewing weather, though. I'm hoping to get a lot accomplished today.

We had errands to run in town yesterday, but errands will always take a backseat to slow-stitching. Before we left, I made a little more progress on the second block for the "Pieces of the Heart" project.

Probably I have another day or two of stitching to finish this off. It might be a time to trace the next block for the "Quilter's Retweet." This is the one block I have for that quilt so far.

When we got home, I went to work quilting another vertical row for the Cats in Pajamas quilt. It's been hard to motivate myself to work on this. Being such a large quilt, it's hard to maneuver without feeling as if I'm engaged in a wrestling match.

There's just one more row of blocks to complete. I'm hoping to get that done today. After that, I'll start on the vertical sashings, the spacer blocks, and the border. The rest should be a little easier than the blocks have been.

From there, I headed into the sewing room to work on the Northern Wilderness project. There, I found my trusty sewing cat at the ready.

The Tree block is mostly finished now. All those little nooks and crannies were time-consuming.

There's just a little more to do on this one. I left it needle down in the final tree, and you can see it's mostly finished.

Probably today I'll start with this, and then move on to quilting the final row of the Cats in Pajamas if there's time.

A couple nights ago, I tried a new recipe for Creamy Gnocchi Soup. This isn't my photo. I swiped it from the recipe post on the internet.

It was our first time trying gnocchi. No reason we waited until so late in life, but we liked it. They're really just little dumplings. They can be found in the grocery store on the shelf with the rest of the conventional pasta. 

We liked this a lot. It's filling and hearty. The recipe calls for hot Italian sausage, and I don't know about you, but my stomach can't take that kind of spicy food any more. We used a pound of mild Italian sausage. We didn't miss the spice at all. To make it easier, I picked up one of the bags of chopped kale. Mike isn't a great fan of kale, but he liked it in this soup. Also, I used the julienned carrots also available in our produce section. With winter coming up, warm and filling soups like this are a welcome treat. 

Okay, so I'm going to do a little baking today...some muffins for our breakfast. Also, we have leftovers from our dinner with the family on Friday. I'm going to marinate another steak, and we can finish all that off. Aside from that, there's just one housekeeping chore, and then I can get back to my sewing. It's going to be a gray day, but sometimes those are the most productive.