Bitter Harvest

Good morning, my friends. Oh my...what a dire title to this post. Not to worry, but it's okay if you want to grrrrrrrrrrrrrr a little bit. Before we get to the grrrrrrrring part, though, let's take a look at the slow-stitching. Yesterday morning had me finishing the reindeer on the left side.

Now I've moved my hoop to the right, and this is all that's left. I expect to finish it this morning.

Okay...now for the part that might make you want to grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Please come with me to the garden. At first glance, I was happy to see one of the bean vines has climbed to the top of its pole.

But then, I noticed this.

The leaves are all chewed off. Thankfully, the bean-producing flowers are still there. Only the leaves were munched. We've been thinking raccoons were responsible for this transgression, but this was up too high for it to be raccoons.

But what's this I see? A hoof print!!! We have an 8-foot fence all around the garden. How did a deer get in here?

And deer droppings to boot! WTF?

Okay, well, here's the answer. It's a little hard to see in the image below, but the fencing was pushed in where a deer (or more than one deer) had squeezed under the fencing to gain access to the garden. DEER!!!! (Shakes fist at no one in particular.)

Okay, so we spent a good couple of hours going all around the perimeter of the fence zip-tying the fencing to a cable that also runs around the entire perimeter. We're hoping that will keep them out. (Sigh). If it's not one critter causing trouble, it's another.

While I was doing my zip-tying, I noticed a few newcomers to the bee garden. My phone tells me this is chilopsis.

This is coreopsis

And my phone tells me this is globe candytuft. This little cluster is about the size of a ping pong ball.

And here's the day's harvest. These are the first of the pickling cucumbers. I don't yet have enough to do anything with them, but I believe I will later next week. That one on the left almost got away from me. They're a lot like zucchini in that way. You have to watch them every day or you'll end up with something you could use to club a deer to death. (Would I do that?)

Oh yes, and I was happy to see the first bud on the Firefighter dahlia. The others have been blooming away, but this one has been slow to the party. I was beginning to wonder if we'd see anything from it this year.

When it blooms, it will look like this.

It was time for some lunch. After scooting around the perimeter of the garden on my butt for over an hour, a nap was in order. When I was ready to face the rest of the afternoon, I went to work on the quilting. For this, I'm just doing a kitty paw meander all around. It's hard to see, but there's a kitty paw in the middle of the image below.

Probably I have a little more than a third done. When I reached a point where I'd quilted myself into a corner and was forced to cut threads, I stopped for the day.

Heading into the sewing room, it was time to trace the next block for "Home is Where My Flock Is." This is the 7th of 13 blocks. I'm kind of miffed because I ordered some sepia colored pens recently. When they arrived, their caps and markings all indicated sepia. Does that look like sepia to you? Oh well. It probably doesn't matter.

Finishing the stitching on this block seems like a good candidate for August's

With that ready for stitching, it was time to return to the lemurs. Smitty helped me choose fabrics.

When my hour was up, I kept going for another half hour. I wanted to make a little more progress on the face for the lemur on the left. If you're wondering about that large white piece, it will have several pieces over the top of it, and so I cut it larger than I needed. Some pieces overlap others, and I'm keeping the darkest pieces on top. That means the white is sometimes relegated to background status until the other pieces are added over the top. The lemurs are emerging, but there's still a long way to go on this.

As a reminder, this is the photo I'm working from.

Last night’s dinner wasn’t hard, but it took some time. Since the zucchini wars are gearing up, I’m getting a head start with this new recipe for Zucchini Soup with Dill and Sour Cream. It’s made with 2-1/2 lbs of zucchini and a pound of leeks. Then, it’s the usual kinds of seasonings. The vegetables are sauteed and then boiled in some chicken broth. Later, I added fresh spinach and fresh dill, and then pureed it. Some more zucchini and dill was set aside as a garnish. It was tasty enough. The most important thing about it is that it laid waste to around 10 medium-sized zucchini. 

The recipe is from America’s Test Kitchens, and so you’d need a subscription to be able to open it. If you want the recipe, please don’t hesitate to email me, and I’ll be happy to send it to you. As a side dish, I made this copycat recipe of Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits. I’ve made this recipe before, and the biscuits are good. Since I never ate the biscuits at Red Lobster, I can’t say whether it’s a good copycat. Either way, they’re easy to make and they were a good accompaniment to the soup.

There’s one housekeeping chore on the day’s agenda, and I need to water the flowers. Also, I’ll probably make up tonight’s dinner earlier in the day. Making dinner early interrupts my morning, but it’s nice to have everything ready when dinner time comes. There should be plenty of time for sewing today. I doubt I’ll finish quilting the Kittens today. Certainly, tomorrow isn’t out of the question. It’ll have to wait for its binding since things are strewn everywhere in the sewing room because of the lemurs. Never let lemurs run wild in your sewing room. Take it from me. Hopefully, I’ll see them emerge a little more today. When I work on them for a long time, it’s hard to “see” what I’m doing. It helps to take a break and return with fresh eyes.

Okay. It’s just about time for some Sunday oatmeal blueberry pancakes. After breakfast, Ill get on with my day.

It's a Start

Good morning, my friends. It was a busy day yesterday, with a trek into town for a haircut. Fortunately, the haircut was finished fairly soon...one of the benefits of short hair. I was home early enough in the afternoon to be able to fit in the day's sewing goals. There was some time in the morning, and so I was able to get my morning chores done too. As for sewing, I stitched up Tiny Treasure #71. This one has stem stitch, straight stitch, and fern stitch.

And if you’re keeping score, then you might know that the Tiny Treasure I’ll stitch today will be the last one. Yahoo! They’ve been fun to stitch, but I’m excited to sew them into a finished quilt top. I have some ideas about this, and I think it’s going to be cute.

Okay, and I’m visiting the garden every morning to check on the green beans. Today there were some new sunflowers. This first one is called “Ring of Fire.” 

It’s one of my favorites. The bees are loving these.

This is pale  yellow with a yellow center. Unless I’m mistaken, I think another one will bloom eventually with a black center.

This one is the Infrared Mix.

Okay…insert trip into town and a haircut here. Also, I made a stop off at one of our higher-end supermarkets. They have a shrimp roll that I like for lunch, and so I usually stop when I’m over that way. Today, I was also curious to see if they sold dill heads for pickling. I’m not ready for any pickling yet, but I’d like to know where I can find the dill heads. And, yes. They did. That was something of a load off my mind. 

When I got home, I had some lunch, and then I got busy with my quilting. I’m outlining the embroidered kittens, and then filling in the background with a hooking meander. There wasn’t a lot of room in the backgound of this one.

When my embroidery outline doesn’t have a heavy stem-stitched edge (note the left side of the one below), I did a sort of free-motion zigzagging line. 

And last for the day was this one.

That was pretty quick. Probably I could have done another row, but I’ll stick with my original commitment of three blocks per day. Now I’ve moved the quilt down to the bottom row, and I’ll start with the middle block there today.

Also, I wanted to trace out a pattern for the lemurs. As a reminder, this is the image I'm working from.

The traced pattern has a lot of detail. It’s always hard to know how much to include. As I was thinking about this later in the evening, I realized that some of the smaller details can be done by filling in with thread. As I work on these, I put an “x” in the pieces I’ve already done. For this, if a piece is very small, or if it can be easily done at the end with thread, I’ll mark that section with a yellow highlighter. That will make it easy to find when I start doing the thread work. These are collage (applique) quilts, but the thread work is every bit as important as the fabric.

It seemed as good a time as any to sort through my fabrics to see what I thought could be useful. Sadie gave them the snuggleability test. I told her that art quilts don’t have to pass the snuggleability test. My naivete and simplemindedness saddened her. What is the purrpose of such an item if it is not to be snuggled? The whole world could be a huge snugglefest if only the pawpulous would develop an appurropriately loving cattitude. Sheesh. How many times do we have to go over this?

As I organized my supplies, she considered taking a nap. Snuggleability nearly always purrcedes a nap, and so napping characteristics are also carefully considered.

So I think I’ve worked up the nerve to start working with fabrics today. For this, I’m going to institute the one-hour rule, meaning, I’ll work on it for a minimum of one hour. I can go longer if I want to, but I give myself permission to quit at that point and work on something else. It keeps me from going crazy. 

For dinner last night, I tried this recipe for Pineapple Chicken. It was tasty and simple. Mike grilled the chicken and the pineapple slices, but they could also be cooked on a grill pan. The chicken is marinated in a combination of seasonings, pineapple juice, and soy sauce. Prior to adding the chicken, ome of the marinade is set aside and then cornstarch added at the end to create a glaze. The glaze really makes the dish. We liked it. I served it with jasmine rice.

Our grocery store has been packaging different meats in $5 packages. It’s something different each time we go. This was one of those. For our $5, we were able to score four of these thin-cut chicken cutlets, and those worked well in this dish.

Smitty helped me write this post. I'd say he helped me with the editing, but you can see that he was asleep on the job. It happens when you're an old man cat. (Don't tell him I said he was an "old man.")

There are several things on the day's agenda. I’ll stitch up the last Tiny Treasure. My morning check-in with the green beans has been a pleasant way to start the day, and so I’ll do that too. There is a list of quick chores to do, but I think I’ll have plenty of time for sewing. I’m thinking I need to pick a day to get outside and pull some weeds. It’s not my favorite thing to do, but the movement would do me some good. (I swear I’m going to get back to my workouts…someday. Procrastination. Doncha love it?)

Okay, so I have a list of things to do…time to start checking them off.  Have a good day, Everybody!

Busy Week Ahead

Good morning, my friends. My best laid plans for the week turned into better plans when Erik scored a campsite for our two camper rigs for later in the week. We already had a plan to visit the farmer's market yesterday morning, and so what started as a routine schedule for the week just got a whole lot busier. 

Before heading out for the farmer's market, I was able to stitch up the day's Tiny Treasure. This is Tiny Treasure #64. It has stem stitch, lazy daisy, running stitch, and French knot.

At the farmer's market, I was on the hunt for some of the carrots I know only by the name our CSA farmers called them: Nelson carrots. They’re the best carrots for my Spicy Dilled Carrot Spears...a family favorite. I like them for their uniform roundness from stem to root end. Here's a picture I found online.

They’re quartered the long way for canning, and so I end up with nice, straight spears. Also…they’re a short carrot, and so they fit pretty well into the 12 oz. jars I used in the canning process. 

Also, I was on the hunt for some beets to turn into Easy Spiced Pickled Beets. I was able to score both, and so that will keep me busy today and tomorrow. While I was with the kids, we talked about food for our short camping trip, and so I'll be making some things for that as well.

Back home, my first priority was to check on the green beans and continue my mission to train them to grow up their poles. They're doing a pretty good job so far. While I was out, I walked around to check on the flowers. The echinacea are reaching full maturity now with the petals that hang below the center. So pretty. They're one of my favorite flowers.

The buds on the suspected purple poppy get larger and larger, and it has about a half dozen flowers. Look carefully at the midde of the image below, and you’ll see two large buds side by side. I’m so excited for them to open.

Okay, and I thought this was going to be a yellow zinnia, but now I’m thinking it might be red. Maybe I’ll find out today.

Oooh! And lookie there! The first sunflower! The marker next to this one says “Infrared Mix.” According to Territorial Seed (where I get my seeds), its colors can range from the darkest to the softest reds, including many bicolors. You can see that this one has a red-tinged center.

Okay, and then I got back to my quilting. I ended up doing a sort of teardrop motif in the outer border. I wanted something easy that I could do fast. I’ve done this motif before, and so it was pretty easy.

Here’s a peek at the back.

And now that puppy is ready for binding. There were no binding strips cut yet, probably because I couldn’t decide on anything. For a while, I pawed through my stash, and came up empty. Finally, I decided to use the same fabric from the back. The books are a larger scale, and so they’ll be lost on a narrow binding, but the colors will be right for the quilt.

Before I can think about getting that binding sewn on, I need to finish these two blocks for the Northern Wilderness project. This is one of those projects where I end up with scraps and all sorts of crap strewn from “A to Izzard,” as we like to say in our family. (I married into that idiom.) Yesterday’s quest was to make the “Blueberry” block…this one:

First, I needed to make the background. The quilt block is a basket. I struggle with this configuration of triangles every time I encounter it. This one confused me less than previous ones, so I guess that’s progress. At my age, not many things get less confusing. No worries though. If I don’t understand it, I just assume magic made it happen.

I breathed a sigh of relief when that went together correctly. Then, I just needed to add the top, bottom, and sides, and the background was ready for applique.

Just the handle of the basket was fused down, and that pretty much took up the last of my sewing time for the day.

For dinner, I tried this recipe for Greek-Spiced Pork Chops with Warm Zucchini-Feta Salad. We found some nice pork chops at the bargain meat counter on a recent grocery-shopping excursion, and hey…anything to use zucchini at this time of year, amiright?

We actually liked this really well. The Zucchini-Feta Salad was especially nice. It’s served warm and flavored with shallots, garlic, sun-dried tomatoes and some other seasonings. We liked that well enough, I’d prepare the zucchini that way even without the pork chops. It would be good as a side dish for anything. I’d link to the recipe, but this is an America’s Test Kitchens recipe, and so you’d need a subscription to their website to be able to open it. If you want the recipe, just email me, and I’ll be happy to send it to you. No sweat.

Okay, so it’s going to be a busy day today. I need to hoe the garden, and I’m going to can the carrots today. While I’m working on those, I can roast the beets. They need to be roasted and skinned before I can turn them into pickled beets. That will be for tomorrow. If there’s time left this afternoon, I’ll work on the applique for the Blueberries block, and then both blocks will need to be top-stitched before I can say they’re finished. The binding will need to wait until then.

I know some of you have been dealing with smoke and heat. I’m hopeful conditions are improving. Summer is great, but it has its moments…like everything else in existence, I suppose.