November: Part 1

We began the month of November in a darkened, cold house, thanks to Big Storm Sandy.  But the month got better, day by day.  Our power and heat returned after only 5 days and we felt so lucky that the only trees down on our property were nowhere near our house. 

I have 3 cousins with whom we have celebrated Thanksgiving for many years.  This year Linda hosted, and my assignment was dessert (read pies.)  I love making pies, and despite the fact that I was going to make an apple pie and a pumpkin pie, both of which I have made many many times, as usual, I started the process with a little research into recipes old and new. (You can take the librarian out of the library......) I have lot of baking books, so I consult them all as well as the bakers in cyberspace.

 

And, as usual, I end up combining and tweaking recipes I've used before: Nick Magieri's pastry, Richard Sax's pumpkin pie (the filling) and Susan Purdy's apple pie filling.

We brought home about a fifth of the pumpkin pie which was all that was left.  I guess they were a success!

My pies get transported in this beautiful basket that my Aunt Evelyn painted for my mother. 

My aunt also made one of these for each of her siblings.  This one hung in my mother's house.

We had a special reason to celebrate Thanksgiving this year.  Emily was able to be with us, turning our duet back into a trio.

No sewing, you say?  That's coming in the next post!

Powerless Finish for October

Hurricane Sandy paid us a visit this week.  Here in Northern New Jersey many people have been without power, telephone and cell phone service since Monday when the storm landed in New Jersey near Atlantic City.  Although we have been powerless, we consider ourselves lucky.  Everyone in our family is fine.  We were especially worried about my sister and brother-in-law who live on their catamaran.  They have been moored in Annapolis which was right in the predicted path of the storm.  Fortunately, they are fine, their boat is fine, and all of their cruising friends are okay.   Our friends and neighbors are okay, too;  our house was not touched; and the only tree that came down was a pine in the back of our yard.  It flattened our swing set, but our daughter is 25, so she doesn't use it any more!

I had worked on October's Free Motion Challenge sporadically throughout the month, but I had put off posting pictures until this week.  But oops! No internet! No cell phone!  Our public library opened on Thursday and provided Wifi and power strips, but there were too many people on the network and I was unable to upload my photos.
Fortunately, our friend Marge got power back this morning (Friday) and called to invite us to spend some time at her house getting warm and charging our devices.  So here, finally, are my samples from October's Challenge.  Our teacher was Teri Lucas; our challenge was to quilt our names and use echo quilting and other motifs to fill a square. 

 I really liked this lesson.  Teri suggested we change threads for each different quilting motif.  I did that for one sample (upper right) and then decided to stick with my favorite quilting thread, Superior's King Tut.  Thank you, Teri! And thank you, SewCalGal for providing your readers with this wonderful challenge!

Baking with Uncle Bob

I subscribe to the Baker's Banter blog from King Arthur Flour.  It is a never-ending source of baking deliciousness and many of our favorite recipes are from the blog or the KA baking books I own.  The King Arthur store in Norwich, Vermont is always our last stop on the way home whenever we are in the Upper Valley of New Hampshire and Vermont.   The store is a baker's paradise with every kind of ingredient or piece of equipment a baker could ever need want.   They also have a bakery, so after we do our shopping for nonedibles, we load up with bread, sticky buns and cookies to take home and freeze.  (Much of this booty never makes it home, let alone into the freezer.)   We always say that if we lived nearby, we would each weigh considerably more than we do now!

The newest blog entry was a recipe for Fresh Appe Cinnamon Scones, and since our trip last week to an orchard to get apples (and apple cider donuts!) I have several quarts of homemade applesauce and a bin of apples.  This recipe arrived at the perfect time.  The scones were delicious and this recipe is certainly a keeper.

But a great recipe wasn't the only thing I learned from the author and KA Baker Par Excellence PJ Hamel.   Here's a quote:
  
 Make and shape them the night before, stick in the freezer, bake early the next morning, and Bob’s your uncle – by the time your house guests emerge from their respective beds, breakfast is ready.

Bob's your uncle?  I have never heard or read that expression before, but I love it!  It's clear from the context that it means "there you are" or even--en Francais--"voila"  but it is so much more colorful.  I went so far as to look it up on Michael Quinion's wonderful site World Wide Words where Mr. Quinion writes about the English language from a British perspective.  I won't recount his research into the origin of "Bob's your uncle"--you can read it here--except to say that it may have come from an expression "all is bob" that is documented in the Dicionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1785.  What fun.

So forget "voila" and "there you have it," and all those other similar idioms.  From now on, for me, Bob's (my) uncle!

Thanks, PJ, for your recipes and for your colorful writing!

My Country, 'tis of Thee

When I was in high school a friend's mother gave my friend and me each an embroidery kit.  The kit was a map of the United States and even though this was a few years after Alaska and Hawaii had been admitted to the Union, neither was on the stamped linen.  Anyway, my friend and I stitched away at home and on the beach in Avalon, NJ, but when we went off to college and our adult lives, the little project got packed away and forgotten.
I have been on a mission lately, to try and finish some projects that have languished in my (figurative) workbasket.  (I'm not organized enough to have a real workbasket, so UFO's are in my sewing area, in cabinets in the basement, really in nooks and crannies all over the house.  Don't tell Dave.)  So recently, I dug out the USA map kit and took it with me to my Guild's Quilt As You Like afternoons.

Reader, I finished it!  I was tempted to add Alaska and Hawaii in some way, but I decided to leave it just the way Bucilla manufactured it. (Whenever that was.  There was no copyright date on the direction sheet.)

 

This was before the US Postal Service instituted the two-letter abbreviations for the states, so they appear the old fashioned way with a period.  And each state has a little symbol of its industry or history, too: the Liberty Bell for my home state of Pennsylvania and Edison's light bulb for my adopted state of New Jersey.  (Today, we'd call them icons!)

 

 

I'm going to get another embroidery project out and put it with my hand sewing.  Who knows what other UFOs are just waiting for a few more stitches?

An Embarrassment of Stitches

 September has been a busy month, so I haven't had a lot of time to devote to the Free Motion Challenge.  I did a little practicing last week and today I spent a few hours working on the challenge from this month's teacher, Paula Reid.   And it was indeed a challenge!  Following a pattern is not easy, and this circular feather required a lot of backtracking too.  I didn't even contemplate filling the center or the outside areas--I was too focused on the feather and the corners.
 

I really missed having arrows on the pattern to indicate the order of quilting, so I looked at some YouTube videos and searched for other similar motifs to see how to move from one area to the next.  Quite frankly, I didn't find much help.  The hardest part was moving from one corner to the next.

Finally I gave up on the corner motifs and concentrated on the feather circle.  Better.  Not perfect, but better.

  

 

But after nine months of challenges, I am much more comfortable free motion quilting;  my stitches are getting more consistent, lines are getting smoother.  And I have learned that frequent practice is important. 

Tomorrow is Straighten Up the Sewing Room Day.  And after that, more FMQ!

Thank you Paula Reid.  And thank you, SewCalGal!

Hello and Goodbye and a Little Sewing

During the last weeks of summer, Dave and I met my sister and brother-in-law on Block Island to spend a few days on their catamaran, Escape Velocity.  We were at a mooring in the Great Salt Pond where each morning and evening we heard "Andiamo on your boat, " the signal that the Aldo's Bakery folks were selling their wares from a little outboard motorboat.  We became steady customers and bought bread, cookies and morning buns most days.  Unfortunately, I did not get a picture of the motor which had printed on it, "I gotta no change!"

Jack and Dave enjoyed sitting on the "back porch," solving the world's problems, no doubt.

Marce treated us to cucumbers with lime and sea salt, something she had in a local bar in Honduras while she was there with a film crew.

We biked to the Monhegan Bluffs and went down to the beach (140 steps, they say, plus some climbing on rocks.)

When you get down to the beach you are greeted with hundreds of cairns.

Marce collected rocks to build a cairn of her own.

Back on the boat, Dave got in some swimming time and used snorkle gear to go down and scrape barnacles off the propellers.

All too soon, it was time to leave.  Cap'n Jack and First Mate Marce took Dave and me back to New London where we had left our car.

Dave enjoyed being aboard!

After dropping us off, the sailors set out in the dinghy to return home.

We had more time together in early September when Marce and Jack anchored in Nyack, NY for 2 weeks.  We shopped, did errands, met almost daily at the Runcible Spoon, one of our favorite cafes.
One day, Izzy can to play in our yard!

And when my nephew, Drew came for a quick visit, we managed to get almost all of our family together for a group picture.  Missing? Our niece, Ericka

 

 Marce and Jack headed south on Monday.  We really miss them!

Despite all this busyness, I did manage to get some sewing in.  I made this quilt for a little girl who is expected to make her appearance in November.   It's a Chinese Coins quilt made with repro prints.

I machine quilted it with loops and hearts in the borders and sashings.

And backed it with polka dots.  I'll add a label when the baby is born and I know her name.

Tomorrow is the baby shower, so I finished it in time!

Binding and a Bag

Sometimes I look at all the projects I have going and don't want to work on any of them.  So I do some prep work that will save me time when I tackle UFOs or when I start a new project.  I call these days "non-quilting days" even though whatever work I do often is for quilting projects.

One of my favorite things to do on a non-quilting day is make binding for future quilts.  Most of the time I want to complete the top before I even contemplate what kind of binding will complement the quilt.  But lately, I have been making lots of baby quilts for friends who are becoming grandparents for the first time, and I have found that I often use striped fabric, polka dot fabric or star fabric for bindings on quilts for babies and kids.  So having a binding stash helps speed up the production of a new quilt.

 Sometimes I make continuous bias binding, especially when the quilt top is complete and I know the exact length I will need.  But when I'm making binding ahead, I starch and press the fabric and then just cut 2" bias strips from the yardage and sew the strips together on the diagonal to minimize bulk.
Here's some binding that I made recently using bias strips.

I've already used the star binding on this quilt for a neighbor's grandson.  (The pattern is Bonnie Hunter's Pineapple Star.)  The white fabric has multicolored stars on it as do some of the other scraps, so the star binding was perfect.  (This pattern is a great stash buster!)

 

I used a circle-polka dot fabric for the backing.  I love the cheerful colors.

 Another non-quilting project I made recently was a tote bag for my niece's birthday.    I love these fabrics, too.  The bag has external pockets and is lined with another navy fabric.

So I am making small dents in my stash, doing prep work that streamlines the quilt making process, and getting the pleasure of giving handmade gifts to people I love.  All good.