Whoopie Pies and Hand Pieced Quilt Along is Completed.

 Emily and I did a free online class making Whoopie Pies last night. This one was chocolate with a peanut butter frosting. Next time... I'll either do a butter cream or chocolate frosting. Peanut butter is not my favorite but it was still pretty darn good.  They have a lot of different things available for free here. Greg and I had a late lunch (take out $10 lunch from Chili's!) so we were not too hungry for dinner. The kids got our appetizer of chips and salsa for their after school snack in the car (we each got an appetizer, entree and drink for $10 each so there was one for each of them). 

It made 12 but 5 might have disappeared quickly. 

The binding got attached by machine after my trusty helper pressed it for me. I hand stitched it down last night for an official finish of my OMG for March!

Trimmed up but before the binding to see the quilting better!

Linking up with the OMG with my finish.

Hand quilting completed... now to get it finished!

I finished the hand quilting on this Tuesday night. Peanut and Ollie have inspected and approved the quilt for the next step. Time to trim and make and attach the binding and label. I should meet my OMG of finishing this quilt this month.

All that soft texture the hand quilting adds. Love it.

I love the hearts in the triangles!

This is the back - always a fun surprise when you turn it over.

I'll plan to use the extra cut off of the backing for the binding on this one. Started in March 2019 and should be finished in March 2021! Not too bad considering this one is all hand pieced. 

Hmmm. Dinner Monday night was meatloaf with roasted rosemary potato and asparagus. Tonight was a lazy meal of frozen Berber chicken (3 kievs and 1 broccoli and cheese for the boy) with some mashed potato and baked zucchini fries.  I have no clue what I will come up with for Wednesday night.. but the girl did mention alfredo .. so maybe we will have pasta with alfredo sauce with whatever veggie I find to toss in (broccoli) and maybe some shrimp or chicken mixed in (Em does not like shrimp so she gets chicken). 

Thursday night Emily and I will be attending a free cooking class at 7PM EST and making whoopie pies. This is the link if anyone else wants to join in =). It is a free link up, they send you the zoom info and the recipe they are using. This one is new england whoopie pies with peanut butter frosting. 

 

Hand quilting the setting triangles!

 First off - the kids stayed home on Sunday since the fish tank was getting it's 3 month cleaning which takes a few hours.  That meant... I needed to think of making dinner! Hmmmm. Crepes. I had some chicken tenders that I cooked in the grill pan and then froze last week. Half a bag of spinach that needed using and some mushrooms and a scallion. That got  cooked up on the stovetop while I made some crepes. Then you fill the crepes and roll and place in a baking pan.  350 for 15-20 minutes. I omitted the cheese... so Emily would try it. I attempted a holandaise sauce... but I did not like how it turned out.  I had a few extra crepes ... so I added a slice of ham, swiss and some chicken to about 5 of them and had some chicken cordon blue ones as well! Not bad. I enjoyed one of each for my lunch today warmed up in the microwave. I got the idea from a friend years ago and placed her version on my recipe tab toward the bottom.

I put the quilt onto the floor yesterday to mark some hearts into the setting triangles and corners of the quilt... when Sophie offered to 'hold down' the quilt for me. So nice of her to make sure it didn't move when I was not expecting it to!

My template plastic had a set of 3 hearts together and I traced one in each corner.

I have had that stencil for over 20 years and it is the first time I have used it! It also has 3 other patterns fitting in a 3.5 inch space. I like the hearts with this quilt. I tried using that blue marker and it really spritzes out well with water. The cats were wondering what the quilt was being punished for when I was squirting water on it last night though!

Seems Ollie got all excited with a swishing tail and moving from window to window... when Aidan investigated. Turns out there was a bunny outside the window! I sent Emily out to get some photo's. 

Slow stitching.

My little bit of hand stitching yesterday was making my hexagon and then I did add a little stitching on the Hand Pieced Quilt Along quilt quilt last night. 

I finally finished up a knitted dish cloth on Friday. It just stays in my 'busy bag' and I felt like knitting instead of hand stitching on Friday while Emily was riding. I just do a simple knit pattern for mine after casting on 4 stitches. Knit a row. Knit 2, yarn over, then knit to the end. I do this until there are about 49 or 50 stitches on the needles. Then I knit one, knit 2 together, yarn over, knit 2 together and knit to the end... until I get down to about 4 stitches.... or 7 like Friday when I had just enough yarn to finish it off at that point! I don't think the dishes will mind!

Linking up with the Sunday Slow Stitchers. I plan to prep some Harmony pieces for hand piecing, a few more hexagons for the week and then maybe some hand quilting today.

Instead of stitching on International Quilt Day yesterday, the kids and I went for a kayak paddle down the Rainbow River in Dunnellon Florida. It is crystal clear and fed by natural springs with a current that brings you down (minimal paddling needed!). We found a company that you park and they shuttle you a few miles up river with kayak, life vest, and paddle and let you go. You make your way back to their business where you are pulled up the bank and helped out and then you are at your car to continue your day! We went at 1PM (ok, there were 2 companies with similar names and we might have gone to the other one first... since I had a reservation I left there and went to the place I had called. I liked the idea of when you get back you are at your car option!). We arrived back at our car around 4PM. We decided to paddle up river a bit to see a couple of islands, but there were some people on jetski's with really loud music playing. We decided to turn around and let the current take us down the river while enjoying some beautiful scenery, nature and lots of birds and ducks. Oh to own a house on this river would be awesome! 

Someone might have forgotten to add sunscreen and wear a hat! I think Greg and the kids both walked by me last night and mentioned - boy, you really got a lot of sun! The polite way of saying you are red as a lobster and burnt to a crisp!

Rainbow Scrap Challenge in Green.

 I got a little green sewing in this week, despite the kids being on vacation.  I swapped Emily's horses to Friday since I scheduled our Kayak adventure for Saturday afternoon. Friday was all booked up when I called. 

After horses, a trip to the Tack Shack to take advantage of their sale (riding pants, boots and a helmet for $89+tax) and a few other errands I got to sew! The extra helmet will be donated to Camp Wildwood for Girl Scouting since she has one that works just fine. She also got signed up for a week of horse camp this summer..... which hopefully should work out this year. It will be her first away camp!

A little chilly at 57 degrees this morning for riding. Liz was adjusting her stirrups.

I finished up a few more of the brackets and sewed them together. Hmmm that row is a little short so one more might get made? Or.... the edges will even things out when it is all put together.

Then I used the more sage greens to make another garden path block. It is the top left corner one. Here are the first 6 this year. I do like how they are coming out.

I'll be linking up on Saturday morning with the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. I still have one set of blocks to make and a table topper.....

Thursday...

Normally Thursday is my day off and I play with fabric and run errands. I swapped days and worked today and am off tomorrow. I was planning to kayak down the Rainbow River with the kids tomorrow (since storms are going through this afternoon to cool things down a bit) but they were full when I called... so we will go on Saturday. Greg would love to but we figure that probably would not be good for his back as it is 2-3 hours of paddle/floating down the river back to the car.

By swapping the days, I got to attend the IT quarterly department meeting to hear what has been happening. I am pretty isolated so it is nice to see and hear all that is going on. While I was listening in on that Teams meeting, I was able to get a little stitching in =)

I finished putting the last section onto this block and got 2 more sections hand pieced. I need to see if I can get a few more cuts out of the remaining fabric to add some of the darker blues. I think I have 4 of the lighter green/blues cut but I am out of the white half peels so that Accuquilt Flowering Snowball dye will be making an appearance tonight and I'll also cut out some dark green fabrics for the scrappy kit I am cutting out this year.

Then I switched to the hand quilting on the Hand Pieced Quilt Along Quilt. I was running low on the YLI neutral thread so swapped to this blue YLI I have for the sashing. I think I did 2 or 3 in the neutral thread and the rest are in blue... which I might leave or I might go over it with the blue. I just have the long sashing strips on the rows to stitch and then I'll pull some small templates I have and see what fits best in those setting triangles. Progress.

Lets see - for the International Meals - Tuesday evening was Pressed Cubans with Cuban Black Beans and rice. Wednesday - Corned Beef, potato, carrot and onion in the crock pot and then I used some of the juice to cook the cabbage on the stove. Emily made the Irish Soda Bread to go with it. This morning I cut up some of the potato, carrot, beef and onion and warmed it in a skillet and then added a couple of eggs. Yummy. Thursday is the standard American - leftover night! Everyone is on their own and there should be plenty to select from.

Tonight will be game night - we will see if it will just be Battleship or maybe we will add a game of Parcheesi? We will see. For now - I think I'll go prep those Flowering snowball parts and cut out step 3 and 4 for the new Harmony sew along. 

A new recipe....

 We tried the Chicken Tikka Masala tonight and it is a keeper recipe! We used this one and had to buy a few items - tumeric, garam masala, naan and I needed rice so I got some Basmati this time. I did get the cilantro but we forgot to add it at the end.  I had tomato sauce, chicken and the other ingredients on hand. I need to remember to pick up another tube of grated ginger as we used the last of it.  The one thing I missed was the heavy cream.... so we popped over to Winn Dixie and picked up the Cuban bread for tomorrow night while we were there. They have the best cuban bread.

Aidan pretty much made it all.... I only did a little chopping and prepping of the spices in order of addition while he was charing the chicken. 

I remembered to take a photo after we started eating!

After everything was picked up and put away, I headed outside for some fresh air and found some friends!

DC was not cooperating for photo's so I did not catch myself with a smile.

Lily hopped up after DC jumped down and she was a little better at the photo taking. They were scattered over the yard until I got up from the chair to go inside and then they all came running to the back door. All 9 of them. Silly girls.

Tomorrow night we visit Cuba (hubby loves cuban sandwiches!). I'm using some carnita meat from last week with the cuban bread, ham, pickles, mustard and swiss cheese. I have a cast iron press with my grill pan that we use for these. I'll soak some black beans overnight and make a batch of Cuban black beans to go with it and we had a bit of extra rice that will work with this meal for tomorrow.