Two Quilts, a Top, and WHY WHY WHY??? Oh yeah - zucchini report too.

This is a cute Yellow Brick Road quilt.

Love that panto pattern:  Ba Da Boom from Urban Elementz.

This intrigued me.

It's a block I've never seen before, so I had to examine it closely.

Oh and here's THE TOP.  Yeah, I can be a real idiot.  One of the guild members brought this top and put it on a give-away table, hoping someone would decide to take it home and give it some love.  Apparently (!) that someone was me.  Aaand, now I have another UFO.

Most of it is very wonky but ... it just has something that appeals to me.   It's a fair size, around 75 x 100.  I won't "fix" anything except a couple of seams that I notice have popped open.

WHY WHY WHY???
Stupid basement.  Actually, stupid washing machine, which walked itself across the floor because the load was not balanced.  And then it pulled the drain hose out of the laundry tub.  Grrr.

PITIFUL ZUCCHINI REPORT
Picked last two weeks:   5
Picked YTD:                 22

Where oh where does FEAR come from?

In Tobermory, on retreat with the Beach Girls, normally I share a room with Deb.  Because Karen couldn't make it this year, Deb and I each got our own room.  I was praying to the Universe that I didn't have to take Karen's room... because it has patio doors.  I might be sitting up in bed reading, with the light on.  A bear might see the light through the curtains, burst through the glass, tear me to shreds, and then eat me.  Right!?  Right!?  One year I got up in the middle of the night to make sure the UPSTAIRS patio doors (on the second floor) were locked...so the bears couldn't come in.  seriously???

I have never seen a bear in my life.  I am terrified of them.

These bears did NOT scare me. 😀

This is no way to start the day

Even a non-quilter should be able to figure out that something is not quite right here.

No. I don't have any more fabric with me.
No. There is no quilt shop within 80 kilometers of here.
Solution. Colourful language, then Baileys in my coffee.

Why can't I be like normal people???

Before we get to talkin' about me, we will discuss the change of the seasons.
This is the end of the Summer Quilt for 2017. (Washing quilts:  do it in the washing machine, on gentle "wash" cycle but full "spin" cycle.  Use a gentle detergent.)

Say "Hello" to the fall/winter quilt.  This was made with the fabrics I collected in Asia in 2009.  Wool batting, which is my absolute favorite.  Wash as noted above, but use cold water.

Now... Why can't I be like normal people?  This is a patio planter.  A big pot, about two feet across.  Those are sweet potatoes growing in there.  I have TWO of these pots.  Oh, sorry, yes.  That's my cutie patootie too. 💗

DH loads up the pot(s) on some man-equipment thing and hustles them over to the garden, where he dumps the contents.  Yahoo!!  Produce!!

See, a 'NORMAL' person would buy their sweet potatoes at the grocery store.  Or  get all crazy-like and go to the farmer's market.  But me?  I have to do this all myself.  idiot.  FYI, sweet potatoes are not sweet until they are CURED for four days at 85 - 90 degrees, and then they need to "rest" for a couple more weeks.  So they've been living in my oven with the lights on, staying all nice and cozy.

And again, a 'NORMAL' person would buy their pumpkin at the grocery store.  In a can.

Uh huh.  I noticed when I posted this pic that there are TWO bottles of wine on my counter.  Was I expecting to be thirsty?  Or was I planning ahead? 😀

And here's the cleanup crew.  I pointed out to her that she missed the pumpkin that sprayed all over the front of the dishwasher and gooped up the handle.

I've been workin' too.  Great quilt - jelly roll friendly.

I am leaving tomorrow on the annual retreat in Tobermory with the Beach Girls.  I cannot wait.  Hopefully, while I'm away the Universe will take pity on me and bring in a deep frost that will kill everything left out in the garden.  But I suspect I'll come home next weekend to more produce that I will feel compelled to do something with.  banging head against the wall

Winter is Coming...& Final Zucchini Report

Yes.  Winter is coming and the Christmas quilts are starting!

The fabrics in this quilt are just beautiful.

Stitch in the ditch, plus 1/4" outlining outside the motifs.  Trees in the trees, and a swirly thing in the stars.

Straight lines, x-hatching, and the cutest angel/tree/star border design.

Because Winter is Coming, the spiders have been very busy.

I took these pics on a morning just after the fog had burned off but everything was still wet.

I am scared of the big spiders that build these webs.

But I must say, they are certainly beautiful when covered in dew.

In my last post I was regaling you with the list of shit the Universe had rained down on us.  The following week DH came down with pink eye.  Gaaahhhh.  The week after that, the front doorbell quit.  That wouldn't normally be a big deal, but the doorbell is wired into the whole-house intercom system.  Pfftt.  One of us should have checked that one of us hadn't accidentally turned the power button to "off". 😉

ZUCCHINI REPORT TO CLOSE OUT THE 2017 SEASON
Picked over the last, what, 2 weeks?  say... 6, because I'm not really sure.
Picked YTD:  89

Today I picked the remaining three weird football-ish orange squashes, three ripe pumpkins, and two wee immature pumpkins.  There is one more pumpkin out there that I hope will finish turning orange.  It was SO HOT here last week I had the air conditioner on.  Never before in my life at the end of September!!! Then on Wednesday the temp plummetted.  I think the coming week should be nice and "normal" for this time of year, like "Sweater Weather", so fingers crossed for the pumpkin, ok?  I've promised the Beach Girls a pot of Spicy Pumpkin Soup on our Tobermory retreat.  And lemme tell you - I'm counting down the days.  I've saved my best bottle of wine.

Challenges, Stash Report, & Laundry (idiot)

I belong to two quilt guilds and they both ran challenges this past year.  In the spirit of killing two birds with one stone, I combined the projects into one.

• Caledonia was a paint chip challenge, where I drew the orange, lavender and turquoise.  Then I added black and white.  Sadly, at the June meeting I did not win a viewers choice prize.
• Binbrook was a border challenge with a hot mess of weird instructions every month.  The voting on this challenge will happen at the September meeting.

I'm honestly not crazy about the QUILT, but I had fun with the quilting.  That argyle design took f.o.r.e.v.e.r.

I'm really not very good at those wee circles.

I had fun with the back, too!  I used up some smaller pieces that were travel gifts to me from my DB and SIL (who b.t.w. are currently in England celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary, and witnessing the financially devastating Brexit vote.)

The past couple of weeks we have been entertained by COCO Paving who first tore up our road, and are now PAVING our road.  I knew they were paving this morning because all the racket woke me up. Clearly, those guys don't realize just how much beauty sleep I need.
I like to think that I stay on top of my housework with a scheduled list of chores.  I stripped the bed and decided it was a good day to put the summer quilt on the bed.  So, I washed the non-summer quilt and hung it on the solar dryer to dry.  Then I realized that all I could smell in the air was liquid tar.  Sigh,  When I get that quilt out of the cupboard in September I will probably have fond, aromatic memories of road paving.  Idiot.

STASH REPORT
Used this month 8.2 m
Used YTD         37.74 m
Added this month 2.5 m
Added YTD      73.3 m
NET YTD:       +35.56 m

When I was at Quilt Canada last week I attended a lecture/trunk show by Julie Plotniko.  She had lots of ideas for easy, scrappy quilts and got me a bit motivated!  At Scrappy Club on Monday I started a new lap-size-ish quilt for donation.  If I stay motivated maybe the stash report will get down to a red bottom line soon.

Rocky Mountain High Quilt - photo heavy post

Honestly, some people make the most incredible quilts.  This is ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH by Country Creations, Strathmore, AB.  There is no link to the pattern because I cannot find one that works.

Many, many hours of s.i.d.
I had no trouble deciding how to quilt the sky, the mountains, the trees, and the water.

Deciding on the buildings, roofs, and landscape was a bit more challenging.

A brown "wood" house.  A few with "siding".

Blue "board & batten".

"Stone" and "siding".

Ground quilted with "pebbles" and fencing (which I thought was just too cute!).

"Normal" quilting with border treatments.

 Aaaand... the back.

Last night we had 1-800-Luke and his beautiful wife here for dinner.  I suggested that they bring dessert so they didn't have to eat apple pie (again!).
Imagine my surprise when I glanced at the cheesecake.
I thought to myself "WTF!!!  Dessert from Home Depot????!!?".
Then I took a closer look.  Ha ha... that's a gift card for DH, not a Home Depot sticker.

New England Quilt Museum

Hah! Don't ask me to be a tour guide. I will take you to a museum that is not open until tomorrow.

2016 UFO Challenge and In The Kitchen (the YOGURT story)

2016 UFO CHALLENGE
Every year, my dear friend Margaret (of the Kawartha Margarets) organizes a UFO Challenge for a few of us.  Normally we send her a numbered list of 6 projects, and every two months she pulls a number out of her...we'll say HAT.  This year there will be no numbers.  And no lists.  This year she will have us PICK A PROJECT every two months.  The nice part about that is by the time November rolls around we are not stuck with something we thought about way back in January.  There is nothing to stop us from making a clandestine list, which I may do, since my memory is good for sh*t.

As for me, for the past two years this baby has been on my list, yet has not seen the light of day.  No more procrastinating!!!  Piece 'O Cake, here I come.

IN THE KITCHEN
Just after Mom died at the end of March my friend Noshi came over and got me started on making my own yogurt.  Ever since then I've been making a batch about once a week.  (on a side note:  most people including DH are afraid of home made yogurt and will not eat it.  Curious, eh?)  Fast forward to Christmas when DH and I went to Calgary for a week.  On Jan. 2nd I started a batch of yogurt using a clump of starter that I had put in the freezer before I left.  It doesn't set.  Huh???  Damn.  Down the drain with that four cups of milk.  I have no more starter of my own yogurt, so I opened the last packet of commercial starter and put another batch on.  It doesn't set either.  WTF???  Down the drain goes THAT four cups of milk.  I headed to Goodness Me for supplies and brought home another box of commercial starter.  OK.  Four more cups of milk and ANOTHER failed batch.  Twelve cups of milk have gone down the drain now, and I'm beginning to wonder if Mom is annoyed with me for not visiting her plot since the summer.  Or, maybe it's too cold in the house?  I decided to live it up and try one more time.  But this time I'm going to leave the batch in my lovely warm workroom where there is a nice toasty fire.  Hah.  Fail.  Four more cups down the drain... I'm up to 16 cups of milk down the drain at this point.  I do the math...every four cups is about $1.33, sooo I'm out of pocket over $21.00 just in milk.  Never mind the hydro to heat it up to 185 degrees and the half hour of time to make each batch.  The other part of my brain is calculating how much it would have cost me over the past nine months if I had been buying Greek yogurt.  This half decides that I am still plenty of $$ ahead of the game.
I will try one. more. time.  But THIS time I will put the oven on 'bread proof' setting, which stays at 100 degrees.  We have a dinner date with friends for Chinese food so the yogurt should be done by the time we get home.
... oh dear... much blue air... still runny after eight hours... and the oven is NOT warm.  (There may be an automatic shutoff on the bread proof setting.  After all, who proofs bread dough for eight hours???)
By now I am pretty pissed off.  Pour a glass of wine (size:  large).  Decide "what the hell" and turn the LIGHT on in the oven and shut the door.
When I got up at 8:30 this morning, magic fairy dust had sprinkled itself all over my milk and turned it into yogurt.

The short part of this long story is that the house was too cold for the yogurt culture to ... culture.  Leaving the light on in the oven totally solved the problem.  See?  You are never too old to find out you don't know what the hell you're doing.

A Recipe For Disaster (and zucchini report)

RECIPE FOR DISASTER:
1)  Start with one of these.  It doesn't have to be a zucchini, it could be any fresh vegetable.

2)  Get a cutting board to chop up the vegetable.

3)  Take the cutting board and the chopped vegetable over to the stove.

4)  Ensure you have the cutting board UNsecurely held, and then drop it on one of these.

5)  Voila.  Chipped bone.

In case you are unaware, you cannot prop yourself up on crutches AND push a quilting machine around.  So now you must call your customer and explain that her QUILT will take a bit longer than originally discussed.

When DH drove me to the emergency department, again, I was quite surprised that there was no 'reserved' spot for me.  sigh.  I have an appointment at the fracture clinic on Monday (which is how "LUCKY" DH gets to spend our 30th wedding anniversary) and I am being optimistic that the ortho doc will tell me to stop with the cast and crutches as soon as it stops hurting.  The blessing this time is that the cast is removable.  Oh, sorry.  The $169.00 air cast.  Yeah.  Not all of our health care is exactly free.  But I'm still not complaining.

So, with my current  incapacitation I have finished the hand binding on the 'gift quilt'.  I finished a book by Wiley Cash (he has 2 books out - both VERY GOOD).  The other book I just finished is called Flash Boys by Michael Lewis.  LINK  That one is NOT fiction and also VERY GOOD - about a trader from Royal Bank who opens a new stock exchange in an attempt to combat the unscrupulous bastards running the other exchanges.  Because I have limited knowledge of the stock market I had to keep reading the book or I'd forget some of the terminology and have to go back to re-read parts.  If you google Brad Katsuyama you'll get an idea of what the book is about.  Frightening, really.

While I'm on 'light duties' I plan to work on the bookkeeping which I have not touched all year (bad Helen, bad!!) and get our new mailbox painted.  Hopefully I can quilt a bit from my drafting chair - one hour with my foot down, then take a break with an ice pack and spend a half hour with my foot elevated while I do ... something.  Poor DH is doing everything right now, as you can see in the above pic of the cooktop.  OMG.  So dirty.  He doesn't mind cooking, but cleaning is NOT his forte.  Hopefully we don't have to push each other to the emergency department with food poisoning in the coming weeks.  :-)

ZUCCHINI REPORT
Picked this week:  4
Picked YTD:        17