Am I A Fraud? (also, how I cook snow peas)

 I might be a fraud because this is the ONLY thing I've quilted in June.  And I didn't make it.  This is a top that was gifted to the Binbrook Guild by Paul Leger for our donation program.

It was quilted the first week of June and it's been sitting patiently waiting for someone (ahem) to get the binding on.

I might be a fraud because I went to Quilt Canada and bought absolutely NO fabric.  Although I did buy a book.  But you can't quilt with a book.

I might be a fraud because I promised myself to give up my constant irritation with Donald Trump.  And yet:

Donny is mad at the mean Canadians because we want some tax money from what multi-billion dollar companies earn off of us.  Seriously. Everybody else who earns money has to pay tax.  Such a big baby!

Here's an explanation of the tax.  Which only kicks in after $20 million in revenue.

Does anyone SERIOUSLY think this is a harmful tax???

Take a look at who was in the Peanut Gallery when Trump was inaugurated.   Do ya think there might be a little bit of hands-in-pants going on?

So...this is The Universe pooping on MY head.

Yeah.  That's my kitchen tap.  Poor DH - I should probably have said that The Universe was pooping on HIS head.  He had just fixed the toilet that had decided to stop flushing, walked into the kitchen to turn on the tap, and the handle came off in his hand.  With my delicate sensibilities 😏 , I am glad I was not here when that happened.

The good news is MOEN is honouring their lifetime warranty and sending us a new tap, saving us a couple hundred dollars.  The bad news is this happened on Wednesday, they just sent it on Friday and now we have to wait for delivery, which will probably be at least this coming Wednesday.  Because of course these things happen over a weekend AND a national holiday when the post office does not work. Sigh.  No running water in the kitchen is not exactly fun!

Anyhow, that's a small problem in life.  This is what I picked today.  I will do my last pick of asparagus on Monday, and leave the plants to recouperate until next April.  It's been a great crop again this year.  Definitely a plant that keeps on giving.

I get a couple of strawberries every day.  

We got ZERO cherries once again.  Between the  raccoons, skunks and birds, the tree was completely denuded overnight.

Back in May I planted a row of green beans.  ONE bean sprouted.  Although, I think 🐰 was the real problem. 

No photo, but I pick a lettuce plant every few days too.  This year it's all been red romaine.  I'm a very lazy gardener(*) and let the lettuce (and cilantro, and dill) go to seed.  Those seeds overwinter and sprout in the spring.

* I am actually lazy at heart BUT I have so much garden stuff to take care of that I think I deserve a pass on this.  The garden is 20' x 40'.  DH will till the garden.  He plants and harvests the potatoes, and he waters the garden.  But that's pretty much it.  He does not weed or pick the garden.

HOW I COOK SNOW PEAS

• wash 'em
• nip off the stem with my thumbnail, and drag any string off with the stem
• cut them in half
• do a quick stir-fry... maybe 5 minutes? in a bit of olive oil, or a combo of olive oil & sesame oil
• eat - yum!

Here's a little health advice for you. Ha ha ha...

Happy June! (or Good Lord I'm Sick Of Politics!)

 

After You-Know-Who's inauguration in January sh*t started happening.  Every morning I was glued to the news sites, my jaw dropped, often in shock saying "honey - did you see this???".  I kept thinking that once Trump got that (whatever executive order he'd just signed) out of his system things would quiet down and politics would go back to normal.  But no!  There was more!  Every single day!  

After four+ solid months of this I've decided to give it a rest.  The USA is not my country, and I cannot do anything to effect any kind of change down there.  I made a committment to myself back in 2016 when he was elected the first time that I would not travel there, and that still stands.  My two personal biggest issues are their free-for-all gun laws, and the steady withdrawal of women's rights.  But there are so many more drastic changes in progress that I can't even keep track any more.

I'm still planning to read the news over my coffee & breakfast in the mornings, but no more wasting my life until noon - which is what I have been doing.  Stupid, giving up my time to keep track of him and his antics.  WE'RE DONE, DONALD.  I'M DIVORCING YOU.  YOU'RE FIRED! 😆

The quilt above was a challenge for TWO guilds.  The Binbrook Guild had a President's Challenge to work with circles.  Any kind of circles.  Circle quilt, circle fabric, appliqued circles, pieced circles, quilted circles, whatever.  Maker's choice.  The Caledonia Guild let us buy a 5" strip of fabric for $2 that had to be used in any quilt with a max perimeter of 80" (I think 80"??).  80" would be too small for my intended space, so I played along anyways and simply disregarded that rule. 😯  The fabric is the mottled turquoise/green used for the appliqued leaves.  

The design was copied from a Dover copyright-free book on Art Deco designs.  I'm pretty happy with it, it looks nice hanging on the wall.  I didn't win the challenge in Caledonia, since I admittedly did NOT adhere to the rules but that's ok - I wanted to play anyways.

That was finished in February.  Next up are the March finishes:

These are the two small leader/ender quilts I've been working on for several (!) years,

Cute labels:  

Here's a Disappearing 9-Patch that took me several years to get around to finishing.  I don't like anything about this quilt except maybe the border. 🙈

The Super Bowl Sunday quilt is finished. I always like the way these turn out.

In April I made a big bag to carry a Tupperware Cake Carrier, as a birthday gift...both the Cake Carrier and the bag.

I also made a BARN QUILT.  Diane (beach girl, you know) made arrangements for us to have an early Beach Day at her place.  We took a class with KADI BARN QUILTS (check 'em out on facebook).  I still have to hang mine - I think it's going on the wall of the front porch.  Maybe this coming week.

In May I managed to get this little quilt pieced.  It's mostly from fabric donated by a customer and will end up going to the women's shelter with my other donation quilts later this year.  The pigs-on-motorcycles border fabric is from my stash. Cute.

There's also been a lot of this in May...

I'll close out this post with two of my favorite memes this year.

December sewing & today's pop-quiz

 I was asked to make a Christmas table runner.  This was pretty easy to do, using my 60 degree ruler and 1.5m of border print fabric.

I cut two 10" swaths along the length - if you look you'll see there is waste fabric * in between and along the top because the swaths need to be identical sections of the print.  Using the 60 degree ruler, cut triangles.  This makes an 'uppy' and a 'downy' set of triangles.  You can see from the finished piece above how to put them together. 

* we all know there's no such thing as waste fabric, ha ha ha

I also finally made myself a new purse.  The old one was at the point of being embarassing, it was so worn.

Pockets ring the inside of the bag.  I've stitched these into the appropriate size to accommodate all the junk that we think we need to carry around every day.  Like:  who would dare to go out without their emergency binder clip?  weirdo

TODAY'S POP QUIZ

Today's pop quiz is brought to you by the Canadian government.  What follows are the comments made by some of our political well-knowns (aka political leaders) in regards to Justin Trudeau's resignation.

The game is to figure out who said what.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

My personal opinion on these comments is:

1 & 2 - mean-spirited

3 - a neutral remark but at least it's polite

4 - apparently responding to a different question.  Hellooo...?

5 - what you should say to someone (and I mean any politician) who has spent the last ____ (insert some length of time) in government

Whatever.  No one cares what I think.  Here is the newspaper article with the pop-quiz answers, from today's Hamilton Spectator.

More of my opinion (that no one actually cares about)...Pierre Poilievre is the worst.  Right up there with Donald Trump.  P.P. wants us to think we're living in a dystopian nightmare ("dark chapter", "break the country").  DJT wants to suck us into his realm of gun violence and everybody working their way towards the bottom, except for his mega-billion dollar buddies.  See the disgusting comment that P.P. made when Charles Angus annouced that he would be leaving Ontario politics (Hamilton Spectator 4/17/24):

As far as Jagmeet Singh's comment, also being mean-spirited: IMO he took excellent advantage of the collaboration between the Liberal party and the NDP and got some very well-received legislation passed.  But now, does he think that if he acts like a prick too maybe he'll gain more popularity?

And Doug Ford's comment?  I guess there were none of his cronies involved, so he didn't know what was going on.

I have to confess here - I DO like Chrystia Freeland.  (Not as much as I love Elizabeth May, but still.)  Yes, I find her a little tedious, but she's one smart cookie.  I was glad to see that Chrystia's comment was polite and expressed gratitude - which is what a 'normal' person would do when their remarks are going to be preserved for a very long time.

Jungle Walk, Recipes

 This is definitely the CUTEST quilt I've worked on in quite a while.

Jungle Walk by Harebrained Happenings

Here are a few of the blocks...

Today we are celebrating VALENTINES DAY.  Still locked in with the stay-at-home orders, until Tuesday.  Supper tonight will be leftover roast beef, but I'm making a Chocolate Olive Oil Cake for dessert.  This is a new recipe for me.  The Savour Ontario site (apparently I follow them on Instagram?) has never led me astray, so it will probably be very good.  Assuming I don't forget any ingredients which I know happens to all of us once in a while.

Yesterday, being GALENTINES DAY, I had a lovely two hour video cocktail party with the Beach Girls.  If they'd been here for our annual Winterruption get together I would have shared a large jug of Salted Caramel Martinis, but as it was I made a small jug and hic drank it all myself. 

MY THOUGHTS ABOUT POLITICIANS (not that anyone cares what I think...)

In Ontario, the province is getting opened up starting this coming Tuesday.  The government's plan is to transition the Public Health areas into colour coded zones - I think for two weeks at a time. I'm in Haldimand/Norfolk, which is going back to Orange status.  We are surrounded by Niagara on one side - which is going to Grey (really bad!), and Hamilton on the other side which is going to Red (bad!) - both areas keeping MORE restrictions than us because their situations are much worse than ours.  What that means is, like what happened around Christmas, residents of those restricted zones simply get in their car and drive to a more open zone to get whatever they simply cannot live without, which spreads more infection here into our zone.  So, my request to Hamiltonians and Niagrans:  STAY AWAY FROM HERE.  Please.  And thankyou.  The medical officers of health in most of the province think this whole thing is nuts, because the new variants are spreading and they want the stay-at-home orders to remain in effect for the time being.  But hey, why would the government listen to their experts?  

OK, that covers my thoughts on the Doug Ford Conservative government idiots.  Now I shall move on the the United States.

Yesterday, Donald Trump was exonerated for inciting the riot at the Capitol on January 6th.  I kind of expected that, but I am still shocked.  No more than I was when he was initially elected, though.  They have become a country that willingly elects a man who laughingly, sexually abuses women, makes fun of disabled people, feels justified in paying almost zero taxes, etc.  Now, they have no problem with permitting (arguably) the most powerful man in the world to run roughshod over democracy and encourage the murder of his fellow politicians.  What a sad state of affairs.  I was honestly hoping that with the election of Joe Biden things would turn around but that is not to be.  I would no more travel to the USA again than I would go to Iraq, Nigeria, or North Korea.  Not happening, and I know I'm not alone.  Sigh.

COVID-19 UPDATE

WORLDWIDE:  108.7 million cases, 2.4 million deaths, 310,800 new cases Feb. 13/21

USA:   27.6 million cases, 484,000 deaths, 84,727 new yesterday

CANADA: 825,000 cases, 21,200 deaths, 3,046 new yesterday

ONTARIO: 285,868 cases, 6,693 deaths, 981 new yesterday. The current stay-at-home order is in effect until Feb. 16th.

HAMILTON:  9,830 cases, 275 deaths, 40 new yesterday

Comfort and Blessing Quilt and 2020 Year End Posting

 This was the last custom quilt of the year.  I love working on sampler quilts.  This is Comfort and Blessing by Piecing The Past Quilts.

Lots of s.i.d. with some common elements throughout the blocks.

It's a little easier to see the quilting on the back.

Here's a shot of the borders.

This is such a pretty pic of a sunset on December 10th.

Hmm.  What else?... Christmas was quiet with just DH, Sadie and me.  I had to cook a turkey, which I'd almost forgotten how to do.  Normally 1-800-LUKE takes pity on us and invites us for dinner but this year we all stayed safe in our cocoons.  Although we did have a nice driveway visit with Luke and his wife a few days beforehand.  Oh, I miss hugging people. 😢  New Years Eve tonight will be the same thing - two people and one furbaby.  To celebrate kicking 2020 to the curb we're eating junk - frozen appetizers (along with some veggies - I do have some standards).

New Years Day is normally spent in person with a friend who comes over and sews with me, and then she stays for supper.  This year of course, no go.  We'll stay in our own messy sewing rooms and keep in touch with messenger video chats.  The two of us are always part of a bunch of quilters from Ontario having our New Years Day Sewing Marathons, so lots of emails and photos will be flying back and forth.  I am putting DH in charge of supper.  It will be pork tenderloin in the crockpot, with some kind of veggies and some kind of potatoes - I'm leaving that all up to him.

COVID-19 UPDATE

WORLDWIDE:  83 million cases, 1.8 million deaths, 444,400 new cases yesterday

USA:   19.8 million cases, 343,000 deaths, 229,300 new yesterday

CANADA: 579,000 cases, 15,600 deaths, 7,476 new yesterday

ONTARIO: 182,000 cases, 4,500 deaths, 3,328 new yesterday **record numbers, AGAIN!

HAMILTON:  6,057 cases, 168 deaths, 156 new yesterday

The provincial lockdown didn't happen on Dec. 24th as anticipated.  The Province delayed it until Dec. 26th.  Stupid, stupid, stupid, not that anybody asked my opinion.  The Premier decided to let people "shop" and get together for dinner.  I think he also wanted to let religious people have their church services, since they are a big part of his electoral base, but he didn't say that - that's just my thoughts.

Besides that, the latest asinine behaviour was the Minister of Finance for Ontario.  

Keep in mind that the government of Canada AND Ontario have instructed all of us to stay home and travel ONLY FOR ESSENTIAL REASONS.  So, what does idiot Mr. Phillips do?  He goes on a two week vacation to St. Barts.  AND posts fake videos on his twitter feed to make it look like he's enjoying Christmas at home.  Dickhead.

His boss, Doug Ford, the Premier of the Province, tried to tell us that he didn't know his minister was down there. Huh. But as soon as he found out he told him to come home.  Huh.  However, the next day, Ford has to backtrack and admit that well, yes, he DID know,  but not until after Phillips had already arrived there in St. Barts.  So he was going to give Phillips "what for" and wouldn't tolerate that kind of thing "any more".  So...clearly not firing the idiot.  

THEN... we find out that this same idiot had gone to Switzerland for a vacation in August.  WTF?

OMG.  I need the head exploding emoji here. 

To recap:

• the Minister of Finance took a trip out of the country but pretended he was still in Canada, all while the REST of us have been told to stay home and stick to ONLY OUR HOUSEHOLDS.
• his boss, the Premier, pretends he didn't know.
• then his boss, the Premier, confesses that he lied - he DID know.  (my word not his - he would not be honest enough to say that he lied to us)

The final note to this story is that Mr. Phillips has resigned his position as the Minister of Finance.  Probably as soon as he got off the plane in Toronto.  I figure Doug Ford threw him under the bus and made him resign.  Doug has already had so much bad press over the Covid  response that he really cannot afford any more shit going down.

Dear Universe, 

Could you please have a cannabis cookie?  

We really need 2021 to be a bit more reasonable. 

Thanks, xxoo, Helen

Let's wrap up June (since it's already August!) Log Cabin & A Unicorn

Log Cabin - I love the colours in this.  The quiltmaker wanted it quilted "like in the magazine".

That involved feathered swirls in the blocks, from the center out to the corners, and then a simple meander in the rest of it.

No s.i.d. kept the cost down a bit.

Unicorn - this is all paper pieced.  Whoo baby!  

Thankfully the quiltmaker sent me a pic of how she wanted it quilted.  Otherwise I'd probably still be staring at it wondering what the heck to do.

I had to get a little bit of technical help from a longarm buddy who has done this style of work.  The background rays were done with the I.Q., and that was a bit of a challenge too, but in a good way.  I like learning new things.

On the personal front, the garden is coming along nicely.  The zucchini is a bust this year.  In an attempt to thwart the zucchini bugs I planted it in large pots on the patio. Two of the three plants died from wilt.  The third one is hanging in there, so far.  We shall see.  Thankfully a friend has an abundant crop and she's been willing to share.  The bumper crops this year will probably be potatoes and tomatoes.

Pizza and bread made from a big-batch artisanal dough recipe has made a frequent appearance on the dinner table.  In fact, it's pizza night tonight, in celebration of some very expensive mushrooms I picked up at the market.

Since the end of June:

• I had a real haircut from a real hairdresser.  Sooo nice.
• I've had several backyard dinner-at-a-distance with friends and relatives.  The hardest thing is definitely coping with the fact that I cannot hug anyone.
• I've had two massages.  My neck & shoulder have decided they want to compete with my hip to see which body part can cause me more pain.  Aargh.
• I had an honest-to-goodness restaurant meal, on a restaurant patio.  I was very trepidatious but it was long enough ago that I obviously did not catch anything.  Why does Blogger not like the word trepidatious?  Anyone???
• I had a bone density test, then a telephone appointment to review the results (which are good).
• I had an eye exam that had been postponed several times from last fall.
• I was back at the dentist, just for my semi-annual cleaning.  
• I actually received a refund for my trip to Italy that had been scheduled for August 28th.  That shocked the hell out of me, in a very pleasant way.

COVID STATS AS OF AUGUST 9, 2020

I pulled these numbers from the news this morning:

Global:  19.6 million cases, 270,000 daily new

USA:  5 million, 54,000 new daily

Canada 119,500, 220 new daily

Ontario:  40,000, new <100 daily (70 yesterday)

I have to remind myself not to get too cocky over the Canadian numbers vs. the USA.  We are opening up and I KNOW our numbers will be going up too.  Dear God, I hope not to that extent.  I like to think that our politicians have our best interests at heart and will handle things accordingly.  I do, however, have great sympathy for my friends in the US.  I can't see myself ever crossing the border again.