Tucking The Garden In For A Long Winter’s Rest

One of the things we really like about vegetable gardening is the feeling that comes with shutting it down for winter. Part of that is because we’re really lazy, and we like having a the stretch from November to February during which we don’t have to ever do anything for the garden. But it’s also always fun to take stock of how the newly-past garden season went, and start making plans for the one to come. True to form, this year we got really lazy and put off the garden shut-down for a few weeks, but finally, last weekend, the clock struck midnight for Maple Hoo Garden 2009.

As you can see from the picture above, there wasn’t a whole lot going on in the garden other than marigolds the size of our house. We’ve had a few modest frosts in the last month, so the basil was goners, as was the entire late-planted bed of soup beans (lesson learned: you can’t plant beans as late as we did), and the peppers, which were still putting in a gutsy effort, were definitely on their last legs. The herb pots were all overgrown and gone to seed, and the catnip lawn was ready to be taken up. It was time.

Winterizing the garden at Maple Hoo is a pretty straightforward job — we just take out all the plants and put straw over the beds to discourage squirrels from burying acorns that they’ll be looking for come Spring. We’re considering planting rye grass next year, but for now we keep coming up with excuses why not to. Our biggest concern for our day of winterizing was that those marigolds were enormous — surely they wouldn’t give up without a fight?

Nope! It turns out they were like marigold area-rugs, and lifted off in just one piece. It was an easy couple of hours of work removing them and their fellow spent plants to clear the way for our garden’s season of rest.

The next step in winterizing is to get the first of next year’s crops planted — the garlic!

We put in six varieties of it this year: German Hardy, Bogatyr, Chet’s Italian Red (it sucked breaking up all those teensy-tiny heads, just for the record. So far, we’re not big fans of Chet), Inchelium, Pskem River, and Siberian. This past year we filled one big bed and one of the half-sized beds with garlic, and ended up with way more than we needed, so this time around, we only planted one big bed. We did, however, plant it double-thick like last year, so we can get a sizable harvest of green garlic in the springtime, when we’re eager for fresh veggies.

Once the garlic is planted, we cover the bed with straw for insulation, and then give it a cover of chicken wire to further discourage squirrels. Those little bastards better not even think about touching our garlic.

So now the beds are all tucked under their blankets of straw, with one of them incubating the first of Maple Hoo Garden 2010.

2009 was a good year for us — there were tribulations, for sure, with too much rain, too much cold, and too much blight, but there were also bounties. We lost our carrot and beet crops, and our second wave of beans, but we harvested colossal amounts of tomatoes, onions, garlic, potatoes, herbs, and our first wave of beans, as well as record amounts of peppers and basil. We worried, complained, put things off, whined, and were lazy, but we also doted, raved, laughed, went the extra mile, and thrilled in our successes. In short, it was another great year of growing vegetables. We can’t wait for next year!

No, We Haven’t Forgotten About This Blog

We’ve been neglecting IPB Living lately, and for that we’re sorry. We’ve had a good reason though, we swear! Our fabulous friend Patty (in Dallas) was here for a full week of hockey games and photo excursions to New York City, Princeton, Philly, and Ocean Grove. Patty taught us a new trick for processing our photos, and much fun was had by all. Here are a handful of our favorite photos from the week; the rest can be seen here.

Princeton University

Rockefeller Center, NYC

New Hope, PA

Grand Central Station, NYC

Ocean Grove, NJ

Philadelphia, PA

Philadelphia, PA

New York City

Grand Central Station, NYC

Philadelphia, PA

Ocean Grove, NJ

Philadelphia, PA

Adventures In Apple Canning

Our friend Sarah is quite intrepid at putting things by, and in the process of teaching herself how to can a while back, stumbled across a recipe for canned apples with red hots. Well, when she mentioned it to us, we decided that we all simply had to try it. It wasn’t apple season, though, when we started making plans for it, so we had to bide our time for almost a year.

Finally, at long last, it’s fall again, and after a family excursion to pick heaps of apples, Sarah invited us over for the big canning day.

Now, neither Pookie nor I have ever canned anything, so it was very exciting to get to try out this mysterious art for the very first time. The process was pretty simple. Just peel, core and slice a mountain of apples, make a syrup with sugar, water, red hots, cloves, cinnamon, ginger and vinegar (I think that was everything), toss the apples into the syrup, simmer for a few minutes, then pack into prepared jars.

It was a beautiful fall day, and we had a great time in Sarah’s sun-drenched kitchen working on all of those steps. It seems canning isn’t really nearly as scary as it sounds… at least on the front end. Who knows if all of our labors will yield a bunch of pints of botulism.

While Sarah definitely knew her way around a canning set-up, she insisted that she was by no means an expert. And so it was a lovely low-key canning party, at which there wasn’t too much rending of garments and gnashing of teeth when three of our first six cans didn’t seal properly. The recipe book seemed to suggest we shrug it off, return the apples to the pot, and try again.

The only disappointment with this project was that red hots don’t mix well with water. We all visualized, way back when we first heard of the recipe, pretty jars of apple slices with red hots suspended artfully (and brightly red) all around them. Instead, they melted. And even though several red hots in the container Sarah was storing them in had come in contact with some water and melted into big clumps, we still didn’t realize that was going to happen until after the red hots had been stirred into the pot and started turning into syrup. We’re very, very smart that way.

We suppose it’s okay that we didn’t end up with apples studded with solid red hots in the end, because a pretty pink syrup is almost as good. And either way, the product was delicious.

Even with some failed seals and having to re-can half the apples, the whole process was so simple and fun that we decided to make a second variety of canned apples, this time with dried cherries and golden raisins.

With just a little bit of work, we ended up turning 14 pounds of apples into 10 beautiful jars of tasty treats. And, as we always do when we’re at Sarah’s house, we had a fantastic time. She and her husband Paul have such a lovely home, with so many wonderful things to photograph, and far more importantly, they’re such a fun family. What a great day!

Wherein We Try Our Hands At Sewing

My side of the couch, where I do all my quilting and stitching, is on the left side. This is nice because I get a fabulous view of the garden and the trees across the street. This is not nice because I’m constantly dropping my spool of thread and scissors over the side; it seems I’m very right-handed, and very clumsy. Back when I was cross stitching, this wasn’t a massive problem. I could always grab a different set of scissors and just use a different silk to work on a different portion of the design until I felt like getting up to dig my supplies out from under whatever dust bunny had engulfed them. But with quilting, missing your thread is a much harder situation to work around. Also, the sound of a plastic spool of thread bouncing, bouncing, bouncing further away from the couch was starting to drive me batty. It was time to find a solution.

As I pondered what to do, what to do, I remembered flipping through Anna Maria Horner’s book “Seams to Me” while at my friend Sarah’s house. One of the fabulous projects in the book is a pin cushion/sewing supplies caddy. Perfect! All I needed was some fabric and someone to run the sewing machine for me (I will relearn one of these days, just as soon as I completely banish from my memory the frustrations of using industrial grade machines in the NYU costume shop freshman year). Enter “Apple” from Timeless Treasures and Boomer.

I had few 1/2 yards of Apple which I impulse bought a few months ago and was beginning to despair that I’d never find the proper fabric to show off how adorably autumnlonging it is. It took a few days of psyching myself up to cut into it, but ultimately, I really don’t want to be a fabric hoarder. (Plus, there’s still plenty left over to have jauntily sitting atop the stash so that when I walk through the living room I can stop and admire it and squee over the little apples on the trees.)

After an hour of cutting, and a quick trip to PQW for fusible interfacing, it was time to start construction. Boomer ran the wedges through the machine, and got the tube of interfacing and fabric all ready to go. Then I sat down to sew the two together. Turns out the bit in the directions about how “your pieces might not have the same circumference and you might have to go back and redo all your seams” wasn’t joking. So Boomer re-ran the wedges through the machine and it was time for take two. Remarkably, it worked! Perfectly! And then next handful of steps worked perfectly too! In a mere four hours or so, I had a completed — nay, perfectly completed — pin cushion/sewing supplies caddy!

OK, so when I say “perfect”, I really mean “not horrible”, or maybe “adequate”. Heh. But I couldn’t be happier with it! It accomplishes the goals of being a) on the right side of the couch, b) big enough for scissors and thread (bonus: it also holds the USB cord for the camera which up until now lived under the couch cushion where it migrates when we’re not using it), and c) full of “Apple”-y squeeness! So as a finished product, it’s fabulous. As a project? It was fun, but I’m never going to be a one-day-to-start-and-finish-a-project kinda gal. At least not unless I’m really motivated by the sound of a spool of fabric bouncing away from my seat.

[By Pookie]

So, while Pookie was busy making her fancy, intricate, kick-ass project, I was busy undertaking my own adventure in sewing: a pillowcase. Yeah, a really complex and intricate project, I know.

You see, it all started when I decided it was time to break out flannel sheets for my bed. It’s been a few years (flannel and I have a very tempestuous relationship), and when I first dug the sheets out of the linen closet, I thought I was missing a pillowcase. My immediate thought was, “Yay! I can make flannel pillowcases out of those adorable Be Merry fabrics they had at PQW!” Then I found the missing pillowcase and thought, “Aw, crap. This sucks. Now I can’t make flannel pillowcases out of those adorable Be Merry fabrics they had at PQW.” Then I thought, “There’s no law saying I can’t make those pillowcases! Screw it! I’m gonna go to PQW tomorrow to buy the supplies!”

Of course, when I got to PQW, it turned out they didn’t have much of the flannels left, so I bought the pillowcase kit they had for the regular quilting cotton version of Be Merry. Which is just as well, because, like I said, I have a love/hate relationship with flannel sheets.

Now, I love hand-piecing quilt tops, but I actually want to use my Be Merry pillowcase, so that was going to require something terrifying: using the sewing machine. I’ve sewn on a machine, like, once or twice in my life, enough to be completely intimidated by it. But honestly, there is no excuse for being too afraid to machine-sew a pillowcase. It’s three long, straight seams, basically. It is literally a sack. So I forced Boomer to sit next to me and hold my hand through figuring out how not to burst into tears and run away from the machine while sobbing, “Do it for me, Boomer!”

Here’s what I learned while making this extremely simple project:

1. Don’t sew the top of the pillowcase shut. If you do that, especially as the very first step, you are going to either have to add a step #2 for tearing out the first seam you sewed, or you’re going to have to add a final step of “imagine a pillow inside your flat, sealed pillowcase”.

2. Using a sewing machine to make a bunch of long, straight seams is extremely easy, but also requires a level of focus that hand piecing doesn’t call for. I much prefer not having to pay attention to what I’m doing.

3. The construction of a pillowcase, with decorative trim and coordinating band, required a lot more mental gymnastics and visualization that I care to admit, but…

4. …this was, from start to finish, a two-hour project, including a lunch break and a lot of tearing that first seam out. Now, I love, love, love, love, love the finished product, and fully intend to make many more seasonal pillowcases. I think this a great way to get to use adorable fabrics that I can’t figure out how to put into a patchwork quilt pattern. But I also found the process to be a bit unsatisfying. I mean, when I spend $14 on fabric and a pattern, I don’t want the project to be done so quickly. I like to spend time immersed in my projects, getting to really experience the fabrics and the feel of the whole piece. I’m delighted to have my Be Merry pillowcase, but as crafting goes, I’m not about to cast aside months-long quilting projects to start an etsy pillowcase shop or anything.

Anyway, in the end, I have created a delightful pillowcase that is good from afar but far from good. And I promptly found a place online that was selling the Be Merry flannels so I can make a coordinating case to go with this one. Just so I’m ready when I’m in the “love” part of my love/hate relationship with flannel.

[By Schnookie]

The Holiday Sachet: I Like The Ginger! I Like The Creamsicle!

Because I am a really dedicated, serious worker, I spent an hour-long strategy meeting at work this past Friday contemplating my emergency grocery list and what I was going to do with the items on it. You see, I’d spent the morning, being the dedicated employee I am, perusing recipes on epicurious and ended up settling my heart on trying out this one for cold sesame noodles for lunch on Saturday. That meant I’d have to stop at the store on my way home from the office to get a variety of items including fresh ginger. So there I was in my meeting, thinking hard about what the extra ginger I’d be left with could be used for. My standard approach to excess ginger is to infuse ginger syrup and use it in some kind of ice cream-y cocktail, but we didn’t have any ice cream in the house and I wasn’t about to buy any (we had other dessert plans for the weekend), so as the business-related conversation swirled around me, I cast about to think of another cocktaily use for ginger syrup.

Now, the meeting I was in happened to be located in a conference room that I very strongly associate with late fall and early winter. I’ve worked at my company for over five years, and have spent many an hour during all seasons in that room, but for some reason, whenever I’m in there, I feel like it’s November. So while I was thinking of what to do with ginger, I suddenly got a blast of “HOLIDAY SEASON IS STARTING!” nostalgia, the kind that goes waaaaaay back to when I was about six. I remembered making, that one year, those sachet things where you stud an orange with cloves and tie it up with pretty lace (perhaps apocryphally I also remember putting said sachet into a drawer in my room and finding out what happens when you let an orange go for too long. Again, I might be making that up), and that’s what sparked my inspiration:

I would infuse the syrup with ginger and cloves!

I know. I’m a super-genius. You can say it. After making the sesame noodles (which were delicious and extremely simple, if you’re considering making them), I chucked the extra peeled ginger into a small pot, added 1 cup of water and 1 cup of sugar and three whole cloves, heated over moderate heat (while stirring occasionally) until the sugar dissolved, then strained it. Easy-peasy, as they say.

So today was the day for cocktails (to be enjoyed with football, of course), and my final recipe measured out as follows:

2 oz. vodka
1 1/2 oz. fresh-squeezed orange juice
1 oz. ginger-clove syrup
A splash of cranberry juice (for color)

Put all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker over ice. Shake vigorously. Strain into a cocktail glass.

This is an extremely girly drink, because it tastes, as Pookie put it most aptly, like a gingered creamsicle. But that’s a really good thing! And thank goodness it’s tasty, because I’ve got tons of ginger-clove syrup left over. Guess we’ll be drinking these all week.

[Posted by Schnookie]

Where’s The Statler Cake?

The scene: our local grocery store, after work the Tuesday after Labor Day. It was a long day, and I wasn’t terrifically engaged with the task of meal planning for the week. As I wandered the aisles absently, out of the blue I was struck by the strangest inspiration. I needed to make Waldorf Cake.

Back when I was in high school and first started cooking, my one resource was our tattered old Betty Crocker Cookbook, fondly known in our household as “Betty The Crock”. When I was feeling especially fancy and ambitious, I decided to make this Waldorf Cake, which is an angel food cake filled and frosted with chocolate whipped cream. Yeah. Super fancy.

Unlike when I was a kid, I made this angel food cake from scratch. I used the “Dessert Bible” recipe, which I’m too lazy to recount here. That said, I’m never above using angel food cake mix; that stuff is delish.

Once the cake’s all baked and cooled, you lop off the top about an inch down, then hollow out a trench around the whole cake, leaving 1-inch walls. The best part about it is that you then get to eat all the tender angel food cakemeats that you’ve removed from the center.

The chocolate whipped cream is nice and straightforward, just three cups of whipping cream, 1 1/2 cups of confectioner’s sugar, 3/4 cups of cocoa powder, and 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Whip it all up, fill in the trench, try to pack out the air bubbles, then place the top back onto the cake.

Once the top’s patted onto the cake, you frost the whole kit and kaboodle with the whipped cream.

This cake is hilarious and delicious. It seems so delightfully Sandra Lee to be cutting tops off angel food cakes and slathering it all with whipped cream. And today was especially fun because as soon as I mentioned it to Boomer, she wondered aloud whether this was the cake her aunt made every year for her cousin’s birthday. Any cake that brings on a wave of “growing up in the ’50s in the Midwest” nostalgia is a good cake in my book.

I am so glad I made this today, because I feel like I’m 16 again and inordinately proud of my mad baking skillz. I should break out Betty The Crock a bit more often to try my hand at silly retro desserts. Ambrosia, anyone?

[Posted by Schnookie]

Our Picture-A-Day Habit

WOO HOOO!!! We did it! From August 23, 2008 to August 22, 2009 we took a picture every day and posted it into Flickr. What we’ve been left with is the easiest-to-maintain diary of a year we could ever hope for. As you’ve probably noticed from reading IPB, Gentle Reader, we don’t live the most action-packed lives. We’re both in our 30’s, we’re both well-established in our jobs, we own our house, we don’t have kids… basically, life is a straight, unwinding road for us. Looking back on this past year, we’ll remember the big events without prompting. There were the holidays (Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Opening Night), we voted for a new president, we visited our friends in Dallas for the first time, and in sadder times, our grandmother passed away. But thanks to Project 365 we don’t have to go far to find reminders of all the little things that made up our year. We learned a new hobby, started new projects, and finished them (as well as these, and this, and this, and this, and this). We hung out with friends. We harvested the end of one garden and planted another. At work, we went to all-day trainings, completed big projects, got raises, commuted, and watched the seasons change. We each had a perfect snow day (here’s Pookie’s and here’s Schnookie’s), a perfect not-road trip, and a perfect vacation. We had two of the best days ever. And the single bestest day ever. In other words, it was a year worth remembering.

As much as we knew we loved the idea of having a diary of the year, we were both hesitant to start Project 365 because we were sure we weren’t good enough photographers. Then we read some sage advice from a seasoned 365 participant: 20% of the photos you take will be really good, 20% will be truly awful, and the rest will fall somewhere in between. Turns out that person was right. We did end up with mostly average photos, but a few notable ones stand to us as being our best and our worst photos.

The Five Best

November 1st, 71/365

December 15th, 115/365

April 29th, 250/365

July 27th, 339/365

August 21st, 364/365

The Five Worst

September 17st, 26/365

September 25th, 34/365

October 3rd, 42/365

March 27th, 217/365

May 28, 279/365

(Cross-posted from IPB)

It’s Quiet. Too Quiet.

Okay, we realize we’ve been really lax IPB Living bloggers this summer (regular readers of IPB proper shouldn’t be surprised about this), but it’s not our fault. This has been the boringest summer of gardening ever. Here’s what our daily routine as gentlewoman farmers has been like:

1. Wake up.
2. Notice it’s raining.
3. Realize this means we don’t have to water the garden for a few more days.
4. Realize this means we can’t take the camera out in the garden because it’s raining and we don’t want to break the camera (again).
5. Realize it’s actually raining really hard, and it’s too wet out to even want to just walk out and look at the garden without a camera in tow.
6. Read up on Late Blight.
7. Worry about Late Blight.
8. Are those spots on the tomatoes, the ones we can see from the front door where we’re huddled out of the rain, Late Blight?
9. Worry.
10. Read more about Late Blight.
11. Decide those spots aren’t Late Blight.
12. Find something less annoying to think about than the garden.
13. Go to sleep.

That’s been our day, every day, this entire summer. We’ve been lucky in that we’re having a bumper crop of tomatoes in this Summer of the Blight (anyone who’s reading this and thinking about starting a garden next Spring, take our advice: grow from seed), and we’ve had wildly successful onion, garlic, potato, and especially pepper crops this year. Our carrots and beets washed away in a torrential, hours-long downpour that ripped through Maple Hoo the day after we planted them. Our beans are chugging along. And we almost never have to spend any time actually interacting with any of them because there’s been so freakin’ much rain this year. It’s a self-tending garden. On the one hand, that leaves us lots of time to pursue our other hobbies. On the other hand, this must be a lot like what it’s like for parents when their children go off to college. We love the garden, we want to be involved in its life, but it just doesn’t need us anymore.

How Does the Garden Grow Now?

July of 2009 is now finally in the rear-view mirror, never to show its ugly, rainy face ever again, thank goodness! So how does the garden look now that it’s August? Pretty darn awesome!

In our last garden update we were excited for potato flowers and garlic scapes. In the 6 weeks since, the garlic and potatoes have been entirely harvested with much success! There appear to be no signs on blight on the potatoes, and the garlic vareities we chose this year are all delicious.

What beats a side dish of homegrown potatoes and farm share green beans? The garlic is also there, hiding (alongside the volunteer cilantro) in the turkey burger.

The garlic and potato beds are now planted with their secondary crops — beans, carrots and beets. Keep your fingers crossed for the beets and carrots, as we used mushroom compost to replenish the soil levels instead of our tried and true leaf compost. So far the mushroom stuff doesn’t seem as good at draining the inches and inches of rain we’re still getting. As for the beans, we took the Square Foot Gardening approach and plunked down nine plants to a square foot. The bed is a riot of big green bean leaves; I can’t imagine there’s room for all of them in there!

We’ve taken to calling the “Painted Pony” beans “Lightning Pony” beans because they sprouted from nothing to having leaves overnight after a big summer storm.

When all is said and done this summer will surely be remembered as the Summer We Couldn’t Stop Worrying About Stupid Effing Late Blight. So far — knocks heartily on wood — we think we’ve been spared, and as a result the tomatoes are coming along swimmingly. Our CSA pointed out in their newsletter that they’ve managed to fend of Late Blight partially because the farm itself is isolated from other farms thanks to being surrounded by woods. We’re wondering if we’re benefiting from the same effect. The only neighbors growing tomatoes got theirs from us, and Maple Hoo is also surrounded by protected wooded areas. Normally we’d be all over encouraging all our neighbors to turn their front lawns into veggie paradises, but now we’re thinking we like the street the way it is! Heh.

The Ramapos are taking their sweet time turning red, but there are zillions on the plants.

The Moretons may not have lived up to their “Fourth of July Tomato” nickname, but as of the last week or so, they’re ripening up a furious pace.

The Black Plums had some kind of bacterial problem and we had to cut off pretty much everything that wasn’t a tomato, but we’re hoping they’ll shake it off and get back in the game.

Usually at this time of year, the onions would be entirely harvested, chopped, and in the freezer by now, but thanks to all the rain, the Yellow of Parma onions didn’t start bulbing until very recently. Instead, they’ve been putting all their energy in growing the most ridiculous leaves. The Australian Browns, on the other hand, did exactly what they were meant to do, and have been taken up. They’re phenomenally delicious — once again, all the fretting over starting onions from seed was totally worth it.

Hey onion, did you ever consider growing… say… an onion?!

So far, though, the big success in this year’s version of The Maple Hoo Garden, is the peppers. (We fully put forth there’s still time for the Ramapos to take over the top dog spot.) After last year’s pepper debacle, I set my expectations low. Very, very low. Which makes what happened last night even sweeter! After a long, productive day of stitching and watching a marathon of “Diagnosis: Murder” (yes, you heard me!), we ordered delivery pizza — sausage and mushroom on one pie, sausage and onions on another. While waiting for dinner to arrive, Schnookie sauteed up our first two harvested peppers. One was a Tolli’s Sweet Italian pepper. It’s not kidding about the sweet; it tasted like candy! The other was a super-spicy Aci Sivri, a long, green Turkish hot pepper (it mellowed a lot after cooking).

We’ve been watching this pepper like hawks, waiting for it to turn completely red. We could wait no more.

I’m not going to lie — my main motivation for suggesting we plant these was because they seemed very photogenic!

Holy cow, Gentle Reader. Holy. Cow. Putting your own freshly harvested, homegrown heirloom peppers on your delivery pizza? Is mind-blowingly, earth-shatteringly, groin-grabbingly delicious. After her first bite of the be-peppered pizza, Schnookie declared we’re going to plant only peppers next year. Heh. Seriously, we cannot recommend this practice more. Run right out, plant yourself some Tolli’s Sweet and Aci Sivris, and then 80-100 days later, order yourself some pizza. You won’t regret it!

So there you have it. The garden is once again humming along. This afternoon, I read another one of those blog posts that pops up all the time on the interwebs about how much money you save by growing your own veggies, and the inevitable quibbling began about factoring in time, and labor, and blah blah blah. Here’s what I have say to that: you cannot put a price on a slice of delicious NJ pizza topped with peppers plucked from the garden that evening.

Now if only it would stop raining!

Posted by Pookie

Quilting Progress Report: Schnookie Edition

I have been on such a productive quilting spree lately that I’ve been terribly remiss about stopping and actually documenting it. In the seven weeks since I finished Squaresville (and there will be an extensive photoshoot for it, I promise), I’ve pieced the entire top of Amy Butler’s Midwest Modern quilt (and didn’t take pictures of it because it had some serious issues that I’m hoping will be less apparent when I get it back from Mary the quilter) and started some serious inroads on projects about which I am extremely excited.

Every evening I shuffle through my stack of boxes before deciding which project I want to focus on. It can be difficult to choose. I love them all too much!

The most noticeable project I’m working on right now is Ugly City, the kit of wild Kaffe Fassett prints that shouldn’t work together but somehow do. When I say that it’s the most noticeable, I mean that it’s probably visible from outer space. It’s very spicy. And while I can assure you that it’s also stunningly gorgeous in person, it seems to be wildly unphotogenic, because no matter how I try to take pictures of it, they all end up looking monstrous.

I’m a MOOOOOONNNNN-STER!

If I was really focused and bearing down, Ugly City would be done by now. It’s going up in quite a hurry, because, I guess, the wilder the fabrics, the simpler the construction. There are 20 blocks that make up the center of the quilt, and I’ve got 11 of them pieced already, with the other nine about halfway done. Of course, I discovered as I was laying the squares out for this picture that I was supposed to have selected four squares to go on the corner posts of the outer border, and I neglected to do that. So it would probably be more accurate to report that I have 11 of the 20 done, with the other nine halfway done, less the four I’m going to have to tear out, plus the four not-meant-to-be-the-corner-posts pieces that haven’t been worked on at all yet. In other words, it’s not as far along as I had hoped. Which is a good thing, because I am thoroughly enjoying working on this quilt, and don’t want to be done with it any time soon. I want to savor the ugly.

Squeeeee!!!!

Since I had decided to not race through Ugly City, I was able to make an impulse purchase when I first spotted Sheri Berry’s “Trick or Treat Street” line of Halloween prints. Now, I am not a huge fan of Halloween, and kind of figured I wouldn’t be the kind of person who makes seasonal quilts, but as soon as I saw those little cats with their trick or treat bags, I tossed that notion right out the window. I’m calling this project “SQUEEEEE!!! City”.

When I’m working on this, I’m normally emitting a squeal of delight that is so high-pitched only dogs can hear it.

It’s a simple nine-patch of 2 1/2-inch squares that I’m going to sash with black and have the orange brocade as post squares. I’m going to border the whole thing with a random edging of the 2 1/2-inch squares. In other words, simple, quick, adorable, and exactly the kind of piecing I love to do.

You can’t hear it, but I’m squealing just looking at it right now. All the dogs in the neighborhood are barking. It’s just so cute!!

Finally, and most surprisingly, I’m working on my Figgy Pudding quilt again.

I know! Shut up! It’s true!

When Pookie and I first got the quilting bug last December, Boomer was delighted to produce from the depths of her stash two kits that we had apparently picked out. Pookie’s was the sassy, spicy Merry Go Round and mine was this snoresville grandma-print kit of a Fig Tree Quilts project. It was their Figgy Pudding pattern, with their Dandelion Girl line of fabric. It’s a very lovely quilt, but as a newly-minted fabric enthusiast, it bored me to tears. I wanted spicy. I wanted adventure. I wanted to be just like Pookie.

So I put Figgy Pudding away, weakly insisting that sure, I’d totally get back to it someday. I spun some sort of bogus excuse that the fabrics were too autumnal, and what I really wanted back in January was something that would feel all newer, better life or even Springtimey. Figgy Pudding became my shameful secret.

Zzzzzzzz City

So fast forward to mid-July, and imagine my surprise when, in the middle of happily puttering away on Ugly City and SQUEEEEE!!! City, I suddenly felt an undeniable urge to resume work on Figgy Pudding. It turns out I was right — I was going to come back to it as soon as I was hit with autumnlonging again!

It’s a tiny bit spicy… if you squint…

And that’s where I’m at now. Figgy Pudding’s squares are almost halfway completed, and then there’s all manner of sashing to put in around them, so it’s still a substantial project. Ugly City is only probably a couple of weeks of hard work from being done. And SQUEEEE!!! City is just for fun anyway — goodness only knows if I’ll plan on enjoying working on it during the Halloween season, or try to have it finished for it. Whatever I decide, I’m really enjoying where I’m at in my works in progress!

[Posted by Schnookie]