As a long-time cross-stitch enthusiast, I am beyond thrilled that cross stitch is finally getting its due alongside other “rediscovered” cool crafts like knitting, crochet, and quilting. For too long, it’s been ignored as a dorky craft suitable only for grandmother’s bathrooms. It deserves better than that!

However, when most people on the internet embraced knitting, crochet, and quilting, there’s been a lot of love for using high quality or designer materials. So why, for the love of all that’s crafty, is everyone using Aida or evenweave cloth?! People, there’s a whole world out there of beautiful fabrics that are a joy to work with, that feel good in your hand while you work, that add depth to your work, that compliment the colors of your floss*.

It’s called linen, and if you’re not at least trying it out, you’re doing your project and the process of cross stitching a huge disservice. If you have the budget, would you knit/crochet/quilt with polyester? No, because it wouldn’t feel as nice in your hands while working, and the final product doesn’t look as good, right? Guess what? The difference between Aida and linen is the same thing. So this year, do yourself and your stitching a favor — switch out that Aida for some linen. You will not regret it, I guarantee it.

Hugs and kisses,
Pookie

P.S. If you’re worried that it’ll be much more difficult, don’t worry and just go for it! Start with a big count linen. Sure, you may need to really focus in the beginning about counting up and over two linen threads for every stitch, but once you get going, you’ll start to see the linen in terms of the grid made by your existing stitches, and not in terms of each individual linen thread. Trust me!

*If you’ve really got the budget, I also highly recommend trying out silk thread instead of floss. It’ll blow your mind. It’s like sewing or quilting with voile instead of Kona cotton.

This past weekend I finally had a clear canning schedule, so old fashioned marmalade was a go.

I’ve never actually eaten marmalade (that I know of), so didn’t think very hard about what kind of process would be involved in making it. I immediately learned one thing: getting all the pith off the peels sucks. I’m sure there are far more efficient processes to do this than what I’d come up with, but that’s of no use to the me on Saturday morning who feared she’d have horrible, hooked claw hands for the rest of her life. The pain was quickly forgotten, though, because this recipe isn’t about olde-tyme marmalade — it’s about old fashioned cocktail marmalade, so I got to use my newest, favorite ingredient.

Homemade bitters! I had three types to choose from, all bottled in the last week or so, and opted for the figgy-orange ones. They are precious and delicious and I jealously guard them, but I’m very pleased to report that this marmalade recipe was good enough to justify using the dear, dear bitters in.

The whole thing is so simple and also so genius. It’s sort of the standard marmalade, made out of Honeybell tangelos, with an addition of vanilla bean, rye and bitters. It’s like where orange gumdrops meet my favorite cocktail, only something you can spread on toast.

And I even got to try out one of the fancy German jars Santa brought me for Christmas. I’m just in love with how pretty this whole recipe experience ended up being. And to top it all off, for the three regular Ball mason jars we got along with that one Weck one, Pookie made perhaps her greatest label yet.

It’s all almost too lovely to eat. Almost.

[Posted by Schnookie]

1. We can turn tragedy into happiness, tree-wise.

The new vineyard fence, bedecked for the Halloween season. Maple Hoo is much, much more festive now that those dang trees are gone.

We lost a lot of major trees around our yard this year. The big oak in the backyard, the trees lining the driveway (technically on the neighboring property, but whatevs), and half of the shade maple in the backyard all bit it, for a variety of reasons. We were devastated on each count, and spent some time moping about how beauty would never, ever return to our lives… until we really thought about what the changes meant. No line of trees along the driveway means a place to put a fence, on which we can string some wires for trellising, on which we can hang holiday lights in the fall and winter and grow grapes and gourds in the spring and summer. That? Is awesome! No oak and half the maple canopy means considerably more sunshine in the backyard, in which we can grow more foodstuffs. What kind of foodstuffs do we want more of, but don’t have room for in the front-yard garden? Berries! Sweet! Now that those trees are out of our way, the backyard can become the lush berry farm Maple Hoo has always dreamed of. See? Disaster can become opportunity! Thanks, 2011, for showing us how that works.

2. If you do actually take the time to get off your butt to plant bulbs in the fall, it will pay off in the Spring.

By the time fall rolls around we’re normally so over doing garden shit that we really, really don’t want to be bothered with, like, taking out the dying veggie plants and winterizing the yard and blah blah blah. Even less appealing than those sorts of essential chores is the thought of planting bulbs. Yes, flowers are nice, and yes, daffodils and crocuses are insanely easy flowers to have in your yard. But who wants to bother? It would be so much nicer just to sit inside and watch football. Well, last fall we sternly cracked the whip, and Spring 2011 exploded with massive reward. For a good three or four weeks in early spring our yard was literally the envy of the neighborhood.

Bulb planting — do it.

3. If you take the time on the front end of your garden, it’ll pay off.

This is something we’ve been aware of for years, thanks to having gone to the trouble to put in raised beds for our front-yard garden, but 2011 made us even more acutely aware of it. For a variety of reasons, we really got thinking this summer about why our garden achieves whatever success it manages (this is not to suggest we’re, like, kick-ass gardeners. We consider it an outrageously good growing season if 70% of what we planted yields something), and we concluded that the trick is all in the planning. Well-built beds and well covered paths between the beds keep weeds to a minimum. Carefully planned and mapped planting layouts help us know where the good plants are, making weeding easy. Trellising, staking, training and pruning in the early days of baby plants will make grown-up plants fun to work with.

Look how lush and tidy! If we, say, had decided not to properly stake the tomatoes in the far bed, and, say, had planted pole beans in the middle of the bush-bean bed by accident, this place could be a disaster! Take our word for it.

4. It can be rewarding to expand your garden horizons beyond the fence.

We lost our front-yard tree last summer, and this year we finally stepped outside the confines of our garden proper to put some sunflowers where the black locust had been. And you know what? It rawked.

5. Canning is awesome.

We have been terrified of canning for years, which is sort of ridiculous considering how much produce we get from our garden and CSA share every summer. Well, this year we finally confronted our fears and took the plunge.

My god, how we plunged. We had our first canning experience in mid-September and spent the next ten weeks going hog-wild. It seems that no matter how many delicious goodies we cook and put into cans, there are five or six more we want to make. We can’t wait for next year’s fresh fruits and veggies to start coming in so we can start canning like crazy again.

6. We don’t need to grow soup beans but we do need to grow green beans.

One of the staples of our garden has always been soup beans, because it’s a fun and lazy sort of crop. You stick beans in the ground, let them grow, let the plants dry out, then get soup beans out of the dried-out pods. The only problem is that our crops tend to be awfully small, as if the garden gods only want to reward our laziness with about a handful of soup beans. That’s a small batch of soup, yo.

But this past summer we grew green beans for the first time, and they were both bountiful and delicious. And then we discovered the best part — you can pickle and can them! WOO HOO! Screw you, soup beans. There’s a new man in town.

Have we mentioned how much we love making labels for our canned goods? That’s almost as much fun as the food part of it all.

7. Applique is awesome.

As quilters we’ve been convinced that we only like piecework, and all other types of quilt-crafts suck. Then we got started on Bunny Hill’s “Night Before Christmas” quilt and learned that hand applique is easy, quick, and crazy, crazy fun.

The finished product is a lot more, um, attached than this.

8. Red Dead Redemption is awesome.

::Happy sigh::

We’re not gamers by any stretch of the imagination, but after enough people said that “Red Dead Redemption” was amazing, and because Boomer loves Westerns, we decided to get it for her on Mother’s Day. And you know what? It was by far the best TV-ish entertainment experience we had all year. We’ve watched tons of sports and movies and current TV shows and old TV shows on DVD, but nothing came close to being as much fun as Red Dead.

9. We can still thoroughly enjoy the Devils even when they suck.

Okay, so that was a lesson that really was contained primarily in 2010, because the Devils suckiness from the past NHL season was pretty much confined to the time before the New Year. (In fact, we were recently informed that they had the third-best record in the league in the 2011 calendar year…) But the fact remains that they didn’t make the playoffs this past spring, for the first time since we’ve been watching hockey. And they started out this season looking a bit… not-much-better. We’ve spent a lot of years with a lot of our free time focused on being fans of a team we thought should be competing for the Stanley Cup. 2011 taught us that even when our team is obviously doing no such thing, we can still really enjoy our fandom.

This was the day we realized the numbers weren’t going to work, and the Devils were definitely going to be hitting the links in April. But Victory Euro Mats kept on smiling.

10. Learning to eat more locally-sourced foods can be an extremely fun and rewarding challenge.

When you grow up less than two miles from one of the world’s greatest farm stands, you tend to take local produce for granted. Then when you move to Scottsdale, Arizona and discover that your grocery store stocks literally nothing from anywhere you could drive to in less than a day, you suddenly start to realize how lucky you were back in the heart of farm country. So when we moved back here to Jersey in 2003 we were really excited to get to join an extremely local CSA. For the next seven summers we were happy with our easy-to-find local produce; we were supporting a farm in our neighborhood, watching our veggies grow, and learning all about how our food fits into the world we live in. In 2011, though, we started getting interested in what else our area has to offer. What we’ve found is an incredible bounteous bounty. We have award-winning cheesemakers, abundant fresh eggs, fresh pork, turkeys, and chickens (and beef, if we were so inclined), year-round farmers markets, creative artisanal bakeries, and goodness knows what else. Now, we aren’t going in for hard-core locavorism — we’ve just learned how much fun it is to explore our nearby foodshed.

One cool discovery? Local cranberries! 21 quarts of them, in fact, for a song. Our local foodshed demands a larger chest freezer.

11. It constantly gets easier to find obscure or niche music thanks to the internet.

This is a complete no-brainer, and something everyone has known for years. But 2011 was a year when we finally tapped the wellspring of exciting, new (to us) music. Oh, avant garde metal. How did we live so long without you?

Seriously. How did we live so long without you?

12. It’s extremely simple to extend the growing season with tasty greens.

Every year we’ve sworn that we really wanted to get our spring harvests started earlier and our fall harvests ending later. In 2011 we actually did something about it. We got a sort of cross between a greenhouse and a coldframe, and used that to get cold-weather lettuces started weeks earlier than we’ve ever done in the past.

This was one of our favorite photos of the year.

Even more exciting was what happened when we tossed a few packets of seeds into the empty beds after clearing out the tomato plants. We planted a whole bunch of types of winter greens in early September and then did literally nothing to tend to them. They didn’t have a fantastic germination rate, but even so, we ended up with scads of delicious boc choy, baby chard, tatsoi, salad mix, and braising mix. Our last harvest of them was on December 27. December 27!

Being a wintertime farmer is rad.

13. Shooting in RAW makes our photography so much easier.

We resisted RAW for ages, because it sounded so photo-technical, and if there’s anything we’re really not, it’s tech geeks about our photography. But for some inexplicable reason, Pookie finally decided to figure it out in 2011. It has made us so happy. Gone are the days when we have to worry about white balance! Gone are the days when we struggle with our rudimentary Photoshop skills to correct exposure issues! Gone are the days when it takes us more than 20 seconds to completely process a picture! It’s the lazy photographer’s dream come true!

Before…

…and after!

So that’s the story of 2011; here’s hoping 2012 will be just as informative, delicious, exciting, and fun!

That’s six pounds, five ounces of carrots. Not too shabby, considering we almost didn’t get around to planting them!

It was another good year for Maple Hoo, but you know what? Good garden seasons are totally boring now. Every year we have some good crops, and some bad crops, and some “meh, whatever” crops. It’s all super-fun (despite being horribly stressful, but we always forget about the worrying about seeds germinating, and then baby plants not growing fast enough, and then veggies not fruiting enough or fruiting too much, or whatever), but it’s also stuff we don’t ever really think to blog about, because hey — it’s the garden. Doing its garden thing. What can we say? We have short attention spans.

This was before it grew completely out of control. Seriously. We didn’t do a great job of pruning and training this year.

Fortunately our yard has undergone a lot of tree damage in the last year, so now we’ve got all kinds of new locations for newer, better garden projects!

First up, our side yard. Once upon a time we had a row of hemlocks lining the far side of our driveway; they were technically on the neighbor’s side of the property line. In the last year, though, the trees have all died. And then started leaning precariously on each other. And we had to nag and nag at the bank that owns the abandoned property to do something about them before they fell over on our cars.

It’s like an enchanted wood! That shields our view of the creepy abandoned house next door…

Finally this summer the bank sent someone out to take care of the trees. They must have been paying the by the stump, though, because the tree people took out the dead trees, as well as a bunch of old-growth shrubs and a few hale, healthy trees while they were at it. They left a decimated, desolate moonscape in their wake.

This is the photogenic version of the view. Truly, it was a horrorshow.

It took us about 15 seconds to get a contract in place for someone to install a fence, any fence. We didn’t care what it looked like, as long as it didn’t look like the tarps and pond equipment in the neighboring yard.

Ahhh, sweet blocker of the dreadful view.

Now that we have a fence there, we can’t understand why we waited so long. You know what you can do with fences? Hang holiday lights on them!

Bonus!

Also, the fence has bounded a previously invisible to us swath of yard next to our garage.

Who even knew this space was here??

Now we have a spot to put in grapevines! And gourds! And a mulched woodland path running from the driveway to the compost bins behind the garage! And rhododendrons and pachysandra along the side of the garage! And daffodils and crocuses! And we’ll put a little bistro table and chairs along the way, to stage potted flowers! Thanks to the devastation of the hemlocks, Maple Hoo is gaining a vineyard. It’s going to be awesome.

Meanwhile, we finally had to admit this summer that our sad old oak tree was more “falling on the garage and smushing the roof” hazard than actual tree.

So long, old tree.

It’s been a long time since the oak had much of a leafy canopy, but it was quite a shock to see how much more sun the back corner of the yard got as soon as all those branches and enormous trunk were gone. Sun that shines on the weird, ugly rectangle of mulch that used to be the location of the previous owner’s swingset.

We swear, it’s sometimes sunny there.

We’ve been trying for years to let nature take back this rectangle and at least fill it with green stuff, if not actual lawn, but every time we ask our gardener guy to mulch the apple trees in the front yard, he always brings way more mulch than he needs, and puts it on the rectangle. Because, you know, people love to have random swaths of their yards mulched for no obvious reason.

Yeah, that’s attractive. Ish?

In a flash of brilliance, though, Pookie realized that maybe it was a good thing that the gardener and his crew were so over-enthusiastic, because now that there’s some sun there, we have a perfect, undeveloped spot just crying out for a blackberry bramble! One we’ve already planted with daffodils along the front! It’ll have an enchanted little path rambling through it! And have spots for potted flowers and some hellebores! And someday we’ll expand it to embrace Boomer’s beloved little Japanese maple, with a decorative bridge and a river of squill and it’ll be awesome!

Finally, there was the hugely tragic tree damage.

Oh, beloved maple tree…

We had a massive freak snowstorm in October, before the titular maple of Maple Hoo had a chance to drop its leaves. Snow + lots of leaves = more weight than the branches can bear.

At least nothing landed on the house.

The maple ended up losing well over half of its canopy, and is likely not to be too much longer for this world. We rejected the tree guy’s recommendation to cut it down now, but it’s time for us to start planning for the future, and take advantage of the reduction of shade canopy. See all that yard with fallen branches on it up there? If you squint at it, you can just about see all the blueberries we’re going to fill the backyard with. Blueberries! Gazillions of them!

We’re talking about someday harvesting TWO handfuls of these bad boys.

Thanks to the maple mayhem of Snowtober, Maple Hoo (now with less maple) is going to become a full-fledged berry farm! Come spring, we’ll be planting blueberries, golden raspberries, gooseberries, currants, loganberries, marionberries, boysenberries, not to mention more red raspberries and, of course, the blackberries in the bramble. It’s going to be an unstoppable berry machine! It’s so great to have new shiny objects to get excited about.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is, thanks to their help, I was able to finish Henrik Jane this summer! Woo-hoo! After a short spell with Mary, The Long-Arm Quilter, Henrik Jane was back at home, ready to be bound and washed. I put the final stitches in last weekend.

I am simply over-the-moon for how this turned out. It seems lots of little pieces combined with low-contrast fabrics is the signature look that’s going to make my quilts famous. Heh. I was concerned at first that the nine-patches weren’t showing off the fabrics well enough, but once I got going on it, I really loved how it ended up looking like confetti. Or an impressionist painting. Or an impressionistic painting of confetti.

There was a long time there where I thought this project would never be finished. I’m so glad I powered through, though. Now, if Henrik Zetterberg ever shows up at Maple Hoo, we can greet him with a quilt he can call his very own.

September 27 2010

September 12 2010

October 12 2010

May 3 2011

March 28 2011

April 23 2011

April 9 2011

November 5 2010

September 17 2010

November 24 2010

October 20 2010

December 8 2010

June 7 2011

November 6 2010

June 25 2011

November 9 2010

December 27 2010

The whole set is on Flickr, here.

I seem to have lost my ability to take an in-focus picture of a quilt, but what you’re looking at is a scrappy dresden plate made of all kinds of Halloween prints, and with fussy cut centers from Alexander Henry’s “Ghastlies”. Yeah, it’s a little manic, but if you can’t go nuts on a scrappy Halloween quilt, when can you?!

This in-progress shot shows the plates better than the finished product:

The fabrics are mostly Alexander Henry, but there’s some Sheri Berry in there, and some Sanae Spooktacular, and some stuff leftover from Boomer’s Halloween quilt, and some random stuff salvaged from the great Basement Stash project. Oh, and the little candy corns are from my first seasonal-fat-quarter-impulse-buy-while-waiting-for-fabric-to-be-cut purchase! I probably — nay, definitely — should have switched to a different, less busy background, but I got that stuff on sale for half off, so that’s what I stuck with.

My favorite part, needless to say, is the pie centers, which you can see better in this in-progress shot:

Look, there’s Cheeky Dracula himself! If you listen closely to this quilt, you can hear his theme song.

Cheeky Dracula will be heading off to the long-arm quilter soon. I hope he’ll be back in time for Halloween!

So what does a girl do when she finishing one quilt top? She starts a new project, of course! Two weekends ago we held Maple Hoo’s first (of, I hope, many) Irresponsibility Weekend. The idea was we all dropped whatever projects we were working on and picked up something brand new, and low priority. Schnookie made an awesome peacock. Boomer spent the weekend digging up a zillion new projects (but I don’t think she started anything; she’s a master, that one!). I dug out a stack of 1/2 yard cuts I bought with my birthday discount at my LQS two years ago. I had intended to use them to make American Jane’s Fiesta quilt, but never got around to picking the solid colors for it. Instead, I decided to be inspired by copy this quilt I’d seen on Flickr. Nothing says irresponsibility like using 1/2 yard cuts to get, at most, 6 2.5″ squares for a scrap quilt! Heh.

Here’s what I have so far:

I’m planning on making it 6 diamonds by 6 diamonds, so while there’s still a long way to go, I feel like this is pretty quick work for just one weekend. It takes more time to decide which fabrics to use than it does to piece the block! Sadly, we don’t have a ton of scraps yet, so I can’t make it all from the scrap bin. Instead, I’m raiding the stash of fabrics that aren’t put aside for specific projects. It’s been fun to poke around in the fabrics we’ve collected over the last two years. I was especially excited to use the vintage hot pink fabric I got in Brimfield:

I love that I’ll be able to look at this quilt for years to come and remember the Brimfield trip, while also looking at the whale fabric Schnookie gave me for Christmas to commemorate our various trips to the American Museum of Natural History!

One of my favorite things about this project so far is that it’s giving me a great opportunity to play with fussy cutting.

Any quilt that has that goldfish and that camel five inches apart has got to be a good thing, right?

This weekend was no different. Schnookie declared on Friday that she was going to make quinoa with shredded beets to go along with Sunday’s dinner. While she and Boomer waxed on about how great the beets would be, all I could think was, “What the fuck?! You can’t waste quinoa by filling it with beets!! That’s sacrilege!” Schnookie was all, “Oh, no worries, you can pick the beets out.” I wasn’t buying it, but I didn’t say anything.

Well, I didn’t say anything until Sunday night when Schnookie was prepping dinner. She had the unmitigated gall to point out how beautiful the shredded beets were. Well, I never! I may have overreacted out of despair that delicious Rancho Gordo quinoa was going to waste, but I think I said something like, “I hope those beets rot in hell!” That led to a little veggie-hate-filled tiff that I wasn’t proud of, but that I certainly wasn’t going to back down from. I mean, for heaven’s sake, these were beets we were talking about! The lead up to dinner was terrible. Everyone was cranky, the weather was muggy, the view from the grill is depressing. It was a bad scene.

So I was not in the greatest of moods when I found myself standing next to the kitchen counter when the serving bowl of beet-red quinoa, spiced with sumac and cumin, was placed before me. I peered at it. A-ha! Just as I suspected! Shredded beets were not something that would easily be picked out of a quinoa dish! Schnookie’s a liar! A dirty, beet-loving liar! But… The closer I looked at how indistinguishable the beet shreds were from the quinoa, the more I noticed that it was a giant bowl of delicious, delicious quinoa. I love quinoa. It manages to be mushy like mashed potatoes, but also a little crunchy like popcorn, and never too nutty. Mmmm, quinoa. Quinoaaaaaa…

I couldn’t resist! I had to take a little nibble! I carefully chose a tiny bit that definitely didn’t have a beet on it. And it was phenomenal. So… I took another bite. And it was also phenomenal. It tasted like some heavenly combination of southwestern and Indian cooking. Without thinking, I went back in for more. And without realizing it, I took a bite that had beets in it. I had to admit, I couldn’t tell what was beet and what was quinoa. I couldn’t tell what was gross and what delicious. Could it be… the beet wasn’t gross?!

Next thing I knew, I was loading my plate up with beetstuffs.

If you thought the planet seemed to shift around 7:45 pm today, now you know why. Picking-Eating Pookie willingly ate beets.

Posted by Pookie

But the great thing about gardening is that if you have sun and water, it’s really hard to screw up. Nature wants things to grow, yo. And just after we hit rock bottom we stepped outside, took a gander at the beds, and realized that our garden had turned a corner. Our babies were growing up. Our tomatoes, every last one, were sporting wee little green fruits. Here’s a family portrait of our children:

We have a wide array of shapes and sizes growing out there — from left to right, top to bottom we’re looking at Red Pears, Tiny Tim, Cherokee Purple, Brown Betty, Rose de Berne, Blondkopfchen, Rosso Sicilian, Lemon Drop, German Green, Lemon Drop again, Fox Cherry, and Isis Candy Shop. The only one we’ve grown before is the Fox (an enormous and almost comically productive [and scrumptious] cherry tomato that was last year’s biggest hit), so we’re really excited about having a whole rainbow of tomato options. Now that they’re all fruiting up, it’s fair to say that while they might not be the most perfect plants ever (we have a bit of a bacterial speck issue, but then, we always do), we love them just the way they are.

I saw this pattern (“Hook and Eye” by Teacher’s Pet) done up in these fabrics (“Bliss” by Bonnie and Camille) at Quilt Asylum in McKinney, TX last year and decided I wanted a quilt exactly like it. I thought it would be a lovely Christmas quilt, but it could also be a plain old Winter quilt for January and February. I finished all the blocks just after last Christmas, but then dragged my feet on laying them out. Then I lay them out months ago and sort of forgot about them. Then I picked them up again recently, but lost track of how they were laid out. In the end, I had a lot of instances of the same fabrics showing up right next to each other. Um… that’s charm, right? ::shifty eyes::

Anyway, I’m quite pleased with how it looks, especially against a backdrop of July corn. Of course, now that it’s done, I’ve been thrown into a tizzy of having a billion projects I want to work on and a full Saturday with nothing else to do but quilt and watch DVDs. I’m so all over the place with what I want to be working on, so I figured I’d keep a running diary of what I manage to get accomplished today.

11:00 am: The first thing to do on a day like today is admire one’s work on a newish project. In this case, I laid out the first five blocks for FiestaFudd.

Just after finishing “Bliss” last night I realized I wanted to be working on something new. Something bright, sassy, and fun, but preferably with nice big pieces. Of course, starting a new project in quilting is tough because you have to cut the pieces and get them marked. So really, FiestaFudd could not have been more perfect! It’s bright (um, probably to a fault), sassy and fun, and it’s got big pieces that I had already cut and marked. But it’s not new! Waaaah! Just kidding.

11:15 am: Consider whether the panel from the giant stack of Helen Dardik fabric I got last week will work in this awesome quilt from the book “Gone To Texas”. The answer may surprise you.

The answer? No. No, it won’t work. Shuckydarns. But, there’s still hope that the fabric line will work for this pattern, just without showcasing the adorable panel. At least this means I don’t have to get online and order yards more of the panel today.

11:30 am: Press pieces stitched the night before.

I had some loose FiestaFudd pieces, and the top to Bliss, and the background square for Cheeky Dracula to be pressed. Pressing is a great way to kick off a stitching day. It’s kind of like organizing a desk or weeding a garden bed.

12:00 pm: Seethe with jealousy over Schnookie’s new project, “Basement City”. It’s going to be an incredible quilt made up entirely of 1 1/4″ squares (3/4″ visible), all made with repro fabrics from Boomer’s stash. She ordered some lime green solid for the background, and then started picking fabrics for the prints.

At some point today, I have to start cutting these fat quarters up into thousands of teensy tiny squares.

12:30 pm: Decide the thousands of teensy tiny squares can wait. Sit down on the couch and waste time on the internet and on buying stuff on iTunes (I’m pretty sure lots of people buy Dolly Parton and Fantomas at the same time. I hope I screwed up Apple’s demographics on that spending spree.)

1:00 pm: Put in the first stitch of the day. Yeah! I’m stitching up a storm today!

2:15 pm: Two television episodes later, I have 1/3 of a Cheeky Dracula dresden plate attached to the background. Threads of Fire, that’s me! At this rate, I’ll have this quilt done in… um… ::does some math::… 100 years!

2:16 pm: Commence cutting the first of 14,000+ 1 1/4″ squares for Schnookie’s “Basement City”.

Dear Accuquilt,
Please create a 1 1/4″ square die.
Hugs and kisses, Pookie

3:00 pm Cutting several hundred 1 1/4″ squares actually went pretty quickly, thanks to Schnookie helping out with the trimming. If you ignore the 8 1/2 yards of background we have to cut, the whole thing doesn’t seem that bad. Since I still had some cutting get up and go, I launched into a proof-of-concept block for the Farmyard fabric we ordered a few weeks ago. SeptemberFever has been creeping into the air here at Maple Hoo (probably thanks to the 5 hours of rain yesterday) and there’s nothing more September-y than this line.

4:00 pm: Time for more TV! What are the chances I can finish the dresden plate block before dinner?

4:43 pm: I was fairly confident that my zeal for all my quilt projects would overcome my recent obsession with “Red Dead Redemption”, a.k.a. Grand Theft Horsie. It’s now six hours since I got out of bed today and I’m starting to get twitchy. Must. Not. Turn. On. xBox… Must… Quilt… Arrrrgh!

5:30 pm: Dinner is still hours away, but the dresden plate block is done! I’m doing excellent stitching!

6:30 pm: Test proof-of-concept block of “Farmyard”.

Looking good! I was very worried that once again I’d have chosen poorly vis a vis the scale of the prints and the pattern, but I’m satisfied that even with the biggest print in the line, the pattern pieces are just the right size. We’re thinking a deep chocolate brown background will be the way to go. Of course, no more progress can be made on that quilt until getting the background fabric, so onto the next project!

7:00 pm: Finish cutting the centers for the Cheeky Dracula plates.

Boomer picked up a circular cutter and it seems to be working quite well. Also working quite well? The towel draped on the dining room chair. It’s meant to keep Rollie from scratching the chair’s upholstery, but it doubles as a very effective miniature design wall:

7:30 pm: Dinner’s almost ready, so it’s time to hunker down for the evening. After all that work I put in today on Schnookie’s new quilt, Cheeky Dracula, and Farmyard, it’s now time to focus on either more FiestaFudd, or more V&A clamshells. Or both! Either way, I’m feeling very, very accomplished already today. (Which means, I could turn on that xBox afterall and not feel like I’ve wasted my day… If only Grand Theft Horsie had an expansion pack where John Marston goes to a county fair to learn how to quilt from all the local rancher’s wives!)

8:30 pm: Finish dinner, tipsy from a very full glass of delicious red wine. Yessiree, today was a Saturday well-lived.