Goal Setting

September 5, 2016December 29, 20168 Comments

For my entire adult life I’ve never been very far for a day planner. I’m not sure when this habit started, but my “problem” was enhanced with the masterful development and marketing of “day timers” which exploded in popularity in the 1990’s. At that time I was working for a consulting company in Dallas and our management team was filled with organizational freaks who liked to flash their busy schedules. I wanted to be just like them.

I’m trying desperately to transfer my habit to my iPhone, but am having only marginal success. Meanwhile, this sits front and center at my desk and I carry it wherever I go.

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Inside there are the random daily lists: things to do, things to think about, long-term goals, books I want to read. I even have a quilting goals list. If you don’t write it down, it doesn’t happen, right?

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Anyway, this list is old, since it doesn’t have an item called “pick up picnic quilt from Ms. G.” But I accomplished this undocumented goal anyway. I’m so excited!

Picnic quilt returned from the long-armer.

I really love the way the recycled, pieced back came together.

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After work today (yes, I have to work on Labor Day), I’ll focus on figuring out whether or not I have enough fabric left over from the green border to make the binding. If not, I’ll be adding a new list item for next Saturday titled “Things to Buy at Material Rewards“.

Dresser Scarf Madness

August 29, 2016August 29, 20164 Comments

The little red painted dresser in my room has been piled high with reading material and old shopping receipts for most of the summer since I finished painting it 6 months ago. In a burst of new school year/fresh start enthusiasm, yesterday I decided to get busy on making a dresser scarf for it. A pretty covering for this little numbers has been on my to-do list for quite some time.

I bought this dresser at auction 20+ years ago. It was imported from England. It was a dreary walnut brown for years and years. Please don’t tell me I’ve ruined some Elizabethan-era masterpiece.

I have a bad habit of leaving wood furniture without protection. Frequently, after a visit from my mother, I will find a lovely plastic table mat over such items. She never says anything, but I will walk into the room to find a ghastly white or tiny pink flowered “present” in her wake. I know she means well, and I know it’s better than screaming at my housemates about wet glasses on tabletops, but I hate plastic! The dresser in question has escaped mom’s protective instincts because it has been so cluttered. Since it’s time to declutter, I will need to distract myself by sewing and thinking about decluttering. Am I alone here?

Anyway, with a new dresser scarf firmly in my thoughts, I pulled down several of my quilt design books, but didn’t find anything that felt right. So I worked on a design of my own.

My first sketch featured yellow and red stars on a ‘night sky’ background of blacks, blues and purples – I think that will do. I’ve been itching to comb through my 2.5” scraps, so I sorted the appropriate colors and then cut out three 4.5” squares as the center of a trio of saw tooth stars. I want to vary the size of the stars and I might vary the block patterns too.

Star 1

Star 2

Star 3

After I finished these beauties, I decided to use my 1.5” square scraps to create a few red stars, but I think that our closest star was too blistering hot on a humid August Sunday afternoon to make that any fun (how on earth did I sew that picnic quilt using all those little pieces???). I just couldn’t fidget with them this weekend.

So, it’s back to the design board today, before mom notices the bare wood surface awaiting her design touches.

Write, Write, Write

August 25, 20162 Comments

pencil I have been working on a tween girls novel for a while now. When I first started writing in 2011, the words just flowed and pretty quickly I developed a rough draft of about 300 words. There were holes in the story to be sure, but I was headed in a good direction. I worked hard to not be my own snarky editor and I just let the words tumble onto the paper. Sometimes I’d sit back and read what I wrote and think “that’s darn good, where did that come from?” And then I’d write some more. It was glorious! I was not striving for great, world-changing literature, I just wanted to tell the story that I didn’t know was there.

After my initial burst of writing, I became distracted (on purpose, you might ask?)….I started studying to complete a 30-years-in-the-waiting Master’s degree, work got busy, my son was older and he was involved in more sports, we moved to a new house, blah, blah, blah.

Meanwhile, I convinced myself that I was working on my story in my head. I did a bit of research, I created an official story board, I joined a writing group (that promptly folded). I had the 300 pages printed at Staples, I arranged them neatly in a binder, including tabs, a table of contents, a complete outline AND an index of story elements chapter by chapter. Then I created a paper piecing quilt block pattern to use as an inspirational wall-hanging to encourage my future self to actually write. Can you believe the book and the wall hanging both remain undone?

I keep telling myself that this is where the real writers and authors are made. Many, many people have 300 page unfinished manuscripts that are in deep storage on their computers and in their attics. The real authors push through the stalemate and finish.

It’s a quiet time at work. I have a creative space at home. I have hours in the morning and in the evening when I create. I need to finish this book…just as soon as I finish the final book of the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon. I think I’m on book 6 or 7 and I understand that there are 9. Each book is more than 1,000 pages. Go Diana.

Boots supervising my reading material. We enjoyed an hour of sunshine and low humidity yesterday while lounging in the soft grass. The first quilt I ever made was our cushion.

I started creating my own alphabet along with this nifty pencil. I love pencils!

Recently, the universe has been reminding me in subtle and not so sneaky ways that time is ticking. The writing habit can only be a habit if one actually makes time to write and then writes, no matter what. Wish me luck.

Just Peachy

August 22, 2016August 22, 20163 Comments

Just down the hill a little ways is a lovely organic vegetable farm called Quest Farm Produce. The company started only a few years ago, right around the time I bought my house and, honestly, it’s location was a factor is my home buying decision. I was charmed by the idea of being able to stroll down the hill to buy my vegetables.

Dennis and Bridget’s business has thrived over the years: they’ve added a high tunnel and bee hives, they bought and restored the barn behind the storefront and they’ve been really good neighbors to other producers in the region. I love how they have worked together to provide a real service to the community. It is a true labor of love.

Late in the growing season a few years back, Mom and I got a wild hair that we needed to make salsa. We’d never done it before and we had no peppers to do it with, and we couldn’t buy in bulk from any of the big grocers. But sure enough Dennis and Bridget found us a peck of crazy hot mixed peppers that turned into tasty salsa that we canned and enjoyed all winter long.

This year’s wild hair is all about the peaches. The peach crop seems unusually delicious — even with the late cold snap and the hot humid summer. The trees have produced a sweet, firm fruit that just screams PEACH in your mouth. Well, the ones from Quest scream like that anyways. I bought a half bushel just to quiet down the little beggars.

Mom found a recipe for canned peach pie filling that was burning a hole in my soul. I kid you not, I’ve been obsessing about peach pie for some time now. I don’t even like pie that much, but I had to give this recipe a try.

Mom loves canning! Do not ask her how many canning jars she has!

With the giant peaches from Quest Farm in the half bushel size, we were able to make three batches of filling on Saturday afternoon. We altered the recipe a bit each time, hoping to find the most perfect combination of flavors. The final batch was exquisite with these modifications: we upped the peaches so the filling would be chunkier, we reduced the sugar by quite a bit (which really made the lemon flavor shine through),then we increased the cinnamon by 1/2 and we replaced some of the water with peach schnapps for a bit of added peach flavor (shh!).

Peach pie filling before water bath processing.

This is yummy stuff. Why do I always do these things right before I get really serious about eliminating sweets from my diet? <sigh>

What does all of this have to do with quilting? It’s all about the peaches. In 1982 a dear friend of my mother’s (a story I’ll save for another time) gave me this peach Asian-print inspired quilt. It’s a simple twin bed sized quilt that was hand quilted and machine finished.

Simple quilt circa 1982. Made by Mrs. Beiter, Buffalo, NY

Hand stitching.

When I was working with my mother this weekend, she asked whether or not still I had this quilt. Of course I do I told her, “Good peaches are worth preserving.” Happy canning season!