Modern Piecing for a Cause

October 15, 20187 Comments

Good morning! It’s Cindy reporting in from Ohio.

I recently joined the Central Ohio Modern Quilt Guild and have met some incredibly talented quilters. This is a very active guild and the monthly meetings are full of inspiration.

Each year the guild chooses a community charity project, and for 2018, the Meals on Wheels program was adopted. Guild members make quilted placemats that are distributed to Meals on Wheels clients. These placemats are are great way to use miscellaneous scraps and left over quilt blocks to create small, modern quilt designs.

Below is the label each quilter/creator sews on the back of each placemat:

I was looking through a large bag of colorful scraps from my dear friend, MJ, AND wondered how I could put them to work. Then I started thinking about some of the leftover blocks I have from previous quilts. Hmmmm…the lightbulb in my head turned on.

Left over pieced blocks + lovely scraps = bright, bold placemats!

I need to practice my machine quilting skills and these placemats are the perfect size to machine quilt. I’ll add them to my “must finish” list for October.

I have plenty of leftover blocks to incorporate into some type of placemat design. Below are just a few random blocks…wouldn’t that cute fox face brighten someone’s day?

I hope you are still enjoying the sights and sounds of fall! Here’s another photo I snapped while walking in the park with Norma and Sadie.

Favorite Holiday Happenings

July 3, 2017September 13, 20176 Comments

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At my pay-the-bills job, the 4th of July marks the end of summer, since our busy season begins on the Monday after the holiday. To compensate for a long slog of intense activity that starts now and doesn’t end until early October, we always get several days off around the holiday and I am enjoying every single minute.

On Saturday, my room mate and I drove to Ithaca to attend a workshop at the Yoga Farm near Ithaca, NY. The weather was threatening, but the rain held off until we were safely inside. The workshop took place in a converted barn–can you think of a more grounded place to have a workshop? Barns just seem to have an authentic vibe that you cannot manufacture.

We stopped on the way to have lunch in Corning. My room mate’s son-in-law gave us a gift certificate to a new restaurant for Christmas and this was the first chance we had to try it out. Hand+Foot was delicious (but I must say, the name is kind of a problem for me — when I first saw the gift certificate, I wondered why he got us a gift certificate to a nail salon??)

Anyway, when we walked in, all thoughts of nail polish disappeared.

The bar at Hand+Foot

We got there at 11:30 am when it opened, but we weren’t alone for long. Before the rush caught up with the kitchen, we over-ordered with three entrees and an appetizer because, well, did I mention the gift certificate? And yes, if you are counting, there were only two of us.

It was fun to try new things and indulge in local ingredients like the delicious sandwich rolls from a local bakery.

This is the pretzel appetizer with beer cheese cream. Yum! Think “blooming onion” except with bread and cheese.

I can’t resist sushi, so I chose the Tuna Poke as my entree. It was so fresh and flavorful. It featured watermelon radishes. I think I will have to expand the kinds of radishes I grow in my garden so I can try to replicate this dish.

Not quite sushi, but close enough for WNY.

On the way home after the workshop, we chased a rainbow, but we could never quite catch up with it.

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On Sunday, we stayed home, rested and entertained a few friends with a steak roast on the grill.

Christmas eve can never rival the joyful anticipation I feel on July 3rd. This morning’s sunrise was spectacular to begin the 24 hour count-down to the main event. Despite the old adage, we had nothing to fear from the evening’s weather. The weather was lovely all day long.

“Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.” Pffft.

I spent the day reading, sewing and playing tennis with my family. It was perfect together time!

I’m developing a quilt to make for my room mate’s daughter and her small family. She requested yellows and grays to match her living room decor. I created a sample square today. I hope to buy the fabric for the complete quilt when I visit Cindy in Ohio next week. I can’t wait to hit the shops with her!

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Tomorrow’s the big day. I hope you have a glorious 4th of July. Let the “skyworks” begin!

Machine Quilting Woes

September 22, 201610 Comments

I’ve really tried to like quilting on my sewing machine but am having a very troublesome time of it, woe is me!

In my post on August 11, 2016 , I mentioned I was making a sewing machine cover for my mom’s sewing machine. Well, here is the final result. I had a lot of fun planning and piecing this cover, figuring out the necessary dimensions and even sewing it together…but the machine quilting part, not so much! It looks good from a distance.

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We are honing in on a closer view and it still looks reasonable…but wait! There’s more!

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When I started the machine quilting, I made a valiant attempt to do meandering loops, but things quickly turned on me!

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This is just one hot mess of quilting loops and jagged sewing lines. My stitches are less than even because I was dragging the quilt sandwich around with my feed dogs down…talk about downward dog (oops thinking ahead to my yoga class tonight!). I digress…

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I even thought I would try the meandering stitch on my machine (note white in upper right and lower left pinwheel in photo below). I quickly realized this wasn’t a good solution but I wasn’t willing to give up! I kept making jagged loops and lines until I was done. Finally, I resorted to a decorative zigzag stitch to hem this sewing machine cover and bring my woeful attempt at machine quilting to completion.

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I know I’ll try again this again someday but wonder if I should just stick to straight lines?

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!