A Week In Review

 As all weeks seem to do, this past one flew by. I am now officially working from home permanently and I really like it. As our office only has 9 employees, all but me have worked from home since April and I only work two days a week, our building has become a ghost town. The building lease is up next month and the corporate office decided to permanently close our physical location. Almost all of the staff at offices all over the US, Europe and Australia are working from home, and have been for the best part of 2020. Our company has found that productivity has not suffered in the least, employees are happy, and travel expenses are almost non-existent since very little in person contact is taking place. I am really enjoying the experience of working from home.

My "office" is set up in my sewing room.

I am knitting another pair of socks, I just love the colors. The yarn is by Yarn Bee and called Cozy Toes and the color is Fierce Flame, I found it at Hobby Lobby. 

While visiting my parents in June my Mom gave me this cute little bag she made several years ago. She thought one of the granddaughters would like it. I looked at the cute bag and thought how perfect it would be for small knitting projects, and it has become my sock knitting bag. Sorry granddaughters :).

I am busy hand quilting the wildcat quilt.  My Mom gave me the 7 wildcat blocks she made some time ago and then not knowing what to do with them she put them aside. I played around with the blocks and decided on the colors I wanted to use with them, made 2 more blocks in a similar style to the wildcat blocks, sashed everything together, added a border and binding and like the end result. I have a couple more blocks to quilt and I need to figure out how I want to quilt the sashing, then the project will be complete.

Earlier in the week my dear husband brought me a dozen red roses for no reason at all, isn't that the best reason to get beautiful flowers. 

We continue to get melons from the garden, the watermelons are small but mighty good. So juicy, so sweet, so delicious! I have enjoyed a lot of melon this week. Earlier in the week I made my usual vegan bowl of goodness for lunch, I thought it looked especially pretty with the dark green of the kale, the vibrant orange of the sweet potato, and the deep, deep red of the beets. I like to mix my cooked lentils and diced tomatoes together with some nutritional yeast, smoked paprika, tumeric, lemon pepper salt, and lime juice, then I add all of my steamed veggies mix it up bit and enjoy.

Yesterday we finished up the week with a wedding, Dave's nephew Alan married his bride Stephanie. We went to the marriage ceremony, held at the County Court House, but due to Covid decided we would not attend the reception. When we returned home Dave went upstairs to change his clothes, he only changed his dress pants for a pair of shorts. I laughed when he walked into the kitchen, I told him he really looked like an old man with that kind of dress sense, LOL. 

Earlier in the week a friend messaged me with questions about canning food and what kind of canner should she buy, we message back and forth for a bit and then I remembered my Ball Blue Canning Book. I took a picture of the book and recommended that she purchase a copy, it is very inexpensive, I think I paid $4 for mine, but that was a good number of years ago. If you are new to canning, the book gives very good step by step directions to get you going, and if you are an experienced canner there are recipes for pretty much anything you could ever imagine canning.

Well that is a little bit about my past week, I hope you had a good week too.

Bean

An Enjoyable Weekend

This weekend our grandson Masen hung out with grandma and grandpa. On Sunday I took Masen on a bike ride, he rode about six miles, which I think is pretty good for a little guy who just turned five in July. 

 

A few scenic pics from our bike ride, and Masen trying out the giant Adirondack chair in front of the Grabill Dairy Sweet.

After our bike ride we went home. Grandpa made chicken strips for Sunday dinner, Amber and the boys joined us. Amber brought corn from her garden, and a greek salad, and I added a couple bags of potato chips and some cut up melon completed the meal. I feasted on melon. The Honeydew melon was divine. After dinner Aunt Amber gave Masen a haircut. I was amused by his before and after pictures.

Below is picture of a pretty cloud I saw while out walking early Sunday morning. The sky was very overcast except for a little break in grayness that revealed a white puffy cloud reflecting the morning sunlight.

A very silly headline I saw while waiting in the check out lane at Walmart. "7 Ways To Calm Your Pet's Covid-19 Anxiety", Seriously!!!

Bounty from the garden. Our very first canteloupe from our garden. Some lovely cucumber from our daughter Amber's garden, and luscious tomato from our garden along with some delightful green pepper. I enjoyed some cut up veggies with a little scrambled tofu for lunch, it was perfection.

And another quilt update. I have finished the border and am pleased with how it really finishes off the quilt top. I purchased green fabric for the backing, and blue fabric to make the binding along with a king size natural cotton batting. This evening I will seam the backing together and then layer the backing, batting and top and safety pin the layers together to hold everything in place. Next step will be to make the binding and put it on. Once the binding is added I can begin hand quilting, I purchased a golden-yellow thread to quilt with.

Mask Making

 Recently a mask making tutorial displayed in my YouTube feed. I watched the video and really liked the pattern, it appeared easy to make and looked like a comfortable mask to wear.  Here is the link to the tutorial. 

A brown paper bag provided good sturdy paper to make the pattern. And I picked up a few fat quarters of fabric so  I could have a variety of cotton fabrics to use.

I made a whole bunch of masks for our daughter Emily. She is training to become a paramedic and is spending hours and hours doing clinical training and has to wear a mask the whole time. Now she will always have a few extra clean ones available.

In the video tutorial the lady uses little clips to hold the binding in place. I asked my mom if she has ever used them, she said she has a box of the clips and uses them occasionally. Yesterday a package arrived in our mailbox from Amazon, Mom had ordered me a box of 100 clips. Thank you Mom!

Here is my husband humoring me by modeling one of the newly made masks.

 I was amused the other day when grandson Patrick drew a picture of a Lego character wearing a mask. A sign of the times we are living through.

Quick Quilt Update

I finished piecing the quilt top together and am now working on the outer border. I think this weekend I will be ready to buy batting and the fabric for the backing and binding. 

Thirded Bread

 I mentioned in my last post that I was going to make Thirded bread, and I did. I really liked it, there is a lot of molasses in the recipe and it gives the bread a wonderful flavor and color. There are only a handful of ingredients in the recipe, water, yeast, molasses, wheat bread flour, rye flour, and coarsely ground cornmeal. 

Here is the dough once everything is mixed together, it is a clumpy, sticky clod.

Here is a picture of the dough after ten or so minutes of kneading and one hour rise time.

Below the dough is rising in the bread pan, after a one hour rise it is ready to bake.

After nearly one hour of baking the loaf is done. Henry and Patrick were excited to try some of the bread, unfortunately they did not appreciate the strong molasses overtones.

A really enjoy the heel of the loaf, the best part in my humble opinion, I put a little bit of vegan spread on it and I really, really enjoyed my afternoon snack.

Around the Home and Garden

Gardening

Update on our garden. We have some very well fed ground hogs!! One garden does not have a fence around it and the ground hogs think it is their own personal dinner buffet. So, I have only managed to get one cucumber, all others had big bites taken out of them. The sunflowers, kale, beets, green beans and broccoli were all eaten by the ground hogs as they emerged from the soil. For the most part the watermelon and canteloupe plants have not been touched by the ground hogs and the melons are growing well. The other garden is fenced, I am really enjoying the abundance of fresh tomatoes, and I don't think a day goes by that I don't eat one or two of them. The green peppers are doing really well and I eat at least one a day. The potatoes are probably ready to dig up now. The kale in this garden grew well, I cut a bunch off and enjoyed it, went out a day or two later to cut more and all of it was eaten by caterpillars and basically resembled lace, more holes than leaf. But as they say, there is always next year.

Ground hogs don't like Zinnia, thank goodness, they are one of my most favorite flowers, so colorful.

My beautiful kale a day or two before the great caterpillar invasion of 2020.

Yummy, delicious green peppers.

I spy with my little eye a watermelon.

The tomato plants a little earlier this year. Oh there is nothing like a fresh picked tomato, still warm from the sunshine, truly heavenly.

Baking

I have baked bread recently, something I used to do all of the time, and now feel it is a habit I should get back into. I was pleased with my recent batch, a basic white bread recipe but I used a few cups of whole-wheat flour mixed in with the white bread flour. 

I am going to make a Thirded Bread, I had never heard of this type of bread until reading a recent blog post over at Affectioknit. I googled Thirded bread and found a recipe here and am going to give it a try.  It is always fun to try new things. I picked up some rye flour and coarsely ground cornmeal yesterday as they were the only ingredients I did not have in the house.  In the fall I am going to try the recipe from affectioknit which is similar to a Boston Brown Bread.

Sewing

 I have made many, many face masks for the family. Alivia and Aubrey really liked their cute little kitten masks. I have since found a new pattern that I really like and now use exclusively for mask making, you can find it here.  I will say the video is a bit like watching paint dry, but it is best to watch it through two or three times. I made the pattern with sturdy paper from a brown paper bag. I purchased an 18 yard roll of 1/4 inch elastic online and between fabric in my stash and the purchase of a few fun fat quarters I am set to make masks for quite some time.

 

Alivia modeling her mask.

Aubrey modeling her mask.

 

 And finally, another Zinnia, this one just coming into it's own.

QUILTING, QUILTING, QUILTING

 WOW! I love putting a quilt together! My mom and I were talking yesterday about how a quilt changes with each step of assembly. I am really enjoying my latest quilt project, although I am a little daunted by the amount of hand quilting I have in my future. On the plus side, think how warm and cozy I will be this winter as I sit in my arm chair quilting away. 

I added an additional row to each side of this quilt to make the finished size 102" x 92", making it a coverlet size for a king size bed.

I had to satisfy my curiosity about assembly of the quilt as soon as I finished a few blocks. I always do this when I make a quilt.

More and more blocks, I made all of the house blocks first.

Next I made all of the rectangle tree blocks.

Then I laid the blocks out to get an idea of the size and look of the quilt. (Procrastinating the start of the pointy trees).

Finally the pointy tree blocks are done and I could again mess around with block placement.

Bottom three rows assembled and pressed. I am feeling really good about the way this quilt is coming together.