just a little change

Hi everyone! I just put a meatloaf in the oven, and oh does it ever smell delicious! There's a reason we call this comfort food.  I made a giant double recipe. This coming week we are expecting snow snow and more snow---so leftover meatloaf is a good thing to have on hand. Tonight we'll have it with baked sweet potatoes and tiny green peas.
Thursday when I went to bed the weather forecast was ''sleet, no accumulation"; I woke up Friday to 12-14" of wet heavy snow, school closings and  snow shovelling. What a shock!

Mo got out before the drifts got too deep.

Overnight we went from this:

to this...

And it seems it didn't snow much in the city so the weather guys kinda pretended it never snowed. So weird, one time a huge fuss, the next, so blase'. Huh. This time I  did not have precooked meals on hand and worried all day as power flickered on and off.
Of course snow days are lovely sewing sewing days.

I got this doll quilt layered up and ready for hand quilting. Its been waiting for me to quilt it for almost a year. I was tired of seeing the backing on my sewing desk. Now it's all set, just in case.

For Pokeberry, I did a bit of the embroidery, whiskers on Kitty, legs on the poor robin.

Because I made the design without contrasting backgrounds on the blocks, I am ending up with some big black bald spots. Oh no! I added a bird here, a few berries there, and in this giant empty area I added a traditional Heart in Hand. Why? I guess because it;'s February and Valentine's Day is soon, I love hearts, and it just appealed to me.

I'm making great progress on PB but at times it gets a little tedious,

...so I treated myself to an hour or so of sorting my Civil War repro fabrics and sewing the first block of BB new quiltalong.

I think this will be interesting and doable with one block a month, I could not begin to make two or three or more Stars in a Time Warp every week, nor do I have a huge stash to make them. [loved the series and learned so much, however]. The new series will be about the pioneers who traveled in their covered wagons, looking for land and fortune in the West.You can read Barbara Brackman's first blog post: here

I find social history, the history of lives and people, especially of women, fascinating. I'm not one to study politics and battlefields but the lives and diaries of real Americans--that touches a chord in me.
Brackman says women did not sew on their quilts as they traveled. I believe many of the pioneers walked all that way! And if they rode in their wagons it was a very rough ride. By the time they walked all day,  pitched camp , cooked and fed everyone, most women probably fell asleep in exhaustion. No sewing! The idea of a lovely summer wagon ride, a prairie dress-ed and sunbonnet-ed young woman on the buckboard, stitching her heirloom quilt is, I suppose, a fantasy worthy of a Disney film.
We'll find out, as Brackman educates us during the coming year.
I decided my blocks will be very scrappy. My pioneer woman has brought her scrap bag and will use every tiny bit, once she settles in her [damp, musty, frigid, buggy]  one room sod house in the middle of nowhere, USA.

Block 1: Independence Square. [Missouri]. The wagon trains began their journeys there.

And I've been studying this Jan Patek booklet I got on eBay a few weeks ago. [yes, I know it's very old, c.1993, but it's new to me]---I love this design, originally named When the Wild Geese Fly. I love this quilt, though I was a bit upset that it is in fact a memorial quilt for a boy who died, so shocking and so sad. I plan to fill the empty square with a pumpkin and give it back its original Wild Geese name.

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I plan to use blue shirtings and homespuns, not brown plaids. Autumn here is very bright blue! With orange wool pumpkins. It will be a low key, low pressure project to pick up when I need a little change of pace. If I get bored with it or can't bear to make 150 Wild Geese blocks, I can always turn the pumpkins into candle mats or a runner. The pumpkins will be machine  stitched, with the wools leftover from It's a Crock; and the blues will mostly be my friend's shirts he shares with me.

What a great sunflower! The shirts are from my friend who grows the gorgeous giant Russian sunflowers, you may recall from last summer.

Fun funny pumpkins.

Love the houses.

                                            

And I didn't take its picture but the turkey is just so cute, see him on the cover, lower left.

You know how I am about finishing! And not having a bunch of random projects floating around. Just the idea makes me anxious. But this is supposed to be a little side project, very casual. It will never become a UFO because it has no finish by date. We'll see how I do with that notion, can I mellow out and relax as I am sometimes urged , annoyingly, to do?

Must go put in the sweeties, I forgot! I wish you could smell the fragrance of my famous Mary Giordano's Special Italian meatloaf, taught to me by a samplemaker/ friend when I first moved to NYC. My mom, bless her heart, was famous for making awful meatloaf---Mary's recipe was a revelation. LOL
What are you cooking tonight?
Have a good weekend!

love

lizzy

gone to the beach...

So pretty. Like whipped cream!