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I’m back!

I took a little not-really-planned hiatus from the blog for a couple of weeks, but now I’m back.  Plenty has been happening, but I haven’t really had the energy to write about it.  I’ll try to hit the highlights for ya–lots of pics ahead!

  1.  First, and most important, my mother’s carpet has been replaced!

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Just to recap:  my mother’s quite elderly cat died recently, so it was time to replace the carpet in most of my mother’s house and, hopefully, get rid of the smell the cat had left behind.  This involved packing up 20 years of my mother’s junk (I’ll just say that she does not throw things away, and let you imagine what that means over 20 years), completely emptying the worst room so the subfloor could be replaced, emptying the rest of the rooms, replacing the carpet over two days, then putting everything back.

2.  The day we moved all the furniture back in happened to be Small Business Saturday, so I got myself a little reward for all my hard work:  fabric remnants on sale at SCRAP Tri-Cities.

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You have never seen anyone get so excited about fabric scraps in your life.

I am such a dork.

3.  Thanksgiving happened in the middle of all this contractors-and-cat-pee madness.  My honey and I went to the local buffet, as usual, and ate too much, then took a walk along the river.  Cold, but sunny, day.

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A good effort, considering how little raw material there was to work with.

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4.  Winter arrived suddenly, with cold, cold temps and a little snow, so I’m getting back into cold-weather cooking.  This meal was so good, I made it twice in one week:  roasted potatoes on left, chicken sausage and roasted veg on the right.

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5.  I finished the Cozy Afternoon runner, and in time to enter it in the contest!  The process of finishing it felt like such a hard, slow slog, but getting it done gave me such a boost.

ETA:  this is finish #3 for the 2015 Finish-Along.

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The Quilt As You Go method that I used on this was such a big help; I will definitely use that again.  There are different ways to do it, but the method I chose (one of four from the book “Divide and Conquer”) basically involves leaving an unquilted border around your sections, then sewing together just the edges of the top.  Press open, then butt the batting edges and hand sew.  Finish by folding under the raw edge of the backing and blind-stitching it down; then you can finish up your quilting.

I’m really enjoying having this on my table.

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6.  I put the Christmas tree up over Thanksgiving weekend and the cats are having such fun with it.  Every morning I put all the ornaments back on the bottom third of the tree and every night they pull them off and bat them around.

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7.  I had a moment of geekery on Friday and had to whip this up.

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I had a bit of garam masala and a bit of pumpkin pie spice, so I used a combination and I really liked it, but my honey found it reminded him a little too much of curry.  If you make it, try a different glaze recipe, as the proportions are off and the glaze doesn’t work as written; also, this thing is HUGE, so consider making a half recipe if you don’t have an army to feed.

Oh, I have more pictures, but that’s enough for one week!  I’m working away at my honey’s wool cycling jacket, so I’ll have an update on that soon, and I also plan to get started on my Willara tunic this week.

Have a great week, everybody, and happy Hannukah to those who celebrate it!

STH

ETA:  I have linked the table runner up to Scraptastic Tuesday over at She Can Quilt.  Thank you to Nicky for reminding me to link to it here!