Happy Valentine’s Day….

Happy Valentine’s Day to all of my valentine’s.

I used to love Valentine’s Day when I was little. We would dig into our mother’s package of paper doilies and pull out all of the pink and red construction paper and decorate our shoe boxes. We would cut out hearts with our little silver child safe scissors and glue all of the hearts and doilies to the shoe box that we had saved from the start of school (when we got our new shoes). We would have our mother slice a slit in the top so that all of our classmates could give us a valentine. There was always a party with fruit punch and cupcakes decorated with pink frosting with sprinkles. I remember Valentine’s Day being one of my favorite school days.

I am sure that this would all be politically incorrect these days and children are probably not allowed to participate in a party like this lest someone’s feeling will be hurt. So sad that the powers that be can’t let children just be children any more.

Years ago my darling daughter made me this lovely little heart pin. I still wear it every year on Valentine’s Day. I am wearing it now.

Especially handmade by Elizabeth for her Mom.

My Valentine gave me this lovely orchid for Valentine’s Day. I have several other Orchids in various stages on bloom. One that my children gave me is blooming for the third time. They are amazingly easy to care for and so beautiful to have in my home.

For those of you who don’t realize it today is also Ferris Wheel Day.

I always loved the Ferris Wheel when I went to a fair or carnival. I especially loved it when it would stop at the top and you could look out over the entire fair.

So have a very happy Valentine’s day and try to remember the last time you were on a Ferris Wheel – maybe it was with your special Valentine.

Be Kind…

Faith

The Best Laid Plans….OOPS!

Feb4

So, the beginning of the oops started with purchasing a new sewing machine last week. My goal over the weekend was to totally straighten up all of my scraps so that I could sew, sew, sew with no guilt. As I was pulling scraps out of the many containers of scraps I started to remember – “Oh I made Elizabeth a jumpsuit out of that fabric”, “I used this in the quilts that I made when we were furnishing our first condo in Maine”, the list goes on and on. I was getting nostalgic, so of course I needed to sew.

I pulled out my Accuquilt Go http://www.accuquilt.com/ and started to cut different shaped hearts.

Accuquilt Go

I was using my scraps. No yardage was cut in the making of these table runners.

Work in Progress

I happened to take a quick picture of my work in progress to send to Elizabeth –she of course loved it so I offered to make one for her as well. I worked on these all weekend – finishing the last stitch just as the Super Bowl was ending.

Back to the new sewing machine, I purchased a new Janome Memory Craft 7700 QCP http://janome.com/.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my vintage machines and I will continue to use them but this new machine is a gem. My old Bernina 1230 is still chugging along and doing well but it has a very narrow throat 6”, very difficult to put a quilt through that narrow space. The new machine has an 11” throat. Wonderful! It also has many other features that make quilting a larger quilt much easier. It is really the reason that I bought the machine. So I had to give these new features a try. What fun I had and these 2 table runners are the first of many projects that this machine will help me create.

I used an applique buttonhole stitch to sew the hearts on and the free motion quilting feature to quilt the runners. I will not win any awards for these pieces but there is a learning curve and these are sort of my practice runs. I thought why use a bunch of scraps and thread to just practice – why not make something?

Of course I still have 3 baskets full of scraps and my closet still needs to be straightened out but I had a great time making these. So I will continue to sort scraps and straighten closets until another creative surge hits and then I will stop and sew, sew, sew.

Be Kind….

Faith

Super Bowl Weekend Plans….

Feb1

So I would classify myself as a pretty big football fan. I usually am very excited about the Super Bowl games but this year not so much. I won’t get into all of the reasons why I don’t want the Ravens to win or the reasons why I do want the 49ers to win but I will not be glued to the TV all day on Sunday waiting for the “Big Game” to begin.

OLDEST BIN

Instead I will be sorting. I have way more bins of fabric than I have room to store them. I am going to sort through the scraps that I have been saving for close to 25 years and slice and dice until I have nice neat piles of strips and bricks of fabrics.

LOTS OF MEMORIES HERE

I know that this project will be a walk to memory lane. I can see just by looking at the fabrics in the baskets that there are fabrics from quilts that I made when my children were babies. Many of these scraps of fabrics are from clothes that I made for both of them over the years. It will be a lot of fun to look at all of these fabrics but what will be even more fun will be the bags of fabric that are ready to be made into new quilts. No $ spent and laundry baskets of jumbles of fabric emptied. How great is that!

MORE!!!!!

I have a storage container with 3 drawers in it that fits very nicely under my sewing table and a box of 2 gallon zip lock bags ready to be filled with slices of fabric. My plan is to cut 3 ½”, 2 ½” and 1 ½” strips when I can. I am going to cut 1 ½”, 2 ½” squares, 5” blocks. I am going to cut a variety of bricks 2 ½” x 3 ½”, 2 ½” x 4 ½”, 3 ½” x 4 ½” and possibly 4 ½” x 6 ½”. These are all sizes of fabrics that can be combined easily with strips to use in quilt tops. I will then sort them by colors, not to fussy but general sorting.

Where most of it will end up

I am looking forward to getting all of this organized. I have been trying to use more of my scraps lately just to add some zip to my quilts and to also use up fabrics that have been sitting around for years. If I have an organized way to get at the scraps it will make my job that much easier. All of this organizing has been inspired by Bonnie Hunter – you can see Bonnie’s tips on this here – http://quiltville.blogspot.com/2005/06/scrap-users-system.html. Check it out – she has loads of clever ways to get your scraps controlled.

I am really excited about this. Ok call me crazy for being excited about something as mundane as sorting and cutting fabrics, but I know that in the end the reward will be great! So wish me luck and I will show you the results when I am done.

Enjoy the weekend and the game. Remember to do everything in moderation, eating and drinking.

Be Kind….

Faith

Unexpected treasures….

Jan30

1860’s Civil War Quilt made in Hopkinton, MA

You just never know where you will find a treasure. I have a very friendly relationship with the Postmaster at the nearby Post Office. It is a little Post Office that thankfully is not going to close – it is only having its hours cut. It is amazing how much people in little towns depend upon their PO’s. It is sort of like the village center – especially when you live in areas that are full of people in the summer and little bit empty in winter. That is in no way a complaint! We have a wonderful little community here in Biddeford Pool, we have an active community club that has loads of activities all winter long to keep us all in touch. No Cabin Fever here.

But I digress….back to the topic of this post. A Civil War quilt from the 1860’s!!!!! Terry – the Postmaster – brought this amazing record of American History for me to see today. It was made by someone in his family in the Boston area in commemoration of the soldiers in the war. It seems to have been made by one person. All of the names and towns appear to be written by the same person.

Boston, MA

close up of signatures

Stars in the corner

tells where the man was killed

The quilt doesn’t have any batting in it. It has been very lightly quilted and it clearly has been well taken care of because it is in remarkable condition. It is stored properly in a archival box wrapped with acid free paper.

I am amazed by this quilt – I don’t know very much about it but I am thrilled that Terry shared it with me. I of course, would love to have spent hours looking at it. I would love to know about the maker of the quilter and her history, why she felt compelled to make this quilt. Was it a quilt made by a group or just a single person? So many unanswered questions. It such a wonderful treat to see this quilt up close and comfortable. Thank you Terry.

This is part of the reason that we quilters quilt. To leave something behind, to be creative, to keep our families and friends warm with something substantial and creative, something from our hearts and hands. Quilts remember when the maker is long gone. They hold the memories of happiness and tragedy, of new beginnings and lost loves. Quilters quilt when they are happy, when they are mourning, when they are expecting new things in their lives. Most quilters these days quilt as a creative outlet – years ago many women quilted out of necessity. They needed to keep their loved ones warm. No matter the reason it is wonderful to see a quilt that has documented a very sad time in our nation’s history and is still here to remind us of it.

Be Kind…..

Faith

Braised Beef Short Ribs…

Jan20

It is a warm, windy day today…. but tomorrow it is supposed to be very cold. Joe this recipe is for you. Let me know how you like it.

Lots of playoff football on later today, and my dinner is simmering on the stove. It is a wonderful pot of Braised Beef Short Ribs. It is a variation of a Mario Batali recipe from his Molto Italiano cookbook. I love his cookbooks and use his recipes or a variation of his recipes a lot.

This recipe starts with a Basic Tomato Sauce. I use this sauce for a multitude of different meals. I use it for Eggplant or Chicken Parmigiano; I use it as my go to marinara sauce. It is easy quick and delicious and I always have the ingredients.

Basic Tomato Sauce:

¼ cup olive oil

1 Spanish onion, ¼” dice

4 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced

3 Tablespoons of fresh thyme

½ medium carrot, finely shredded

2 28 oz. cans of whole tomatoes – I prefer San Marzano tomatoes

Salt

In a 3 qt. saucepan, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add onion and garlic, cook until soft and light golden. And thyme and carrot and cook until tender
Add tomatoes, with juices – (I crush them with my fingers prior to adding) Bring to boil and then simmer for 30 mins.
Season with salt.

Be careful when you shred the carrots – watch out for your knuckles, I tend to shred mine. Ouch! Whenever I read to slice garlic thinly I think of the movie Good Fellows where they slice the garlic with a razor. No need to slice it that thinly but the thinner the better because it will practically dissolve in the sauce.

The next step is the ribs… These are wonderful and easy to make.

Braised Beef Short Ribs:

6 tablespoons olive oil

4-5 lbs. beef short ribs bone in

Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper

2 large Spanish onions ½” dice

1 medium carrot ½” slice

2 ribs celery ½” slice

4 oz. diced pancetta

2 cups dry red wine – I used a Malbec this time

2 cups of the Basic Tomato sauce above

In a large Dutch oven heat oil over high heat until smoking. Season meat with salt and pepper. Working in batches brown all the meat until dark golden brown – 10-12 mins. per batch. Transfer to platter and set aside.
Pour excess oil out of pan. Add sliced and dice veggies and pancetta and cook until tender.
And wine and tomato sauce. Bring to a boil.
Add meat and bring back to boil. Cover and cook until meat is tender – 4-5 hours. Transfer to platter.
Bring cooking liquid to a boil and reduce to 2 ½ cups. Season with salt and pepper and pour over meat. Serve immediately.

I am serving this with Roasted Garlic mashed potatoes, a salad and warm crusty bread, and of course the rest of the Malbec that I used to braise the meat.

Enjoy the football games and what ever delicious meal you are making.

Be Kind….

Faith

Chicken Barley Soup –

Jan17

What a beautiful morning it is here today!! It is a bit chilly but the sun is shining so brightly and the snow is so pristine. The perfect day for a big bowl of soup and piece of homemade bread.

Chuck was out of town last night and I hate to have a driveway covered with snow – so I dragged the snowblower out and got the driveway and sidewalk cleaned up. Thank goodness the snowblower is self propelled, it is so heavy that I never would be able to push it around with out that feature.

Chicken Barley Soup

Chicken Barley Soup

4 bone in Chicken Breast

1 large onion – chopped

2-3 large carrots peeled and sliced

2 stalks of celery – diced

2 cups baby spinach rinsed and chopped

1 28 oz can chopped tomatoes

1 28 oz can whole tomatoes crushed in your hands

2 quarts Swanson Chicken Broth

2 cloves garlic minced

2 cans Small white beans – optional

½ cup chopped fresh parsley

1 ½ cup pearl barley – rinsed

olive oil

Kosher salt

Fresh ground pepper

Preheat oven to 350 degrees –

Coat Chicken breast with olive oil – sprinkle with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper.

Place in roasting pan skin side up and roast for 45 mins or until done.

Heat oil in large stock pot – add onions, celery and garlic. Cook until soft. Be careful to not let the garlic burn – it will get very bitter.

Add carrots – sauté until they are softened

Add chicken broth, both cans of tomatoes, chopped spinach.

Once the chicken is cooked – let it cool a bit then cut it off the bone and dice into 1” pieces. You can also shred it if you prefer shredded chicken in your soup.

Add barley – bring to boil. You made need to add a bit more broth or water after barley is cooked – it absorbs a lot of the liquid.

Add rinsed beans and chopped parsley. Add salt and pepper to your taste.

ENJOY!

Winter is so beautiful! I love the snow on the tree limbs.

Enjoy the view from your window if you are somewhere that is covered in snow. The view from my window is sparkling. Stay warm.

Be kind…..

Faith

EASY STREET almost done..

Jan11

Gracie likes it!

EASY STREET Almost done…..

I have to say that I have really enjoyed this Mystery Challenge and I will look forward to next November when we can start another one. I am truly amazed that I have almost completed a quilt top in less than 2 months during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. Of course I have been a woman with a mission! I wanted to be able to link up to Bonnie’s Easy Street Page http://www.quiltville.blogspot.com/p/easy-street-mystery.html every week so that meant that I had to keep up. That is a pretty good motivator. Plus I couldn’t wait to see and start the next step. Bonnie did a fabulous job keeping us all guessing.

It will fit this bed perfectly!

I went to a LQS yesterday – http://www.sanfordsewing.com/. There was a 25% off sale on ALL fabrics so I splurged and bought some for the borders, binding and backing. I didn’t really have any good choices in my stash for the backing – I am still deciding on the borders. These are the fabrics that I bought for the borders. I love them and they may work beautifully but I am still deciding.

border fabrics

I will use the fabrics that I bought one way or another because I love them. I have found that it is fun to take pictures of the edge of the quilt with different choices of borders. It makes the quilt look so different to see it through the lens of a camera.

border fabric audition

Thank you Bonnie Hunter http://www.quiltville.blogspot.com/ for sharing all of your wonderful talents, for sharing this fabulous quilt with us all. I am definitely going to be making this quilt again with different colors. The stars in this quilt are just screaming at me to be made in Christmas colors, who knows, someone may get it as a present next year.

I will be putting the borders on this weekend and bringing it to my longarm quilter next week. I can’t wait to see it completed. This has been a wonderful learning experience for this quilter.

Keep pushing your imagination – keep trying new things. I have been quilting for over 30 years and I have never made a quilt that is this “Funky” before. It has stretched my use of colors and taught me several new, quicker techniques. So you can teach this “oldish” dog new tricks. Remember to have fun and sometimes just let it fly!

Be Kind….

Faith

The New Year…..

Jan10

So it is January 2013. I don’t know about you but I am having a difficult time figuring out where 2012 went. Phew that was a fast year. For me it was a good year. I got alot of quilty things completed. I designed and made a wallhanging without using a pattern. It was great fun and it was very satisfying to look at a quilt and know that I had created it start to finish. No patterns, no one elses idea just changed to suit yourself, just a quilt made from your own imagination. I think that as artists and quilters we need to trust ourselves more often. Take a risk, go with your gut and let it fly.

This is a picture of the work in progress.

in the garden

I assembled the background by paper piecing different log cabin blocks. The blocks were 6 1/2″ with a 6″ finished size. My vision was to have it look like a landscape. The top is the sky and the bottom is the ground. I am very happy with the way it turned out. The stems are biased cut tubes that I first stitched down on the machine then flipped and hand appliqued down. Some of the flowers are English Paper Pieced grandmothers flowers – they were hand pieced and the hand appliqued onto the top. The rest of the flowers are yo-yo’s, which are then hand appliqued to the top. The leaves are also hand appliqued to the top. I really love doing hand work, so this was a lot of fun to work on.

I added the borders – I loved this blue for the border. It just seems to tie the quilt together.

in the garden

The back of the quilt was also pieced. I had gotten all of the members of our quilt group to sign peices of fabric and then I peiced them all together to assemble the back.

This was a gift for the out going President of our Quilt Guild. She is a gardener, she had just finished her quilt studio and I am proud to say that this hangs on the wall of her studio.

The recipient of the Quilt

So go for it – start the new year with a project that you have created yourself. If you are worried that you will not like it start with a small piece. Make a pillow or a table runner. Pull out the fabrics and go for it. You will be amazed what you can do.

The most important thing is to enjoy yourself. Don’t be your own worst critic – give yourself a break and get rid of the self doubt.

Have a wonderful January day. The sun is shining here and it is really rather warm. The perfect day to imagine your garden.

Be Kind…

Faith

Happy New Year….

Jan2

Home

Happy New Year…

It is so hard to believe it is the year 2013. When people tell you that the older you get the faster time goes by they are sadly correct.

The Christmas tree has been taken down – the decorations have been packed away for another year and the memories a tucked safely into my heart to pull out whenever I need to smile.

So did you make a list of New Year’s resolutions? I did not – I don’t want to disappoint myself. There are some changes that I want to make but they are not necessarily things that I need to share. They are more things that I will work on changing to make myself happier.

I have started a sort of gratitude journal – I had read about it in an Oprah magazine. No groaning – I don’t usually put much stock in Oprah-isms but this one sort of hit me. She mentioned that she started to write down things – things that she was thankful for.

So I have started to do that – every day or two I write down something that I am thankful for – some days it is something as simple as the love I feel from my family – or the fact that the sun is shining. When you actually stop to think about your life you usually don’t have to think for too long to realize that you have something to be thankful for. So one of the resolutions that I will share, is to take the time to be thankful and to write it down to read another day.

Today I am thankful for the beautiful snowy view out my windows –

I am thankful for my warm, snuggy home –

Gracie

I am thankful for the furry chocolate lab that is asleep on my feet. I am always thankful for my wonderful family.

Stop each day and think about what you are thankful for….however simple it may be.
Be thankful and be kind….

Faith

Post Christmas…

Dec27

At the present time there is a Nor-Easter raging outside. It is an ever changing day here, one moment it is raining and the next it is snowing. I do anticipate that we will lose power at some point in time because the winds are really howling. It doesn’t seem to take much to make the power go out these days, and our area is always one of the areas that gets hit with power outages. I am so glad that we had the generator installed. No worries when the power goes out. We have heat, hot water, some lights and my freezer and fridge have power so I don’t lose all of the food in my freezer, I can cook because I have a gas cooktop so we will be just fine.

I have family flying out of Albany, NY today – flight is delayed at this point. Hopefully they will be able to get safely off the ground soon winging their way to sunny Florida.

Island Star for Charlotte

This is a quilt that I made for Charlotte –it is a flannel quilt because Charlotte, like many of the young ladies in our family, is always cold. It is named Island Star. The pattern is from a book written by M’Liss Rae Hawley called More Fat Quarter Quilts.

Island Star Blocks

I didn’t use fat quarters but I did use leftovers and some scraps. I love making flannel quilts but you have to be careful not to use a pattern with too many small pieces. It is hard to get your points sharp when you are using flannel.

Close up of Island Star

Since it is a stormy day here – I will probably work on the next step of Easy Street so that I can share it on Bonnie Hunter’s page later today. I will start planning some new quilts that are bouncing around my head and I will think about dinner tonight. I love to cook hearty meals on snowy days. At this point the plan is Penne ala Vodka and a pork tenderloin. If the power goes off that will probably change since I will not be able to roast the tenderloin.

If you are in the Northeast stay safe and dry.

Be Kind….

Faith

quiltingonthecove

A peek at my life. My quilting, my cooking and a look at the beautiful place that I live!

Archives

Happy Valentine’s Day….

The Best Laid Plans….OOPS!

Super Bowl Weekend Plans….

Unexpected treasures….

Braised Beef Short Ribs…

Chicken Barley Soup –

EASY STREET almost done..

The New Year…..

Happy New Year….

Post Christmas…