Eating and sewing...it's that time of year

The leftovers from Christmas are serving us well. I made a terrific turkey matzo ball soup on Monday night (recipe courtesy of a neighbor); on Tuesday, scalloped potatoes and ham with the fabulous ham my dad sends us each Christmas; and tonight we had tamales, courtesy of Maggie. She got together with about five of her work friends in Austin and they made dozens and dozens of them. She brought two dozen home on ice and we polished them off tonight-Yum! We did manage to walk/run for awhile this afternoon, so that may have off-set the caloric count of...one matzo ball...

Maggie got a sewing machine for her birthday and wanted to learn a bit more about the basics of sewing, so we planned a quick project. Yesterday we got some fabric at Home Ec, the wonderful little yarn and fabric store that opened about a year ago. She chose some gorgeous Valori Wells fabric. (Valori was one of my earliest interviews for Quilts and More. She's an avid photographer who had a newish daughter at the time. I loved that she talked about working with her mother, Jean Wells, as a way of honoring all that her mother had done for her over the years. That mother-daughter connection seemed appropriate for our sewing project.)

Maggie added some brown cotton/linen pieces to frame the red print and stitched an envelope back. I made a few measuring errors, but we managed to salvage it so that it will still fit a standard pillow form.


I think I was probably more excited about it than she was. It was all I could do to not take the leftover fabric and stitch another pillow. Maggie kept teasing me about how much I think about making things.



I did finish making one thing last night—
the Sweetie Pie baby quilt in the 30s fabrics mentioned in the previous post. I'm happy with it—but kind of surprised that I felt that it had to be gender specific. Last year I gave a boy baby a quilt that had just a few fuchsia squares and I think it was too much for the traditional parents.