Weekly update: our Christmas gift, the kitchen, Frolic 4 -- and LOG CABINS!

Our Christmas gift to one another was a pair of tickets to today's matinee performance of The Light in the Piazza at the Lyric Opera in Chicago.   Soprano Renee Fleming was magnificent in the starring role. The rest of the cast was great, too.  (Signor Naccarelli was played by Alex Jennings who was the Duke of Windsor in The Crown.)

 The opera house is on the Chicago River (the white stone building on the right). We had not been downtown on a Sunday for many years. The train down and back was pretty full.

Now I'm going to borrow the original novel and try to find the 1962 movie version.

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 Here's the kitchen on Sunday morning.  I put post-its on the cupboard doors so we'll both know what's inside.   I haven't unpacked all the boxes partly because I want to make decisions about keeping things before squirreling rarely-used items into hard-to-access corners. And how much Fiesta do I need to have on display all the time?

The other reason is shelf pegs....You may recall that shelf pegs were the seed for this entire project. (Well, shelf pegs and being tired of the acres and acres of floral wallpaper.)  I read an article by a woman who was waked up in the middle of the night when a kitchen shelf collapsed because the shelf pegs had given way.  I checked the pegs on our shelves and discovered that not only were the shelves hanging on by sheer geometry, but also the cupboard walls were bowing badly due to the heavy weight of dishes on the top shelves. I removed the contents of the top shelves (stored in boxes in the basement).   The carpenter replaced the pegs with metal ones though he had to drill larger holes. Pegs held but wall still bowed. 

The deep hidden corner

The new shelves have plastic pegs that appear to be flimsy.  I went to Lowe's and got metal pegs.  I tried to insert them. Same diameter, fine. But the *length* of the peg is longer.  I asked the carpenter about that. He said that drilling the holes deeper might poke through the cupboard walls. They'd need to look into that and perhaps they'd have to plane the edges of the shelves.  The contractor is coming Monday morning to go over the punch list and I will ask.

 The drawer pulls look assertive, but my husband's arthritic fingers can grab them easily.
There is a pull-out cabinet for the wastebasket but it is in the exact corner where I do most cooking.  I can't stand in front of it when it's pulled out. I will buy a  lidded stainless steel wastebasket to park at the end of the counter (where the white wastebasket is now).  The trash can cabinet will be refitted with pull-out shelves.

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 Here is part 4 of Frolic, the Quiltville mystery. The units are sets of four sewn HSTs and four unsewn QSTs, each set from one blue and one aqua fabric.  I put each set in a sandwich bag to keep them sorted.

I have NO idea how the blocks will be put together!


A few weeks ago I found a pattern for paper-pieced 5" log cabin blocks in AmP&Q.    I didn't want to tear out all that paper so I sewed the blocks conventionally.  The strips were cut 1" and finished at 1/2". That size was not hard to work with. I trimmed each round as I went. I sewed the blocks in fours with a skinny inner sashing and a contrasting outer sashing. (By that time my design had totally deviated from the magazine pattern.) I knew I wanted a busy background. This citrusy print was not the one I originally chose but it provides just the effect I sought:  log cabins floating on a cheerful background.   The flimsy is approx. 68 x 80 and used 9-1/2 yards by weight.

I'm linking up with other bloggers at
 Oh Scrap
Monday Making
Design Wall Monday


P.S.  I culled a few food items as I put things away.