Weekly update: Thanksgiving, fall hiking, a flimsy and a start-and-finish....plus a great book

 
We enjoyed a quiet, two-of-us Thanksgiving.  I got a 21-lb. turkey for .29/lb. It was easy to spend the additional $30 the supermarket required.    I made pot pie this evening (Sunday) and froze the rest of the turkey. 

We love the tang/sweet/onion taste of Mama Stamberg's Cranberry Relish .  

I cooked down the Halloween pumpkins to provide the chief ingredient for dessert (and several desserts to come).  

I always make a loaf of cranberry bread using the recipe from Cranberry Thanksgiving by Wende and Harry Devlin. The well-used photocopy dates from the 1970's when I read the book to the story hour kids at the library.   [This year rather than using orange juice and a teaspoon of orange peel I ground up an entire orange, rind and all.  That added moistness and good orange flavor.]

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It was so good to have lunch with my friend and ALA roommate Pat on Tuesday!  She lives in a retirement community in a western suburb, about 60 miles away.  We chat often but we hadn't visited in person since 2019. 

Closer to home Stevens and I enjoyed an outing to Illinois Beach State Park and to Lyons Woods Forest Preserve.  

Top right:  motherwort (a last burst of growth before winter?); center: mullein; bottom left:  multiflora (Japanese) rose hips.

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In the studio:  I discovered a piecing error in one of the columns of the CW repro nine-patch I wrote about last week.  I didn't have enough of the neutral setting fabric to remedy the error so I just eliminated the entire column. 

I took four nine-patches out of that column and used them in the corners.  

One of American Patchwork and Quilting's emails this week announced a giveaway + sew along.  Entries post on their FB page go into a giveaway. The fine print says, "Your quilt and the content of your entry post will not be judged."  I read that AFTER I'd pulled fabric and begun sewing

BUT  I have finished the quilt!  The pattern is Positive Effect by Amanda Niederhauser.  The original had a lot of light fabrics with cream linen sashing.  I entered the giveaway and who knows? Maybe I'll win. 

My version is bright!  

I dipped into the bin of brights that were so popular 15+  years ago.  The sashing has yellow, hot pink, orange, olive, and dark teal butterflies on dark orange. I found out that  cross-cutting that print meant resulted in couple of rows of   mostly dark teal--really jarring. To avoid that I fussy-cut the sashing to distribute the colors better.  

The back incorporates the leftover blocks with almost all (but, darn it, not completely all) of a few other prints.  

It's quilted and bound -- 6-1/2 yards in all. 

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If you'd like a feel-good, cheerer-upper of a book I recommend this one!

The Calder sisters were never close. Not only were they five years apart in age, but they also had very different ambitions. Edith married Stanley Magnusson right after high school. They raised two children in their hometown where she worked in the nursing home kitchen and gained renown for her pie-baking.  Helen went off to Macalester, majored in chemistry, and married Orval Blotz, the scion of a regional beer brewing family. When Helen inherited the family farm (and sold it to finance the revived beer business), Edith quit speaking to her. They were estranged for decades. Ironically Edith's granddaughter Diana discovered a talent for craft beer-brewing. Once again Edith and Helen's paths cross, with Diana as a bridge. It's a Midwestern family story with humor and heart.  

Linking up with  Monday Making,  Oh Scrap, and  Design Wall Monday.   Tune in tomorrow for my One Monthly Goal summary and the Stash Report.