Still Standing

Since the last time I updated, we have had some repairs done to the Manse. The carpenter looked at the steps and said, "Hmmm...You have some real structural problems here." Ooohhh! The house in question is over 100 years old and beloved husband collects oak furniture and books. See .

These are the books in one corner of the attic, I do not mention the books near the upstairs bath (mostly because those are my knitting and sewing books), the 800 plus cookbooks in the kitchen and dining room, the Jewish collection in the front hallway, or the history/literature/poetry books in the living room. I haven't even looked at the books in the children's rooms. As a result we are going to have to get rid of about one-third of the books in the house. I have already gone through the sewing room and reduced the clutter in there by one-quarter so there will be a huge lawn sale chez Gordon shortly after Mother's Day. Beloved husband (Bob) believes that most of his books should go on E-Bay. I will wait while you laugh.......Yes, I agree, some of his books should indeed go on E-Bay but the end result must be to de-aquisition, not to make scads of bucks (though that would certainly help pay for the above mentioned repairs).

PS Carpenter Guy says if we lighten the load on the house, all should be fine.

To cheer me up I made this:

Eventually, it will be a quilt for the new baby in the family. I am also knitting socks, but that is a story for another day.

Less sewing, More food!

Lately I seem to be getting involved in non-sewing/knitting things. I am working on Valentine's socks, but slowly. The name of the blog is Needle(for sewing etc)Tart( for cooking). Saturday was a little slow on the sitting-in-front-of-the-TV-sewing-stuff front, so I cooked. The caramel cookies from the most recent Bon Appitit were less than stunning. A cookie only makes it into the family cookbook if we devour the whole batch in one day. The caramel cookies were OK, but lacked that certain something that makes things so addictive.

On the other hand: The Chai/Pear muffins were a great success! Start with a basic muffin recipe...Oh, you need a little more help? Here:
Chai/Pear Muffins

2 cups flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 package dry Chai tea mix(I used Pacific Chai)

Mix all the dry stuff in a largish bowl.

1 can fruit juice packed pears
Drain the juice (don't use one of those cute little drainers. The pear pieces will just plug it up) and save it.
Chop the pears up and toss them with the flour mix.

Juice from the can of pears and enough milk to make one (1) cup
2 eggs
1 Tablespoon vanilla
3 Tablespoons canola oil

Mix all the wet stuff together and add to the dry stuff. Mix until there are no big bunches of dry stuff. Place in 12 lined muffin cups, filling about half way. If you would like, sprinkle the tops with raw sugar or cinnamon sugar.
Bake at 375 degrees for about 20 minutes.

Sit down with a cup of tea and some muffins and knit or sew.

Solution in sight

I talked to "the Guy" at a local camera store and his take on the whole picture/blog thing is that EasyShare was not meant for people who want to play around with the images. Editing - fine. Printing - fine. Saving - fine. Moving image from camera to blog - not so fine. His advice to remove EasyShare and use another photo software. As there are at least 3 different programs on the main computer there should be something I can use. Someday I will have time to fix all this stuff and get just as smooth as all the other great bl0gs I have seen out there. Thanks to all for the inspiration (*whispers*)Now how do I get more than 6 hours sleep and still get everything done?

Too Much Time

With the Olympics over I find I am ready to start a whole bunch of new projects. Let's see if i can show you what I am up to.

This is the fabric for Niece Cherise's quilt for the new baby (due sometime in March or April). Note the big red holes. These are caused by "fussy cutting". You don't measure the squares so much as you figure out what you want to show in the quilt piece and then you cut the picture out. Takes a whole lot more fabric, but can be really interesting in the final quilt. I once cut out animal texture for a Noah's Ark quilt for Number One Great-Nephew.

Once again I am having trouble posting pictures for you. If someone who uses blogger can give me some help, here is the problem: Every time I add a picture to the blog I get thrown off line. We have broadband, I use Kodak picture software (Let's no go into moving from Kodak to a folder I can actually access), and if I try to add another picture to this post I will get nowhere at all. Thanks.