PreTurkey Day preparations

Sophie is at preschool this morning. The boys and I are home doing a little cooking and a little of nothing. I have the boys making their "thankful turkey". One is doing this much more willingly than the other, but the turkey is cute. The less cooperative one with his feathers & sentiments was overly helpful with the mechanical things we pulled from craft drawer for attaching the feet & feathers. I guess all things even out somehow, though I am not sure wat it says about our upbringing when one of the 4 things he is most thankful for reads "I have a good DS"! My younger boy did me proud though...look at the bottom right feather. It reads " We have wrm qillts" (translated "We have warm quilts!").

I made a Pumpkin Pie crunch cake that truly is to die for. I had this last month at the Handi Quilter retreat in Utah, and they gave us the recipe. It's painfully easy, and I can hardly wait for it to cook so we can dig into it. This won't wait until tomorrow! My mom is making pies, so we only need a little of this to bring. Hopefully there will be that much of it left! My house is wafting with this delicious scent. If you are dying to make something that is untraditionally traditional (and I do because pumpkin pie is not my absolute favorite), then here's the recipe.

1-16 oz can pumpkin

3 eggs

1-1/2 C sugar

1/2t salt

1 can evaporated mik

4t pumpkin pie spice

Mix above ingredients together. Pour into greased 9x13 greased pan. Melt 1C butter. Sprinkle 1 yellow or white cake mix over the pumpkin pie mixture. Sprinkle with 1C chopped pecans. Drizzle butter over cake/nut mixture. Bake at 350 for 55-60 minutes. Cool & eat.

Now onto regular programming...

In my spare time (if you know me, you ought to be laughing & choking right now!) I have finished piecing the outer border of this quilt. It is currently 73" square, give or take a little. I was awaiting an order which had the backing fabric and more black, since I ran out last week. I think I may add another 2" of black around the outside to ground the outside of the quilt better. Or maybe not. It's not like it needs to be any larger since I don't really know what I am doing with it anyways! I still have one corner to revisit and modify the squareness a little bit. It has areas because of the heavy piecing that will definitely take a little manipilation while quilting, but I am hopeful that it will quilt well...if only I knew what to do with it!!??!!Here is my other experimental quilt - ha ha. It is smaller, and I don't intend on it growing much. It's maybe 45" square. I had originally thought I'd applique butterflies and or dragonflies onto the corners & center of the quilt to help fill in the background some. I am sort of leaning away from that. I want to bring another color in. It needs a punch - something to awaken the senses. The green & purple are nice, but they are simple & refined. It needed something to bring it to life. Whether or not I have found that is the question of the day! Gold & orange are perfect complimentary colors for both green and purple. I have appliqued some shapes that will resemble a morning glory flower. Now, I know that morning glories are not these colors. I have that issue covered. I did a little research and these look like a nasturtium flower, sort of - or at least in their color selections. They are a low climbing-style flower.

I am on the fence about whether adding these flowers to the applique is the right direction. It needs an accent color, but is this too much? They will obviously have embroidered stems, tendrils, and maybe a few leaves from a brighter green too. The other thing I am planning is to accent the flowers with colored pencils (there is a technique that makes this painting permanent) to make them look like the real flowers, and then small seed beeds will be added to the flower centers. What I did below is an approximation of how it will look. I have ordered a dozen gold, brown and orange pencils and will not get them until next week sometime. The flower will get similar accenting with the quilting, but it needs color deepening and shading as well, which the pencils will provide.

Thoughts? Am I nuts?

Have a good Turkey day!~