Oh, The Productive Life

 I have been sewing in the studio!!  Pat Sloan offered this little flower in a pot pattern and I decided it would make a great mug rug for the craft table I have recently set up in the great room.  I drew out all the pieces on my fusible and then spent some time picking out fabrics.  I even ironed them all on the wrong side of the fabric, something that does not always happen even though that is the right thing to do.  Just as I finished with the iron I realized that the six little pieces were not supposed to be leaves but petals.  The original plan was for a yellow flower.  Opps!!  Anyway, I now am calling this an art piece.



I quilted the piece using a quilting stitch on my domestic machine: I think it really looks more like chicken tracks than anything else.

 I used a small blanket stitch for the applique and I think it turned out pretty good.  I did fill in between the petals: I will show that in the next post as I still need to put a binding on it.  Anyway, I now think this is going to be a gift so I am going to start another one for me. 

I made one other thing this week, well really 6 other things.  It was DH's 75th birthday Tuesday.  He has always loved apricot pies, something it is difficult to find.  And he married a woman who is not a pie baker.  But for the last few months I have become obsessed with cooking shows.  I stopped cooking when I got sick and haven't even tried to pick it up again but Tuesday I made apricot turnovers.  Eric had to teach that morning so I pulled out my packaged pie rounds, rolled them out and cut pretty large circles in them.  I cooked the apricots (canned) with artificial sweetener, water, and a little cinnamon.  After I folded the rounds over the apricots and crimped the edges I coated them with some butter (no eggs in the house for an egg wash) an baked them in a 350 oven for 11 minutes.  I'm told they are very good and they must be OK as they are disappearing.  I wanted to make something that was easy to handle and/or even to eat on the way to work.  And they made a real surprise for a man who has really been a rock for me as I attempted to work my way back to a somewhat normal life.

I got an early start to my day today as we had an electrician come to fix the outlets that were not conducting electricity.  We have a modular home and I had suggested that the electric plug between the two modules had come unplugged (this had happened before).  My sweet hubby disagreed with me but he was not here when the electrician came so I sent him under the house to see if that was it.  AND I WAS RIGHT, again.  The electrician was here for only 13 minutes.  I texted sweet hubby to tell him the outcome: he texted back "don't you get tired of always being right?"  Never.    Gari