Looks like spring to me

This may not be everyone's idea of spring, but it looks pretty close to me. The sky blue, warm greens of new grass, browns of the tree trunks as they begin to be clothed in new leaves, plums of spring bulbs and tree buds. I'm generally not a pastel person. This fat quarter set, Twiggy by Moda, is an encapsulation of my current favorite color palette. Add some dark coral or terracotta in there and a little yellow, and that's me in a nutshell.

My color preferences seem to have evolved as my quilt collection has grown. At times, my color choices were driven by the colors used by my favorite designers. About ten years ago I fell in love with the collections by Robyn Pandolph, and my quilts were softer and more pastel. The muted dusky colors of the Thimbleberries line appealed to me with their richness, so you'll find those in my closet too. I almost never make anything with bright colors, and there's never a lot of red or orange. Almost no black or gray, either.

There's always a good range of blue, and I've made several blue and white quilts, both for myself and as gifts. Blue and yellow are represented too. When I became captivated by the Red Delicious BOM, I was torn because I just don't use red that much. But Esther Alui's Yahoo Group has shown me that this pattern could be wonderful in other color schemes. One quilter is making it in black and white, and it's very striking. I started thinking about my blue and white porcelain collection, and how beautiful this pattern would be if blue were substituted for red. It might become a complement to my Blue Willow dishes. There's food for thought there.

This glorified nine patch is made from a fat quarter bundle with additional yardage for borders. I decided to make blue/cream and green/cream centers and split the "melon" patches down the middle, brown on one side and plum on the other. The plum will face the blue squares and the brown, the green ones. Here's a sketch: There are 36 blocks, which comes out 66" x 66", so borders were necessary. If I had done it all nine patch blocks, it would take years! Also, since the squares come out of the fat quarter bundle, there was only enough for 36 blocks. So 36 blocks it is.

You bought what??!!

Occasionally you find yourself shelling out perfectly good money for something so embarrassing that you wish you could block it from showing up on your credit card.

No, not THAT.

It's an electric pepper grinder. And it's not like we didn't have a pepper grinder already. We did. That was the problem.

Fresh ground pepper is a wonderful thing, something I never had when I was growing up. Pepper came in a Durkee tin which lasted probably 5 years, so the pepper certainly wasn't fresh. We never noticed. But, unfortunately, when y0u cook a lot and read cookbooks and watch America's Test Kitchen on PBS, you become aware of things you didn't know you needed until then. A pepper mill was one of them.

To try out fresh ground pepper, I bought one of the prefilled McCormick pepper grinder dispensers you can find in the supermarket. What a revelation! The freshness and pungency sold the idea. I used these a while but the grind was inconsistent and occasionally you would bite down on a hunk of pepper. I had to buy a real grinder.

But which one? My husband searched for equipment reviews and discovered it was the consensus that Peugeot made the best ones. Yup, Peugeot, just like the cars. You'd be surprised what some of the European car manufacturers also produce. Peugeot didn't just make a pepper grinder, they made a slew of them. Stainless steel, copper, wood, clear acrylic, acrylic and wood, acrylic and chrome......take your pick.

We finally settled on a set of clear acrylic salt and pepper grinders with black walnut bases and caps. Beautiful things. We waited with baited breath until they arrived, and then filled them and tried them out. Fantastic! They produced a nice even grind, and worked like a finely tuned machine.

But they were small, maybe only 4 inches tall, and didn't hold many peppercorns. And since the grinding area was small too, it didn't produce pepper very quickly. This was fine for the table, but a problem to use when cooking, where you ground and ground and ground and ground to season one pot. We decided that these would be good in the dining room but by the stove we needed another model. And they do look wonderful on the table. Guests never fail to notice the Peugeot emblazoned on the base. I had already had bought a salt pig to keep salt by the stove for seasoning while cooking, which was much easier to use on the fly - just reach in and grab a pinch of sea salt when needed. (And that opens up the whole issue of gourmet salts, in which I simply refuse to get embroiled.)

While browsing through Amazon.com, I came upon a lever action grinder. You could hold it in one hand and pump the lever to dispense pepper. It looked like a good design, was much larger to hold more pepper, and could be used one-handed, which was a plus. So I ordered it.

When it arrived, it was also filled and tested with much anticipation. And while I can say that it does produce a prodigious amount of pepper at a time, the grinder wasn't consistent and the hunk-of-pepper-in-your-food problem re-emerged. Plus, while the one-handed operation was a good idea in theory, you had a seriously tired hand after seasoning a pot of mashed potatoes.

There had to be a better way. I went back to reading equipment reviews.

That was when I came across the Trudeau Gravati, a battery operated pepper grinder with a gravity (get it? Gravati?) switch. Fill it, put in the batteries, and when you invert the grinder it goes to town, producing pepper at a rate hand grinders can only dream about. There's an adjustment on the top for the grind, coarse to very fine, which doesn't seem to impede its production in the least. It's consistent, handy and appeals to all my retired engineer geek genes. It's a winner.

I am acutely aware of the reaction most readers are having right about now. ELECTRIC PEPPER GRINDER? Isn't that a little, I don't know, extreme? Overkill? Ridiculous, in fact? Well, maybe it is, but it works so well I can overlook the obvious reactions that to be honest occurred to me too, even as I was ordering it. But, I have to tell you, if you have any members of the household with dexterity and hand strength issues, it's the berries.Here's the whole lineup, including the salt pig, which really does have pig ears and a tail. I couldn't resist.

If you want something seasoned, you've come to the right house.

Can't sleep

I woke up when my husband came to bed at 3 a.m. He did his eye medications and had quality time with our cat (who only wants him to pet her there on the bed before they go to sleep) and the activity was enough to wake me completely. I gave up and got out of bed at 4.

Time to check in with my favorite blogs. Play a little Scrabble. Read the news. See if any more BOM instructions are published. I'm following six - I didn't say I was MAKING six. I meant to start them but then the double wedding ring got in the way. So, I'm saving all the blocks and will someday be able to devote time to them, especially Esther Aliu's Red Delicious BOM . It will be absolutely gorgeous, but I have to go on a red fabric buying spree - red is not a color well represented in my stash. It might have to be a fused applique, even though I'm not usually a "fuser", but looking at all those pieces, I'm also not that kind of crazy.

What other BOMs? Well, there is Come Over To My House, which will be done in batiks; A Tisket A Tasket, which is about the cutest basket design I've ever seen; A Touch of Amish, all in solids - also need to buy; Batik Baskets, which will probably use up the rest of my batiks (must add them to my list when I shop for reds and solids); and, Building Blocks, which would be great in hand-dyed fabric if I can find some.

In the meantime, being the glutton for punishment that I am, I plan to start my Glorified Nine Patch as soon as I hem the clothes I made. More curved seams - what am I thinking? I did find the perfect fabric for it - Twiggy by Sanae for Moda. I love sky blue, I love chocolate brown, I love mossy green, I love deep plum. It's like they designed it for me.

Oh good grief - now that it's almost 7 a.m., I'm getting sleepy!

Old books with personality

I love all books, but I especially love old books, so when I saw this little gem at a library fundraiser sale, I had to have it. It cost all of $2.00. I know it's not in the best of shape; the cover is discolored, the binding is starting to loosen and the pages have yellowed. However, it has such an aura of mystery!

Where has it been since it was printed in July of 1908? The information available is tantalizing. It is part of the set of Macmillan's Pocket American and English Classics, the list of which is printed inside the frontispiece, and it cost 25 cents when new. It's a small thing, about 4 x 6 inches, and around 200 pages. It's tiny enough to have ridden around in a gentleman's coat pocket or a lady's handbag, ready to read during a spare moment. It was the equivalent to our paperback books. The name J. H. Valley is inscribed in a very old-fashioned hand inside the cover. Was that the original owner?

As precious as it is, I might have passed it by as I did so many other old and intriguing books, except it was a copy of "Cranford", Elizabeth Gaskell's novel chronicling the trials, tribulations and triumphs in the lives of the women in a small English village in 1842, which I have been meaning to read since I saw an excellent BBC miniseries adaptation last year. Since Cranford is a short novel, the miniseries used parts of two other Gaskell novels, "My Lady Ludlow" and "Mr. Harrison's Confessions" to build the story arc. The casting, writing, cinematography and acting are all magnificent, as I have come to expect from BBC productions. It's available on Netfix, so look it up if you want to be enchanted and whisked away to the mid-19th century.

Out of practice sewing clothing

This is the coral pique jacket I bought last month. When I couldn't find a skirt at any store to match, I went to Hancock Fabrics and bought a piece of gauzy print that had the same coral in the design.

As I started sewing together the gored skirt, I kept thinking, "Boy, those seam allowances look awfully large! Am I reading the throat plate markings correctly on my new sewing machine?"

I was, of course. It's just that I have made so many quilts and so few clothes in the last 10 years, the standard 5/8" seam looked enormous!

Let there be (bendable bright) light!

One of the Christmas presents from my husband was a bendable bright light for my sewing machine. I had seen ads for this small auxiliary light on a gooseneck which attaches to your sewing machine, and someone had blogged about how nice it was (I apologize, but I can't remember who it was).

I hadn't gotten around to installing the light because I was working on the Double Wedding Ring gift quilt. Today, I was altering a pair of black pants and fussing about the difficulty of seeing the thread I was picking out. I ended up at my desk with my Verilux adjusted down within 6 inches of the fabric so I could wield my stitch picker with any accuracy. After the pants were taken apart, I started fitting and pinning them and went to the machine to sew the waistband back on.

Boy, if I thought picking the threads out on the black fabric was hard, sewing the seams back in was even harder. I felt blind as a bat, even with the pendant light over the table switched up to 300 watts. Then, I remembered the stick-on light. Would this ever be a challenge for it!

It's a little LED bright white light which comes with a small round adhesive holder that snaps on the base, and adhesive clips for the cord. I positioned the light base at the back of the sewing machine next to the presser foot lever, and stretched the cord along the back, using the clips to keep it out of the way. The cord ran down the other side of the machine, and plugged into the extension cord I use for the sewing machine. I switched it on.

Wow! is all I can say. The dark stitching jumped out at me. I could see everything perfectly. The light didn't glare off the machine parts, or shine in your eyes. The little gooseneck allowed you to focus the small light head exactly where you needed it, on the point where the needle entered the fabric. As an added bonus, you could redirect it to illuminate the eye of the needle when threading the machine.

The literature with the light showed it attached to the left outside face of the machine head, but since that is not a flat surface on the Juki I had to go with the back, which works just fine.

How did I ever sew dark fabric without this?

Ott Lite giveaway

Quilting On A Budget is giving away an Ott Lite floor lamp! This is a great product and everyone who reads this post should scurry over there and enter. I have an Ott Lite table lamp and believe me, if you do any kind of hand sewing, this is the way to go. It helped immensely when I was working on the teacup swap blocks and dragonfly applique last year. It's amazing how much the right light can help.