Do you sleep under the quilts you make?

I've been noticing an interesting thing about patterns in my quilt magazines. Fewer and fewer of them are actually bed size. I was thinking about this while machine sewing bindings today. The binding process has gotten away from me and I'm trying to catch up this weekend, so I'm doing the machine part today. Three down, four to go. Two queen size, one full size, one crib, one lap quilt, two wall quilts. In the past, the whole pile would have been queen size quilts, because I felt that if it was worth making, it was worth making large enough to sleep under. That was before the closet exploded from overload.

So now I do make smaller quilts, but I still produce bed-size designs - and by bed-size, I mean large enough for me, my husband and the cat. It's amazing how much the addition of that twelve pound cat changes things.

But, I digress. I pulled out four recent quilt magazines that I like and tallied up the quilt designs which were obviously not table mats or crib quilts - my criterion was to toss any quilt narrower than a width of fabric out of the count. Then I tallied the size distributions. If a quilt was larger than the top of a queen size mattress, 60 x 80, I begrudgingly considered it a bed size quilt although it would hardly be adequate for the average two adults, never mind any companion animal presences.

The results? 21 small quilts, 14 bed quilts. And the bed quilts were often pretty small - 81 x 89, 74 x 92, 65 x 91, 76 x 88, 73 x 82. Why so small? What are these quilts used for? Are they used at all?

My paternal grandmother pieced quilt tops, although she was not a domestic sort of person. I guess it was just a way to pass the time. During her life, I think she hired the hand quilting done. She left a drawer of quilt tops which Mom sent to a lady named Mrs. Abshire to machine quilt around 1960. These were the quilts the family slept under, although "under" might be an overstatement. She made her bed quilts barely bigger than the top of a full size bed. Mom always marveled at the size of the quilts since neither my grandmother or grandfather were short or narrow people.

But many old quilts are small. Perhaps it was because of the scarcity of fabric, or the lack of time, or just because many people in the past were smaller than we are now. But that doesn't explain why new designs are 55 inches square or 60 inches square or 54 x 62 inches. These are obviously never intended to grace a bed. Are they all for wall hangings? To drape over couch backs? To cover up while watching TV?

The practical person inside me wants them to be at least big enough to use on a full size bed. I've never been the art quilt type. Quilts were the perfect merging of beauty and function, and without the function intrinsically lost in their worth. I still make some wall quilts, but the word quilt conjures up a patchwork bed covering.

So, do you make your quilts large enough to sleep under? Do you make small quilts? What are your criteria for a quilt?

More storms in the Southeast - hm, that would be my fault

It rained last night - rained buckets in fact, with wind and lightning too. And it did it again today. I figure it was because I watered the new bushes yesterday. Forget the tired old saw about rain after you wash your car. If you really need precipitation, send me out in the yard with the garden hose. In 24 hours you'll be treading water.

I'm just sayin. . .

What's so hard about cooking?

I admit to being a little perplexed about the mere existence of the Food Network on cable. In an age where almost no one seems to actually cook dinner and sit down together as a family to eat, why a whole network about food? When did cooking become a spectator sport?

Perplexed, and then completely exasperated, about the way cooking has become a hobby. It's not a hobby, for pity's sake, it's a survival skill. The same way as sewing on a button, washing and ironing a shirt, taking care of your own house and car are survival skills - not that anyone much does any of those things anymore.

(Oh, a little sideline rant - have you seen the commercial for a cleaning firm called "The Maids", where the smug lady of the house says of cleaning her kitchen "Better them than me". Yeah, because you're, like, so important that scouring a cooktop is such a waste of your talents. I don't think so.)

Anyway. . .I was thinking about the dearth of home cooking while making dinner this evening. As I do almost every single evening. Unless we're having a roast chicken or pot roast or something where I had to start the main course earlier, I usually wander into the kitchen about 5 or 5:15 p.m., start making stuff, we eat around 6 p.m. and by 7 the kitchen is washed up and I turn off the light for the night (well, not tonight because there's brownies in the oven. That recipe from the newspaper was so terrible that we had to perform a do-over with a recipe that works.) I could probably get the meal on the table faster (my mom could make any weekday dinner in 30 minutes flat - everything from scratch - but she knew, trusted and used a pressure cooker, and they scare me silly) but I don't like to rush. Is that such a terrible investment of your time to get a fresh home-cooked scratch meal?

Take tonight for instance: mushroom stuffed chicken breasts, sauteed carrots and mashed potatoes. Add iced tea and it was pretty good. The only other thing my husband could have wanted (besides the brownies he requested for dessert) was a good piece of Italian bread and we were out of it.

It doesn't take a genius to make this kind of dinner, and I think it's pretty representative of the sort of weekday cooking that anyone could do. Get out the cutting board and peel a few potatoes, cut them in half and put them in a pan of water to boil. (Oh, and what about the commercial for the bagged peeled and diced potatoes you microwave and mash? I HATE that commercial. The idiocy of it. Implying peeling a few potatoes is such a Herculean effort.) Peel and slice 2 or 3 good size carrots. Throw the sliced carrots into a skillet with a dab of butter and some water. Cover and start them cooking.

I've written about the mushroom stuffed chicken before.

Keep an eye on the carrots and when they're almost done toss in some dill. When the potatoes are cooked, fish them out and put them through a ricer, add salt, pepper, butter and milk and make mashed potatoes. Use a pyrex bowl. When they're ready, put the pan back on the burner and perch the bowl on the top, covered with the saucepan lid. The potatoes will wait for a while, kept warm by the steam from the boiling pan of water.

Your chicken should be just about ready. You could also make a salad while the potatoes and chicken are cooking, if you have the notion and the ingredients.

Now, that wasn't so hard, was it?

This is by no means "gourmet" food. But it's all fresh, home-made and easy. No MSG, no preservatives, and pretty cheap, too. I would much rather have this than a Lean Cuisine or something from the drive-through. Am I weird?

Heat, humidity, gnats - and brownies

I spend about 2 1/2 hours outside this morning, weeding and watering, and came in so tired my knees were shaking. It's in the mid-eighties with the humidity pegging the meter (ah, summer in the southeast - and it isn't even summer yet) and it's hard to describe how a temperature in the mid-eighties can be so oppressive.

By the time I finished I looked like someone dipped me in a bucket of water. No wind and high humidity so nothing ever evaporates and you get hotter and hotter. By next month it will be really ugly, and will stay that way until September.

Oh, and let's not forget the gnats. My lawn guy calls them the East Brainerd gnats, because he swears where he lives north of the city he doesn't have them. Don't stand around with your mouth open in my yard, or something will fly in. So you're walking around in sodden clothes, scratched up by the roses from trying to weed around them, lugging a heavy garden hose, surrounded by a flying cloud of devil-bugs. Oh, yeah, gardening's fun.

My husband asks why I do it. Well, I like to see flowers growing and I don't want the yard to look like an abandoned lot. Since the lawn guy mows, I get out of the worst of it, so I try to keep everything else in shape. And my latest landscaping additions look pretty heartening so far. The new bushes are putting out lots of growth, the new azaleas are blooming, and my tomato plants are setting fruit. I may be a little miserable out there while I'm working but once I come in and shower, everything looks a lot better.

Now to the brownies. My husband tore a recipe out of the newspaper yesterday: "Best-ever Brownies". With a name like that, they must know they're setting themselves up for a fall. Wait - it gets better - with: Nancy Reagan's Frosting. First off, nothing against the lady but Nancy Reagan is about a size minus 2 and probably never weighed more than 80 pounds in her life. You KNOW she doesn't eat frosting, much less cook it.

So, how were they? The brownies were appropriately fudge-y and rich, but a little thin. The recipe specified a 9 inch pan, but I think using an 8 inch pan would be better. The frosting is a cooked type and was very rich but a little grainy, and really more like a glaze. The recipe made twice as much as needed, so I put the rest in a Tupperware bowl in the refrigerator. I just checked, and I now have a chocolate brick. I have no idea how to make it smooth enough to use. I just checked the newspaper's website and the recipes aren't available. If they are added to the archives, I will post a link so you can try them too.

This and that

Tanya blogged about a home-built ironing board her husband made for her here and it got me to thinking about ironing boards. First, they are getting pretty expensive. Tanya said that a good ironing board costs the equivalent of $130 in Japan. Amazing! Bed Bath and Beyond sells a good Rowenta board for $99, and even that still seems too much. I have a 18 inch wide ironing board my mom bought me for Christmas several year ago at Walmart. If she paid more than $35, I would be very surprised. So, why are they so much now? Does nobody iron anymore? Is permanent press and casual clothing the death knell for ironing? As long as there are quilters, there will be ironing boards sold, I guess. This is mine. As you can see, it sort of takes up the room in the kitchen where I sew, so I usually use my tabletop board, and save this one for pressing borders and full quilt tops. Secondly, I want to recruit the help of gardening quilters to identify this plant. A landscaper told me it was an amaryllis but didn't know the variety. Maybe he was right, maybe not, but I would surely like to know what kind it is. As you can see, the stalk has 5 or 6 blooms that develop sequentially, each lagging the previous by a few days. The blooms are 4 to 4.5 inches wide.

Can anyone tell me what variety this is? Or, maybe I'm wrong and it's not an amaryllis at all!

Whatever happened to movies on film?

Well, this old fogey has found something else to complain about. Have you been to a movie lately? At a big cinema chain? Then you probably watched it on a DLP digital projection system. No clickety projector, no light bulb, no big metal reels. Bye bye, film.

I went to see the new Star Trek movie today (I won't comment because it just came out, and many have not seen it yet. But I wasn't impressed.). The Wynnsong theater puts a big blurb up on the screen just before the moving trumpeting their DLP digital projection. If I were them, I wouldn't brag about it.

Movies on film were crisp and clean, with beautiful Technicolor, bright whites and true blacks. Digital images on DLP? Well, no. The colors are muddy, blacks are more dark gray than black, and the action is blurry. Really fast motion seems to turn images into a smear. This is particularly a problem with the current penchant for fast cut/cut/cut editing. This movie didn't come off as badly as some, though. We went to the Harry Potter movie last summer and between the murky lighting, the terrible jerky editing and the pitiful DLP digital projection, I'm not exactly sure what I watched - I felt like I could only see about half of it.

It might be that this theater is cheap and hasn't upgraded their equipment. Maybe there have been vast improvements I'm not seeing because Wynnsong doesn't want to spend the money. Or maybe it all looks this bad. My whole "movie-going experience" wasn't enhanced by the fact that the sound was turned up so loud that my ears were ringing when I left the theater.

And the big dirty blotch in the center of the screen didn't help either. It looked like someone threw their Coke at it. Everybody's a critic.

Back yard idyll

Between the rain storms I have been able to enjoy the back yard only sporadically, so I took a minute to do a few outdoor chores before it rains on me again. There were branches to put on the curb for pickup and roses to deadhead. The branch pickup is an especially nice benefit of living inside city limits. If you have any trees or bushes at all, there is always something to dispose of, and having one day a month where any lawn waste put at the curb will be whisked away is a big help.

This is my favorite corner of the back yard. There is a small peony which has unfortunately been beaten up by the rainstorms, three Gumpo azaleas just starting to bloom, a lantern, a bird feeder, a birdbath and a lovely mature crape myrtle that blooms the most gorgeous hot pink in July. There was a robin enjoying this corner earlier too. He took a bath and had a bite to eat. Scaevola is one of the most dependable hanging plants I use here. It seems to love the heat, the hotter the better, and as long as you water regularly it will bloom through October. I like the purple variety especially.

Here is an amarylis starting to bud. I have no idea what variety they are- they were here when I moved in. The bloom is large and slightly varigated pink clustered five or six on the stem. I've never even had to dig them up. They winter over in the ground here very happily.

And here are my red old-fashioned roses among the reworked fence border in the side yard. I have been waiting for them to bloom with anticipation. These are another flower I inherited, and I have no idea what variety they are. They are vigorous climbers and would scamper up a trellis (or even the fence) if I didn't keep them in line. The blooms are rather flat when opened fully and have yellow stamens. The japanese beetles don't seem to like them nearly as much as the white rosebush in the back yard, which is almost identical except for color but gets bugs and diseases much more readily.

And finally, a peek at things to come. . .

the tomatoes are beginning to set fruit. Yum!