As always, our December Frayed Edges was friends, food, smiles and fun.

And since it was December, gifties!  We met in Kate’s couple-hundred-year-old farmhouse near Merrymeeting Bay (isn’t that the most awesome name?) on a gray day with the woodstove warming us in the kitchen/dining room, and Bailey (OOOPS…I am SO bad with names)  Bristol the wonderdog keeping us company. The photo at the very  top is as I sat in my chair and looked up…isn’t the shadow pattern on the ceiling awesome?

As always, Kathy was the one with work to share!

Kathy's portrait of her son, for a drum case!

Her son is a drummer, and asked Mom to make him some round covers to put on his drum cases.  Kathy is using a different technique for each, and this one is a portrait  of said son done with bleach pen on cloth!  Totally cool!  She shared that she did a sketch of her son, place glass or clear plastic on top, drew over the lines with the bleach pen, THEN placed the cloth down  on the bleach pen.  That solved the problem of having the bleach react too much with where you start drawing and not enough where you finish.  A clever lady she is!

Then we had gifties… My small offerings are the mistletoe, Kath gave us each awonderful key and card holder, thereby supporting local craftswomen, and Kate took some fabric I had given her (an old damask tablecloth of Mom’s, actually), dyed it, and made us a set of re-usable gift bags.  Those clearly will be for in-house giving!!!!  Kate made the lovely vignette of votives on a small mirror (also found at the local dump’s swap shack….I really need to go to the Bowdoinham dump!), then gave us the candles which you saw here on my blog! Kate recycled old music sheets to make them.

then there is lunch in the sunshine:

including soup and dessert…yum!

Then we remembered Deborah, our itinerant member who lived in Maine, then near Dallas, and now near Annapolis, had sent a box!  more gifties! Here are her funny snowmen and one of the inspiring ‘zines she makes:

After lunch, Kate said “let’s make journals”.  Hunh? It appears the gift-giving wasn’t over!  Kate bought this cool gizzie and said we’d make journals.  Apparently the covers of discarded Readers’ Digest Condensed Books make the best recycled covers.  And then Kate had a stash of de-commissioned letterhead from a couple places; some of the paper had this “ghost” terrain map on it…SO cool!   So she let us choose from her stash of scavenged-from-the-swap-shack (gotta go there!) stuff, and we made our own journals.  I’ll share than in a post fairly soon.

Finally, there is Bailey Bristol being sweet!

A while back I learned something from Lisa W. (then at Curves, now at Quarry Hill where mom lives, first in assisted living and now in the memory loss unit…mom lives there that is, not Lisa…she works there!):  every day say what was a good thing or the best thing that happened to you that day.  And nothing backhanded (saying that the best thing was that the day wasn’t any worse than it was doesn’t quite cut it).  So I try (but don’t always remember) to give thanks daily.

At our local quilt chapter auction this past month I bought the adorable felted wool mat and --for the first time in memory-- remembered to bring out my Thanksgiving candles, which I have had since I was about 6! I believe these are now beyond "vintage" and headed towards "antique." And that is my October Angel (my birth month) in the background, a gift from gramma about 50 years ago!

But today is the annual U.S. feast and giving of thanks.  This year, I am so glad that despite our very small numbers, the four of us are here, happy, healthy and together.  As you can see from the photo, my pleas to “wait for the Thanksgiving photo” were this year greeted with “heck no I’m eating!” <grin!>

Wait for the photo? Apparently not this year LOL! PS--notice Joshua, on the right, wearing Elmo pants! Love 'em!

Here’s the repast in preparation….I try to clean as I go, otherwise it would be impossible in our no-counter-space kitchen!  After breakfast I started with the pie crust, then the cranberry sauce, then the pie filling, then the stuffing, then putting the hot pie filling into the just-baked crust (A recipe from The Cook’s Bible, where you bake the crust separately as if making a banana cream pie, cook the pumpkin pie filling on the stovetop, then combine and finish in the over for about 25 minutes.  Helps avoid soggy crust.) Anyway, once I get that done, I clear out and hubby does the turkey. I do NOT “do” raw birds or large meat…they need to be mostly cooked before I get near them!  Then I do the potatoes, veggies and gravy.

In progress...pie made, Turkey in the oven......

As far as I am concerned, the best reason for roasting a turkey is to make the gravy that goes on the potatoes.  Half the pan of potatoes is for me (ditto with the gravy, tho I usually get a fight on that one) and half for everyone else.  Can you tell I’m Irish?  Life is GOOD!

I hope whether you are in the United States celebrating also or elsewhere in the world that your lives are filled with goodness, love and light.  And thread and fabric and time to create!  Blessings be, Sarah

Wowie zowie…that was a snowstorm!   On Sunday it began to snow, and snow, and snow… when it finally stopped on Monday (yes school was cancelled for the day) we had 11 inches of fresh, WET powder in the driveway and a prodigious snowplow pile.  The photo above is of our house, from the street.  Here is my handy dandy quilting ruler in the snow next to the snowplow ridge…that is an 18 1/2 inch ruler, dwarfed….:

I always take pics of the St. Francis birdbath and the nearby pot.  The latter is large, and buried.  Here, you can see the snow is almost up to the basin!

Paul and Joshua in front of the snow-crusted garage.  See that little bitty orange thing sticking out of the snow?  That’s the 3 foot post to show the plow guys the edge of the driveway…..

Eli took Widgeon for walkies, cross country in the little woods across the street.  Are those not the cutest two things on six feet?  Widgeon LOVES the snow and doesn’t care if his tummy and dangly bits get all cold and red! Silly sweet dog!!

And coming over the plow ridge…if we have much more snow we’ll have to park in the driveway or have a bonfire as there is nowhere else to push the stuff:

Shortly after the Oscars began, the power went out.  For 21 hours.  Since we have a woodstove and gas range, this isn’t too big a deal.  Except the water pump is electric.  That means each toilet has one flush.  Ooops.  So what to do?  Well….melt snow! All this barely made a dent in the mound on the front porch steps:

Then there is the mailbox…see that lump in the middle…that’s it!

The boys were at first at a loss without iPod (battery gave out), cell phone for texting (ditto), laptop (ditto), internet….so they got out the board games and I treated myself to reading a fluff quilty novel! Paul slept or read. Then, at some point, I discovered we had a scant half-loaf of bread, so decided to bake some.  I had forgotten that while we can light the burners (they have knobs), the oven does NOT have a knob.  So I had 12 cups of flour (4 loaves) kneaded, risen, punched down, and formed into rapidly rising loaves.  What to do????  Well, I figured if I could find a metal box (yeah right) I could improvise an oven…Paul’s thermometer on the stovetop tells him when the surface is 500, where he keeps it.  I needed a 375 degree oven.  So….I thunk on it….the canning pot!   Down to the basement.  But the bread would burn on the bottom…hmmm… my sad iron trivet…kinda like this … under the pan.

And here’s the improvised oven:

Guess what…It WORKED!

And one of my favorite pics just because….the ancient bike on the deck:

Well, we really need Deborah here to remind us to TAKE PICTURES!  Sigh……   I remembered about the lunch food photo… AFTER we ate, so alas this is all you get:

Kate has this beautiful hand crafted silverware (hand wash only!) which she brings out for our visits, with the matching scroll napkin rings.  Her son H. did the artwork on the trivet; his school does an (expensive) annual fundraiser where you can pick the product onto which your child’s 8 1/2 x 11 artwork is printed (size is reduced but proportions stay the same I think).  Kate chose the tile, then had a friend make the wooden holder to turn it into a trivet.  Wonderful!

The lunch menu:  Corn chowder (me, recipe from Martha Stewart’s Sept. 2007 issue of Living….I’d skip the cayenne, cumin and coriander next time, but loved the cheddar and the bacon –I added the latter), baby organic spinach greens (which we picked from the field next door…the farmers had already harvested, so neighbors can now go in and cull from the still-growing roots…..yum…but why didn’t I take a picture???? where was my head?), and Kathy brought these delectable (Sorry Deborah….we ate them with you in mind…since she introduced us to them) molten lava cakes…chocolate, with a gooey, yummy hot “lava” center of chocolate (if you have a Hannaford store, look for the On The Go Bistro or Hannaford Inspirations line in the frozen food section).  Best of all, they are only 300 or so calories, so it is a decadent treat that doesn’t use up an entire day’s worth of calories.

We shared a few things… my loot from Houston, Kathy’s in progress piece (glorious as always, for the Art Quilts Maine black-white-plus one other color challenge…. Kath picked blue), and some Ikea fabric Kate bought to make cushions for the Bowdoinham library kids’ area:

Kate had been to NYC on business, and she and her business partner in Adoption Day Cards snuck in a stop at the Ikea south of Boston (about 6 hours away from me! boohooo….. I wish it were closer).  I think Bowdoinham is very lucky to have Kate as their new librarian!   Here’s the other fabric… Kate has a totebag made from this one that I have loved… it would do well in the black-white-plus one challenge… Kate of course thought leaf green, I thought vivid cranberry……(and sorry about that triangle of bright sunlight in the center bottom!)

And on the way home, I got gas for 2.15 a gallon.  This guy was perched on the top of the building as the sun began to set:

He stood there on one foot the entire time I was filling my tank…

That’s it for now….. off to Boston as soon as I finish writing this, and by the time it “publishes” I’ll be on my way home.  Giving a lecture for the Bead Designers International group… gonna be fun!

The Frayed Edges met at Hannah’s house in Harpswell, Maine, this month.  We missed Deborah, but had a wonderful visit amid the autumny leaves and air.  As usual there is a flurry of e-mails the weekend before about who’s gonna fix what…. Kathy asked if I’d share the recipe for the turkey kielbasa-potato soup, tho she was planning on making a pie already.  I quickly volunteered to make the soup, which I’ve mentioned on this blog in years passed….. Hannah had sumptuous, blueberry-laden muffins and coffee, Kate brought a salad with fresh baby organic spinach (from the acreage next to her house no less…fresh picked…handy having a farm next door!), bacon, blue cheese and a raspberry-vinagrette dressing….she and I cleaned the salad bowl.  Heck, I could have eaten the bowl myself!  I’ll post the recipe (from Janet Wright on San Juan Island, who got it from the cook at the Cannery restaurant years ago, in Friday Harbor…the legacy of this recipe is long!) at the end of this post.

Last month, Hannah gave each of us these wonderful IKEA mirrors…they are about 12 inches square, with a 4×4 mirror in the center.  I’ll share mine in the next post, on October 31…but for now you can revel in Kathyu’s wonderful mixed media piece made of painted 2×2 ceramic tiles from Home Depot, some stone tile (same place), and some Fimo clay tiles that Kathy made!  I  LOVE IT!

I shared my leaves table runner and my Batiki bird, which shipped off to Lark books on the 23rd, for inclusion in a book that will come out late next spring…hmmm…. I see I haven’t blogged about it…OK, will do that in a week or so!  Hmmm….only have in-progress pics of the table runner on the blog too…gee….you’d think I’ve been working instead of blogging LOL…OK, I’ll share that one too!  Give me a chance to take pics and write the blogpost…..

As always, Kathy shared her latest project, still in progress…. to get an idea of the size of it I’m including this photo, tho it isn’t the best:

Here’s a better picture of the quilt…..

Kath is using this cool technique of printing the birds onto tissue paper, fusing them to the quilt, then stitching the daylights out of them….yields a very accurate, realistic and stunning bird.  You may have seen this picture already over on Kathy’s Studio in the Woods blog:

And here’s the crockpot soup recipe:

•  Most of a 5 pound bag of Yukon gold (or similar) potatoes
• 1 yellow onion, chopped
• some butter and a dribble of oil
• 1/2 pound turkey kielbasa (buy it in a 1 pound package, freeze the other half)
• 8 cups chicken broth / stock (more or less)
• 2 bay leaves (if desired)
• pepper
• stoneground mustard

Scrub and cube the potatoes into pieces, a small potato can be cut into four, a larger one into pieces that are about 1 1/4″-ish square-ish …just cut them up!  Place into large crockpot (turned off at the moment). My crockpot will hold a 5 pound bag minus four or five potatoes–this brings the potatoes to about 1 inch below the rim.

Slice kielbasa in half lengthwise, and again so it is in four quarters.  Cut into 1/2″ chunks.

Add butter and the dribble of oil to skillet  and saute onion until clear.

Push onion to outer edges of skillet

Add some of the kielbasa and brown.

Push that kielbasa to the side and brown more…if pan is too full, dump onion and kielbasa into crockpot.   Brown remaining kielbasa.

Pour a cup or so of the chicken broth into the pan to deglaze.  Turn off heat under skillet and pour contents into crock pot.

Add enough broth / stock to cover the potatoes…pretty much up to the very top of the crockpot.   While adding the broth, stir to mix up the onion and kielbasa througout the potatoes.

Add 2 bay leaves, pepper and whatever else you’d like to season with.

Turn on low for 12 hours; OR turn on high for 1 hour, then to low for 6 hours (or low for 6 hours, then high until the potatoes are tender).  When I make this for the Frayed Edges, I make it after dinner the night before and let it cook all night.  It is obviously not on while in the car, then I plug it back in at our destination for the day.

Just before serving add a large dollop of stoneground mustard, to taste, and mix.  I love the tangy goodness (this is the secret ingredient that makes this soup glorious)… I know it is odd… you don’t actually taste mustard, just flavor!

I’m SO GLAD they like this soup, as my family pretty much doesn’t, and an entire crockpot full is too much even for me (it’s about a week’s worth of meals!).