Halfway around the world and back again

I thought I had published this entry on 9th Feb as per the heading, but somehow I managed to delete it from the blog during editing, so here it is about three and a half weeks later than intended!

As I mentioned last time I have travel scheduled for half of February. My first trip was to Lithuania, specifically to the Baltic coast. There is no quick route so, on Monday afternoon I flew first to Chicago, then overnight to London Heathrow in England, arriving Tuesday morning, where I waited 6 hours for a plane to Copenhagen in Denmark, there I should have only had a 3 hour layover, but that eventually became 5 hours after technical issues with the plane (something to do with a door!). I finally exited my destination airport at 3 a.m. local time on Wednesday morning or 8 p.m. EST, and arrived at the hotel half an hour later, 27 hours after my first plane took off and 37 1/2 hours after my alarm went off at home on Monday morning. Rarely has a hotel bedroom looked so inviting!  During my outward travel I completed knitting one scarf, started another and also continued with a summer weight sweater for my grandson. This is the back pinned out on my ironing board after I got home.

I had been expecting to be met by cold weather but by the time I arrived it was a balmy 6°C, as opposed to the -15°C of two weeks earlier! Strong gusty winds, grey and wet are in some ways better than 2 feet of snow and bitter cold, especially as there would almost certainly have been a cutting wind with that too.  However I was still very glad not to be out in it for more than a few minutes at a time.  After I had completed the job I had flown out to do I had a couple of hours on Thursday afternoon to wander around Klaipeda by which time the wind had dropped and the sun had come out. This is one of the older buildings in the town.

Now for the important bit of the travelogue: the food! My chosen hotel was home to an Armenian restaurant and the dishes were excellent. I enjoyed salads that had never seen a lettuce leaf in their existence, aromatically spiced meats served with fragrant fluffy rice and a delicious filo, honey and pistachio dessert.  Definitely a cuisine to investigate further.

Travelling home on the Friday I essentially reversed my route, though with shorter stopovers at the various airports along the way. The icing on the cake for the journey home was clearing immigration at Chicago O'Hare in about 10 minutes (as opposed to the, at least, 2 hours it took me on one previous trip) and being able to catch an earlier plane for my final flight, getting both me and my luggage home 4 hours earlier than expected!  More knitting on the homeward legs led to completed scarves for my sons.

An unexpected bonus on the transatlantic flight was flying over the southern tip of Greenland - only the second time I have done that in 20 years of travel between Europe and the USA.

Burning the candle at both ends

Last week was another complete wash-out for all things sewing and craft related, even Storm Jonas didn't dent the pressures of other stuff that had deadlines and so had to be done.  In fact he only brought us about 4" of snow which was starting to recede within 24 hours due to the temperatures hovering around and above freezing.  I keep telling myself that the recent efforts will be worth it in the end.

There was a glimpse of hope this week on Wednesday when, in between loads of laundry, I managed to insert an extra piece of fabric into the backing for my table runner, get it pin basted and started on the quilting.....

After that it was time to head out for an evening of ten pin bowling. Although a complete novice in September last year, I now bowl twice a week - Wednesday evenings and Thursday mornings. Ostensibly this is exercise, but it is mainly good fun, an opportunity for some gossip and a way to make new friends even though my scores are nothing to write home about. Further efforts on the quilting front, and a trip to Stitch Your Art Out for the binding fabric, led to completion of the table runner on Sunday evening. Here it is in place:

Sadly my OMG is just not going to be achieved this month, nor probably next as I know I will be away for two of the four weeks February graces us with. My knitting will travel with me so I hope to have something to show next week.

Busy but not with quilting

Somehow the last week has vanished with me barely finding time to sit at my sewing machine.  A whole lot of other stuff just barged in and pushed out most of my home based plans, so I don't have much to share with you this time. A concerted effort on over the last couple of evenings has led to me completing the top for a wintery (but not Christmassy) table runner.  This was made using some shimmery almost white fabric I had in my stash, together with most of a charm pack and some grey strips from the scrap strip box.  The pattern is, once again, from the Moda Bake Shop with a few extra blocks and skipping the pieced border, as the charms I excluded were largely black and bright red which didn't suit the colour scheme of the charms I had already selected.

Does using just one fabric from the scrap bin and a charm pack make this scrappy? I'm not sure to be honest, but I hope so, so I am linking up with Oh Scrap! for this week anyway!

A Winter's Tale (part 1).....

Wow! Winter arrived with a bite this week!  UK winters tend to be mild and damp, with a January average high of 6.6°C and average low of 1.1°C (43.9°F & 34.0°F respectively) so the overnight low of 6°F or -14.4°C was a bit of a shock to the system, particularly for Smokey who wanted, nay needed, to nip outside to do kitty things, but certainly didn't want to hang around any longer than absolutely necessary. To put this in perspective the record low at Manchester Airport is about -17°C or 0°F.  I was here for some of the winter last year, but this cold snap still came as a surprise; it was definitely time to break out the hats, gloves and scarves. A couple of milder (and wetter) days gave some relief, but this evening we are back to windy and cold conditions. Brrr!

Nevertheless the weather was largely bright and sunny which made ideal conditions for sewing.  On Monday I got one quilt sandwiched and pin basted and part of Tuesday was spent removing a border from a quilt top, inserting an extra column of blocks, adding some extra border pieces and finally reattaching the removed border.  All this to use up another 8 blocks which turned up as I organised my fabric and projects, but they do add 10" to the width of the quilt, which does make the quilt a better size.

The pattern is Frugal Patch from Marcia Hohn's Quilter's Cache site and I have been using my scraps to make these blocks on and off for more years than I care to remember! Now this top is completed and there are no blocks left I need to choose a new scrap block to make. I am thinking of Simply Woven from the Moda Bake Shop as in addition to fabric pieces I have a box of binding strip remants to use up.

I now have 2 quilts basted ready to quilt and this flimsy ready to sandwich and baste next week now I have bought some backing fabric. Backing fabric is an exception to the "shop the stash" rule as I much prefer working with single piece backings if I can and I didn't have any extra wide "in stock".  Progress was also made on Circle in a Square - all the circles for the border blocks are cut out and ready to fuse to the background squares.

In news from the non quilty part of my life: both of our sons have settled in well in the local school system and our younger son has been immersing himself in the high school music scene.  This weekend he was part of the pit band for the senior thespians' production of Return to the Forbidden Planet which was most enjoyable and well produced, though it was a shame that the Friday evening show was cancelled due to the forecast of freezing rain.

Today I am linking up with:

Oh Scrap!

OMG or One Monthly Goal - January

An incentive to make achievable progress has come from Heidi at Red Letter Quilts who has come up with a great concept that I am hoping will help me finish off some of my nearly there quilts. Her idea is One Monthly Goal or OMG! For January my goal is to complete the Circle in a Square quilt top that I showed the blocks for last week.

The next step is to cut 72 circles out of a fusible product, iron them onto my fabric, cut the circles out again and then machine applique them to the backgrounds. The wine, whisky and shot glasses in the picture below were used as circle templates......

Added to the squares I have already fused and sewn that should give me the 76 I require for the border.  Then, and only then, will they all go onto the design wall for arrangement and rearrangement until I am happy with the layout.

Thank you Heidi for giving me the push in the right direction to get this top done this month, rather than just sometime in 2016.

Keeping track

This year, now things are somewhat more settled, I am going to take a leaf out of Nann's (With Strings Attached) book and try to keep track of how much fabric I use over the year by counting up on a month by month basis.

As do most quilters, I have a stash of fabric acquired over the years, some with a particular project in mind (not necessarily started), some because it was just right for a current project (and now there are left overs), some received as a gift or in a swap, some because "it was bargain" and some simply because I liked it. My intention is to "shop the stash" before heading out to the quilt shop for more fabric, which may or may not be successful, I tried it last week and still didn't have what I needed, so went out and bought 5 new FQs which don't count in the accounting because I bought them last year!

I also intend to create an ongoing list of completed quilts, some of which are already flimsies (quilt tops ready for sandwiching and quilting, some are complete collections of blocks waiting to be sewn into quilt tops, some are just a few blocks needing more to be made and some are only ideas or uncut fabrics.

First up to be worked on is Circle in a Square, which I started in a class in the Bernina Connection in Phoenix AZ in December 2007.  The class handout, my chosen fabrics and a handful of completed blocks came to light in the Big Move and thanks to some excellent, and most appreciated, detective work by the shop owner and the designer I now have a photo of the finished class sample to guide me. Of course, I can't do things the easy way and am making a twin sized quilt rather than a wall hanging (hence the 5 FQs in the last week of 2015) but hope to make good progress over the weeks.  As of yesterday evening I have assembled all 77 blocks for the centre of the quilt.

Today I am linking up with:
Design Wall Monday

Holidays in both the New World and the Old World

Starting with Thanksgiving and moving through to Christmas and New Year.....

Thanksgiving

Back in the UK there is no formal Thanksgiving holiday.  Probably the nearest thing is Harvest festival, a pagan celebration assimilated by Christianity (aren't they all?) and now fading somewhat, though schools still observe it with collections of non-perishable foods which are then donated to charities.  As a child I remember going to the village church where we would take our edible donations, sometimes home grown, sometimes canned goods, up to the altar where it would be stacked up to show the generosity of the parish, before being taken to those that needed it.  There were special hymns sung to celebrate the safe bringing in of the crops, and growing up in a village surrounded by largely arable farmland these were particularly resonant.  Over my adult life I have lived in areas less in tune with the natural cycle of planting, growth and harvest so it is refreshing to once again recognise the importance of nature's bounty even though the consumerist experience of Black Friday seems to be overshadowing the original history of Thanksgiving.

For our part for Thanksgiving 2015 we joined our first State College family friends for their celebrations for the second year running (first time for me though) and had a wonderful meal of turkey, sweet potatoes, Yankee stuffing, Texas stuffing, cranberry sauces, the most delicious buttery potatoes and other good things.  It was a lovely evening of family and friendship with the six children and five adults all having fun, eating too much, doing puzzles, playing games and sharing conversation and music.

Feast of St Nicholas aka Sinter Klaas

The world certainly seems to have become smaller,  as at the beginning of December I was sat in a Mexican restaurant in a small city in Holland and it seemed quite normal.  The wide acceptance of international cuisine is a far cry from the occasion of when one of my brother's grammar school friends asked "Is your mother foreign?" after being served lasagne and salad at our house in the early 1980s. Oddly enough in our market town in SE England the predominant immigrant culture at that time was Italian, thanks to the local WW2 prisoner of war camp having held mainly Italian soldiers some of whom returned as soon as they could after the end of the hostilities.  Further south in the county there was a significant Polish population seeded by the Polish airmen who flew from the local airfields for the RAF.  There were also representatives of the Windrush generation too, adding to the mix of cultures making up our small corner of England.  As children this was seen as normal, in our eyes our classmates with odd names were as English as we were, we had grown up together and that was that - multiculturalism working on a local scale because it just didn't occur to us that  there was any other way.

I was in Holland on 5th December, better known over there as Sinter Klaas, or the feast day of Saint Nicholas (a Greek/Turkish bishop), who across the Atlantic has been transformed into Santa Claus, and as I ate a young lady dressed as Zwarte Piet visited the tables and photographs were taken of her with smiling children. Zwarte Piet is Sinter Klaas's assistant or sidekick in a similar way that Santa Claus is helped by an elf, now nobody blinks an eyelid at Santa being accompanied by somebody dressed up as an imaginary being, but Zwarte Piet is being tarred (sic) with the brush of racism and yet when you look into the history of the character he wax probably based on a Moorish servant boy travelling with Saint Nicholas from Spain where the gift s of oranges and pomegranates were collected.  In Holland Sinter Klaas is the big gift giving/receiving day for children and the shops were full of seasonal goodies - the marzipan filled pastry rolls were particularly good!

Christmas

Two Christmasses into our American life we are still celebrating in the UK style -  our tree and decorations go up the weekend before the big day, which was the first weekend of the school holidays back in England and was when decorations went up when I was a child.  This year we have also put up external lights with an animated LED "tree" to brighten the evening gloom in the US style.  Mincemeat was made just before I set off for Europe and has since been made into to dozens of mince pies! Christmas Eve was spent doing as much preparation for Christmas Dinner as possible to stop Christmas Day itself being too frantic to enjoy.  At bedtime stockings (actually pillow cases this year as we couldn't find the stockings) were hung on doorknobs by the boys, gifts were placed beneath the tree and we went to bed with a sense of exhausted achievement and anticipation.

As ever Father Christmas brought silly gifts from around the world and put them in the "stockings" - this year he seemed to have visited Holland and the UK as well as finding oranges from California ;)  After opening the gifts a full meal of turkey, Brussels sprouts, peas, carrots. roast parsnips, 2 sorts of stuffing, cranberry sauce, bread sauce, gravy and pommes dauphine was consumed, followed by mince pies once we thought we had enough room for them. I had even managed to find some UK Christmas Crackers complete with paper hats, silly gifts and dreadful jokes!

In the UK the day after Christmas is know as Boxing Day and as a child was spent with the extended family. As the closest family members are now over 1000 miles away and the rest over 3000 miles we shared our evening with our friends from Thanksgiving and ate even more food.......

New Year

....which brings us to New Year's Eve and I for one am looking forward to 2016 being a more settled year than 2015, which had some big ups (me finally getting to the USA) and downs (the loss of my much loved mother-in-law) and lots of undulations along the way.  A New Year and new start in a new country (yes I was here on New Year's Day 2015 but knew I was heading back to the UK for the final pack up of home and business, which took way longer than anticipated), I hope it is a good one.  The Christmas tree and decorations will stay up until Twelfth Night (another UK tradition) at which point they will be packed carefully away until December 2016 when they will have the chance to brighten another mid-winter.

What with travel and other stuff I didn't actually sew any gifts for Christmas this year, but did manage to make some table mats and matching coasters, which have at least been both decorative and useful.