Mon Feb 25: Piecing & New Favorite Treats

FitBit Activity: 10136 steps taken, 2 floors climbed, 4.23 miles traveled, 2050 calories burned, 531 active score

Woke at a reasonable time - starting putting together my next quilt.  We are liking it enough that I'm thinking of making it longer and making it as gift for DH.  I can get other fabric for the charity quilt for Quilts for Kids.  I still need the quilting foot for the machine and the pinmoors so now I can cut and piece.

It's nice to use the metal kitchen table for the pressing and cutting - the right height and I don't have to worry about scratching anything.

You can see the design that I'm working on.  Each column has three subcolumns.  The outside columns are just a strip of material.  The inner pieced column has two kinds of piecing.  One is a square and one is two pieces of fabric cut also into a square.  It sort of makes the square pop.  The designs in the fabric are sort of organic.  One looked like wax batik, one is stamped design (with possible wax), one is tie dyed, and one is either a more complicated tie dye or is sprayed.  I like the combinations and have enough fabric to make around 80 inches tall - and at least 50 inches wide.  The measurements are all based on my 4.5 inch ruler - so the strips are 4.5 inches wide, the square is 4.5 inches, the inbetween square is made of two pieces each 2.5 x 4.5 inches.  So one section will be 1 foot by 40 inches.  I will need to add more width - I can use different yet- to be purchased fabric if that is needed.

A few weeks ago someone on the lib-quilter list shared a design for a baby quilt that I got this idea from. In her design the strips were sewn together - then cut to make a whole strip of squares - these were then sewn between larger strips of uncut fabric - it was very nice looking.  I didn't have the variety of fabric so adapted this way.

I made oatmeal with blueberries and mangos for breakfast, and a thick vegetable soup/stew with a tomato base for lunch - added a little cheese on the top! Toasted English muffin - (DH let me know he doesn't like whole wheat anything!).

Added later:  For dinner once again we got a salad and hot dish from Live Alive  but tonight I also got DH an Almonds & Sea Salt in Dark Chocolate bar (by Chocolove).  He really liked that!  And for mainly me although I also shared two things that are already on my favorites list:

lizlovely.com

healthywhitetea.com

Inko's White Tea Blueberry and Liz Lovely Gluten Free Oatmeal Raisin Cookies.  The first container has 2 servings - but at 28 calories for each it didn't feel bad to drink the entire 16 ounces.  The cookies were unexpectedly wonderful.  I don't 'believe' in gluten free stuff - but do as a rule like oatmeal/raisin cookies.  These were moist, tasty, sweet, soft with the occasional walnut.  There were two cookies in the pouch, and I should have read the label first as a half of cookie is 180 calories and 7g of fat!  Luckily I only had 1.5 cookies, so I saved 180 calories but that means I added 540 calories to my daily count.  That's almost 30% of what I'm supposed to eat!  So these cookies will need to be a once a week or longer treat....  Or I guess I could have a half of one cookie and freeze the rest to parcel out to myself.

We watched a PBS special on Li Wei Artist and Activist - Trying to get to bed earlier than usual so we can get up and get more work done in the day time!