My First Embroidery Experience

While I was on vacation last week I stayed at my cousins.  While she was helping me get sheets and stuff for bed she asked which blankets I wanted to use.  I immediately recognized one of them.  It was a quilt that I helped make!

A long time ago my Aunt (who happens to be my cousins mom) decided a perfect gift for our Memere would be to make her a quilt.  It wouldn't be any ordinary quilt.  Each piece would have a personalized rectangle by each of the kids, spouses, and grand kids.

Before I folded the blanket up to put it away I snapped a quick shot of my square.

My first embroidery project ever!!!

I was dumb and didn't take a picture of the whole thing to show you how creative and beautiful it is.  Sleeping with it made me feel a little closer to my Memere again.  How we all love her and miss her so much.

If my cousin gets back to me with a photo of the whole thing I will add it. :)

EDIT!!!!  Melanie got back to me and sent me a photo!

 

Quilting Bug via my Memere

My Memere (my mom's mom) was always doing something wonderful.  Whether it was cooking, baking, sewing, crocheting, or being a great grandma she always was inspiring.  She was also cute when she had her little old lady green curlers in.  See here for an example.

One of the things that she did a lot of was making quilts.  I am sure all of the kids and grandkids cherish the quilts that Memere made just for them (many with her signature embroidered at the bottom).  I have several that I would like to share.

This quilt that we are currently using on the bed was the last quilt that I received from my Memere.  I can remember working with her, my Matount's, and my mom.  We were all around the quilt putting the finishing touches on.  Using yarn or embroidery floss we were adding in the little frilly things.  Sorry didn't think to take a picture of those up close but you can kinda see them on the pink part.

The second quilt I am going to share is the quilt I made for my math class in high school.  We had a project where we had to make something that was geometric.  I chose to make a quilt.  My Memere helped me to pick a pattern, pick out the fabrics, and get it all together.  It is not much bigger than a lap quilt (hey it needed to be light enough to bring to school and back).  I am very proud of that thing.  It was the last thing that my Memere really helped me make.

So, now that I am in the process of making my first quilt alone I am often thinking of my Memere.  She made I believe 100 quilts to be donated to a shelter or a hospital.  I hope that maybe one day I can do something like that.

I will have to look around to see if I have a photo of her to share...

Food Friday - Adventures in Crock Potting

For this Food Friday I will be sharing my first real adventure in cooking with a crock pot.  I received a 5Q one for Christmas (so exciting) and accidentally left it at home when I traveled back up to Orlando.  My sister luckily goes to school up here so she brought it up for me.

We had a Publix turkey dinner for our "christmas" dinner and when it was fullly heated/cooked the bag was opened and juice started crazy waterfall pouring out of the bag.  My Mom is not the best gravy maker and had already bought jar gravy for those that wanted some, so I declared the turkey juice was MINE!  The bf gratefully helped to separate the juice into two Tupperware containers (the whole time thinking I was crazy for wanting it).  Regardless of what he thought, my grand plan was to use the juice as a base for a turkey soup!

Fast-forward to this past weekend and I had a grocery list of all of the ingredients I wanted to add to my soup.

I had squash, zucchini, celery, sweet onion, stewed tomatoes (still in their full form) turkey tenderloin, italian green beans, vegetable stock, the frozen turkey stock, and a home grown carrot from the bf's parents garden.

Frozen turkey juice close up!

I chopped everything up to about the same sizes.

Yes this is a homegrown carrot.  Very delicious!

I heated up the turkey juice on the stove so that when I put it in the crock pot it would be ready to go.  As I was pouring the pot of juice in I realized I probably should have strained it... but I had already scrapped off the top layer of fat before I froze then.  So the more little turkey pieces the better.


I dumped all of the veggies in (at that point realizing I might have gone overboard).

I cut the turkey into chunks and cooked them almost all of the way through in a pan on the stove.

They were dumped into the crock pot too.  I tasted the broth and realized it was super salty so I added in some veggie stock, garlic powder, pepper, onion powder and set the crock pot to Heat for 3 hours.

After a while I just had to check on it so I lifted the lid

and saw....

At this point I felt it was time to add in the stewed tomatoes.  Now that is probably not a very common item to have in a soup but my Memere always made her chicken noodle soup (which my friends have tested and it does have cold healing abilities) with a can of whole stewed tomatoes.  The tomatoes were always my favorite part of the soup.  Cutting them in half in your bowl to see the red juice seep out into the rest of the bowl... yummy.

I stirred it around and let it cook some more.

After a while I pulled the lid off again (I know I know I am not supposed to have to do that) to stir and peek and the soup looked perfect.

 The last thing I added was a strained can of italian green beans.  We left for Curtis Earth Trivia with the soup on warm just to finish it up.

We came home to an apartment that smelt almost exactly like my Memere's chicken noodle soup.  Which in and of itself made me feel happy and successful.

I made myself wait a WHOLE day before I ate the soup.  Made the bf have it for dinner and I must say it was very wonderful (even though he thought it tasted too much like veggies and not enough like turkey).

Chicken noodle soup for the bf will have to be next since he "suffered" through this one without too much complaining ;)...