Just a great sunny mild day.
All went well in the studio today. No glitches, no error messages. As this is a quilt of all things scrappy, I had made a departmental decision yesterday. This quilt would be using a pale blue for the top thread. With so many colors, any number of colors would have worked just as well. Now in the bobbin thread . . . that’s a whole different story. I am emptying bobbins of various colors. There started a blue, than a light brown, and then a tan, and then a light gray. To finish off the time I had left, I put in a darker gray. When the empty bobbin message came up, I had decided three hours was enough. From the top of the quilt, it all shows that blue thread was used. It isn’t even very noticeable that five different colors were used.
Wait a minute. I checked the backing of the very last stitches and it showed pink. What! The bobbin for sure was showing gray when I loaded it into the bobbin case. There must have been gray thread loaded over some pink thread. How the pink picked up right after the gray had been used up, a modern mystery. As it is, I do have a bobbin with pink thread on it that I used when Dennis’ great granddaughter got her pink quilt last year. I might as well go for it.
Three hours of free motion quilting was enough for this day. The quilt under the needle has to keep moving for the stitching to be done, thus the free motion. The quilt is heavy as it is moved with no pulling or drag as it goes under the needle. Everything went very smoothly today.
Yesterday while I did battle with the machine, Dennis stirred up some sugar cookie dough. I had never bought cookie mix in a box before. Betty Crocker’s sugar cookie mix had pre-mixed pouches. With each pouch, a stick of melted butter and one whipped egg needed to be added. As Dennis was doing the heavy duty stirring all together, I put the “whipped egg” into the directions so as to not have the whites and the yolks, not get mixed in equally. I have a cup with a screw on lid and that whipped the egg perfectly.
My job was to roll the dough into balls and then flattened with the bottom of a measuring cup dipped into sugar. The flavor was fantastic. I need to take note of how long to leave the tray in the oven. All ovens have temps that vary. The first batch was taken out when just the rims of the cookies had a bit of tan showing. These cookies will need to come out when they still look raw. That first batch will make great dunkers. We had a total of 24 cookies when all was done.
Sugar cookies have a long history with me. My great grandmother, Christine, lived with Christ and Laura on the family farm as did Christ and Laura’s youngest son and his wife. Talk about a busy farm house. Christine did most of the baking. Christine’s hair was as white as snow, always wrapped in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. She spoke very little English that I ever heard. She came through Ellis Island from Poland and I know the household in Penn Township spoke fluent German. My cousin Shirley and I did get to stay with them for a week or two during summer breaks from school. The household was large and the two of us had a bed in the upstairs
No one called my great grandmother anything but Mutter, German for mother. Mutter always wore a long black dress with a crisp white apron. Her aprons never got mussed or dirty. Mutter made the best rolled out sugar cookies. They were huge rounds with sugar on the top. When Shirley and I would have a cookie, Mutter would bring out one for each of us plus one for herself with her cup of coffee, and us girls also had a cup with coffee in it. Mutter would sit with us at the round kitchen table. She would beckon us as she picked up her cookie and showed that we should dunk the cookie as she was. Of course we followed suit, letting the bite of cookie soaked in coffee melt in our mouths. Mutter would watch us and smile.
Oh for memories. Who doesn’t like a sugar cookie dunked in coffee.
With that I take my leave. ♥
