Junior

Looked who popped out to say hi. Can you see his head in the green bush? This is Junior. His big brother Fred hangs out in the front yard and suns himself on my long row of bushes. I peek to see if he's out there before I exit the front door. If he's there, I go out another way. Because you know that thing will lunge at me and attack. Well, you never know...

One of my guild buddies brought this vintage quilt top to show and tell. I recognized some of the prints from my oldies collection I've been working with recently. I love the blue sashing. Such a happy quilt. I sure hope she finishes this beauty. She is a talented quilter, so she could make it shine. I may have to copy this design with my oldies.

I unloaded donated my sampler blocks to another guild friend. She put them together and added borders to make a nice charity quilt. I remember falling in love with that fabric collection when I first started quilting. Blech, what was I thinking? I do love the Sunbonnet Sue carrying a load of fabric. Some of those blocks look complicated for a beginner. I bet they were a mess! I'm glad they found a home.

I remembered to fill (and bring) the raffle basket to the guild meeting. It was fun shopping my stash for goodies. Today I'm going to work on our block-of-the-month, which is this really cute Pippi Longstocking girly.

Gee, I've been in a beer theft kind of mood. I stole another beer to make this Easy Beer Mac and Cheese. The recipe only needed 8 oz. of the 12 oz. bottle, so there was a swig or two leftover for the cook. The dish was really good. And easy! And you use whole wheat noodles so they cancel out the cheese.

I served the mac and cheese with these Honey-Soy Chicken Thighs. I'm not a huge honey fan, so I only used 1/4 cup versus the full cup. The full cup of honey would have made them really sticky. Everyone loved these. The baking sauce is a winner. I put a squirt of yellow mustard in to thicken it up and used less soy sauce since I wasn't using the full amount of honey.

Here I go again, using a spool of thread to its ultimate death.

Thankfully, six new spools arrived yesterday. I bought that spool on the right last week to give the Aurifil brand a try. Everyone raves about it. My local quilt shop sells it for $9 a spool! Yikes! I hope I hate it. The other spools go on sale for $1.95 each at Connecting Threads and they're larger. My sewing machine purrs when I use it.