Friday was an exiting mail day.  I saw the mailman walking past my front window and thought I sure hope he doesn’t have to go far.  Immediately followed by the thought of how is he going to drop my mail off carrying those two boxes.  I got up and headed to the door and never heard the mail box.

Turns out the boxes were for me!

The top box is from a cousin who sent me some old family photographs.  My great-uncle, my great-grandfather and if I understand the relationship correctly, my great-grandfather’s brothers.  I really need to find my box of genealogy stuff and photos and try to get names to the faces.

The larger box is from a quilting friend.

Shirts — missing the backs.  She said she just wanted the shirt backs and would be happy to send me the rest if I was interested.  Naturally I said YES!

Reds, yellows, browns, greens, blues and neutral.  A great addition to my shirts which tend to be on blue side.  I can’t wait to finish processing these shirts and then make some great quilts.

In addition to these wonderful shirts, I dropped by the fabric store and picked up 2 yards of fabric for my young quilting friend.  She says she wants to make 2 more quilts.  This goes in her stash and doesn’t get counted in mine.

Fabric Added Since Last Report: 31.444 yards
Fabric Added to Date:  53.944 yards

Fabric Used Since Last Report: 0 yards
Fabric Used to Date: 0.663 yards

Net Used for the year -53.281 yards

Other stash reports can be seen over at Patchwork Times.

Yes, these are wonky string geese like the ones that Bonnie are making.  Her pattern can be found HERE.

It was not my intention of starting a new quilt. (Isn’t that what we all say?) But since I have this basket of shirt tails to deal with, I figured I could play with some of the resulting strings.

I keep telling myself that I don’t have yardage in my stash – but then I find exactly what I need. Admittedly I knew I had 2 or 3 yards of the yellow — I bought it to use as the background of a stack-n-whack with the Halloween Micky Mouse.  Yellow skies weren’t my first choice  I thought they would be too bright and in your face.  My first choice was scrappy dark green — scrappy on the theory that I “don’t have yardage in my stash”.  I was surprised to find 1 1/2 yards — exactly what I need for 125 – 3 x 6 geese.  Except it’s not.

The yellow is the best choice.  And there is plenty of it so I can make a bigger quilt if I desire.  I’m thinking 150 geese.

My first thought when Judy announced that Cream Corn was this week’s ingredient was to make “Sue’s Corn Casserole”.  Sue was the woman who my friend Patti had gotten the recipe from.  I in turn passed it to my mother who made it a staple of the Thanksgiving dinner and now my nieces and nephews all think it’s “Nana’s Corn Casserole” — they also think that about the chicken and dumplings I taught my mom to make after I got the recipe from my mother-in-law shortly after I got married as well.  But I digress.

I couldn’t find my copy of the recipe — it’s not in my cookbook, my recipe box or mom’s recipe box.  Knowing my husband wasn’t a fan, I decided to do something else.  Mexican or jalapeño corn bread.

It’s been a while since I made any, so I started with an internet search.  I ultimately settled on THIS RECIPE with modifications.
Turns out I don’t have any corn meal.  I like sweet corn bread so I make my corn bread with a box of Jiffy Yellow Cake mix and a box of Jiffy Corn Muffin mix.  The only time I make corn bread from scratch is when I need it for turkey stuffing.  Don’t use sweet corn bread in that!

Anyway, I had a box of Jiffy Corn Bread mix so I just needed the jalapeños.

Here’s how I made my jalapeño corn bread.

• 2 3/4 tablespoons shortening, melted
• 1 box Jiffy Corn Muffin mix
• small can of cream corn (I used 1/2 of a large can)
• 2 eggs beaten
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• 4 oz can of chopped chilies
• 1 cup shredded cheese

Mix everything together and pour into an 8 x 8 inch greased pan.  Cook at 375 degrees for 30 – 35 minutes.

The cornbread is good — sweet like I like with just a little kick from the jalapeños.

To see other Cream Corn recipes follow the links over at Patchwork Times.  Now I’m off to debate the merits of Tofu??!!

Now to trim these into usable strips and strings.  It could take a while.

I can’t say that I’m finished — only that I can easily get the big bucket of shirts closed.  It’s amazing how little space a shirt takes up once you rip it down to flat pieces of fabric.  There’s a small laundry basket of cuffs, collars, button plackets and shirt tails/strings which still needs to be dealt with.

It looks like there is a blue quilt in my future.  At the moment I’m leaning toward something like this — only made from the shirts.  Each block would have a light and dark blue fabric, but not all blocks would be the same.

The blocks would be made from 2 1/2″ strips, so I’d end up with bonus HST squares from the pinwheels.

I’m not sure when I’ll start cutting fabric.  There are a couple of things ahead of this.

There’s been no change to my design wall this week. –Wait, now that I think about it I did tuck Piglet’s right arm under the body of the bass.  It looks much better, but I didn’t think to take a picture of it.

So, what have I been working on?  Well Monday, I did the Just Takes Two block and section. I think that was the last piecing I did.

Basically, I’ve been reading — Jennifer Chiaverini’s The Wedding Quilt and I’m nearly through Diana Gabaldon’s Dragonfly in Amber.  I might have been able to finish Dragonfly in Amber, but I was distracted.

I processed the shirts I bought Saturday and then pulled out overflowing box.

In each bundle I have the shirt back, fronts, sleeves and yoke.  The cuffs, collars and button placket has been tossed into a laundry basket for further processing.    I can’t wait to see all the shirts processed and then come up with a quilt for them.  I’ve got some ideas floating around my head, but I haven’t settled on anything yet.

Check out the other design walls over at Patchwork Times.

This past week I made one block for the Just Take 2 quilt, using about 1/4 yard of fabric.  Then I went to the Goodwill Clearance Center.  Let’s just say my numbers got shot.  A while back I figured my ‘shirt standard’ to be 1 1/2 yards — and I bought 18 shirts/pajama pants.  But since 5 or 6 of them are tiny I’m figuring my yardage based on 15 shirts which means I’m counting 22 1/2 yards.  I definitely need to stay away from thrift shops for a while until I get a few more quilts made.

Most of the shirts were plaids, stripes and checks. My favorite find of the day was a gray shirt.  I just love this print.

Well, I can’t put it off any longer.  Here are this week’s statistics.

Fabric Added Since Last Report: 22.5 yards
Fabric Added to Date:  22.5 yards

Fabric Used Since Last Report: 0.244 yards
Fabric Used to Date: 0.663 yards

Net Used for the year -21.837 yards

To see how others did with their stash follow the links over at Patchwork Times.

I’ve been jealous of the report of quilters scoring big on their thrift store shirts, but today, I have to say no more. Last fall I did OK over the span of two weekends and many miles on the car as I drove from one side of town to the other, but now I’ve found the Goodwill Clearance Center and it’s only 20 miles from me.

It doesn’t look like much since that pile on the left has some tiny shirts in it.  I had no expectations on what I would find or how the process would work.  So, I put my tie shoes one, removed my watch (the band is about to break) and rings and off I went.

This store has bins that are about 4 or 5  feet wide and maybe 8 or 10 feet long and a foot deep. On wheels they are about waist high.  They are set six bins in a section and I guess there were 14 sections, plus some around the perimeter of the room.  About every 30 minutes they swap 1/3 of the bins out and everyone descends on them looking for whatever it is they are looking for.

I focused on 100% cotton and big enough to get at least one block out of the shirt.  That top shirt on the left is only a 3 mo size, so that’s about all I’ll get.  Once I got an arm full of shirts and had made the rounds of the bins, I went and found a shopping cart.  I pushed the cart onto the scale, it was weighed and I ended up with 8 1/2 pounds of shirts for $6.71.  I’m guessing there’s at least 20 yards of usable fabric on my ironing board.

So, ‘de-boning’ these shirts, plus the ones in my overflowing shirt bucket is going to be my weekend project.  Once I make a few more quilts with shirts, I’ll venture back up north to replenish my stash.

I participated in an “ugly” fabric challenge in 2009.  The challenge fabric was roses strewn across a green background.  I fussy cut the roses and wove them around a “wicker” trellis.  The roses are machine appliqued/quilted with invisible thread.  The trellis is stitched in place with a small satin stitch.  It is then quilted 1/4″ inside each of the spaces created by the trellis.

The quilt measures 15 3/4″ wide by 23 1/2″ long.  It hangs over my work computer.

I’ve entered this quilt in Quilting Gallery’s weekly Quilters’ Show and Tell.  Please take a look at the quilts and vote for your favorite.

Judy, over at Patchwork Times has started a regular “What’s Cooking” post.  Each week she picks an ingredient for us to use in a recipe.  So far she’s picked Sweet Potatoes – which I love, Carrots – which I have nothing against and now Spinach.

So which week did I try to participate?  Obviously I’ve lost my mind.  I blame it on the still clean house and kitchen.

I happen to love Spanakopita.  My sister-in-law’s mother taught me how to make it — but since I’m the only one who will eat spinach around here I didn’t want to go to the trouble.  So, I did a web search for spinach recipes for people who don’t like spinach and found THIS.

Sounds easy enough I have everything except for the breadcrumbs and spinach.  So off to the store I went.

The only fresh spinach I could find was a salad kit, so I bought it.  I then attempted to figure out how much spinach is in a head of spinach.  Search for spinach ball recipes and decided that I probably only had enough spinach for 1/6th of the original recipe.

• 1 spinach kit (spinach only)
• 3 T butter – melted
• 2/3 C Italian bread crumbs
• 3 T parmesan cheese
• 1/8 t pepper
• 1 egg beaten
• 1 T chopped onion (in the bowl)
• 1/8 t salt
• 1/8 t thyme

I started by rinsing the spinach, running it through the salad spinner and then tossing it in a covered pan on med-high heat for about 5 minutes.

Once it was done, I dumped it on to a paper towel, squeezed out the excess moisture, then chopped it up before adding it to the other ingredients.

Once mixed, I used a my cookie scoop and put 1″ balls of the mixture on a greased cookie sheet.

I baked them for 20 minutes in a 350 degree oven.

The bottoms were nice and brown. I’m not sure if I would call this finger food. They were tasty enough, but not something I would do again.

Check out the links over at Patchwork Times for more spinach recipes.  Next week’s ingredient is cream style corn.  I like that!