Everything BUT Stitching

 Last night I stayed up way too late and got some good stitching done. I got tired of stitching the house so I moved up and started stitching on the letters and a bit of the border. This morning I was the first one awake so I got a bit more stitching done. 

This morning, before I started stitching, I removed the staples that were holding the top leader to the top roller and stapled it back a bit more straight. The bottom is still a big wonky but I'm going to wait and do it when I get this piece finished. I didn't have a screw driver or an easy way to get the staples out of the wooden dowel and I was afraid I was going to cut myself so I called it good once I got the top redone. I think I'll be ok with that for now.

It was funny because you probably all know I just load a fat quarter of linen and stitch on it til it's full. As I unrolled this piece of linen, I saw this and said "There you are!"

I knew that piece would show up one day! I think I have a frame for it. Funny that the house is almost the same color as what I'm using for the current project, the roof and window trims are black and I think I may use that light mustard color for my door. That's just weird.

From there, things went south and I got trapped in the kitchen!

A day or so ago, I made popovers. They weren't the best or, at least, they weren't how I remembered them. I didn't want to throw them out so I decided to slice them, heat them in a little butter, and make pancakes of sorts with them.

They were so good for breakfast. I think I'll make them again but not to have as rolls but to have for breakfast.

Next, Vince told me he was almost out of Ezekiel Bread. I knew that bread was getting low so I went ahead and got that made.

This uses four types of grains, three types of beans and lentils. It's always pretty to see the different colors the flours produce.

Next, I wanted pumpernickel bread because I love ham sandwiches with sauerkraut on pumpernickel so I made the bread.

I always add caraway seeds, black sesame seeds and sunflower seeds to this recipe.

Yesterday I made sandwich bread so I'm glad I had that already done!

The final big project was a ham bone from the freezer. I had it simmering most of the day so I put the broth in jars. I got 14 pints of ham broth.

I was using the small canner and I can only can 7 pints at a time so that's the first batch and there were 7 more in the canner. I also had a quart and I kept it out to make split pea soup.

While this last project wasn't terribly time consuming, I got next week's meal plan done.

As you can imagine, there will be very little stitching done this evening and I must get to bed early and get some sleep! It may be hard to read - a lot of light was coming through the windows. There's not a lot of cooking next week. The beef fricot is in the freezer. The split pea soup will be made in the slow cooker. I'll take a pizza crust out of the freezer and use a jar of my canned pizza sauce. The eggplant salsa is from a jar. Then on Saturday, I'll make orange cranberry bread, white bread and English muffins for our bread the next week.

You can see that we need very little in the way of groceries next week. Mostly it's just things I'll use next week. I had carrots delivered in a grocery order today but I used most all of those because I made enough split pea soup to have some for the freezer. I like carrots with cottage cheese so I munch on them a lot. 

I have to go to the dentist on Tuesday so I'll probably run by Aldi and get what I need from there. The milk and buttermilk will come from Natural Grocer. With the holidays, we haven't been able to get the raw milk we usually buy so I can get pasteurized but not homogenized from Natural Grocer and that's as close as I can get to raw milk when I can't get it from the farmer.

Now it's time for a couple of hours of stitching!

Anyone read this all the way to the bottom??  :)