It's So Easy!

Wow! I followed the recipe from Jill Santopietro's Tiny Kitchen video for tangerine sherbet. (The delightlful little bowl is by Shelburne potter Molly Cantor.)

I started with the most amazingly juicy tangelos. Did you know that a tangelo is a cross between a tangerine and a grapefruit?

I zested 2 of them, then juiced the whole lot by hand.

There are a few more simple steps. Go the NY Times website and follow the whole recipe if you want to try this.

There it is, churning about inside the machine . . .

Holy smokes! The most delightfully light, delicate tasting sherbet I've ever enjoyed. If I'm going to keep exploring this sort of thing, you'd better come over and share some . . . or else I'm going to become quite a chubber! :-)

Winter Trees

I love to see the structure of trees when they have no leaves in the winter.

January Thaw I

Here in the Northeast US, we usually have a brief respite from January's below-freezing temperatures: the January Thaw. It began yesterday with daytime highs soaring into the 40s! (he he)
Really, it was sunny and quite pleasant, and I couldn't resist a nice long walk.

This charming couple looked quite content, noodling about in the little unfrozen section of the pond.

We Can All Do Something to Help

Please help the people of Haiti however you can. Click the image below to make a donation to Doctors Without Borders. Every donation, no matter how small, helps people who are suffering in unbearable ways.

Broken Dishes

I have a long, sporadic history of making pieced cotton pillow covers and quilts. I made my first quilt in 1977. In the early 1990s I happened to flip through a copy of A Treasury of Amish Quilts by Rachel and Kenneth Pellman in a fabric store. Inside those pages I discovered the Amish quilt pattern called Broken Dishes, and I've been fascinated by it ever since. I love the straightforward, graphic use of solid colored cotton fabrics that Amish quilt makers employ. And Broken Dishes is barely a pattern at all - the order of the triangles is the only requirement. The color arrangement is random - or so it seems. As you can see below, I made considerable effort to orchestrate the arrangement for this pillow.


Here are the triangles, cut from 2" squares, laid out on the counter. I spent quite a bit of time moving them around until I was satisfied.


The finished top. I think I managed to keep all but one row in the desired order! I adore the fact that a mistake like getting the pieces out of order is easily incorporated into the whole.


Here's the cover stuffed with a 20"x20" down & feather pillow insert. Hey, what's that black fuzzy thing on the right side?


Oh . . . it's my little helper, Miss Bettie!

This pillow was a gift for my dear friend D. It looks really nice on the blue couch in her office.