Chilpotle Peppers #chilpotle #peppers

I bought a can of chilpotle peppers because I had a recipe that called for 3 teaspoons of chilpotle peppers.  I didn’t want the contents of the can to go to waste.

So I food processed the peppers and put them into an ice cube tray and froze them.  Here is what they looked like after I took them out of the ice cube tray:

I put these into a freezer bag and put it into the freezer.  When I want to add extra punch to a dish I’m making, I can drop one or two of these chilpotle cubes in the pot.

On the bag I guess I spelled Chilpotle wrong.  I spelled it like the restaurant name.

I made cubes of frozen basil last year and am I glad I did that because my basil growth sucks this year because of the drought.

Have a great day and thank you for reading my blog!

Quilt Pillowcase Number Three #quilt

Here is my third pillowcase:

This is one side of it.  I like the woman in the what were Danish cocktail napkins.  She is alternating between drinking martinis and a pitcher of water.  Then I have really garish deer and horse fabric.

Here is the other side:

This fabric might look familiar to some of you.  It’s Grandma Moses fabric.  You can Google her.  I love this fabric.  I tried to sell it on ebay and when it didn’t sell, I thought, “That is it!  I want it out where I can see it forever.”  So this fabric is on the other side of my pillowcase.

Here is the lining:  happy face fabric and retro housewife Michael Miller fabric.  Happiness inside of the pillowcase!

All of this fabric is over 50 years old!  That is amazing!

Here are all three pillows:

Next I will make a cover for our ottoman, which is a first for me.

It Finally Rained! #rain #wisconsin

It hadn’t rained in our neighborhood since May 25, 2012.  Last night it finally rained!  We could see the storm coming from the west.  Although it took me awhile to truly believe it would rain.

Many of our plants were starting to die.

The only plants doing well are the weeds.  Look at how green that sucker is!

If you are wondering…HELLLOOOOO…why don’t you just water all of your plants?  Well, we want to conserve water.  So we have to prioritize.  We watered our most important plants and trees.  We watered our veggie garden twice a day.

Here is an important tree that we watered, our evergreen tree.

This tree is very meaningful to us and we don’t want anything to happen to it.  See how crunchy and dry the grass is!

So, I know you want to see this.  Here is a photo-by-photo account of the storm!  Whopee!!!

Could it be possible that we will really get rain?

Yes, rain might happen! It think it’s going to rain!

Yep. I see a squall. It’s going to rain.

Yes! Rain is coming!

Nature is amazing!

Ahhhhh…

It’s raining!!!

We closed our garage door and moved to the front porch to watch the storm.  My son and I went out into the rain and got wet.  Loved it!

We are grateful for the rain!

My friend told me the best time to pull weeds is after it has rained.  It’s easy to pull all the weeds from their roots because the soil is soft.  I’ll take some weed shots before I start pulling.

So, off to the veggie garden I go.

Quilted Pillowcases #quilt

I decided that I didn’t want to make a quilt because I don’t need one.  I already have enough bedspreads in my house.  But what I really need is more pillows on our deep couch to support our backs.  I have extra bed pillows and decided to make pillowcase covers for my extra bed pillows.

And then I will put them all on my couch and it will be super psychedelic! 

It was really fun to choose the fabric.  I used 5″ squares.  For each pillowcase I used 6 squares across and 4 squares down.  Each pillowcase is lined.

Here is the first one I made:

I had a “friend” who sent me an email after I moved to Wisconsin.  She said that

every time and and her girlfriend see cows or cheese on a TV commercial, they think of me. 

Well, that was a major faux pas (MISTAKE) to say that to me.  What an insulting generalization!  And, at the time I had only lived here for one year.  I was really pissed off that they would say something so shallow.  So I didn’t answer their email for a couple years.  All I got out of their faux nice, long email was that

they now associated me with cows and cheese.  Ugh!!! 

Couldn’t have been a worse insult to a city girl like me.

Oops, is this post supposed to be about quilts, sewing, and being creative?

Well, then why do I have the farm fabric?  I was being rebellious and bought it.  The other cute fabric of a fisher boy and girl swinging is from my mom.

Here is the lining:

I bought some bug fabric in New Jersey and thought that some day I would make my son a quilt with a bunch of bugs and animals on it but of course that never happened.  So, I put the bug fabric inside the pillow.  Cute, huh? And the bug lining has nothing to do with the outside of the pillowcase.

The green pillowcase is slightly annoying but it gives me pleasure somehow.

Here is my second pillowcase:

When you quilt it’s important to use your favorite fabrics that mean something to you.  The troll/gnome/elf fabric is from Nick & Nora pajamas that my mom gave me.  There is a lot of troll merchandise in Southern Wisconsin, so I thought it would be perfect to cut up the jammies and use them for this purpose.

The lining I used for this pillowcase is a navy blue flat sheet from Lands’ End.  I had bought a queen sheet set from them and the fitted sheet never fit our bed properly, even thought I measured everything before purchase.  And to make things even more annoying, the flat sheet was huge for the bed!  It was really annoying to put that fitted sheet on our bed and one end of it only partially covered our mattress.

I couldn’t take it anymore and sent the fitted sheet back to Lands’ End and got my money back. 

And then I was stuck with a big flat navy blue sheet.  It felt really good to rip it up and turn it into a lining for a pillowcase.

Although I do think it’s more fun to use fabric with a print on it as a pillowcase liner.

Rag, rag, rag!

If I need some more pillows, I found these cute pillows in a local store:

I love the logo:  Grandma’s Jumbo.

I love the print colors of the pillows – they have green, yellow and blue.

The pillows are nice and plump!

I’ll post the next pillowcase I make.  It’s in the works already.

Thanks for reading!

Zucchini July 14, 2012 #zucchini

When I went to water my veggie garden this morning, I picked this wonderful 15 inch zucchini, my first one of the season.  I photographed it on the floor of my office.

Then I put it on my stairs to bring up next time I go upstairs.

I’ll be you have never seen a photo of a zucchini on carpeted stairs before, so here it is:

 

Oregano #oregano #dehydrator

Here is my beautiful oregano that I grew and harvested myself. 

One of the best investments I have ever made is a dehydrator to dry out the oregano.  I lay the oregano on the shelves of the dehydrator, plug it in and it dries the oregano in around 24 hours.  I haven’t really timed it.  I keep checking it every few hours.

Hay Bales #wisconsin #hay

This is near where I live in the country.  No rain since May 25th.  Shot with an iPod using PictureShow.

Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah Song #disney #wisconsin

This friendly Wisconsin license plate might be referring to the lyrics of the song Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah, from the 1946 Disney live action and animated movie Song of the South.

Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah Zip-A-Dee-A
Wonderful feeling
Wonderful Day!

Coneflowers #coneflowers #wisconsin

Pretty coneflowers in the front yard of my prairie field.

I Am #licenseplate

Wisconsin has very clever license plates, or if they aren’t clever, I like them because of their message!

Kohler Design Center – Kohler, Wisconsin #kohler #wisconsin

We went on a day trip to the Kohler Design Center in Kohler, Wisconsin.  We also went to the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, but I will talk about that in another post.  We did not go to the John Kohler Factory Tour but we will another time.

The Kohler Design Center shows off all Kohler fixtures for kitchens and bathrooms.

It was fabulous!

It was fun to get ideas for our kitchen and bathroom.

My husband liked the marble counters in this kitchen and we both liked the large, one basin kitchen sink.  We have a stainless steel double basin sink, and I have always liked single basins better.

For the bathroom, we loved this contemporary square sink.  We are very content with our sinks in our bathroom though.

I liked this bathroom sink a lot, but it’s stainless steel and if someone scratched it, I would have a melt down.  It looks kinda hard to clean too.

Upstairs in the Kohler Design Center, there were rooms that were just like real kitchens and bathrooms.  They even had running water.  This pottery head vase was in a bathroom that was rococo style.  It was really fun.  Do you think this is a Jonathan Adler vase?

I love Jonathan Adler!

But we are talking about Kohler now.

I couldn’t believe how the water entered the tub in this bathroom:

From the ceiling!

I had to draw arrows so you can see the water stream.  So unique!

This was my FAVORITE room.  It reminded me of a loft in Manhattan.  Take a nice bath in the very arty tub and lay naked on the lounge.  Dreamy!

In the basement of the Kohler Design Center was a museum of bathroom and kitchen items.  It also had original oil paintings of ads from the 1920’s.

http://www.us.kohler.com/us/Kohler-Design-Center/content/CNT400038.htm

Kohler Design Center

101 Upper Road

Kohler, WI  53044

Phone: 920.457.3699

The content of this post was not generated to make money.  I am not being paid for this content. 

Wisconsin Needs Rain #Wisconsin

We haven’t had rain since May 25, 2012.  It will be a celebratory day when it finally rains!  This was a front coming in but it didn’t reach us.

Happy Fourth of July!

Making A Quilt #quilt

I have started cutting the pieces for a quilt.  I have a lot of fabric that I want to make a couple of quilts out of.

There is something satisfying to me when I cut 5″ squares over and over again.

(Not sure what that means psychologically and DON’T TELL ME.)

Now, I said I was cutting the pieces but I do not know when I will start sewing the pieces together because during the week my full time job is looking for a full time job.

It’s fun to choose exactly how I want the print centered on the fabric.  Yes Mom, these are the Nick and Nora pajamas you bought me years ago!  I hope you don’t mind that they now have a different purpose.

The elf/gnome/troll motif is popular in Wisconsin.

This Venice, Italy print is from a skirt that I used to wear to work when I commuted to Manhattan.

This print is also from a skirt I used to commute in daily to Manhattan.  I still love the retro print.

This print is especially garish.  If you know me, which you don’t know me very well yet, you know I love garish, tacky things.

That is why my web site is kinda tacky. 

I really am not into fabric prints of little kids picking apples and the little girl has angel wings kinda stuff.

This print makes me especially jubilant!  Doesn’t it make you feel that way?  And very Wisconsin-centric!

I have a stock pile of Vera Neumann linen calendars, napkins and place mats and I am going to make a quilt out of all of them!

If you haven’t heard of Vera Neumann, you can Google her yo’self.

Yup.  I’m gonna chop these suckers up and it will be so satisfying!

If you want to buy all of these from me, then I won’t cut them up. 

This is a sweet little napkin (from a set of 4) that, yes, Mom you gave it to me!  I still have the matching table cloth and will not be cutting that up!

These two linen napkins are especially lovely because they depict how I feel.  At first unhappy because I haven’t sipped my martini yet, and then very happy because I downed that sucker!

p.s.  I cannot believe that it is already July 1!!!