Progress is Slow

I've been beating my head up against the wall on this latest quilt. But that's ok, it turns out. It just means that I am breaking through - or trying to break through to a different level in my art.

So, I took my sister's advice and just starting making motifs in my chosen color scheme, and building the quilt on the pin up wall. Seems like every day I make a few motifs, place them up on the wall, and then I feel overwhelmed and have to go away until the next day. So, yeah. Progress is slow, but I'm gonna keep plugging away.

Here are some photos showing my progress:





This last photo has a lot of white space, I know. I will fill it in later with different little things. That is, if I decide to leave it this way.

In order to feel some sense of accomplishment, I have also been cooking a lot. I made a caramel apple pie the other day. It was delicious!



For the first time, I made the pie crust in my Cuisinart. It was so easy that way, I can't believe I never tried that before. If you haven't done that before, go to Crisco's website; they have a short video and everything. Easy as pie. Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Then I just sprinkled the apples with cinnamon sugar. I didn't want too many flavors since I was using caramel. And the apples were very tart and a little dry.

For the topping, I had about 18 caramels which I melted in a small sauce pan with a little water. Then I stirred the caramel into chopped peanuts and oatmeal. Working quickly, I spread that concoction over the top of the pie. Quickly because once it cools, it ain't going nowhere.

Then I covered the pie with foil and baked it for a half hour at some temperature. I don't remember what it was. I took the pie out and poked at the apples to see how done they were. They were quite soft, but really still dry, even though I put several dabs of butter on them before putting the caramel topping on. So, I got the caramel topping for ice cream out of my fridge and squirted a bunch of that on the pie, covered it and let it cook another 15 minutes. It smelled so good!

Afterward, when I'd had a taste, I decided I wasn't getting enough of that caramel and peanut flavor that I wanted. It tasted a lot like oatmeal. So I think I will do it differently next time. But it still got gobbled up by my family. Yum!