Food and Fiber Floozie: bread baking, Cookie & Elsie a trois, new card from Michael

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! The end of the year is always a time of reflection, so I thought I’d include the missive we put in our Christmas cards….since we don’t send cards to people we see on a regular basis…so…here you go:

January was a roller coaster month. It started out with me developing 2 small tears in my retina. Luckily, our eye doctor is associated with a retinologist and my tears were laser fixed lickety-split! Things began looking up with an all-too-short one night visit from my best high school bud….Rich Hooper. It was downhill again as one of my good friends, Loree, ended up in the hospital with blood clots; then finally ended on a high note as I visited friends in Connecticut for a week.

February was totally exciting for me as I found a (twice a year) warehouse fabric sale very near to where we live :~), and my honey had a good time celebrating his birthday with lots of his golfing friends.

The best thing about March was taking a bus trip to the Newberry Opera House to see a musical production of “7 brides for 7 brothers”, one of my all time favorite movies. Michael knows how much I love it, so he bought tickets to this play and it was fabulous!

Near the beginning of April we celebrated Easter with good friends and a fabulous menu; I had a great surprise in the middle of the month…my honey surprised me with tickets to CARMINA BURANA (one of my favorites), and I ended the month by finishing a new airline bag for Michael, because May was the month for travel. Michael and I had a wonderful trip early in May to California with many of our friends from SCCL; Susan & Charlie made a visit shortly after we got home; Michael joined a dozen other guys for a 3 day trip to Pinehurst, and BG came down to visit while he was gone. BG got her chops in on Miss Scarlett…quilting 5 quilts in 2-1/2 days! Of course, the end of May was the most special time of all….Michael and I celebrated our 10 year wedding anniversary. My honey was determined to do it in style and surprise me once again. He got tickets to JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR and rented a stretch limo to pick us up and ferry us around for the entire evening!!! It was truly magical.

In June I started teaching hands on bread classes out of our home, and they seemed to be a big success. I started the students making the no-fail butter buns from King Arthur Flour, and then we moved on to a whole wheat bread. I still have to give one more class on artisan bread…maybe in 2016. My good friend Cathy Lombardozzi came for a short, but very welcome visit on her way home from Asheville. Although we don’t talk a lot during the year, it was like we saw each other just yesterday. June also saw the beginning of the SNS (Shaken Not Stirred) Martini Club. Twelve women who get together once a month to drink martinis (vodka based, not gin thank goodness), eat goodies and have a good time. I’m very glad my friend Pat invited me to join this fun group of women. I hosted the first get-together (with Michael’s help of course) and everyone seemed to have a great time.

We had a wonderful time in July…watching the SCCL golf cart parade for the 4^th at Paula & Doug’s house with lots of our neighbors. Then we headed back there for her annual ‘mater sammich lunch! A few days after that, Michael headed off for the golfing vacation of a lifetime….playing at Pebble Beach with Marc. After they did the Scotland courses in 2013, they decided to vacation in California and play Pebble Beach & Spyglass and a few other courses in 2015. They had a fabulous time…wonder where they’ll go next? July is also the month I learned about Clinton School (one of the poorest schools in our county) and I went on a mission to make quilts to donate to the school. The month ended on a high note with a visit from Mary Jo.

August started with an “other worldly” experience…..we got to stand in our neighbor’s driveway and watch the International Space Station fly overhead (17,150 miles per hour, or about 5 miles a second)….totally cool! I played nursemaid for several weeks as Michael had cataract surgery on both eyes, and is now seeing much more clearly. The surgery is nothing compared to the “drops in the eyes” regimen you must follow before the surgery and for weeks afterward :~). Pat & I also drove to Virginia to pick up my friend Ginny’s quilting fabric & books stash. She has decided that she wants to concentrate more on her painting, so she is giving up quilting.

We had a lovely visit from Al (our friend and financial planner) at the beginning of

September, but the big news was our visit to Connecticut. Michael attended his 50^th year high school reunion…this is the very first time he has attended ANY of his high school reunions, and he was a bit nervous at first. But he started running into his old friends and had a really great time. We flew in on Friday; had lunch with Tim, an old teacher buddy, and had a pizza party in the evening for the first reunion event. I spent the day Saturday with my friend Janice, while Michael got to golf with an old friend Chuck. Saturday evening was a more formal dinner with the “Class of 1965 “, while Sunday morning we met about a dozen friends for breakfast. After that we headed off to Ithaca/Trumansburg to stay with Kate & Marc and see their new/first home. It was a wonderful extended weekend and Michael was very glad he went.

October was the month that some of my crafts went national! A friend’s daughter got the chance to sell handmade articles through AMAZON. She asked for pictures of items from me, her mom and Pat (another friend)…and we were approved! If you type ARTISAN PRIDE into the search engine at Amazon, you can eventually make your way to our personal site. Michael also started rehearsing for another play at Fort Mill Community Playhouse called INTERRUPTIONS.

The Fiber Floozie retreat was in November this year and we all had a great time. Michael’s play also opened to good reviews. I went along with 20 other people from SCCL for the second weekend of the play. Michael had a really good time, but it was bittersweet as the playhouse must find new lodgings for the future. The building they have been in for many years is being sold.

As usual, December was filled with Christmas parties and lots of other good food. I made my usual Christmas candies, and they were all distributed far and wide. For the most part the weather was beautiful and Michael continued his regular 3 days a week golfing schedule.

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Michael decided to take down the rest of our Christmas decorations Friday morning (1/1/2016) while I headed downstairs to do a little figuring. I know I have told people this story before….so feel free to skip over it if you know it. At the beginning of 2013, I told myself that I couldn’t make any more quilt tops until I quilted all of the tops I had already completed. Any quilter worth her salt has unquilted quilt tops in her life….it’s just the nature of the beast, since it’s generally much more fun to figure out and piece the tops than to quilt them :~). I didn’t realize at the time how much joy this would take out of my quilting…but I stuck to that commitment and got 3 tops quilted on my sewing machine (with polar fleece backings and no batting) by the end of 2013. In May of 2014, thanks to Michael’s encouragement and support, I bought a long arm. I had a LOT of problems with it, but still managed to quilt 21 quilts during 2014….a huge improvement over the previous year, not to mention that my joy in quilting came roaring back as I started to create more quilt tops…knowing that I could now quilt them. Now we come to 2015…I still had a few problems with my long arm (named Miss Scarlett (thank you Cathy!) remember because 1 – it is a good southern name, 2 – it totally suits her sometimes temperamental workings, and 3 – that was probably the color of my face as I dealt with all of the problems!!), but after January it seemed to really settle down. Then during the summer I found out about a very poor school in our county (Clinton), and the teachers/kids were thrilled to receive quilts as donations. My sewing/quilting definitely accelerated and I quilted 53 quilts during 2015 (both my own and some customer quilts). I can only imagine what 2016 will bring, but I feel VERY blessed to be able to continue to make quilts that are gratefully received by kids who could definitely use some joy and beauty in their lives. I got a packet of letters from the entire 4th grade class…thank yous for all of the donations. I took the letters into Stitch & Chat (since the members of that group have donated so much to the school) and will also take them to quilting next week (since the Scrap Happy Quilters have also donated.) So, sew-wise/quilt-wise, 2015 was a fabulous year and I can only hope for more of the same in 2016. And yes…I’ve already started to make a list of the (sewing) things I would like to accomplish this year :~).

After that, I worked on the last 2 quilts from Miss Scarlett. I got them unpinned and trimmed and started to work on making binding. I took some time out to put together bread dough and get it baked…we took 1/2 a loaf over to Jan to share with her company (it’s been forever since I made some…we finally out of all of the bread/rye/English muffins in our house).