What's Up Wednesday

Happy Wednesday, everyone!  Are you all having a good week?  Wednesdays are always a little irritating for me because it's my laundry day.  I just don't like doing laundry!  I know intellectually that I should be grateful that I a) have nice clothes that need washed and that b) I have a nice washing machine and dryer to make doing laundry easier, but I still get grumpy about the interruption to my day.  Oh well, I guess I have to make the best of it!

So I may as well take this time between loads to tell you about my week and what I've been up to.  I feel like I haven't been doing that much, but I'm sure there's more doing on than I remember!  The little details of life tend to fall through the cracks in my brain.  Better check the pictures on my phone.

Oh yeah!  My hubby and I decided to do a COOKIE BAKE OFF this past weekend.  He said he wanted to add gingersnaps to our list of Christmas cookies, and I told him that we already had a recipe for old fashioned pepparkakors in the rotation.  So we decided to get a recipe for American gingersnaps and compare it to (what I found out that weekend is actually) Swedish gingersnaps.  My hubby is 1/4 Swedish, his grandpa came off the boat as a young man and spoke Swedish, so I'm more emotionally partial to the pepparkakors, but we had to know for sure which tasted better.

As it turns out, the pepparkakors were so much better!  I'm sorry I don't have a better picture of them (they're on the left in the photo above).  I usually pipe some white frosting on top to highlight the cookie design.  They're very spicy and just the right amount of sweet.  The American gingersnaps ended up being far too sweet.  When I get around to icing them, I'll take a better picture and post the recipe!

We also bottled our strawberry wine this weekend.  It's hard to capture the lovely pink color in a picture.  Oh My Goodness.  Have you ever had strawberry wine?  Because it's the most heavenly liquid on this earth.  We left it dry because it's just so heady with fruity goodness, adding sugar seemed like a crime.  It needs to mellow another month or so, but it's so amazing.  Wine making is a long term hobby, but it's worth it!  (Plus it's super frugal.  A bottle of wine costs us less than $1 to make.)

I've been very slowly working on a hexie quilt, too.  It will eventually be a sewing machine cover for one of my millions of sewing machines (actually, I sold one so now I'm down to six!  Hubby is happy about that).  It's slow going, though.  This is my first time doing English paper piecing, and although I like it a lot, goodness it takes a lot of time!  I'm so tempted to rev up one of my zigzag machines and just zigzag them together.  But, I'll be patient.  I have just 8 more flowers to go, then I need to put them together with white pieces.  Ugh.  How on earth do people do entire bed sized quilts?  I clearly need more time and/or patience.

I have once again been digging into my Taste of Home magazines.  There's something about cooler weather that makes the cook in me squeal with joy.  I actually got so excited this year that I went onto Ebay and bought a few lots of magazines so that I could fill out my collection.  Yep.  Now I have every since issue published between 1993 and 2000.  I have about half of them from 2001-2006, and maybe someday I'll fill that in too.  That's all I want though.  In 2007, they sold their souls to an evil corporation that took all the heart and warmth out of the magazine.  I wish someone would come out with a magazine like TOH was back in the 90s and early 2000s.  If anyone knows of one, let me know! 

And of course, I've been working on this guy!  That's a sneak peek for you!  (He's sitting on my Wacom tablet, in case you're curious.)  Remember that I'll be posting the first installment of instructions this Friday!

Well, that's my week.  How has your week looked?  I'd love to hear about anything interesting you've been up to!