Sunday Sundry 8-9-15

Welcome to Sunday Sundry, the almost-birthday edition!  That exclamation point is about as excited as I get about my birthday, although I do enjoy getting together with people to celebrate.  I'm looking forward to having lunch tomorrow with Dad and my sister, and I very much enjoyed visiting with my daughter over a meal at Outback yesterday.

As far as cake, that's been covered with the Chocolate Beet Cake I made this weekend.  Because when life (via the garden) hands you beets...you make cake!  Am I right?  Doesn't everyone?  ;)

Well, whether or not beets are involved, we do love our cake around here.

(But we do, darn it...we really do.)

This was the first beet I pulled from Dad's garden—it's heart-shaped!  Two plants grew together and formed one.  Ah, now there's a lovely metaphor.

Not so lovely to behold were the first rutabagas (elsewhere known as swedes...which reminds me of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, slavishly digging swedes from the muck for winter cattle feed).

Certainly, they are not a glamorous veg, but I put them—washed, peeled, and cubed, of course—in the slow cooker today with carrots and a tenderloin tip roast.  They were delish!

On the Wall
I finished two more kennel quilts in the past week or so, and have another small one on the design wall.

This one uses parts of two scrub tops with butterflies and two scrub pants, in sort of a Charlie-Brown-shirt zigzag or chevron.

You can see the backing I pieced for it on the cutting table below.  I love being able to use up odds and ends from the stash for the quilt backs and bindings.

Here are the other two I finished during the week.  Just patchwork squares.  Soft and simple.

These particular quilts are 25 x 45 inches.  

The pink/butterfly chevron above will be 24.5 x 32.5.

Being Human
Season 1 of Poldark finished last Sunday, unfortunately, before I was finished admiring its star, Aidan Turner.  Thankfully, I found a new-to-me series on Netflix to tide me over.

 

Being Human, the UK version, is pretty awesome!  I'd never seen the American TV version (which some say sucked, and they weren't talking about the vampires).

The premise almost sounds like the setup to a joke:  A vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost move into a flat together.  Drama (and some hilarity) ensues!  The characters are interesting and funny and have great chemistry, and you end up caring about what happens to them.  I'm only on episode four, but I predict some serious binge-watching ahead.

Looks like I picked up a few new followers yesterday, and welcome to you all!  My Blogger stats tell me a whole bunch of people popped in from Facebook in the last day or two, but I don't know why.  Can anyone enlighten me?

I hope your week is off to a great start!