Quilting and Eating

As I have been telling you about our Italy trip, I feel like I should limit blog worthy things I am doing, since I can't keep up with telling you about current events and our trip.  I thought I would give a break to those of you who are tired of hearing about our vacation, to give you a quilting update.

I started a new quilt, or technically two.  It is so much easier to start a new quilt than to finish one.  What you see are two backgrounds for an applique quilt I am making.  They will be small, about 12 inches square.  A friend of mine asked me to make a lily quilt for her when she saw the pictures from the quilt show, just as I was working overtime, getting ready for the Italy trip and our Japanese guest, etc.  I decided making two would be just as easy as one, and I wouldn't feel bad about giving one away if I still had one.  Plus, she might want two, who knows? 

I have been catching up on my Buck a Block quilt blocks.  Apparently I am very behind on them.  No pictures yet - I need to relearn how to sew, so that each HST and the final blocks come out to be the expected size.

Our Japanese guest came and went.  This seemed like a very short program, although I think it was the same length as the previous years.  We hosted the tour guide instead of a student this year, and she had rented a car.  Usually the tour guide stays in a hotel, but since we had more host families this year than students, she and the teacher were able to stay with host families. She doesn't know how to cook, and gets tired of eating out, so she was looking forward to staying with a family.  She had a lot of work to do - filling out paperwork,  helping students, taking the teacher to a Major League baseball game in Cleveland, filling out paperwork, so we didn't get to spend as much time with her as we do with students.  We did take a couple of trips which I will tell you about when I get done with telling you about Italy.

I was very good about cooking everyday - on different days,  I made spaghetti with real Italian spices (it was very peppery hot), french onion soup, chicken nuggets made out of Chex (honey nut), chicken stir fry, roast beef, chicken thighs with Indian spices with fragrant rice, beef chilli with cheese sandwiches.  I didn't get tired of cooking until a couple of days before she left when we had spaghetti again. She said I was a good cook - she even told someone else that, so it must be true!  She wanted to learn to cook, so we made the Indian dish together. She is going to France next.

I finished all the candy I got from Italy - it was so good, it was hard to make it last.  They had this wonderful limoncello candy - it is a hard candy with a soft filling of limoncello liqueur.  Also you know the chocolate covered almonds that sometimes get served at weddings? They had those in so many different varieties - lemon, licorice, orange, cocoa, etc.  If I had known they were that good, I would have gotten a lot more!