Dried butterbeans - April 28, 2020

I cooked dried baby lima beans for dinner last night.  This was a first for me.  Oh, I've cooked plenty dried beans in my lifetime, but I've learned that not all dried beans cook the same.  I soaked them for the recommended time and cooked them for the recommended time (plus 2 more hours!), but about 50% of the beans WOULD NOT GET DONE.  The rest went to mush.  Is this common for dried lima beans?

Today is The Husband's birthday.  We can't have a party, not even for the relatives on the hill - we're all practicing social distancing.  But I am going to make him a birthday cake.  And I'm going to grill him a steak instead of making him eat leftover meatloaf and rattle-y lima beans.  Thankfully, one of his  presents arrived yesterday, so it won't be a total non-birthday kind of day.  We'll just think of it as being spread out over however long it takes for his presents to arrive. 

Yesterday I worked on The Granddaughter's quilt.  It's coming along.  The log cabin blocks are fast and easy to assemble.  The striped squares, not so easy.  I created a world of trouble for myself when I decided to try this:

I  may have said this in another post, but I took The Granddaughter to the fabric store and asked her to pick out one piece of fabric that she loved.  The plan was to use that fabric as the basis for the whole design.  Here's what she picked:

You can't tell it from the picture, but that stripe is printed DIAGONALLY on the fabric.  It will almost cross your eyes to look at it.  It kind of "radiates" when I look at it.  The fabric automatically said, "quilt border."  But it seemed necessary to incorporate that stripe into the main part of the quilt top, too.  I wanted to use it in big sections, to better show the fabric design, since it was the basis for the whole quilt.  It took a long time to figure out what to do with it.  I decided to play up the eye-crossing aspect, a trompe l'oeil, so to speak.  The log cabin blocks are meant to look 3-D (it is more apparent in pictures than in person), and the striped blocks are meant to "radiate."  I wanted it to cross your eyes AND make you dizzy.  ;)  This striped fabric tricks the eye in another way.  Those radiating colors seem as though they are neon shades.  They are NOT neon.   They are pastels.  At a distance, pastel-colored coordinating fabrics seem to clash.  Up close, neon colors seem to clash.  I picked out one of the blue tones and one of the green tones and ran with it. 

This is what I came up with:

That's about 1/4 of the quilt.  Those blocks will finish 10" square. 

Running the stripes vertically or horizontally instead of diagonally requires cutting the block pieces on the bias.  A bias edge stretches, thus when I cut the triangles to make the striped squares, ALL THREE SIDES of the triangles were stretchy.  Getting those stripes to match is a b*tch.  (A walking foot helps with the stretching problem.)  7 down, a million to go.