Using What We Have

I was up relatively early on Saturday morning--"relatively" because what's early for me is sleeping in to other people.  Nevertheless, I headed out to a local farmers' market and arrived around 9 a.m.--my first trip of the year.

Perhaps most people thought, as I did, that there wouldn't be very much fresh produce available in mid-April because the market wasn't very busy.  Why did I go if I didn't expect to find much there?  Well, I'd been dreaming about the lemon ricotta raviolis made by the Pasta Queen and decided picking up a couple packages was worth getting up early for--and I knew the pasta would be there, even if not much else was.  But look at all this good stuff--I was surprised!

On Friday night, I'd looked at the farmers' market cook book I bought last year--it's arranged week by week based on what's fresh and available in our region.  I was surprised to see that strawberries were already in season, but look at the table full of them--and yes, I purchased some.

But one of the other things I bought was several pounds of too-soft tomatoes.  Last year I found that the over-ripe tomatoes nobody else wanted made some really nice spaghetti sauce, and it was inexpensive too.  Even better, the tomatoes I picked up at the farmers' market paired well with some of the leftovers in my refrigerator, like the small bunch of basil and the peeled garlic.  Soon they were all bubbling away together, roasting in the oven, and the house was starting to smell quite delicious.

I started thinking, as I was cooking the spaghetti sauce, that this was a little bit like working with fabric scraps.  I was using the leftover scraps of fabric from other projects; scraps that wouldn't otherwise be used.  And in the end, I'll have at least one beautiful new quilt--and probably more if I keep going.

Last Sunday, I made four more blocks.  I'm using the Pie in the Sky pattern by Kim Diehl in her book Simple Graces.

Then I thought I'd make a fifth block.

I realized I had 16 blocks made--a quarter of the blocks needed for the quilt--and I wanted a couple extras in case some blocks didn't play well together when I'm ready to set them, hence the fifth block.  Here are 16 of the 17 blocks I've made so far:

This weekend, I'll make four more blocks and enjoy some excellent spaghetti sauce for dinner.  Not a bad way to spend the weekend using up leftovers!