2012 June 10 — Patchwork Times by Judy Laquidara

June 10, 2012 · by JudyL

Tonight we had smoked salmon, fried potatoes and tomato/cucumber salad. Vince came in from getting the salmon out of the smoker and he said “Do you have anything else you can heat up for dinner?” I thought he had dropped the salmon or something terrible had happened to it. I said “I’m sure I can come up with something. Why?” He said “This looks so good, I may not share with you!” Nice husband, huh? He does make the best smoked salmon!

We use the Smokette Elite from Cook Shack. We’ve had it for 6 or 7 years (or maybe 8 years!). We use it a lot and we love it! For the salmon, Vince uses a large grain salt and sprinkles it on the non-skin sides of the fish. If it has skin, he doesn’t salt that side. If it doesn’t have skin, he salts both sides. He sticks it in the fridge, in a container (9 x 13 glass dish) uncovered for about 15 minutes. Then he rinses it, pats it dry, re-salts it and he might do that again. After the final rinsing and drying, he coats it with brown sugar and lets it sit in the fridge overnight uncovered and then smokes it for a couple of hours at about 200. We like the milder woods – cherry, peach, apple. Too bad we don’t love mesquite since it’s EVERYWHERE around here.

We have homemade pineapple ice cream for dessert and I’m going to spend the rest of the evening knitting.

Staying Organized

June 10, 2012 · by JudyL

Folks who don’t know me think I’m organized. I tell friends that I’m so unorganized that I look organized! While chatting with a blog reader last night, she asked how I keep track of the quilts I make and the quilts I want to make. Here’s how I do it.

I have four folders or sometimes it’s three ring binders. These things fill up fast and when they’re full, I write a date on the front – like January, 2010 – November, 2011, and stick them in a drawer in the filing cabinet. Before filing away a “Quilts in Waiting” folder, I go through it and see if there are any designs in there that I really want to make. Sometimes I’ve moved on and the designs I loved 6 months ago aren’t the designs I love now but if there’s something I really want to make, I put it in my new folder.

One of the things I struggle with most is remember what I’ve named a project in Electric Quilt. Most every night I spend some time on my laptop doodling in EQ and I may name the project anything that comes to mind since I name it before I have any idea where I’m going with it.

Most of the time it’s just a junk file and never amounts to something I want to make but if, at the end of my doodling time, I see it as a possible quilt, I send the file to a gmail account that’s only for EQ files. Since most of my real work is done on the desktop, which is in the sewing room, when I get to the sewing room in the morning I open the file and I rename it as something that makes more sense to me.

For the projects that I seriously want to make, I create a page with a picture, the name of the project so I can easily find it on the computer, the size of the quilt and any notes. This page goes into my “Quilts in Waiting” folder. These quilts may or may not be made and I may even go back in and revise the design but at least I have a spot where I can go to see the projects I’ve liked. I also have a folder on my computer called “Good Quilts” and the designs that I like enough to make get saved in the Good Quilts folder instead of the default PJ7 folder.

This, sadly is the folder that fills up quickly – Quilts Started! As soon as I pull fabric to make the quilt, the project page goes into this folder and it stays here until the quilt is completely bound and finished and ready to find a new home. This folder is almost full and I started it new in January, 2012. Not good, huh?

The Completed Quilts folder gets photos and notes about completed quilts and I can tell you that so far for 2012, there aren’t nearly enough pages in this folder. So many quilts are waiting for binding but they don’t go into this folder until they are totally complete.

The first folder I open each day and the last folder I look at before leaving the sewing room in the evenings is the To Do folder. This particular list is available here but the main website is this and there’s so much good info there.

Everything that needs to be done goes on this list. Because it stays in the sewing room, I keep a pad of post-it notes in the house and I write down things I remember that need to be done and that list goes with me to the sewing room the next day. The items are added to whatever day they need to be done and everything will be checked of the list before the day is done . . I hope! Smile

Last but maybe the most important list I keep are my weekly menu forms. The form I use for the weekly menu is here.

Some will comment that they don’t like lists, don’t use lists . . good for you! Without lists, I would never get anything done. I sometimes wish I weren’t so controlled by my lists but these lists are what keep me on track. I’m sure there are many other great downloadable lists/forms out there but these are some that I use every day.