Easy Street...slow walk.

With all the holiday obligations this past weekend I didn't get too much done on Bonnie's Mystery Quilt, Easy Street.

I knew I would fall behind this week but I scheduled 30 minutes on Saturday and Sunday to stitch.  Amazing how much you can get done when you know you are racing the oven timer!

  It also helped that I had cut too many of the purple pieces for the last flying geese step so I was halfway there for this one!  (lesson learned - do not clean off the cutting table until the mystery is over!)

Yesterday I finished making 8 dozen biscotti and made the batter for mint chocolate and molasses cookies.  Those I bake today.  If I have time I will also make some Kouremmbiethes (Greek Butter Cookie.)  If not I'll make them on Christmas.

This little kitten is our new neighbor.  Macbeth, my scottish terrier, loves kittens and we are having a difficult time keeping him in the yard.  It has been years since he has dug under the fence!  To be honest I didn't think he had it in him (he turns 13 next month!)...but surprise!

So I've had to get more dog toys and bones to keep him active and distracted.  He doesn't really chew on bones...he just carries them around debating where to hide them...it can take hours!

Mint Chocolate Chips....

Baking this week got me wondering where folks go now for recipes?

                                       Block for a table runner I am working on but doubt I'll have ready for Christmas!
It used to be they were traded on little cards.  You would get them from friends or relatives.

Who most likely got them from friends, relatives, coworkers, newspapers, magazines or cookbooks.

Now I think most folks go to the internet.  I know I use Land-O'Lakes butter's site often and Pintrest occasionally.  To be honest I still like to use the old recipes best.  Last night I tried two new cupcake recipes, both from the internet, and only liked one.  The banana cupcakes with cream cheese frosting from www.twopeasandtheirpod.com came out really good.  Only down side was lots of extra frosting but that is partly due to my not liking lots of frosting on my cakes.  The second "experiment" was a mini-chocolate chip cupcake from Ghirardelli...don't think I'll make them again.  They weren't so bad I didn't send them into work with my DH but not my best....

So for the rest of the season I will stick with the tried and true....like my Chocolate Mint Snowtops (recipe to follow.)  This recipe is in my family's cookbook that we put together a few years ago.  We attributed it to my cousin Barbara.  When she saw it was she surprised!  "Are they any good?" she asked.  When we told her they were a favorite she said "then of course they are mine!"  In reality she doesn't ever remember making them!  It may be that the Barbara on the recipe card was a friend of on of my sisters...we'll never know!

Chocolate Mint Snowtops 

1-1/2 cups flour
1 10-ounce package mint chocolate chips (I use Hershey's)
1-1/2 teaspoons vanilla
1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder
6 Tablespoons butter
2 eggs
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup sugar
confectionery sugar

In a medium bowl combine flour, baking powder and salt then set aside.

Over hot water, melt 1 cup of mint morsels.  Stir until smooth.  In a large blow, beat sugar and butter until creamy.  Add melted mint morsels and vanilla.  Beat in eggs then gradually beat in flour mixture.  Stir in remaining 1/2 cup mint morsels.  Wrap dough in plastic wrap.  Refrigerate until firm.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Shape dough into 1-inch balls.  Roll in confectionery sugar.  Place on un-greased cookie sheet (I use parchment since it make cleaning so much easier!)  Bake 10-12 minutes.  Let stand 5 minutes on cookie sheet.  Cool.  Makes 4-5 dozen

Store in an airtight container.  If the cookies get hard put a piece of bread in the container for a few hours and they will soften up.  (Do not store these cookies with other cookies...the mint flavor will transfer!)

Christmas baking - or Why I Will Fall behind on Quilting this week

Today officially starts my Christmas baking marathon...

My husband's office party is tomorrow so he needs a couple dozen cupcakes and three dozen biscotti...

Thursday is my Quilt Guild party...Ellie's chocolate Cake and a Stollen (we have a couple of members from Germany!)  I haven't made my Aunt Ellie's chocolate cake in years.  A few of you asked for the recipe earlier this week...let me to a trial run since the ink has blurred on the directions.

                          Last year's stollen (photo reminded me I need to find that platter.....)
Friday night a friend is having a large Christmas Party.  Instead of baking I making Spanakopeta, tzadziki, Keftethakia, and Fattouch.  So why is this Irish American making all this Greek food...the recipes come from  my husband's first mother-in-law!    (I do make a great Irish bread but that is for March....)  Also, amazingly enough, we do not have a Greek restaurant within 40 miles so I've had to learn to cook it myself.

                                                   One of last year's cookie trays....
Saturday and Sunday is cookie baking days.  Mint Snow-tops  Molasses  Christmas Biscotti, Coconut Biscotti, Chocolate Chip and a cookie to be named later.  (I like to try a new recipe every year and haven't made the final selection yet!)  These go to neighbors, work, and church.  It will keep me busy!

                                            Coconut biscotti....recipe from Cooking Light

I know this is generally a quilting blog and so far no quilts!  So here is a little quilt I made a few years ago.  It is a reproduction of a doll quilt circa 1880.  15 inches by 15 inches, had pieced and hand quilted. The madder fabrics I used came out in the early 1990's.  I wish I had bought yards of them!

The quilt now hangs in my sewing room.

Easy Street Step three - beware of Gremlins!

Amazingly I am keeping up really well with Bonnie Hunter's latest mystery!  It helped that I had 90% of the fabric in my stash so there was really no extra shopping to do.  Even more was the pile of 2-inch black and white strips already cut from an earlier project.

                                  Left to right: what I cut...what I should have cut...what goes into the scrapbag!
However just as I was getting all full of myself for being so smart the quilting gremlins smacked me up side the head to get me back in line.  This week we needed to cut more black and white hst from a 2 inch strip using the easy angle ruler.  No problem.  We also needed hst from a 3-1/3 inch of turquoise.  Ah yes, this is where the gremlins saw an opportunity...you see I didn't have coffee Saturday morning before I started to cut the fabric.  I used my companion angle instead of the easy angle.  They are so not interchangeable!

Fortunately I am able to cut the piece I needed from what I cut.  The piece I cut off is large enough to be used in another project somewhere!

Part of my reason for sharing this is to let some of the beginners out there know it isn't a disaster to make a mistake.  (I know of a very talented quilter who made the 4-patches using 2-1/2 inch strips and is in the process of cutting them all down! Gremlins must have gotten to her as well....)

To help here is a list of my anti-Gremlin tactics....

1.  I love reading Bonnie's post for each step but when it comes time to cut and sew I make myself a cheat sheet.  One piece of paper with a drawing with measurement of what I am supposed to be doing and how many.  I am easily distracted...for Orca Bay I ended up with twice as many of one step than I needed....

2.  Before starting a large quilt (and this is Bonnie so you know it will be a LARGE quilt) I change the blade in my rotary cutter and the needle on my sewing machine.  I also put a thinner thread, like Aurifil #50, in the machine.  It makes a huge difference in accuracy.  There is a lot of pieces in her quilts and in this quilt we are working with a fair amount of bias...accuracy helps.

3.  Slow down.  This includes taking breaks often during cutting.  Taking breaks during pressing.  Alternating tasks so I don't use the same muscles too long at one time.  This also includes running my sewing machine at a reasonable (for that read slow) speed.  This quilt uses a lot of half square triangles which don't give you a lot of fabric to hold onto.  Better to put it through the machine slowly than to have to rip it out later...bias really doesn't behave well when ripped out.

4.  Don't fight the process.  What do I mean?  I am a "make a test block" sort of quilter.  Anytime I start a quilt I want to have the crutch of knowing exactly how the quilt is going to go together and how the fabrics will look.  Mystery quilts don't work that way.  But you know neurologists say that sometime doing something in a new or different way is good for the brain.  That un-comfortableness you feel is your brain having to work a bit harder.  If it helps treat each step as a "quilt" and make a "test patch" for it before you start...it isn't giving in to your type A personality but just tossing it a bone (or a block....)  Just think, if I had done that I would not have cut out 64 turquoise companion angle pieces....


Nerd note:  Just read that Gremlin is a term believed to come from the British Air Force either from WWI or II.  Just like today it was used to describe unexplained mechanical errors.  My Dad, a WWII pilot, used to use the term often!

17 days till Christmas....

I've been slow getting into the Christmas Spirit this year.  So far I only have a few decorations out.

The little NOEL set is only out because I bought it in an antique store last week!

Same for the little Santa salt and Pepper shakers.  I love the 1950's vintage decorations.  Remind me of my Aunt and Uncles house during the holidays!

I did put up my Christmas quilt.  I made this sampler quilt right after 9/11 and kept a diary of what was happening as I made each block.  A bit of a "stress" quilt...sometimes being a news-junkie is bad for the nerves.  To make matters worse...at the time I was producing an 11 pm newscast.  Couldn't get away from the news if I wanted to!

I put some Christmas carols on today as I try to clean the house to make way for more decorations.  I even put fire on in the fireplace though the only one who seems to enjoy it is Dobby....

Christmas Pillows

In addition to collecting quilts and quilt tops I also have a large collection of vintage and antique quilt blocks. Most of these I use for fabric study.  Like tops the fabric has seen little to no wear so it gives insight into what colors and styles quilters of that time period were using.

Occasionally I will use a block.  For instance I have a stack (about 24) of these Dresden plate blocks.  The center is really large.  The fabrics are typical of the the 1920-30's but nothing really significant.  So I felt it was ok to use a few to make some holiday pillows.

As I said the center part of the plate is very large so I decided to do some embroidery.  Fits with the time period of the original blocks.  I don't embroider as much as I used to and every time I pick it up again I am surprised how much I enjoy it!  The muslin was thin so I added another thin piece behind the block before I embroidered.  This helps the stitches lay flatter and hides the threadtails better.  I used some batting left over from other projects (bonus...cleared out  a bit of the extra batting bin!)  It is quilted with #8 perle cotton.

One of my quilting friends commented on my small embroidery stitches.  It reminded me of my sewing lessons in Girl Scouts.  I was about 8 or 9 years old and Mrs. Lynch warned us, "you don't want to have people in church whispering there goes the girl with the big stitches "  That must have made an impression because I still hear it in the back of my head every time I thread a needle!

Second step down Easy Street

Just counted out my last stack of 4-patches and I only need to make 4 more!  Why does the count always come out differently before going through the sewing machine to after being pressed?  I mean how can I lose blocks during a 5 foot walk?

Anyway, I also have a good start on step two...about halfway there.  I sew a bit slower on flying geese...I press a bit slower too.  I have now burned three of the fingers on my left hand...what a klutz!  These are some small geese though so I expect to have toasted digits until these are finished!

I am really happy with the purples.  When they were all piled up as fat-quarters and yardage I wasn't  sure if there was enough values and patterns.  When I see the pile of smaller pieces I feel better about it!

When I'm not working on Easy Street I have been trying to get some Christmas decoration out.  Hoping that will get me in the Christmas Spirit!  I've used this quilt as part of my decorations for the past dozen years of so.  It is a 9-patch on point, circa 1880 from Pennsylvania.  It looks great hanging on the wall behind the Christmas tree.

Last of the new/old tops...

I really like blue quilts and am really fond of Indigo so no surprise that I brought home this 9-patch quilt top.

Indigo was a major cash crop in South Carolina in the early days of American's history.  South Carolina grew lots of rice, cotton and indigo.  I live on the Savannah river which separates South Carolina from Georgia.  There were several indigo plantations around here back in the late 1700's.

So with all that local history I justified getting another top for my collection.  Other than some age spots this is in very good condition.  I have several quilts from the mid 1800's that have indigo fabrics in them and the dye holds up amazingly well.

Dobby of course came out for the photo shoot....

Also noticed the puppy next door, Zero,  has almost burrowed under the fence...think he is lonely and wants to play with Mac!  I expect to see Zero at my back door any minute now....

And new old Quilt Tops

Another "new to me" quilt treasure...some tops from my South Carolina trip.  Ended up having long discussions with my DH on the drive home on why I like quilt tops.  He says, "they are abandoned projects... unfulfilled destinies...they can't be complete until they are quilted and used on a bed like the maker intended."  (unfulfilled destines?  I think he has been watching too much of the Sci-fi channel....)  My side of the discussion, "it gives me great examples of the fabric as it would have looked when the original maker selected it...never  been washed...and little to no fading...also, I can clearly see the construction techniques."

Two hours later when we pulled into our driveway we had agreed to disagree...not like he is going to quilt them when I'm not looking or anything!

The first top is an Economy Nine Patch.  There is a small penciled note on one corner....

It is all pieced by hand.  Each Economy Patch is only 3 inches making the blocks 9-inches finished.  And to think this was done before paper-piecing!

She used blue in the outside edge of each patch giving unity to this scrappy quilt.  There are some great fabrics in this but you have to get close to see them!  This is one I'd like to use as inspiration for a new quilt....

I don't have my Brackman Encyclopedia handy but I think this pattern is called "Boston Commons."  It is circa 1930.  The workmanship isn't quite a good as the first top but it is a great fabric study!  Sometimes you can figure out why a top wasn't finished.  This one does not lay flat...and not much of a chance it could be "quilted out."  The mitered inner border have an almost 1 inch fold in them!  Another good reason to just appreciate it for what it is...fun fabrics!

Early Christmas Quilt...

Christmas came early this year.  My DH and I drove up to South Carolina to view a quilt collection that is about to go to auction.  I came home with a couple...early Christmas presents!  (makes up for my not going out shopping all Thanksgiving/Black Friday weekend!)

First is a brick quilt done in columns circa 1880.  The blue sashing strips vary in width...largest to smallest differs by more than 2 inches.  Lots for wonderful indigos mixed with shirtings, and plaids.

 The binding is back to front and is sew down by machine...a bit rough on the corners but it is the earliest quilt that I own that has machine binding.  I'm thinking the maker was showing off her new machine!  The rest of the quilt appears to be hand pieced and hand quilted.

The quilting is a Baptist fan or elbow fan.  Interestingly the fans begin on each side of the quilt.  The arcs meet in the middle and the "empty" spaces are filled with parallel line quilting.  Makes you wonder if they planned this or got halfway through the quilting and went "how the heck are we going to join the two sides?!  Anyway, it works!

Worked on my embroidery a bit today.  Trying to keep calm as I have an MRI this afternoon and I hate being in those big metal tubes!  Anyway, hope to have a finished pillow to show tomorrow....

Easy Street step one...

I got quite a bit done on Bonnie Hunter's latest mystery quilt, Easy Street, this weekend.  I am more than half finished with step one and since she only posted it a few days ago that is saying something.

Having done many of Bonnie's prior mystery quilts I am feeling sure that she started out with an easy step to lull us into a sense of accomplishment...I am sure I'll be splattered when the next step is posted on Friday!

I am looking forward to cutting into some of the fabrics I've put aside for this though.  I was surprised how many I had in the color scheme.  Maybe it is because I never put these in one quilt before!

I've also been working on some Christmas projects.  I have several of these vintage Dresden plate blocks.  I traced an embroidery design in the center.  Now I have to decide if I am going to use a variety of colors/threads

or just red or blue?  (more traditional...)  The blocks are 16 by 16 inches so I am making pillows/cushions.

What do you think?

Random sewing...

Not really focused on any particular project this weekend but I am sewing a lot...

My Dh has had to work all holiday and I have developed new MS symptoms...random facial and eye twitches (think of the police commander in the Pink Panther....yuck!)  Anyways, they have kept me indoors and though they make me a bit cautious using the rotary cutter I have got some things done!

I cut my strips for the first step of Easy Street...Bonnie Hunter's latest mystery quilt.  I sewed a few together and like the repro gray I pulled from my stash.  It was difficult finding a gray that could hold up to the white and black fabrics...

                                                         Tim Latimar's mock-up....
Also I pulled some seed/orphan blocks from the sewing room to test out a scrappy Road to California Block.  A facebook group I belong to have been discussing this pattern.  The quilt from Laura Fisher Quilts  (a great source for antique quilts) is white and green and looks great a two color quilt.  Tim Latimar of TimQuilts.com did some great two color mock up's of the many ways this block could be set.  A question did come up on how it would work as a scrappy block.

Well I just happened to have a stack of HST left over from my Ribbon Candy quilt and a basket full of four patches from various leader and ender runs so.....

It isn't quite as graphic as the two color but then you get the fun of the fabrics!  Like it both ways....though you can see why some of these blocks ended up in the orphan pile...needed some squaring up!

Late and tired..Happy Thanksgiving

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  Thanksgiving was a success at our house.  Even with the short notice that I'd be cooking a large meal for many it went surprisingly well.  It did cut into my posting and quilting time but as I do not go out on "black Friday" I should be able to catch up today.

For those of you who have or work with children a question:  Is there a book or a comic that has school lockers in it?  My 8 year old grandson is obsessed with getting a grey school lock for Christmas!  Funny kid.   He couldn't find the perfect locker on the internet so I drew one for him based on his "specs."  Then gave him a box of crayons so he could decorate it.  "Wow," he said in disbelief, "this is as fun as an IPAD."  Who knew...wonder how long it had been since he used crayons!

We made a huge batch of waffles this morning...somehow by the time the plate made it to the table we were one short.  There are waffle crumbs behind the couch and Dobby's belly is dragging a bit...doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure that one out!  Heck, Dobby can barely fit in his basket...we may have to get a shoe-horn to get him out!