Sister's Choice Quilts

Sweets for the Sweet?

It is the final countdown of days before Christmas.  This month has just flown by. It feels like we only just got the place decorated. I may have to leave things up longer this year. I never do though. It gets to be New Year's Day and I want to clear away all the clutter. We shall have to see if this year is different. I sure have enjoyed my lights and candles and other decorations this year.

Yesterday I made two kinds of cookies. The ones above are called Monster Cookies and are from Sally's Baking Addiction. The recipes I try from her site always seem to turn out so well.  I think she tests everything a gazillion times before she decides the recipe is perfect. The secret to these is not to overbake them. You take them out of the oven when they have just a touch of color and are still really soft. After ten minutes or so they set up and are perfect.

Check out this gift from my nephew. Killer Brownies. Oh my. I am going to need to find more people to share these with.

And here is the last batch of cookies. These are Chocolate Crinkle Kiss Cookies with peppermint Hershey's Kisses on top. They melt in your mouth. This is another cookie you don't want to overbake.  They don't really look done when you take them out of the oven, but once they set up they are wonderful. There are a thousand recipes for these on the internet, but I use the one by Betty Crocker.

I sure do hope you all have a wonderful holiday. I wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for your support and friendship. You have definitely added a big plus to a difficult year! I have so enjoyed all of your comments. And even if you read this blog, but don't comment, I thank you for checking in with me. Best wishes for a healthy and prosperous new year, filled with lots of love.  I'll be taking a brief break, but will be back on January 4.  Happy New Year!

 

 

 

This and That

I know I've shown this a million times, but the latest update is that I have completed all 42 blocks and have begun to sew them together! The intersections where the cream sections have to fit together isn't absolutely consistent, which is driving me a bit bonkers. If it is really off, I have had to re-do the places where the seams need to meet, so it is slow going. I sure would love to finish this dinosaur up before New Year's.

What I've been spending my time on is wrapping Christmas presents. I worked on that for most of yesterday and finished, except for a few gifts that have not yet been delivered. And oh my gosh, is USPS ever overwhelmed. I'll be surprised if everything I am waiting for even gets here by Christmas Eve. I have one package that has been sitting on the bottom of a pile at the post office of a town only an hour away from me since Dec. 11.

Oh and here is a funny story. One of my neighbors sent out an email to everyone on the street saying he had gotten a notice saying that a package had been delivered to his front door that day.  No package. He asked us all if it could have been delivered to one of our front doors by mistake.  Nope. A week went by and we all got another email from him. It was trash day, so he went to the area under his house where he keeps his garbage cans, and there was the package. USPS had delivered it to the door to the crawl space under his house.  I am not kidding.

Here is a little fabric bundle I treated myself to recently. It is Bess' Flower Garden by Pam Buda. I thought it would be fun to sew something up for the summer/4th of July. I am toying with the idea of decorating my front porch in all red, white, and blue quilts for summer.

Well, that's all I've got for today. I am going to go reward myself with a cup of hot cocoa. With marshmallows. Hope you are all having a great week!

Sewcialites Re-Set

I had a talk with myself over the weekend and had to admit that I was not loving my Sewcialites Sew-Along quilt blocks.  I was using fabric that just wasn't floating my boat. I think I'd like the Betsy Chutchian fabrics I had chosen in smaller bits, but not in the big 9" blocks I was making. I had made around a dozen blocks and decided not to invest any more of that fabric or my time making a queen-sized quilt top.

So I pushed my fabric re-set button, had a rummage through my stash, and came up with a new game plan. I pulled red, black, and gold/tan fabric from several designers (Jo Morton, Renee Nannemann, and Pam Buda) and remade 13 blocks in the 6" block size. It will be a smaller quilt, but I think the fabric colors are more cohesive and will make a nice statement together.

For reference, these are some of the blocks I had made with the other fabrics:

Pink, purple, black, green, and (inexplicably) blue. Hmm.  I am usually pretty good at this, but what the heck was I thinking? Just because a designer puts numerous colors in a fabric collection does not mean you have to use them all together. 

On another note, I have come to think that when making a sampler quilt comprised of 36 or more different block patterns, it might pull things together more to use just one background fabric instead of a dozen varied ones. That cohesive thing again.

I had an absolutely delightful Saturday and Sunday starching, cutting, and re-doing my 13 Sewcialites blocks and am much happier.

I was in my happy zone, binge-listening to a new reading podcast discovery.  A Strong Sense of Place is the name of it.  It is a blog and a podcast done by an absolutely charming husband and wife duo. They put out two extremely well-researched podcasts per month where they discuss and recommend books that have a strong sense of place.  For each episode, they pick a country or a city or a place, such as Paris, Germany, the Circus, etc. They also discuss books that are specific to a holiday or a setting.  They have a show on Halloween books, and my favorite so far: books that are set on Trains.  Their recommendations are not all new books by any means.  They often recommend older books that are dirt cheap on Kindle or readily available through your library. I highly recommend both their blog and podcast. Besides, they seem like super nice people you would like to know better. 

Hope you all had a great weekend.  Ready for Christmas this week? It will be different from the norm, I am sure, but I plan to try to find the wonder in it regardless.

My intention is to post Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week, then I will be taking a break between Christmas and New Year's. I'll be back to my usual posting schedule on Monday, Jan. 4. 

Christmas Candles and Sew Along Blocks Catch Up

I am really enjoying my house and my holiday decorations this year. Next week there won't be any homeschooling and I plan to spend every day just soaking it up and loving every minute of the lights, music, and holiday cheer.

The lack of time spent in the sewing room is catching up with me.  It's time to make up for lost time and get some of my various sew along blocks done.  The two blocks above are from the Moda Blockheads 3 sew along.  47 and 49 I believe. I wasn't sure I really liked either one of them, but went ahead and made them anyway. It turns out I do like them. 

I wanted to share three different holiday candles that I am especially loving. This one is Tree Farm by Bath and Body Works. It really smells like fresh-cut trees and other Christmassy smells. I love Bath and Body Works candles, but get impatient with their gimmicky sales.  You would never want to pay full price ($25) for their candles because they reliably go on sale for half price every few weeks. There is so much hype around their various releases, which is annoying too.  They play on the "buy it NOW or you will lose out" mentality. Obviously, I fell for it, but am enjoying this one anyway. I did get it for half off!

This one is by HomeWorx, and I got it on QVC last summer and have been saving it for Christmas.  It has all the good smells of holiday baking and is very warm and cozy. I have enjoyed many HomeWorx candles from QVC, but do find they burn fast.  Maybe those four wicks have something to do with that.

Talk about candles that last forever, I have such good luck with Yankee Candles.  They honestly burn for hours and hours and hours. I can use them for a couple of years if I just take them out around Christmas time. This one is Snow Dusted Bayberry Leaf. When I was younger, bayberry candles were about the only scented candle you could find during the holiday season.  That is what my mother used to buy anyway. Smelling bayberry really takes me back to my childhood.

Hope you are enjoying the sights and smells of the holidays wherever you are!  Have a great weekend.

Some Good Books for December

Snow by John Banville was so good!  It starts just like an Agatha Christie book. "The body is in the library", said Colonel Osborne. "Come this way". The scene is set in County Wexford, Ireland, in an old manor house where a priest is murdered. There is the typical Christie-type cast of characters, but the style is more gritty than any of her books ever was. Aristocratic Detective Inspector St.John Strafford is determined to get to the bottom of things during the course of a blizzard. It was very entertaining, and of course, since the book is set in Ireland, I was hooked from the get-go. Four stars.

This is the year for Agatha Christie for me.  There are a couple of new books that feature fictionalized biographies of her life that are very intriguing.  The first one I read is The Woman on the Orient Express by Lindsay Jayne Ashford. As many of you may know, there was a huge scandal involving Agatha Christie back in the 1920s.  Her husband was having an affair with a younger woman and asked Agatha for a divorce, whereupon she disappeared for 11 days.  When she finally turned up, she claimed amnesia, and would never speak of the incident again. True story. This novel is set after Christie's divorce and gives a fictional accounting of her trip to Baghdad on the Orient Express. She was very interested in archaeology and joined a "dig" in Mesopotamia.  Her books Murder in Mesopotamia and Death on the Nile were inspired there. She stayed in Iraq for some months and then returned to England where she married her second husband. I loved this accounting of Christie's activities and the real historical people she met on her travels. I give this book three and a half stars.  It was quite entertaining. It's only $4.99 on Kindle.

The second Agatha Christie-inspired book is coming out on Dec. 29 and is called The Mystery of Mrs. Christie by Marie Benedict. I can't wait for that one and am hoping it is a Book of the Month selection.

I just started The Arctic Fury by Greer Macallister and am loving it so far. Set in the 1850s, a dozen women undertake an Artic expedition and not all of them come back. Mysterious Lady Jane Franklin wants them to find her husband's lost expedition after four male-led parties have not been successful in locating him.  She thinks she will have better luck if she puts a group of women in charge. The main character Virginia Reeves is very appealing.  Your attention is grabbed right away, as the book opens with Virginia standing trial for the murder of one of the women on the expedition. $7.99 on Kindle right now.

I accidentally purchased this book, thinking it was a Christmas themed book.  I was wrong about that but still enjoyed the book.  Jenny Colgan is a very good writer who writes cozy books for women, that often feature a sweet romance. In Meet Me at the Cupcake Cafe, we meet Issy Randall who is romantically involved with her sleazy boss and ends up getting laid off from her job, thanks to him. It turns out the girl can bake like a champ and uses her severance package to start up a little cafe outside of London. And the banker who gives her a business loan may be a better choice of a boyfriend than her previous one. The book is amusing and is full of recipes and fun secondary characters. Fast read. Three plus stars. The book I meant to buy was Christmas at the Cupcake Cafe.  I just ordered it for my Kindle and hope I like it as much as this first one in the series.

Another Christmas themed book by Jenny Colgan, Christmas at the Little Beach Street Bakery. This one was ok. It is the third book in the Little Beach Street Bakery series.  It can stand on its own, but there were constant references to events and characters from the previous books (that I didn't read), which I found distracting and annoying. It was like when you get together with friends and they keep talking about things they did in the past that didn't include you.  Snore. Set in Cornwall, which was fun. Very annoying secondary characters with problems they created due to their own stupid decisions. Only two and a half stars for me, but you might like it better.  I do enjoy this author and will read more of her stuff. This one just wasn't my cup of tea.

In December I often tend to read faster, lighter themed books.  This month has gotten off to a great start. I hope if you pick up any of these books you will enjoy them!

 

 

Cataracts

I've been blessed with pretty good eyesight during my life.  I need readers to magnify the print when I am reading, but my distance vision has always been all right. In the past few years, I have experienced a gradual worsening of my vision.  I walk three or four days a week with a friend.  I began to notice that the individual leaves I used to be able to see up in a tree were now a blur of indistinguishable green. And when I read a page of a book, there would be a blurry area in the upper left of the page.  I could always shift the page around so my eyes could read the blurry bits, so I didn't worry too much. Then threading needles became really difficult.  I kept wanting more light for whatever task I was working on. More light always seemed to be the answer to my issues. And it helped. Up to a point.

I went to the eye doctor yesterday and she confirmed I had cataracts in both eyes, worse in the left eye.  The good news is, it is fixable. No rush.  I think I'll wait a few months until the COVID issue is more clear, then schedule my procedure.  I have never met a person who has had cataract surgery who has regretted it, so I am pretty excited for good results.

My husband is having some health issues as well, of a more personal nature.  I don't think he would like me to discuss them specifically, so I will respect his wishes.  Let me just say, a general wish of good luck would be welcome on this end right now. Getting old sure is the pits. 

On a lighter note, Eva was having homeschooling with her dad Monday and Tuesday of this week while her grandpa and I were away seeing doctors.  She is such a creature of habit.  She kept texting me, "Nana, can I have my morning break now?  It's 10:30."  "Nana, can I have lunch now?  It's noon".  Good heavens. I will be home soon and we will be back in my kitchen doing homeschool and the Earth will keep spinning on its axis.  

Hope you are all well.  A random quilty thought popped into my mind: have you heard of Joanna Figueroa's (Fig Tree Quilts) new Winter Solstice quilt along? It looks very interesting.  Eight-inch blocks with a dark background.  I do miss the nice big PRINT HERE button for printing the patterns, but you can copy and paste and work around it.

Hope your week is going great. Not long until Christmas.  I just want to get back home and stay put until mid-February.

Cutest Mug Rug Ever

You have to admit this is the most perfect mug rug ever. I am just so pleased with this and want to make one for every woman in my life. If you need a cute, last-minute gift for someone, this might do the trick for you too.

The pattern is a block from one of Lori Holt's books, "Quilty Fun". I added a border to the block to make it a bit larger. It took no time to make, and is such a great gift for a girlfriend, a teacher, a stocking stuffer.  Who wouldn't love one of these? 

I apologize for the brevity of this post. My husband and I have doctor's appointments on Monday and Tuesday and are getting ready for a trip out of town to see the doctors. I have a busy few days coming up! 

Hope you all have a great weekend.

My Treat for Myself

How fun is this?  I bought myself an Advent calendar! In the past, I have bought very pricey David's Tea Advent Calendars, which are gorgeously packaged and have two servings of various teas for each of the 24 days before Christmas.  I have thoroughly enjoyed them the two years I got them. The David's tea calendars cost $50, and for some reason, this year, it slipped my mind to order one.  Maybe I was hoping they would have a sale? Anyway, I was missing having an Advent calendar, and David's was all sold out of theirs.

We were already three or four days into December, and I was searching for something online and found this K-cup coffee pod Advent calendar on Amazon.  It was $25 and contains 12 K-cups.  Still kind of pricey for what you get, but I am going to have fun with it. Look at those flavors! Merry Mocha, Cinnamon Bun, Spiced Eggnog, Spiced Rum Butter... This is going to be fun.

The only criticism I have so far is that they are impossible to get out of the package.  My husband says he thinks he knows how to do it. I told him to surprise me every morning with a Holiday K-cup of the day.

Are you doing anything special for yourself this holiday season? I think we all need a reward, considering.

Red Pineapple Blocks, Apple Crostata, and Quiche

I could have sworn I posted Tuesday.  But when I got up in the morning to read my comments from you all, there weren't any.  What? Well, I hadn't posted anything for anyone to comment on.  I am losing it I tell you.  Our governor has issued another strict stay at home order for our area, and we are not supposed to mingle with anyone outside our household or go anywhere unnecessary.  There goes Christmas. My mind has been everywhere but focused on what it needs to be!

I have been working on my last five red pineapple blocks, and they are so gorgeous.  I have two more rounds to put on these last blocks and then I am going to sew those puppies together. What a great quilt this will be for next Christmas!

After, what, forty-some blocks I am getting pretty good at using the Possibilities Pineapple Ruler. Do you see how I drew diagonal lines on that center block? That is the key to keeping things from going wonky on you. You line up the center lines on the diagonal lines of the center block and make sure the diagonal and horizontal lines on the rest of the ruler line up. You just want to keep everything super straight. It is a challenge, but if you do your best, the blocks will turn out quite well.

ADDED LATER: A reader asked where she could purchase this ruler, and after an extensive online search, I am unable to find it. I am imagining that the company "Possibilities" must have gone out of business. Linda Milligan and Nancy Smith (who created the ruler) also wrote a book or too with "Possibilities" in the title.  Some of those you can still get, but since they feature the Possibilities rulers, they might not be so useful. Maybe eBay would be a source to find a used Pineapple Rule.

For our baking project this week, Eva and I made a Rustic Apple Crostata. It was an Ina Garten (The Barefoot Contessa) recipe and was delicious!  Her crust was a teensy bit hard to work with. I should have used my tried and true recipe for the crust, but I was honoring her recipe by following it to the letter. The crust was awfully flakey and kind of fell apart, but what the heck.  We served it with a spoon and called it lunch.

Since her recipe made two crusts, I saved the second one to make a quiche for dinner. 

And that turned out pretty well too.  The secret to quiche (and pumpkin pie) is that you need to partially bake the crust before you fill it.  No more soggy bottomed pies if you bake the crust for a bit before filling it.

Hope your week is going well!

 

Square in a Square Blocks

I always think Square in a Square blocks are one of the most difficult block units to make. There are so many ways to go wrong when attaching the triangles around the sides of the square. And when things go wrong, you have a wonky unit with inadequate seam allowance at your points.

I have had the best luck making these square in a square units using a tool designed by Deb Tucker called the Square Squared® ruler. It has marks on it showing the exact size to make your center square for a variety of sized finished units. The tool has the size for cutting your triangles printed on it as well. You end up with a slightly oversized unit, as you see on the right in the photo above. You then use the ruler to precision cut your final unit with the square perfectly positioned and the exact 1/4" seam allowance at all four of your points. My trimmed unit is on the left.

Deb has a great YouTube tutorial that explains way better than I can, just how to use the tool for perfect Square in a Square blocks.

This tool has been in my collection for at least 10 years, but I sometimes forget I have it and always regret it when I do. My Square in a Square blocks never come out as well.

The reason I was using it the other day was that I didn't care for the most recent Sewcialites Sew Along block offering. (Do you see a pattern here?) I made a substitute block that I preferred and my little block units came out so nicely with the Square Squared tool.

My source for this substitute block pattern was a little "book" of blocks called "The Quick and Easy Block Tool".  It is a funny little thing that reminds me of a book of fabric swatches or wallpaper samples. It is full of great quilt blocks in numerous sizes. I like the small size of it, and find it easy to follow. However, I don't think the book comes in this format anymore.  I found something similar that is an actual book on Amazon.

Hope you all had a great weekend and managed to squeeze some sewing in amidst all the holiday hoopla and preparations.