Short Attention Span Girl

I took a quick break from the quilt re-assembly to make a couple of flannel receiving blankets.  With those out of the way it was back to finishing up the quilt top.

The top is finished and is now 38″ x 49″ which I think is a much more useable baby quilt size than the original 32″ x 39″.  It’s also much better looking with the sashing, I think.  Thanks to Judy D in AZ for the corner stones idea.

Then I took the scraps and pieced up the backing.  I had a pretty big piece of the border fabric left over.

And for all that, I still have a bunch of scraps left over.

This quilt was made from the scraps of another quilt and yet, they just seem to grow. It’s like wire coat hangers, they just multiply when you aren’t looking!  The last of scraps will likely go into a quilt for the NICU and then I hope they’re all used up.  If not, they will go in my scrap bag for the guild give away table and someone else can do something with them.

See what the other quilters are doing over at Judy’s.

- – marcella

I’ve been having fun working on putting the quilt top back together.  I’m really liking how it’s turning out with the sashing and scrappy cornerstones between the blocks.

Off to the side is one of the original borders.  I think I have enough of this fabric to use it for the borders on this version.

- – marcella

Here we are in the middle of January and I’m just getting started on this months unfinished project.

I found buried in the back of the pile a little quilt made from scraps of another quilt and a matching charm pack. I used Anita’s method of making square on point blocks.  I just made my template for a 5″ square. They made for very cute little blocks.  Where I went wrong was to just sew them together side by side, slap on two borders and call it a baby quilt top.

The blocks were just too busy, and it was just a tad too small for what I consider baby quilt size, and it just wasn’t what I wanted.  Into a bag and into the closet it went.  Until now.

For the past few days, I and my seam ripper have been taking it all apart.  The borders are off and nearly half of the rows have been dismantled, pressed and every little annoying thread bit thrown away.

Here are the blocks that have been taken apart so far.  I’m kind of liking the way the design wall looks like sashing.  I had been thinking of alternate plain blocks, but I may just sash them instead.

I’m pretty happy that I’d just bought a new lint roller.  It has sure been put to work cleaning up thread bits!

Now to find enough time by the end of the month to finish taking the top apart, sew it all back together and quilt and bind it.  This challenge is teaching me to be a faster quilter!

See what beautiful things the other quilters are up to over on Judy’s blog.

- – marcella

Can you believe it?  I actually made the French Fridays with Dorie recipe two weeks in a row!  This week the chosen recipe from the Around My French Table book is M. Jacques Armagnac Chicken.

I happen to love roasted chicken.  It seems we are always trying new variations when we find them in various cookbooks.  This is a super simple recipe so if you think roasting a chicken is too tricky, this recipe is a good place to start.

First some vegetables are cut up and tossed in a dutch oven or other large pot with some olive oil and given a stir. Fresh herbs are added and the chicken is placed on top.  A little armagnac is poured over top.  This is where I departed from the recipe.  Not being a drinker, I can really taste the alcohol in recipes so I always cut the amount used down. Not finding armagnac in my husbands cabinet we used brandy instead.  So,  we replaced 1/2 C armagnac with 1/4 C brandy and 1/4 C chicken broth and we were on our way.

On goes the lid and into the oven for an hour.  How easy is that?  No basting, to flipping, no fretting.

The recipe than says to take the chicken out of the oven, remove the lid and admire the beautiful golden chicken.  We and the recipe parted ways again.  You see, huge though our dutch oven may be apparently the chicken was just too much for it.  We lifted the lid only to have the lovely, crunchy golden chicken skin stick to the underside of the lid.  We did not have a lovely golden chicken to admire.  We had a pale, naked chicken.

At least we didn’t have to feel that it was just too pretty to eat.  Ugly it may have been, but it smelled heavenly!

Carved up it was juicy and perfectly cooked.

To make the sauce the pan juices are skimmed of fat and additional water is added and then simmered until thickened.  We had so much liquid in the pan that it seemed silly to add another cup of water so I just added a little bit and simmered away.  The sauce was very tasty served over the chicken and vegetables.

See how the other cooks faired with their versions of this dish over at French Fridays with Dorie.

- – marcella

Usually on Mondays I try to report what has been going on in the sewing room.  There hasn’t been much happening in there.  I got a little bit of time to work on the mystery quilt and sewed a piles of triangles together.

I’m hoping now that nearly all of the holiday things are put away I can find some sewing time this coming week.

A lot of time this week was also spent in the kitchen.  We’re still swimming in lemons around here.

Two more batches of marmalade were made – the original lemon-vanilla and also an experiment of lemon-raspberry which looks beautiful.

Then there were the little individual lemon tarts -

Good but not stellar.  There was a lot of butter whipped into the lemon curd and it really blunted the lemon flavor.  Not a recipe I’d likely ever make again.  They were sure pretty though.

The unsatisfying tarts left me craving a really lemon-y dessert so I made a batch of Ina Garten’s lemon bars.

I like her recipe the best.  It has a greater filling to crust ratio than most lemon bars.  I put half the zest in the crust and the other half in the filling.  Other than that, I actually follow the recipe.

Then we spent a morning zesting and squeezing lemons and packaged up a lot of zest and juice for the freezer.

I think we’re down to just a dozen or so lemons in the fridge for cooking and such.

Visit Patchwork Times and see the real quilting that’s been going on.  Hopefully there will be more quilting here next week.

- – marcella

It’s been months since I’ve participated in French Friday’s with Dorie, but I suppose it’s no surprise that the recipe that lured me back was for bread.

I’ve only made brioche once before and all I remember was it was a ton of work and the dough became scary and slimy while adding all the butter into the dough.  This time it didn’t seem so challenging, and while there is still a ton of butter added into the dough it behaved itself.

Even with my fairly cool kitchen the dough went from new to risen in a pretty short time.

Then it went into the fridge overnight for a rest.

The next day the rolls were shaped into what I’ve always heard called cloverleaf rolls but the author calls bubble top.  They are simply three small balls of dough put into a muffin pan together.  Once risen they are brushed with an egg wash and baked fairly high at 400 degrees.  I cut back on the baking time but the rolls were still pretty toasty.

They were great with our homemade soup for dinner.  They were also rich enough to feel like dinner and dessert all at once.

See how all the other cooks did over at French Friday’s with Dorie.

- – marcella

I’m really happy to have finished my December unfinished quilt project.  For a while there I really thought it wasn’t going to happen until well into January.

The center blocks got all the seams stitched down and then diagonal lines about 1/2″ on either side of the seams.

I really had some fun with the borders.  I pulled out the free motion foot and did some humps and bumps in the narrow border and some spirals in the wide outer border.

The quilt was finished off with a striped binding.  This time I was smart and did it all by machine.  I think that’s a good sturdy choice for a baby quilt that is likely to take a trip into the washing machine often.

Now it’s all ready for the arrival of my friend’s baby in February.

I’m excited to get back to the Orca Bay Mystery quilt.  The final step is up and wow is the quilt beautiful!  I can’t wait to get mine finished.

See what the other quilters have been working on over at patchwork times.

- – marcella

My sister has a prolific meyer lemon tree.  The other day we were in her neighborhood and she said we should stop by and get some lemons.  Who am I to turn down free lemons?  After just 10 minutes of picking we had a big bag of lemons and honestly it didn’t even look like any lemons had been taken off the tree.

This would be what 24 pounds of meyer lemons looks like.

I was thinking a couple of batches of marmalade.  I’ve had to expand that just a bit!

First up were some lemon poppy seed scones from my new copy of Alice’s Tea Cup cookbook.

Later that day I made the first batch of marmalade.

I used the recipe I’d made before with great results.  However, I cannot resist a little bit of tinkering.  This time I skipped the vanilla bean and instead added 1/2 cup of fresh grated ginger.  The ginger really brings out the lemon flavor.  I might be tempted to add a bit more ginger to really get that spicy flavor to shine.

On the stove is the next batch of sliced lemons waiting their turn.  I’m thinking of raspberry lemon marmalade. I’m telling myself that I’m going to stop at three batches of marmalade and hope that one is fair worthy.

There are a lot of lemons left though.  Lemon bars, lemon chicken…wonder if my husband would like a lemon pie for his birthday “cake”?

- – marcella

The month has been speeding by and I hadn’t even started working on my UFO for the month. I decided to find a project I could finish into a baby quilt for a friend who is due with a girl in February.

I settled upon these large half square triangle blocks.  Back in 2006(!) I had purchased a charm pack of this collection by April Cornell and made the center blocks.  They were all put together and then packed away with fabric for borders, backing and binding.

The borders went on quickly and I was able to get the backing pieced and the whole thing basted together.

I’ve started quilting.  Right now I’m stabilizing everything.  The center will get diagonal straight lines about 1/2″ on either side of the seams.  For that I’m using an orangy-pink thread. Hopefully I’ll be inspired with what to do in the borders by the time I get to them.

Not sure that I’ll have it done by the end of December but it should be easy to finish before the baby arrives.

See what the other busy quilters have been up to over on Judy’s blog.

- – marcella

Santa’s getting closer!

Hope you have a wonderful holiday

- – marcella