A little cooking time…..

On Monday I decided to use a couple of Butternut Squash that we had received in our weekly vegetable box.

I started out by sautéing some chopped onion, potato and carrot in a few tablespoons of butter…..

I read about cooking the squash in the microwave and found it super easy to do. I placed the cut squash in about 1/2 inch of water and microwaved them for about 12 minutes…..

The squash was hot but the flesh was SO easy to remove from the hard shell….

I added the Squash to the vegetable pot, covered with it Chicken Stock and seasoned with Cayenne Pepper, Salt and Black Pepper, and Simmered for about 40 minutes…..

After blending, the soup was dipped into a bowl and served with a dollop of sour cream……

SOOOO yummy!!!! We REALLY need to make more soups!!!!

Halloween Luncheon Fun

On Saturday I was invited to have lunch with several friends at Linda’s house. I had been told that she did amazing decorations and I was not disappointed.

Even if some of them were a little gross…..

She had lots of Halloween inspired foods prepared, including some “finger foods”…..

….LOVE the black fingernails!!!

There were also lots of fun animals present, including chocolate covered Oreo Cookie frogs…….

……Peanut butter cup spiders……

and Spider Web Cupcakes……

After lunch, Linda brought out beading supplies……

…..to make a Christmas spider to sit on my Christmas tree…..

SUCH A FUN AFTERNOON!!!!

Thank you Good Witch Linda!!!!

“Why don’t you???”

Just after we moved into this house, I built a design wall to go in my studio, very happy that it was about 24 inches wider than the one in my old house.

As I have been working on my queen size Australian fabric quilt, I commented to my husband that I wish my wall was a little bit wider. He then uttered those wonderful words…..”Why don’t you make it wider so that it goes behind the door?”…..DUH!!!!

So, yesterday I bought the needed supplies, and this morning Michael helped me to put it in place….

Now I have LOTS more room to work…..

What would I do without my hubby?????

A bump in the quilt planning

I have been continuing to work on the Australian Fabric quilt and “thought” that I had planned my border and was basically ready to finish it up…..NOT!!!

My plan was to put a narrow border around the center section and then add 10 inch blocks around the outside. These blocks were going to be curve pieced just as the smaller ones had been.

I spent a good deal of time going thru the leftover Aussie fabrics and looking for ones that would allow me to cut another large block…..12 inches to start with. Since many of the fabrics that I had were only fat quarters or half-yard cuts, I had to be very careful with the cutting process.

Since I wanted to use the Aboriginal designed fabrics for the binding, I decided to go ahead and make a long cut from each of the fabrics as well.

Additionally, I wanted to use up as much of the fabrics as I could so was planning to put any leftovers on the back of the quilt. I started cutting these pieces at the same time.

THEN…..

I started piecing the large border blocks, but they looked horrible…..

I felt that it just made everything look muddled!!

So, the first thing that I tried was to change the inner border to a brighter fabric and that helped some…..

….but not enough. So, I went downstairs to eat lunch and think about it a little.

As I thought, I started wondering if the problem wasn’t that there was too much movement in the blocks and that they were simply too big. I went back upstairs and started folding the big blocks down so that there was only one curve in each….

Now I was getting somewhere!!!

Since I didn’t have a lot of fabric left at this point, I knew that I was going to have to cut down these blocks so that I could use them as well.

It was a bit difficult to do, but I tried to get at least 7-1/2 inches out of each block.

On some I even went to the trouble of re-pressing the seam allowance to give me that extra 1/8th of an inch…..

In this block, the stripe was too large so I cut it down and re-pieced it to be smaller……

So, as of quitting time, it was looking much better and I am more encouraged about the border…..

I am thinking that I will place the blocks so that the stripe continues around the quilt, but will decide that once I have them all pieced

On an aside, I was really wanting to use the Indian fabric that had been bleeding in my last post, so I decided to see if I could wash it out. After THREE hot water rinsings, the water looked like this….

…..and after 15 or so rinsings, it looked like this……..

I am still conflicted about whether or not to use it for the inside border, but will get there and see…..

Piecing those pesky curves

I have been enjoying working on a quilt that I first posted about in May. I had pieced a few blocks back then but hadn’t gotten any further….

Last week, I started making more blocks and adding them to the design wall, but it just didn’t look right. I finally realized that the curves all had to go in the same direction. Much better……

I have had a lot of fun piecing the blocks and have found them to be fairly easy to do. I was trying to figure out how to describe the piecing process, but decided instead to do a video. Here goes…..

<img src="http://lh3.ggpht.com/-Ot1ZDDMBFfA/UmFpTH0pxqI/AAAAAAAANHs/b03cGB0csKg/video019f142a4117%25255B3%25255D.jpg?imgmax=800" style="border-style: none" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('7aee54b3-aeb6-430b-b991-943654bad161'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "

http://www.youtube.com/v/l3wRN-az1vY?hl=en&hd=1“;” alt=””>

Piecing those pesky curves

I taped this several times to pick which one I liked best and realized that in one of them, my daughter’s dog (Marley) was photo-bombing me!!…..

After each curve was stitched, I spritzed it with water and then ironed it flat.

The final step was to cut the block down to a 7-1/2 inch square. There were a few that weren’t quite big enough, but I was able to add bits of fabric here and there to make it work.

I then put them all up on the wall…..

As I looked it over, I realized that there were a few blocks that stood out too much, such as this gold one…..

I pulled two such blocks and added another stripe in a different fabric to tone them down.

Finally, I knew that I wanted to add some accent pieces across the quilt so started adding small strips of red fabrics….

Then I noticed that there were bits of red color on my ironing board cover…..

Uh-oh….something isn’t color-fast!!!! The offending fabric was a piece that I had bought in India and was one of my favorites……

….but I couldn’t afford to leave it in the quilt, so I cut them out and replaced with other fabrics.

At this point, I need to decide what borders to use. I am thinking about using larger blocks that are also pieced in curves but to have the curves moving around the quilt.

More fun to follow…….