Random blocks

Today I finished the first block of my barn quilt. The block is machine pieced with blanket stitch applique. I did the blanket stitch by hand so it takes me a while to do, but I take it to my sewing groups where I can chat with friends and work on the block. I have three more barns to do and then I will start on the boarders.



Here is my cute snowlady block that I appliqued on the machine. I made this block for the block of the month at one of my quilt guilds.

Crazy Quilt Pillow

My last Christmas gift is finished!! I made this for my daughter-in-law to be. I used upholstery samples, beads and buttons from my stash. The only thing I bought was some of the silk ribbon for the flower embroidery.

Engagement

Jared asked Katy to marry him on Thanksgiving day in front of both families, I really thought he may pass out before he finished all he had planned to say. She said yes and we are all excited about the upcoming wedding!!



Merry Christmas everyone!! Next year I plan to keep my blog updated with all the family events and all my new sewing ideas!!

Whats going on in my garden

Fall weather is in the air and my vegetable garden is winding down for the year. I picked the last of the butternut squash and red peppers this week. I still have a few small cantaloupe that may ripen if the weather warms up for a few days and there are a lot of green tomatoes that should be ripe by the end of next week.

However my flower gardens are far from dead, I was out mowing the lawn and had to stop and take a few pictures. I was about out of gas so it was time to take a break so on the way to the garage for the gas can I passed the gazebo and saw this little fellow. I had to get my camera and take his picture!






While I had the camera out I took some pictures of my roses, which I planted this spring so I'm very happy with how they did this year.



I planted some mums about three weeks ago and they are doing well also, sometimes they can be a little fussy to get started, but these are doing very good so far!

Crazy Quilt Pillow

I recently joined a crazy quilt group and found another type of quilting that pairs my enjoyment of quilting and embroidery together. Before you can participate in the groups round robin quilting, which is embellishing one quilt block for each member of the group, you must let them see something you have done to show you are skilled at embroidery and beading. I heard the horror story about why they do this and totally agree its a great idea as you don't want to spend time making a quilt block for your quilt and have someone do the embellishment on it with puffy paint and safety pins, which is NOT exactly the Victorian look you're going for! So here is the pillow I did for my first project. The wording and the cross I did on my embroidery machine and the rest of the stitches and beading I did by hand. Crazy quilting is a project you can bag up and take with you to do when you travel or wait in a doctors office.

The pillow is also an up cycled project which I made from upholstery samples and the lace, embroidery thread and beads are from my stash of sewing notions I have gotten from auctions, garage sales, and the good will.

Spiced Butternut Squash Muffins

My garden produced an abundance of butternut squash so I have been trying some new recipes to use all the delicious squash. These muffins were a big hit with the whole family, they are easy, delicious and very moist. They definitely did not last long. I found the recipe at allrecipes.com, this is a great site with some awesome recipes.



Ingredients
1/2 pound peeled, seeded and cubed butternut squash
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup white sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
3/4 cup milk
1 egg, beaten
1 tablespoon butter, melted

Directions
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C). Lightly grease a 12 cup muffin pan.
2. In a medium saucepan with enough water to cover, boil squash 20 minutes, or until tender. Remove from heat, drain, and puree in a food processor.
3. In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, white sugar, salt and pumpkin pie spice.
4. In a medium bowl, thoroughly mix together milk, egg and butter. Stir in squash. Fold the squash mixture into the flour mixture just until moistened.
5. Spoon the batter into the prepared muffin pan, filling cups about 1/2 full. Bake 20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean. Remove from muffin pan and cool on a wire rack.

I did one thing a little different from the recipe, I cut the squash in half and baked it for 1 hour at 400. Then scooped the squash out, this is much easier then trying to cut it up into chunks to boil.

New Sink & Faucet!!!!!!

I finally have the new sink and faucet installed!! Ed was such a sweetheart and got it all done for me last night just in time for me to host my quilting mini group tomorrow. This has been about a month long ordeal with us having to use a broken faucet.

The last time I was in Springfield I found the faucet I wanted at very good price at the Habitat Resale Store. About a week later our old kitchen faucet broke, so Ed attempted to replace it, but the new faucet was missing a couple small parts and he couldn't get the old faucet off the old sink as it was a rusted mess. So... I called Moen and ordered the two parts for the new faucet then went to Lowes and bought a new stainless steal sink. They didn't have what I really wanted so I settled for something that would work. When we took it out of the box the sink was bent and it sounded like a tin can when you touched it. So, back to Lowes I we went and returned the the sink.

Ed talked to a friend of his who is a contractor so we looked up the sink I wanted and ordered it over the Internet, which we got considerably cheaper then buying it from Lowes or direct from Kohler. I also ordered two soap dispensers to match the faucet, one for dish soap and one for hand soap!! Awesome.

In the meantime the parts for the faucet arrived, but they were the wrong parts!! So I looked up the part numbers from the Moen web site and ordered them again. Yesterday everything arrived, my new sink and the correct parts. WooHoo!!! I love it. Of course now Katy can't accidentally shoot water at Jared and the stove since we're not using the broken hose from the old faucet anymore, but we had our memorable laugh over that one already.

Now I have a beautiful sink and faucet. I didn't care for the redneck broken faucet look, which I might add was better than washing the dishes in the bathtub!!