Jack-O-bama

It is that time of year, to carve up your pumpkins and select your candidate of choice. Who knew you could do both at the same time?!

Steve and I made a trip to the farmers market and selected a very special pumpkin. Then we spent some quality time doing some carving and placing some strategic toothpicks.

I would hope you all are Obama supporters, because of his longtime stance of pro-quilting. You can find a template for the candiate of your choice or their spouse here. Is that Cindy McCain?

49 and Not Counting

So in the spirit of taming my scraps, I've organized all my projects and scraps into 5 storage bins and an Excel spreadsheet. It contains all the projects I have at the moment. And as the title suggests, I have 49 projects. The snapshot is of the first twenty projects.

Some of you may not know that Glad Creations has a monthly lecture call Scrap Tamers Club. The objectives of scrap tamers are to tame your scraps, control your clutter and to finish those projects. It goes from Sept 2008 to Aug 2009.

So you will notice that in order to make myself feel better, I've listed a project that I've already completed. Wahoo! Also I've set a goal to finish 19 other projects by the end of the club. This would put me at 29 projects in Sept 2009.

I've also set a goal for myself to finish the year with fewer project than I started with. You all know how we quilters are, we can't stop buying fabric. I had to leave room to buy more fabric.

Stay tuned to see how I do.

Show and Tell

Since everyone couldn't attend the first session of the Mystery Weekend, you may not have seen the Show and Tell that I brought to share. So here you go!

This is a quilt that I put together this year. It is a Glad Creations' pattern, called Nifty Nine-Patches. I love this quilt. It uses 16 fabrics for the blocks and one fabric for sashing. I tried to use very natural colors. When the quilt was put together, I noticed that I had used a lot animal prints and that was why I ended up with the animal print on the back of my quilt. Well that, and it was in the half price fabric section.

Oh, I almost forgot. This quilt was one of the 6 quilts that needed bindings. As you can see the binding is on and it looks great!

Potatoes - The Lucky Ones!

Why is it that only potatoes are mashed up and made into a side dish? The answer to this is that they don't have to be.

Here is a great recipe for Mashed Roots, a tasty alternative to Mashed Potatoes.

4 cups cubed peeled baking potatoes

2 cups sliced peeled parsnip

2 cups cubed peeled turnip

1 large onion finely chopped

1/2 cup celery finely chopped

2 bay leaves

5 tablespoons butter

1 cup evaporated milk

Salt and Pepper

Place first 6 ingredients in a large saucepan, cover with water and bring to a boil. Cook 20 minutes or until vegetables are very tender. Drain well and discard bay leaves. Return veggies to pan; add butter, milk, and salt and pepper. Beat at medium/high speed until smooth and fluffy, about 5 minutes.

Enjoy!

Trick or Treat!!!

For part of my Caroline's visit, we took at trip to Stillwater, MN to do some antique shopping and make a stop at Aamodt's Apple Farm. Any trip is not complete without a trip to a quilt shop and if the trip is to Stillwater, then that would be Charlotte's Quilting Web. It is a great little shop and has a discount on end of bolt fabric. I took advantage of this to get a couple of backs.

While we were there, Steve found some cute Halloween fabric and decided he need a tote. Here is a couple of pictures of the finished product. As you can see the tote is reversible and will be great for handing out candy at Halloween. Who knows it might be filled with tricks!

The Mystery Continues

Mystery weekend is over and Caroline is headed home. I'll miss her. We both got a good start on the mystery quilt. It is a winner. Anyone doing the mystery quilt will love it. Unfortunately, it is a mystery so I can't post pictures of the progress I'm making until after the last mystery session. So instead I'm posting a picture of the fabric I found for the back of my quilt. It was in the discount fabric upstairs at Glad Creations. It is from the Ragtime collection put out by Moda.

I plan to continue to blog about my progress on the quilt, but they won't post until the last session of the Mystery weekend. So stay tuned!

'Sis'tery Weekend

So my sister Caroline is visiting me for a week this week. The plan is to do the Mystery Weekend at Glad Creations on Oct 11 and 12. We spent the last two days cutting out our fabric for the quilt. So we needed a post to celebrate the accomplishment of finishing the cutting for the quilt. I'm a statistician, so here are the stats for this quilt. The quilts finished size will be 90"x110". It requires 16 7/8 yards of fabrics. There are dark fabrics, medium fabrics, one accent fabric and one background fabric. The dark fabrics get cut up into 331 pieces. The medium fabrics get cut up into 213 pieces. The accent fabric gets cut into 44 fabrics. The background fabrics gets cut up into 416 pieces. Do the math, that adds up to a grand total of 1004 pieces. Wish us luck!

I picked fabrics designed by Kaffe Fassett, in the first photo. Caroline did a mix of fabric but the majority of them are from Moda, in the second photo.

Caroline also brought a great recipe with her from Martha Stewart Everyday Food magazine. She made Rigatoni with Roasted Pumpkin and Goat Cheese. As you can see from the picture she did a good job. Let me tell you it was delicious.