Bread

Waiting for the loaves to come out of the oven


Loaves, rolls, and focaccia cooling


Beautiful challah braids


Rosemary focaccia


Decadent sticky buns


...bottoms up!


Dough to go (at various points in the rising process) for more yeasty goodness at home

Truffle photos

Earlier in the year we attended a benefit for Truffle's animal shelter, and participated in their silent auction. One of the items we won was a b&w pet portrait with a photographer, who also happened to be one of the shelter managers.

We decided to have the photo taken of Truffle (since it was his shelter, after all), and scheduled the photo session for last weekend.

It took quite some time to coax him out, and the first set of photos were taken with him on my lap. Eventually he did pose for some stand-alone shots, although I don't think he'll ever be a fan of flash photography.

Anyway, here are a few photos from his photo session, while they're still online. You can see some of his apprehension on his face in a few of them. We are deciding between #4 and #5.

In the pink

...and here is the chosen pink. Click to see a larger version.




Now I just have to sew it together and figure out the border!

You scream, I scream...

I am currently working on an ice cream cone quilt. I have the individual cone blocks constructed, and am now playing with possible fabrics for the alternating squares. As you can see below, pink seems to work nicely, but I'm not sure whether the particular fabric is right. (I like the shade of pink with the other fabrics, just am not sold on the texture for this quilt.)

I guess I'll just have to drag myself ;) to the fabric store!




(Click to view a larger version)

I like quilts too

Truffle today

Click the photo to see a larger-than-life version, complete with dusty face from exploring under the bookshelf :)

New kit on the block

The tall, dark, and handsome (and somewhat cross-eyed) gentleman on the right is my new kitty, Truffle!

We had gone into the shelter to talk to someone about possibly fostering a cat... but after we met all the adult cats, the shelter manager took us to meet the kittens. I sat down and within 30 seconds, mr. kittenpants was up on my lap purring his little heart out. I knew I was dooooomed :).

I put in an application to adopt him the next day :)

(If you want to see Truffle in a silly mood, you can go to the other kitten's page here and click to view the video.)

Happy birthday, Eisa dear

Happy 17th birthday, Eisie!

Then:


Now:

Iterations

I promised to share the evolution of a quilt here when it was done. I'm not sure that it's all the way yet, but the layout is close enough (pre-border) for you to at least get a sense of things.

I began with the idea that I wanted to build a quilt using a standard split nine patch block. Making fabric choices somewhat at random can give a nice effect, but I chose instead to put it together square by square. (Click on any of the small photos to see a photo that is large enough to see the individual fabrics.)

This was the first iteration. You can see that, with the exception of the center, this version sticks pretty strictly to the split nine patch block.



After I slept on this idea, I decided that the sharp contrast between lights and darks was too sharp. I also found the yellow "propeller" in the center to be a pretty heavy handed "X marks the spot" thing. So I made the corners consistently dark, broke up the propeller blades, started replacing some of the lightest lights (like the ice blue polkadot) with darker fabrics. Here it is in the middle of implementing those changes. Already I'd be hard pressed to find a single split nine patch in the bunch.



Here I finished implementing the changes. Another improvement: the center is no longer surrounded by chunky rectangles, but now contains a pinwheel. Ah, much better.



At this point, there were a few color issues that were still bothering me, like the isolation of the light green squares, and the need to tweak some of the light oranges. Here I've switched out the pale blue triangles adjacent to the green squares for green triangles. Still thinking about the orange options...



...to be continued

Blurry 'Belle

Little Eisa is very unassuming, and never gets possessive of my quilts. However, I left this one on the kitchen floor for a while, between the tying and the trimming, and she went to sit on it a half-dozen times.

I snuck off and grabbed the camera, and managed to snap a single, blurry photo before she became self-conscious and left. Maybe I'll try to entice her back for another session after the quilt is done. Til then, here is my blurry Dorabelle!

Great Scott!

The scottie quilt is done!



Now that the quilt has been delivered and I don't have to worry about giving away the surprise, I can also show you the backing (a charming print by Heather Ross). It may be hard to tell since the scan is a little bluer than the actual fabric, but the color of the scottie's ball on the front was selected to match the color of the brown doggy's ball on the back.

Don't take my picture, mama!

You are what you quilt

Here's the first round of tops for the Snuggle quilt(let)s:



You'll notice that I did end up doing a bunch of Crazy Quilt blocks in the end. They may be slower to sew, but to me, their spontaneity and randomness makes them more fun to make than Disappearing 9 Patch blocks. Plus I get to use all the tiny pieces that have been sitting in my scrap bag forever!

Whee, flying monkeys!

The monkeys and their quilt are currently flying on their way to Michele, and should be there tomorrow before noon!

Here is a shot I took immediately after I tied off the last knot in the thread I was using to stitch the back of the binding. (If you click on the image to see the larger version, you can see a bit of a dimensional look to the squares. That's what happens when you stitch "in the ditch" between blocks. It is a pretty neat effect.)

Blocks for the kitty quilt

Tam requested that I share where I am on the kitty wall hanging for Finny's cancer clinic.



I am still pretty uncertain about how it is coming together. Sometimes when you are auditioning fabrics, there is a moment where the colors start to sing. That's when you know you are good to go. I haven't gotten to that point (yet) with this one.

I may pull some of the individual blocks and substitute others. (For instance, I need to move past my crush on the stars and moons background fabric in the upper lefthand corner so I can admit the color won't really work unless I add at least one other warmer blue into the mix). The hyacinth blue sashing between the blocks is also not set in stone, and the potential border fabric is so up in the air that I am not even showing it.

Part of the struggle is that I really want to get the emotional tone right. The colors need to feel calm and meditative, and avoid coming across as unthinkingly cheerful on the one hand, or brooding and dreary on the other.

Of course, it is all on hold while I work on the monkey quilt!

For Michele

We narrowed possible striped fabrics down to the two below. (The stripe in the earlier photos did not make the final two: the colors aren't quite right.)

So,

1) Which of the following stripes do you prefer? (Click for a larger view)

a) the narrower of the two stripes (a solid red on white)



b) the wider of the two stripes (a stripe with some mottling and color variation within the red)


Here is a close-up of the two stripes next to the red, for comparison

2) There are two possible fabrics we are considering for borders. In the second of the two quilt photos, you can see the starry fabric as the left border and the darker hand-dye below and on the bottom half of the right right. (If you want to see the pattern better, the starry fabric appears in the background of the close-up shot of the stripes above. The hand-dye is the fabric you see as the border of Caedmon's quilt, and in all of the quilt shots I have taken prior to today.)

Which do you prefer?

The monkeys made me do it!

I know I wasn't supposed to start anything new... but when I was in my studio, my eye fell upon the yard and a half of cute simian fabric, and before I knew it, I was monkeying around matching fabrics. (Oh well!)

EDITED: Potential layouts removed; view the final monkey quilt here!

Grandparents' photo quilt (top)

DH said the quilt should be blue and brown, sort of a traditional Japanese color scheme, and masculine because it's intended to be used by his grandfather, and so it is. There are two special fabrics that I wanted to call out.

1) The ecru fabric (third from the left in the link) is the only fabric here that was actually made in Japan. It's part of the popular Daiwabo line which is based on antique Japanese prints. I wanted to use it for this reason and because (with pale blue and taupe leaves and amber-brown dots, it married the brown and blues in the quilt). The stripe in the narrow middle border and the backing were chosen to coordinate with this fabric so it wouldn't stick out too badly!

2) The deep brown border is a sunprint batik with little leaves and twigs on it. It's absolutely beautiful, and it had to be washed about 10 times before the wash water stopped leaking dye. There is a close-up here, only the color in the piece I have is ruddier, not so olive. You currently see the brown as 5 3/4"; after I sandwich the quilt, everything will get squared/trimmed up and the (black) binding will be added, so it'll end up 5" wide (same as the blocks in the body of the quilt).

Click the photo to see the larger version.

Practice, practice, practice

When my mother was out visiting, she and her friend got me started on hand quilting. She gave me a special thimble and an embroidery hoop with a little lap stand, too, so now I am all set to start a hand quilting project using proper hand quilting - once I can truly figure out what it is I'm doing.

(Proper hand quilting isn't exactly intuitive. Take a look at the stitch here Confused yet?)

I've done enough to realize that it'll take a lot of practice before I'm confident enough to do it on a real project. So I have a hoop set up with some scrap fabric and batting so I can try to get a few stitches on a needle at a time without having my stitches be an inch long. And in the meantime, I'll go back to "cheating" and finish up an in-progress project using my nice old familiar stab-stitching method. Only another quilter would be able to tell ;)

First group project

The first group quilting project took place not long after I first learned to quilt. Our quilting teacher was getting married - what better gift than something quilt related?

My partner in crime concocted some relatively plausible excuse to procure the entire guest list, with addresses. (I'm still not sure what she said, but it worked!) Then we sat down and wrote a note explaining the project, asking each person to sign an enclosed muslin square and return them to us before the date of the wedding. We would embroider all of the signatures and present all of the squares to the couple on their wedding day. (We didn't have a lot of time, so we were aiming just to have all the squares ready; they could be assembled into a quilt after the big day).

Incredibly, we had full participation. Everyone sent signed squares. More than that, even, because the bride's best friend found an old letter from the bride's father (who had passed away), and copied that onto a square too. (They had been very close, she wrote to us, and she knew that the wedding quilt wouldn't be right without him.)

This is a shot of some of the ones I worked on first. Unfortunately I don't have a photo of the finished set, but I hope it'll give you a taste of the project.



On the wedding day, we arrived at the reception just a few minutes before the bride and groom, but it was enough time to lay out all of the squares in a row. We'd divided the blocks in half and had each tackled the embroidery on our half individually, so we were seeing the whole batch together for the first time. It was pretty exciting!

But our excitement was nothing compared to that of the bride and groom. They went down the line (accumulating quite a following of guests behind them) and read each and every message. And then we pulled out the pièce de résistance - the square from her father, and there was not a dry eye in the house.