Designing Monday

I pieced together this top per the 12 Days of Christmas mystery from Temecula Quilt Co. It was fun to use up a few scraps.

My pile of blocks for my other quilt is continuing to build. This week I have been making HST's. Won't be long and I will be able to start piecing a block.

I'm off to the Y. Hop over to Judy's blog to see what other quilts are happening.

Monday Designs

Temecula Quilt Co. is hosting the 12 Days of Christmas mystery quilt. These little cuties are 3-1/2" squares. Just one per day. How easy is that? I grabbed some scraps and made these during the commercials of the endless football games that are going on here.

Also am working on lots of HST's and finished up the Flying Geese I have been making for awhile. I cut hundreds of square to make the wings and when I finished making the Geese I needed, I still had tons of squares leftover. I'm not sure how that happened. Okay, I guess I do know, but I sure hate to admit it!

Gotta go. Watching the Rose Parade and then it's time for Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl game. On Wisconsin! Go Badgers!

Be sure to hop over to Judy's blog to see what else is going on.

Have a Happy New Year.

Have you Seen this Stuff?

I visited a friend this week and she had some of this stuff called Deco Poly Mesh with Foil. It comes on a roll and it is very light and airy. It is kind of stiff and is great for decorating. My friend had used some with greenery to make a fabulous table runner for her dining table. She also used some with ornaments to decorate a table in her entry. I went to Stein's Garden Center and they had several different colors and widths. They had this mesh on a number of displays including as a ribbon on a ginormous wrapped package. They wrapped the mesh with lights to make swags. They used two different colors shaped to make a giant candy cane.

I bought lime green in a 10" width and used it on the mantle as a backdrop for all the stuff I have there.

Don't laugh at my meager decorating skills, but take in how fabulous this stuff looks and how it makes instant wow factor wherever you put it.

The Geese May be Flying South...

But mine seem to have taken up residence on my cutting board. I have to make a skajillion of these for the quilt I am working on. I have been so busy with Christmas stuff that my flying geese are just sitting on the runway waiting to take off.

Be sure to check Judy's blog to see what is on everybody's design wall.

Hope you are getting lots of sewing time in. I am just enjoying the holidays.

Little Houses

I am starting a subdivision in my sewing room. I saw this pattern last week and got busy this afternoon making these little cuties. I found a linen blend at Joann's and had a lot of fun finding colorful scraps in my piles to play with.

I hope to get a few more made in Christmas colors for our tree. These are destined for gifts.

It's Cookie Time

Time to start making cookies for the holidays. I'm sharing my most favorite and easiest cookie recipe ever. They are also the first to disappear at the church cookie walk.

Here we go:

First start with these great ingredients.

Weigh out 10 oz. of almond bark and heat over low heat until melted and smooth. No lumps, please. Take it off the heat. Add 1/4 tsp. of mint extract and a couple of drops of green food coloring.

Once it's all stirred together, take one Nabisco Famous Chocolate Wafer and dip half of it in the melted bark.

Place it on a waxed paper lined cookie sheet. Repeat until you have used up the whole box of cookies. There will always be one or two broken cookies. Dip those,too. Those are you treat for a job well done.

Melt 3/4 c. of your favorite choc. chips. I use milk chocolate. The recipe calls for mint choc. chip. Dark choc would be good too.

Put the melted chips in a ziploc bag. Cut off a teeny tiny piece of the corner of the bag. Squeeze the chocolate and move it back and forth across the cookies about 3 or 4 or 5 times. Whatever looks good to you.

Start about 1/2 inch away from the edge of the cookie and just keep the chocolate coming as you go the whole length of the pan and back. That keeps from getting big blobs of chocolate on the cookies. Not attractive.

Let them dry until the coating is hard. These are so yummy.

I also made Raspberry Ribbons which are also very yummy.

Hope you try some and like them. The hardest part of this recipe is finding a box of choc. wafers that are not broken and making sure the grocery checker and bagger don't maul them. I usually hold on to them the whole time and don't let the bagger touch them.

Designing Monday

I spent some of my Thanksgiving weekend working on the last Jo Morton quilt top in the pattern package for this year's club. It is a cute little quilt and I really want to make a scalloped edge on the border. I am not sure if I have enough fabric to do that, so I am rethinking right now.

Just look at all those HST's!

We enjoyed having our son home for a week and are even more excited that he will be back again in just a couple of weeks after finals AND he will be home for a whole month. I hope I am still that excited at the end of that month. I sometimes forget what it is like to be so young and full of energy. He is really a great young man and I can't wait to see what the world holds for him.

Hop on back to Judy's blog to see what everyone else is doing.