Books, Quilt Blocks and a Present.

I recently won a blog contest for the book, The Gingerbread Architect: Recipes and Blueprints for Twelve Classic American Homes from Stephanie over at Half Baked. She generously sent me Little Cakes from the Whimsical Bakehouse along with my prize. I adore both of the books. The Gingerbread Architect Book requires you to be meticulous and patient because the houses do look like a lot of work. Luckily for me, that kind of thing is right up my alley. Though, executing one of these houses might prove to be difficult while taking care of a 15 month old. The 12 house designs are: Pueblo House, Second Empire House, Cape Cod, Adirondack Camp, Dawson City House, Urban Brownstone, Carpenter Gothic, Tudor Revival, Victorian Farmhouse, South Beach Art Deco House, Greek Revival Antebellum Plantation, and Modern House. And true to it's name of the book, it has blueprints of all the houses for you to enlarge on the photocopier. It reminds me of my drafting class in art school. The book contains all the recipes for the houses like the gingerbread dough, royal icing, and pastillage. Then it also has a list of resources for buying the candy pieces for the decorations.

I think it will be lots of fun to have Melody participate in decorating a Gingerbread House this year. It will have to be something simple because I don't think she is up for making a Victorian Farmhouse yet. :-)

Little Cakes from the Whimsical Bakehouse has delicious looking recipes. I have my eye on the Blueberry Crumb Cakes and Plum Kuchens right now. The pictures of the baked goods are very good, so it further entices you to make some. I find that people really like miniature cakes. Maybe it tricks you into thinking that you are having a smaller portion or maybe they are just too darn cute to resist. From my own experience, I know that my friends really love the fact that I now make my cheesecakes in individual portions. Shhhh...don't tell them, but it's actually a little easier.

I noticed that the book has some recipes that require you to have specialty mini-cake pans in different shapes, but not all of them require that. The front of the book has a section just for using muffin pans. Towards the back of the book are the decorative cakes that require a lot more decorating. I think this book ranges from Easy to Advanced, but they are all certainly doable.

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My friend, Jen, recently sent me Weekend Sewing and Material Obsession. Unless you have been living under a rock, I am sure you have seen Weekend Sewing. It's the new sewing book by Heather Ross that has taken over crafting blogs and Flickr. I seriously couldn't avoid seeing the book. Every blog I visited had pictures from the book or finished projects to show. I even had one person recommend it to me because of the cute children's clothes section. It's so true. I love that section. I have been wanting to sew garments and children's clothes would be a good baby step towards it. The Smocked Sundress and Flower Girl Dress would be adorable for Melody. I love the step by step illustrations (by the author) and the simple look of the projects. The hand drawn illustrations really adds a special touch to the book. You can tell how much love and care the author put into the making of the book. The projects, especially, the garments (adult and children) have simple clean lines. It really makes the garment projects look approachable, even for a newbie like me.

If you like making quilts, this one is a winner. Isn't the name, Material Obsession fantastic? Not only is it the name of the book, but it is the name of the authors store in Sydney, Australia. The two ladies really have an eye for color and fabrics. The way they combine prints and color really makes the quilts look so beautiful. Their most simple pattern, which is called Avalon, uses rich bold colors that are combined perfectly. Even though it is a pattern that uses only 12 squares of fabric, the fabric choices is what makes it unique.
I was very inspired by the book and decided to use one of the block patterns for Lynn's month of our virtual quilting bee, Common Threads. She sent an impressive selection of fabrics. I chose the 4 biggest pieces to make this block for her. The block is from the pattern, Cowboy Baby, in the book. I took one set of the block and blew it up. The block ended up being 14 inches, so she could trim it down if she wants to. The picture below is the picture of the quilt, Cowboy Baby, from the book.
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I haven't talked about the other blocks I made for the virtual quilting bee since the last update.
This 15 inch block is for Jacquie. The light blue is a linen and was a little tricky to work with because it frays very easily. The finished quilt is for her son, Jon. Jon asked for something minimal, modern and masculine.
These two are for Jenny. I had extra fabric, so I tried to make another one.The second one is smaller because I ran out of fabric. But I had fun experimenting with the striped fabric she sent.

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Last weekend, we Melody received a special package in the mail. This little guy came all the way from Chicago only to arrive on a yucky rainy day here in NYC. Sara had made this for Melody as a belated birthday present.
The next day, Easter Sunday, was bright and sunny, so we took Melody and the Koala to the park. She never let go of him and dragged him around the whole afternoon. DH took her on the slide and all 3 of them slid down together.
Here is Koala resting on the park bench. We decided to give him a break from the jungle gym and the (dirty) ground. He might need a bath now after all that playing.

Thank you, Sara. She really loves him. She loves holding him by his apron. I think that is my favorite part, too. So cute!

Winners! And lots of crafting.

The winners for the Rainbow Moebius pattern giveaway are: Flanthrower, Mz Kwooz, craftattacks, Brittney, and Julie. Please email me with your address at (oiyi.yau at gmail.com) replacing the spaces and at symbol acordingly. If you don't contact me before Friday, I won't be able to mail out your pattern until I get back after the holidays.
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I have been knitting, baking and sewing like crazy. I haven't been spending a lot of time online except for Ravelry. I will have to catch up on my blog reading after the holidays.

Over the weekend, I took a break and went to the annual Sit 'n' Knit Holiday Party. This was my first time and it was a lot of fun. There was a Open Bar and lots of food. Everyone brought a knitting project and there was also a raffle for some great prizes. The pictures from the party are from Rima. My little old point and shoot wasn't working very well in the bar, so I asked her to take the photos and she sent me copies.This is me with Rima. She was so nice to save me a seat at her table. I didn't know many people there so I really appreciated that.There was also a Optional Gift Exchange. You knit or crochet a gift before the party and then we drew names at the party. After all the names have been drawn, you have to find the person that you got and give her your gift. And someone else will be looking for you to give you their gift. It sounds easy enough, but there were over 60 people there and it took me a long time to find my gift recipient. The above picture is me with Katy. I eventually found her and gave her my gift which was a little scarflet. It's a cute little pattern that my MIL taught me when I first started knitting.I got my gift right away from my friend, Tomo. I couldn't believe that she drew my name. She made a fabulous soft scarf that was in the colors that I like.
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I bet you haven't seen any of my sewing endevours in a while. I owe 5 blocks to the members of my Online Quilting Bee, called Common Threads (link on side bar). This month is my turn to send out the fabrics for my quilt. The other 12 members will work on the block with my specifications and fabrics. Over the weekend, I finished everything up and the next day, DH kindly took all 12 packages and stood in line at the Post Office.The blocks vary in size. It's whatever the person of the month tells us. On all of these blocks, the sizes ranged from 11 inches to 15 inches. The above one is 15 inches and it is the largest block I have made so far.This person wanted log cabin blocks. I made 2 blocks because she gave me ample fabric.This was the most challenging block so far. She wanted a tree house block. The block is 14 inches and is mostly appliqued. I bet this is going to be an awesome quilt when it's finished.
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I have been knitting like a demon. I have finished a lot of projects, but haven't had time to photograph them. I finished this hat almost 2 weeks ago.This hat is for DH. Can you believe that he almost bought a hat from Target? His wife is a knitter!! He said that I always seemed to be so busy with a lot of projects and didn't want to bother me.

After I made him put the hat back at Target, we went home and he chose the yarn from my stash. Then I searched through Ravelry for a non-girly pattern (he specified no girly yarn color or girly pattern). I casted on late Sunday night and on Monday when he got home from work, I presented him with a finished hat.It's a really good pattern and produces a very nice hat. Because the brim is folded up, you can pull the brim over your ears on the really cold days.
Pattern: Seaman's Cap (free pattern)
Needles: US 6 / 4.0 mm and US 7 / 4.5 mm
Yarn: Lion Brand Wool-Ease, color: Grey Heather, 0.74 skeins = 145.8 yards (133.3m)
Size: Large

A Little Hand Sewn Doll

Thank you all for your well wishes. The insomnia continues to plague me. The magic hour seems to be 5am. That is when I drift off to sleep, but that is also when DH starts to snore! So, I barely get 3 hours of sleep and then I have to wake up at 8am to feed the baby. Sometimes if I am lucky, she will sleep until 9am. Hopefully, this will end soon.

My recent project is from a Japanese Craft Book that uses socks and gloves to make dolls. I got this book a few years ago, but now they have published a English version. The Japanese version has enough pictures to show you how to make the dolls even if you can't read Japanese. The neat thing about the projects is that you don't need a sewing machine. Just a pair of scissors, needle, thread, and a pair of socks or gloves.
So, I started off with a pair of cheap gloves from Target. I chose to make the Pig. I cut apart the gloves and sewed them back together to form the pig. I made a boo boo on the head but sewed up the glaring hole afterwards. When I looked at the English version at the book store, I realized where I went wrong.This is my practice pig, so I left off the eyes and button for the snout. I did add the cute belly button. I am not crazy about how the limbs and ears are attached on. They instruct you to use a whipstitch which produces a very "home made" look (you can see the stitches). I am sure that is part of the charm, but I like my work to have a cleaner look. That's just how I am. I am working on another animal and I like how it's turning out so far by making the stitches as invisible as possible.Apparently, she likes to chew on pork.She looks like she is growing a Mohawk.Here she is stalking her prey.The poor Pig resting after getting chewed on, drooled on, and having it's arms and legs yanked on. I think one of the legs is longer because of all the yanking.

Someone turned 3 years old!

Today is Napoleon's birthday. I will be grilling up a steak for him and Caesar to share. 3 years ago, he was my first "baby" and now I have 3, one human and 2 fur babies. Babies and dogs bring a lot of laughter into the household.Someone else is having a bundle of joy soon, so I made this Care Bears soft book for her. Don't worry, Napoleon's paws are clean. Since both my dogs live in a Chinese household where we take off our shoes when we enter the house, they get their paws washed when they come in, too.I made my first soft book from a kit I got at Joann Fabrics, but this time, I bought fabric panels from Hayloft Fabrics. You just have to supply the batting. I used a nice cotton batting I got from Michaels. Hayloft Fabrics delivered quickly and without any problems, so I would definitely recommend them.

The only problem I had was in making the book. The panels are not printed in perfect rectangles, the sides are not straight at all, so you can't cut them out straight. In fact, some of the sides are warped, so it made lining up the panels very difficult. I did my best not to lose any of the important parts of the book when I sewed them together, like the star numbers and the pictures. It was frustrating and I almost didn't send it since I felt awful it wasn't perfect. But then I remembered that babies won't scrutinize the book for imperfections. They are just happy playing with it and putting it in their mouths.

This is the second month of the virtual quilting bee at Common Threads and I made this 14 inch quilt block for Melissa. Curves are hard, but I had a lot of fun with this block. I just don't know if it fits in with her theme. When I hung it on the wall to take pictures, it reminded me of a modern art painting. Slap it in a frame and you can hang it on your wall.

Sewing and More Baking (Long Post)

These are the blocks that I made for the last 2 classes of my "Quilt Making By Hand" at Purl Patchwork. The second class was about triangles and the third class was about set in seams. Apparently, there are blocks that are much easier to hand sew than to machine sew them. Like the one on the top left hand corner, the Spool block.

Sadly, the last class is tomorrow. I have really enjoyed taking another class with Cassandra, the teacher, and I am sad that it's ending. Tomorrow we will be learning about basting, marking the top, quilting designs, hand quilting with a hoop, and binding by hand.

Someone asked me what fabrics I am using in the comments, but there was no blog link or email link, so I will answer it here. It's called "Bleeker Street" by Marcus Brothers. I got it as a fat quarter set by this Etsy Seller. The green solid fabric is from Joann Fabrics. There was no specific project for this class, but I would like to turn the blocks that I have made into a quilt. I just have to make more blocks and figure out how to arrange the blocks.

This big block (11 inches square) was made for Rebekah. I was invited to join a virtual quilting bee called Common Threads. For round one, Rebekah sends fabrics out to the 12 of us and tells us how big she wants the block to be and what general design that she would like. We have a month to complete it and send it back. Then the next month, it's someone else's turn. My month is December and I still haven't decided what I want yet.

My sister emailed me a link to these cute cookie cutters and I had to have them. Home made Animal Crackers!! There are 5 spring-loaded cookie cutters: Lion, Elephant, Giraffe, Tiger and a Seal with a ball on it's nose. They are made by Williams-Sonoma.You can buy the pre-made mix for $12, but there is a recipe on the back of the box and it's on their website along with a how-to video. I didn't want to spend money on the mix and made the recipe from the back of the box. Easy peasy!

I do have to say that cutting them out and imprinting them is not as easy as the video demonstrates. First off, the cookie dough softens really easily, so do it in a air conditioned kitchen or keep frozen cookie streets on hand. You can put the cookie dough on the cold cookie sheet to firm up the dough or throw the whole thing back in the fridge. I had problems with the giraffe's neck and the elephant's trunk. The other animals were easy. Flouring the cookie cutters really well helps a lot.How do they taste? Delicious! They are crisp and crunchy. They are kinda addicting. You can't just eat one. I made a batch for my friend's daughter, Veronica, though I heard that her dad ate them all. DH loved them and couldn't stop eating them. I can't wait until Melody can eat cookies.

All right, this post is long enough. I promise to give my review of my Anniversary Dinner at Mesa Grill next time.

Doing it the Old School way.

Last week, I attended my first class in Quilt Making by Hand at Purl Patchwork. I took their Machine Piecing and Quilting Class last year while I was pregnant and I really enjoyed it. Both classes are taught by a wonderful teacher, named Cassandra.

So, why do I want to hand sew a quilt over using a sewing machine? I am finding less and less time that I can sit in front of the sewing machine. Especially now that my sweetie pie can roll over onto her tummy and raise her chest with her arms. I swear, she seems like she is going to be crawling any minute now. She claws the ground with her hands, but doesn't realize that she needs to use her legs to crawl. So, she ends up crying in frustration and then I have to flip her back on her back again. Then she does it again and we repeat ourselves over and over again all-day-long. Gone are the days where she would lay on her back and play with her toys that dangle above her.

Anyway, I wanted to learn hand sewing so that I can have small portable projects while watching her. During our first class, I made the 4 Patch Squares in the above photo. I had a lot of fun learning to hand sew a quilt square. I thought it would take forever, but once you get going, it doesn't really take that long. At first, it was hard sewing a straight running stitch and keeping the stitches even length, but you soon learn it doesn't really matter when you flip it over to the good side and iron it. Practice does make everything better. After a couple of squares, my hand stitching looked a lot better.
We didn't get any homework, but she did encourage us to keep making squares when we got home because that is the only way to improve our hand sewing. She said that we could continue to make the 4 Patches or start a different design as long as there wasn't triangles involved.

So, you start off by drawing your design on Quilter's Graph Paper. You draw the exact size that you want and you don't add in seam allowances. That's one of the differences between machine piecing and hand piecing. The design is then transferred onto a plastic template and then you cut it out. The above photo shows how I used the template to trace rectangles onto the fabric. A piece of sandpaper on the back of the fabric really helps with the tracing. You have to leave a little room for the seam allowance but preciseness doesn't matter. Then you cut out the pieces with scissors.
The reason why you don't need to add in seam allowances when you make and cut out your template is because you sew on the drawn pencil lines. So if you want a 6 inch square, your template would be 6 inches and then when you trace it onto the fabric, you leave room for the seam allowance. For this particular quilt square, I wanted the finished square to be 6 inches, so the rectangle template is 1.5 inches wide by 3 inches long.I think that it's pretty cool that you can make quilt squares with just scissors, fabric, thread and a needle. No machine necessary! And I find that the running stitch used to sew the squares is similar to the garter stitch in knitting, very meditative. I can't wait to see what we will be learning this week.
On the machine sewing side of things, I have pieced all the squares together on this quilt that I blogged about a few weeks ago. All that is left for the quilt top is to piece the border pieces together and then sew it to the quilt.

This one is for her.

I am back! We lost our cable internet connection for a week. And boy did I go through some withdrawal symptoms! Time Warner Cable said they would send someone to check it out by the end of the week. A whole week seemed like an eternity for DH and I since we are internet junkies. The problem turned out to be a bad modem and they gave us a new one and we are back online. Woohoo!!

During my internet free week, I kept busy with some more sewing projects. This is another one of those Cuddly Quilt Kits from Jo-Ann Fabrics. This one is called Children at Play and the colors are brown and green. All the fabrics is 100% cotton and cotton flannel except for that brown plush. It was a nightmare to sew with. Let's just say that I spent more time with the seam ripper than actually sewing.
This will be my last Cuddly Quilt Kit. I am tired of struggling with sewing the fabrics that are in the kits. The brown plush was the problem and it would not stop shifting even though I pinned the hell out of it. I do love the colors of this quilt and I am glad that this one is going to my little girl. Normally, she does tummy time on my bed or on a carpet next to my bed. This is the first time doing it on a hard surface on top of a blanket.For some reason, it made her lose her balance and she fell over. I noticed her arm kept buckling when she was on the hard wood floor, but she has no problem propping herself on a softer surface.Whoops! I checked for boo boos and she was fine. I am a mean mommy, but I kinda think this picture is funny.Laying on her back was much better. She stopped crying and let me take some pictures.I love the back! It's a soft cotton flannel with a swirly print.