White Christmas

From the Calico Quilter, the Radio Guy and Molly the calico cat in snowy Tennessee, a blessed Christmas to you and yours this season. May you be happy, healthy and safe.

A few finishes

I was inspired by the Carrie Nelson books I have been buying and I've been in the mood for some mindless sewing; aka, copy the nice lady's quilt. Sometimes you want to be adventurous and creative and sometimes you want to push fabric through the sewing machine. At least I do. It's easier to do the latter with someone blazing the trail ahead of you and assuring you that the product will be pretty.

So, without further ado, I give you my version of Carrie Nelson's "Double Duty": which I absolutely adore.

Then I jumped on her pattern "Six Degrees" (don't know WHERE these names come from). I made a mistake in that my greens aren't vibrant enough but that's what was in the stash closet. The four stars in the middle really need brighter green points, but they show up well enough in person, they just don't photograph well:Finally, while waiting between clues on the Quiltville mystery quilt I got out my cut out quilt from the "Open Door" pattern and sewed away. It came together so quickly I was surprised because it looks like a showstopper. It was really easy:

Anyway, that's what I've been doing. This morning I cut out another quilt from her book. Got to keep those hands busy. It's got a lot of HSTs too but you know, I'm getting really good at them!

New project

Here's a peek at three blocks from my new project, which is a Carrie Nelson design called "Open Door". The three are the top row of this smallish quilt, and the bottom block actually goes between the other two.
I like a lot of Carrie Nelson's designs because they look complex without being complex to cut out or assemble.

Sewing room frustrations remain. I still have this tiny design wall because I can't figure out how to get a couple of pieces of 4' x 8' foam insulating board home to make a bigger one. I have a station wagon and no access to a truck. So for now my little 40" x 60" wall has to do. But the fact that I can walk off and the close the door, leaving my projects in place and my mess undisturbed, is priceless.

Oh NOOOOOOOOO. . .

I pulled out one of my project-in-waiting this afternoon to fill the time until the next installment of the Quiltville mystery and started sorting out the cut pieces. It was then that I realized that the first thing I needed to do was to make 225 red and cream 2" HSTs.

Sound familiar?

Even though I didn't think I could face another little red and white square of fabric I decided it was good for my character to persevere.

Just in case you're wondering. . .

. . .I wasn't crushed under an avalanche of red and neutral fabrics and actually finished all of my HSTs for the Quiltville mystery. And here they are:
I'm using a hatbox shaped woven box with a lid to store the mystery pieces. Here are all of them laid out in groups of 20 in the lid. Kind of looks like a pizza, doesn't it?

There's actually 720 of them because I'm increasing the quilt to king size. Friday morning I was debating the wisdom of that decision.

Quiltville mystery

I just happily popped out of bed and printed step 5 of the Quiltvillle mystery.

We need to make 600 half square triangles.

600.

Dang.

Well, have a nice week, I won't be seeing you for a while. . .

A kitchen foray

Pleasant surprise. You CAN bake acceptably with Splenda. I hadn't tried it yet, but when faced with a few bananas that were trending toward decrepit today and a fond wistfulness for my Kona Inn banana bread recipe, I knuckled down and tried it. First I calculated the carbohydrate grams in the recipe. I found out that with the flour, the bananas, the walnuts and the bits of Russell Stover sugar-free chocolate that I added (hey, I always put chocolate chips in my banana bread, no reason to give it up) there were 54 grams of carbs in a mini loaf from my small pans (6" x 3.5" x 2" deep). Diabetic diet translation: a little more grams of carbs than I'm allowed per meal, but I can forgo 1/3 of my carbs at dinner and have a little less than a third of a mini loaf as a quasi-dessert. That's about four bites. Oh well, it'll have to do.

(An aside: just leaving out the sugar didn't make the calories go away either. This stuff is crammed with them. See, sugar isn't your only enemy in the battle of the waistline. It's the only thing that is medically limited on my diet, but I also have to watch the calories and fat. And the bananas are wickedly caloric. We're not even going to talk about the 1/2 cup butter in the recipe.)

Off to the kitchen I went to mix up a batch and bake four mini loaves of banana nut/choc chip bread. And you know what? It wasn't bad. There was still that "Is that actually sweet?" thing that Splenda does with me. It's not like sugar-sweet, but your taste buds don't quite know what to do with it and provisionally categorize it as sweet. This is the only way I can describe what goes on when I taste Splenda. It's kind of weird.

But the banana bread loaves had the right texture and browned nicely, acting just like the regular recipe. They were moist and dense and quite acceptable. To back my up impression of the experiment, I asked husband if he wanted to try them. He replied that since he doesn't like Splenda and he doesn't like the Russell Stover sugar-free chocolates and he's not crazy about walnuts or banana bread either, his opinion probably wasn't needed.