Dragon Rambles

So I now have my Farmer’s Wife Quilt book. It arrived on Thurs so I spent the evening looking through it and choosing fabric. I got a call on Fri from the online fabric shop I’d ordered it from. They didn’t have several fabrics of my order. I got them to replace it with a different line. They arrived yesterday.

They are a lot lighter than I was expecting from the images on the web. They looked like they were going to be deep jewel-like colours. After some thought, I’ve decided to go ahead with these as I think it’ll still give a nice colour palette. But with the lighter colouring, I’m not sure if the greeny one works. Here it is lined up against the side of the others. Thoughts?

Originally I was planning on black for the sashing. But with the lighter colours I’m rethinking that too. I have a gorgeous purple and a deep blue, both with subtle mottling that might work. I’m not sure though. What do you think. Which of these do you like or should I keep looking? Maybe go with something lighter. For the corner squares and edge triangles I plan to use the same colours that I’ll be using in the blocks so I only have to pick the sashing fabric. Any opinions or comments are welcome.

Years ago, during my first year of PhD, I bought Jinny Beyer’s kit for Moonglow.

I started it and did the first three or four blocks then stopped as my PhD took over and ruled my life, with time off for good behaviour (otherwise known as stitching). Last year when I was on holidays I decided to pick it up again. I wasn’t too happy with the blocks I’d done so I decided to start again. I cut the fabric for all the blocks.

I bought Jinny’s book on hand piecing, which is in the top of the box there. It’s great, it goes through all the sorts of joins working up to curved piecing and a mariners compass. I liked the idea of that because this quilt was designed to teach the same thing, also working up to a mariners compass. I decided to start with the last block (block 12). It’s designed to teach strip piecing but I decided to cut each piece out individually to practise the easy square/rectangle joins before moving onto the the triangles and odd shapes – kinda following the order of the book.

I think I did ok lining up the edges what do you think?

That’s as far as I got last year, but I’m picking it up again. I don’t expect it to go quickly, but that’s ok. It’s the process, right?

Ok, so I had no plans to post for a second time today, but I just ad to share this. I have an old pillow under my bed (because where else do you chuck stuff that you don’t know what to do with), and Macros seems to like lying on it. He actualy likes lying on anything. Have a towel on the floor? Pretty soon it’ll be occupied. Have a blanket/duvet hanging over a chair with a small corner on the ground? Yep, he’ll make that a nest too.

Well, the pillow got pushed towards the wall yesterday during my half-hearted vacuuming, and so today the little sounds I hear are coming from further away. He seems happy.

But I’m starting to think I need to get him a bed he can curl up in. Obviously though, I need to push it well under the bed, since that seems to be one of his favourite places to sleep the day away.

Wow, two posts in two days and five in a week! Do you get the feeling you’ve come to the wrong blog?

NOTE: I thought a lot about posting this post in it’s entirety as I know some of the content might offend some people. But since this blog is supposed to be about my hobbies, including my thoughts and the journey involved, Rather than just a place to post pretty pics, I decided to leave it all in. If you are one who does not like controversy with your blog reading, just skip down to the last paragraph and picture.

Last year I posted about two stitching projects: Blue Faery and Rhapsody in Red. Well after my post about Blue Faery, I had an email conversation with Michelle from HAED and she recharted that section to give the faery her butt back. I wasn’t sure I liked the fix but it was hard to tell off the screen, so I got her to send the new chart to me. I figured I could use the new edge and play with the colours from that rehion of the original butt to get something I liked. Unfortunately, it had been charted with a whole new symbol set. When I told Michelle, she said she’d send it redone with the old symbols within a couple of days. When I still hadn’t received it a week later, I decided to just go with the new symbol set and try and figure out the overlap to the old chart section myself. Problem! The chart may have been charted with a new symbol set, but the OLD symbol key was provided. Emails about this to Michelle were ignored so Blue Faery got put in the discard pile.

At the same time, when I had first mentioned the disappearing butt problem, I had also mentioned some charts that myself and friends had bought where the colours were totally different from the artwork (eg, Gargoyles of Notre Dame – the charted wings were blue not purple). I received an email about a month after that saying she had recharted them and to let my friends know to contact her for the corrections. My response was of course, thank you very much, but I also told her which of the charts I had. Like before, this email was ignored.

All this negativity really turned me off my stitching. At first I thought it just turned me off all things HAED. But I couldn’t make myself want to pick up any piece at all. So I switched to knitting, for those odd bits of time, for several months instead.

Well I had the Sat and Sun off work at Easter and finally got the urge to stitch again. I decided to clebrate this with a new start of a chart that I had been wanting to do for several years: Black Lace. I got a lot of stitching done that weekend and have found moments here and there where I can pick it up and put in some more stitches. Despite being stitched 1 over 1 on 28ct linen, this is a fairly easy project since it’s monochrome, so I don’t have to think about what colour goes where. I had trouble getting a photo of the true colour of the thread – it’s a deep wine colour. And actually I’m going to have several spools extra as I had originally planned to do this 2 over 2. So I’ll send a spool to the first two people to comment with a “yes please”.

Ok, so some of you know thst in addition to stitching and knitting, I really love quilting. I just haven’t done much over the years for lots of reasons. I did buy a gorgeous kit back in my first year of PhD and start it (planning to do the whole quilt by hand). I got 3 or 4 blocks done then PhD took over and that was that. I restarted this on my holidays last year, but I will blog about that some time this coming week.

I’ve been catching up with a lot of blogs lately – and a lot of the blogs in my reader list are quilting ones. Well the quiltng bug has hit again, and I plan to get back into the above project but also, I’ve been planning something else…

I had heard of a Dear Jane quilt which intrigued me so I went searching. What I found was a sampler quilt that had been made in 1863 and one passionate quilter reproduced the patterns and put together a book. You can read more about it by clicking on the picture of the original quilt below (picture from the author’s website).

Now, I’m not all that fussed on the colourway but I am getting better at looking beyond the colour to the underlying pattern (be it knitting, stitching or quilting). And I had this thought of a black background with gorgeous jewel tones. I’m thinking subtle batics so I don’t have a print but there is more interest than with a solid. I wasn’t really sure it’d work though until I found this version of the quilt.

Not the same colour range I was thinking of but it shows me I was on the right track, because isn’t this amazing! Click on the image to find out more about the quilt and to see the beautiful quilt back too.

So now that I know I was on the right track with colours, and even have my eye on several at one of my favourite bookmarked fabric shops, and found out where I can get the book with the patterns, I started to read the information about the quilt. This is where it gets scary. 4.5 inch blocks (that’s 11.5cm to those of us using the metric system). That means scary little pieces. 169 different block patterns, 52 triangle block patterns and the 4 corner piece patterns. That’s a lot of tiny patterns. I also read somewhere that someone had over 5000 pieces on their quilt. Obviously, I’m not ready for this.

But there is another sampler quilt winging around blogland that could be a stepping stone. The blocks are 6 inches when finished, so the pieces will be bigger, and they are all straiht piecing blocks, that is, no applique. Did I forget to mention that many blocks in the Dear Jane quilt are mixed piecing and applique? In this easier project there are on 111 block patterns and how many you make up depends on whatbsize quilt you plan to make (there are directions for lap, single, queen and king). I can still use my black and jewel tone colour scheme, only these are not all two-colour blocks like Dear Jane so I will have to play a bit with how the colours go together.

So “what is the quilt?”, I hear you ask. You’ve probably heard of it. The farmer’s wife quilt. A quilt-a-long has been organised and you can find the details here. They are up to their eighth week I think, and are working 2 blocks a week. I won’t manage that, but I like the idea of trying to eek out the time to do one block a week. Call it my project to break out of my current workaholic lifestyle. I’m not sure if I’ll sign up to the QAL as I don’t want that feeling of having to produce a block one week when I really can’t (of course, I know there will be no one there telling me I must do my block, it’s just e way I think). I will attempt to have a blog post each week with the block/progress though. So a handy project to keep me blogging too

Here’s the quilt from the book. Couldn’t find a bigger image. I don’t actually like this one, but I think it could look stunning with the ‘right’ colours

I got the image from the author’s website, which you can reach by clicking on the image.

The book has been ordered (I did that quickly before I could change my mind) and I get paid on Fri, so I can order my fabric next weekend once I’ve had a chance to go through the fabrics I currently have and see what else I need. I still want to do a Dear Jane in my planned colours, but this one first.

So what are your thoughts on my plotting? And has this made you tempted to reach outside your comfort zone too?

Around this time last year, one of my office mates left for greener pastures. Well…. maybe not greener, but hopefully less frustrating than his job in Cardiff had been. Since he’d been sround for a while and was well liked by all, I thought this parting deserved a good cake. And since I love to bake and had several ideas of what to make, I actually made several . Since he is german, I felt that one of my offerings should definitely be an authentic black forest cake. Little did I know how much I’d have to hunt around Cariff one Sunday to find the all important bottle of kirsch. Luckily, he chose to leave in summer, so finding cherries was no problem.

Now making a black forest cake is serious business and if you decide to make one, you have to allow several days. The first step is to pit the cherries and soak them in kirsch. Well, I’m no expert at pitting cherries whole, so I decided to halve them instead. I figured this would save me having to halve them later and had the added bonus of allowing them to soak up more alcohol. This could also be why I used twice as much kirsch as the original recipe suggested for this step. So, cherries halved, pitted and getting drunk? Ok, leave that soaking overnight.

Next morning, bake the cake. There are two ways you can do this: make one big cake and slice into three portions or make three smaller cakes. I know my limitations and that includes knowing there was no way I was going to be able to slice three layers from a cake, so I went and bought three shallow cake tins so I could take the sane approach.

When these have completely cooled it’s time to start building the cake. First take a toothpick (cocktail stick to some of you) and poke holes through the cakes. Then give each layer a liberal sprinkling of the kirsch that your cherries have been pickling in. I think my addition was midway between a sprinkle and a douse. Leave the layers while you are making the icing so they can start to soak up the alcohol. Hint: you may want to have put each layer onto a sheet of baking paper before you added the alcohol so they are easier to pick up and layer.

To build the cake, take the first layer and place on a cake board. Spread half of your icing over the base and cover with the pickled cherries.

Top with second cake layer and repeat.

Top with third cake layer and then cover the whole cake in cling film. The cake now goes in the fridge for 1 to 2 days to allow allow all that lovely kirsch to soak through the cake and make it nice and moist.

The morning that you are going to serve the cake, make the cream topping. Cover the cake with the cream, put grated chocolate around the sides, pipe some cream edging around the top of the cake and finish up with decorating the cake with some whole, fresh cherries.

Black Forest Cake

1 2/3 cups flour
2/3 cup cocoa
1 1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter or baking margerine
1 1/2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups milk

Filling
1 cup kirsch
1/2 cup butter
3 cups icing sugar
1 pinch salt
1.25kg cherries

Cream topping
2 cups thickened cream
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/8 cup kirsch
2 Tbsp milk powder
2 Tbsp icing sugar

Put aside approx 10 cherries for decorating top of cake. Halve the rest, remove the pits and soak in a cup of kirsch overnight.
Preheat oven to 175 deg C. Line bottom of three 20cm round cake pans.
Sift dry cake ingredients together. Cream the butter and sugar. Add the eggs and vanilla and mix well. Pour evenly into the cake pans and bake for 20min or until toothpick inserted in middle comes out clean. Cool cakes and remove from pans.
Prick tops of cakes with a toothpick and pour 1/2 cup kirsch (from the cherries) over the cakes.
To make the icing, beat butter until light and creamy. Add the icing sugar, salt and mix well. If icing is too thick, add some of the kirsch from the cherries (think I added about 1/4 cup, but can’t quite remember).
place base layer on top of cake board or tray, spread half of the icing over the top and cover with the halved cherries. Cover with another layer and repeat. Top with third cake layer then cover and sit in fridge for 1 to 2 days to allow kirsch to soak through cake and become moist.
The day the cake will be served, prepare the cream topping. Whip the cream until it forms stiff peaks. Gently fold in milk powder and icing sugar. Add vanilla and pour in kirsch until it becomes a good conistency (note: don’t use the kirsch from the cherries or your cream topping won’t be white). Spread cream over the cake and down the sides. Cover sides with grated chocolate and decorate the top with extra cream topping and fresh cherries.

This weekend I went to London to meet up with Nicki and take Knit Nation by storm. Ok, it wasn’t much of a storm because I actually stuck pretty close to my budget and came away with a massive shopping list and a small bundle of yarn rather than a massive stash of yarn and a small shopping list. One of the things I have missed the most since I moved to the UK was the craft days. Whether it was getting together at someone’s house to stitch and chat, or going to one of the craft shows with one or more friends. So it was great to be able to meet up with an old but new friend for a fun day. See, Nicki and I first met years ago on a stitching bulletin board, and have been kept in touch in some online form since. But as we lived in neighbouring countries with a big sea between, we’d never met. A few years ago we both relocated to the UK, and although we are still technically in two neighbouring countries, this time it’s an easy train ride between, making a meet up at Knit Nation this year the natural thing to do.

Spending the day with Nicki at marketplace was a lot like a day with Vicky at the craft show…. We both had similar taste, were easily distracted by pretty things, had the knack of homing in on the expensive stuff, and took great fun in egging each other on into badness. Really, I’m surprised we came away with our credit cards unscathed. It was definitely a fun day but so tiring.

So, what did I come home with? Well my first purchase was a skein of fiberspates scrumptious lace. I’ve been in lust with this yarn for over a year ever since I first saw it in my local knitting store. It’s entirely Nicky’s fault that I finally caved. She’s the one that pointed out the new pattern book and showed me a pattern that I only needed one skein for. Well, that’s my memory of it, she may have a different story . Also in this pic are some stitch markers for lace knitting on small needles.

Then again with the urging of Nicky (she really was naught, wasn’t she) I bought the two skeins of variegated light purple merino/silk 2ply cobweb yarn from Juno Fibre Arts that I had my eye on, thinking they would be perfect for another heirloom knitting project. And when we went back to Old Maiden Aunt, I bought 3 skeins of merino/bamboo 4 ply (the photo really doesn’t do the lustre of this yarn credit), with the thought of either using them on three different projects, or all on the same, since I noticed how well they went together.

Now you may have wondered what is in the background of the photos. Well, that’s Rudolph. I didn’t get around to blogging about my trip to Iceland in Jan. Well, when I went back to NZ the other year, I had planned to bring back a sheepskin since I have fond memories of a sheepskin rug from my childhood. But I ran out of room in my luggage with more important things like chocolate. So when I was in Iceland and saw the beautiful soft reindeer pelts, I thought “why not?”. I did check with people first to see how they are come by to see if I was happy to have it in my home. I was happy to find out that there are strict rules involved in the reindeer culling with max numbers, only certain people allowed to do it, and in a certain and monitored way, and even better, every part of the reindeer is used. So I went through the pile and picked out the one with the best colouring and softness. I give you, Rudolph…

Ok, I’ve been absent from blogland for a very long time but I’m slowly waking up and rejoining the world. The past cople of weeks I’ve started reading blogs again and have caught up back to March. I don’t think I can handle past that, as that was already a massive number of posts I’d missed. Everyone out in blogland is making some great stuff and really made me eager to do more too. I haven’t done much since my holidays last Sept and I didn’t get around to posting pics of my holiday work either, so I hope to post some of that soon.

I’ve also got some recipes and travel pics to post. I never did finish blogging on my trip to San Fran, and I’ve forgotten what I was going to write now, so I’ll just make sure all the pics are up on flickr but leave it at that.

So I’ll be putting up a few blogs this week then after that I’m going to try for one a week. Lets see how I go.