New Yorker Geese Pillow

I have been wanting to try my hand at more curved piecing lately, and decided the best way would be a New York Beauty block.  The paper pieced pattern came from over here. But I didn't want to commit to a whole giant block because I'm scared of curves, so I made 1/4 of a block for a smaller throw pillow cover.


Well when I finished the block I realized it would look really boring with part of a star in the corner of the pillow, so I drafted some flying geese to go around the edge. I guess you could say I started to get comfortable with curves. I did not mean for the geese to meet in the middle and wanted them to all go the same direction, but I actually like it more this way.


I even finished the back off with a hidden zipper closure.


Oh! Oh! The best part is that everything (fabric, zipper, AND pillow form) came from my stash! YES!

Walnut Scone Recipe

While in Austin, last week, I had a walnut scone that was nearly perfect! Unfortunately Austin is almost 4 hours away, so I needed a better walnut scone option. Every recipe I found online was walnut maple, not plain walnut. So I started experimenting and came up with this walnut scone recipe.

Walnut Scones (makes about 8)

• 1 cup walnuts (toasted or not)
• 2 cups flour
• 1/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• generous 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 stick of butter, cold!
• 1 egg
• 1.5-2 teaspoons vanilla
• 2 tablespoons milk

First off you have to preheat your oven to 400F degrees and gather your ingredients.

Now you need to prepare your walnuts but making sure they are similar in size. They do not need to be tiny, shoot for about 1/2" pieces. Depending on the flavor you want, you might want to toast them (or half, if you can't decide and want diverse walnut flavors).

If toasting, spread walnuts in a layer on your baking sheet and pop in the preheated oven for about 4 minutes. If not toasting, skip this and start making your dough.

For the dough, mix the flour, sugars, baking powder, and salt. Chop in your cold butter and use a pastry cutter or your hands to lightly combine the butter with flour. You want to use cold butter and leave some small clumps of butter because chunks of butter will help make the scone airy. If you use your hands to mix, like I did, you might want to pop the mixture in the freezer for a few minutes to make sure the butter is not completely melted. Then add in your egg, vanilla, and milk and mix! You should end up with a sticky dough like this.

Divide the dough into 8 equal parts and roll/squish them into flattened balls. Put these on a parchment paper lined baking sheet.

Bake for 14-17 minutes until they are golden and beautiful on top!

The bottoms should be a dark golden caramel color.

Mmm, then enjoy!

Lazy Summer

...Emphasis on the LAZY.

I really am not getting much sewing done these days, but in my defense, I have still been staying busy. People have been coming in to visit from out of town, I'm going to the gym a lot, then spent half the weekend brewing beer and the other half taking care of a sick dog. Yay!

Then yesterday my boyfriend and I decided to drive the 3ish hours to Austin to hear and meet Patrick Rothfuss, an absolutely amazing fantasy author. If you even remotely enjoy fantasy, check his stuff out! Totally worth cramming in 7 hours of driving into a 11 hour period of time because he was so hilarious and charming. Here he is in all his glory!


Ernest Cline, another great fantasy author (or does he count as sci-fi?), stopped by the reading/signing and parked his DeLorean out front for everyone's enjoyment. Here I am full of enjoyment and coffee in preparation for the 3ish hour drive home.


But if we want to look at actual sewing, here is what I have accomplished. Most importantly, progress was made on my goal for the June edition of LYoF. I quilted the veins in the eyeball quilt and luckily I like the way they came out. I say luckily because I ripped and restitched three times before this point. Ignore the reference markings that will [hopefully] wash out.


I also started using my "Rapid Fire Lemoyne Star" ruler that had been sitting on a shelf since I purchased it on New Years day. It makes 8 point stars ridiculously simple. Don't ask what I'm using these stars for, because I have not a clue.


It is supposed to also make them fast. Once I practice a little more and and use it without stopping to read directions, it feels like it will be tremendously quick! But who cares about that, because look at these seams! Thanks, ruler!


On Sunday I was accidentally elected as Vice President of the local homebrewing club. I guess that means it is time for me to finally start wearing a name tag, huh? But my hesitation is not that I don't want people to know my name but in the hatred of a hypothetical plain white tag crudely bescribbled with "Sabrina". For over two years I have been talking about sewing a cute one, but it had to do with beer and designs like that are apparently rare. Then I found this beer at a Whole Foods in Austin yesterday.

Zomg! Art deco hop?!?! SOLD! Have yet to actually taste it, but it is chilling in the fridge. So I tried to brainstorm how quickly I would want to commit seppuku if I tried to applique all the teeny tiny bits. Maybe embroidery is the answer? I'm going to use the space where the beer name was for my name. I already got started stitching the outline. Mine is not that awesome, but maybe with some color it will be. Side note: I now want an art deco hop tattoo.


Then we have some cooking... Let's start with veggie pasta (no, really, the noodles are made of veggies) with more veggies, tons of garlic, and venison summer sausage.


Followed by a recreation of my favorite dish in Hawaii, green bean and spam stir fry with coconut rice. The recipe needs a little tweaking, so I'm not ready to share yet. Sorry.


Aaaand that's it. What have you been up to?

Eyeball: June LYoF

Before I knew much about quilting (like 4 years ago), I decided to make an eyeball quilt. I didn't know what paper piecing was. I didn't know how in the world to make a y-seam. I didn't know how applique worked. I had no idea to piece curves. I was also completely self taught. So deciding to make a curved eyeball with intricate piecing and y-seams was a totally realistic challenge. NOT!

What was I thinking??

Four years ago, this was the best I could come up with. I'm still amazed that I did the star without paper piecing! The middle is a little wonky because I didn't know how to stitch stuff together. Also the applique was grotesque.


About one year ago, I finally picked it back up. I un-appliqed the iris and did a much better job. I also picked this as my first try at piecing curves. So the whites of the eye are actually pieced to the black cat-eye makeup.


I also added some eyelash quilting to spruce it up. Then I got stuck AGAIN and let it sit.


I picked it up again in the beginning of this year and decided to add in half inch spaced straight line quilting on the background fabric.


Now I'm making it my April Lovely Year of Finishes goal to finally finish this! All that's left is to decide how to quilt the whites of the eye, then to do whatever that is and to bind it! This should be totally do-able. Right?

Wait a minute, if this was totally do-able, wouldn't it be done already?!

Plaid(ish) Placemat Tutorial

These placemats are quite fun and surprisingly easy to make. I am big on shortcuts, so I tried to make this as easy as possible. They finish at around 12" x 18" because a fancy schmancy designer friend once told me that is the proper size of placemats. 

Fabric Requirements:

• Background fabric: One WOF 16" strip
• Vertical stripes: 1/4 yard, cut into four WOF 2" strips
• Horizontal stripe: 1/4 yard, cut into two WOF 2.5" strips
• subcut into four 2.5" x 17.5" pieces
• Backing: 3/4 yard fabric (or pieced scraps)
• Batting: 1/2 yard of the wide kind (or scraps from other projects)
• Binding: 1/2 yard of fabric

Okay, let's get started. First off, you are going to take the background strip and keeping it with the selvages folded together, cut about a 4" strip off one cut end. This will leave you with a WOF x 12" strip and a WOF x 4" strip.

Now we need to get one strip of the 2" vertical fabric strips and sandwich it in between the the 12" and 4" background pieces. I pressed this strip towards the background fabric, but you could press this step to either direction.

Next we need to divide this new sandwiched strip into quarters, like this, as if you were cutting along the dotted lines. This means we will now be working on each placemat individually.

Next up is adding the horizontal strip to the placemats. Cut a 2.75" strip off the bottom of each placemat and sandwich the horizontal strips in.

Now we are going to press towards the horizontal strip or else things will be too bulky.

Now it is time to add the remaining two vertical strips. This bouncing back and forth is what gives the appearance of weaving or plaid. With the remaining three WOF strips still folded in half, cut 14" from the selvages. Toss once of the remaining three folded pieces in your scrap bin.

Unfold and flatten the two remaining pieces, and cut them to about 14" pieces as well. This will give you the 8 strips you need to finish the placemats.

At this point, you will cut either 1.25" or 1.5" away from the right and left sides of the first vertical stripe, and sandwich the others in between. *Please note: From this point on, it is important that you keep things in order (or use 4 different pin colors) so that the strip you cut off one placemat goes back on that same placemat, just in case any previous cuts or seam allowances don't meet up.

My original sketch required them to cut at 1.25" away from the central stripe but my hands were moving faster than my brain, so I cut the gap between the middle and right stripes at 1.5" (which resulted in a 1.25" gap between the two) and it didn't look so bad. For contrast, I cut 1.25" away for the left stripe (resulting in a 1" gap). Here are a couple of pictures to show how they each look.

That is 1" of background between the left and middle (because I cut 1.25" away), and 1.25" of background between the middle and right (because I cut 1.5" away). Whichever distance you choose, cut the placemat and sandwich the vertical stripe between the two cut pieces, then repeat for the other stripe. Press into the vertical stripes. At this point, you are going to square up your placemats. They might come out a little large, so you can just make them bigger (I like to leave wiggle room in case something goes disastrously wrong), or trim them to the 12" x 18" standard size.

Now that we have everything squared up, all that remains is the quilting! I decided to add some hand stitching, which is completely optional. Whenever I add hand stitching, I like to not have it show on the backing, so I spray basted the front to the batting and hand stitched, then spray basted on the backing and machine quilted.

To save time, I machine quilted a few decorative lines in between the vertical stripes, and then just used the stitch-in-the-ditch technique. Then you add some binding and presto: You have 4 fun placemats!!

Since I chose linen for my background fabric and didn't do very dense quilting, it looks a little lumpy, but I'm okay with that. If you are not okay with that, make sure you add more straight line quilting or use a dense FMQ design.

Side note about seam allowances: I'm awful at keeping exact 1/4" seam allowances, so as long as you keep your seam allowance consistent, you can use whatever works best for you.

Fence Quilt Finish

I was able to finish my goal for the May round of Lovely Year of Finishes (goal setting post, over here), a barn COOP fence quilt. Originally I wanted to make a barn quilt since I will never be able to make a quilt for my chickens that they would appreciate (and by appreciate I mean not stomp on and cover in feces). Then it occurred to me that we don't have a barn, so I better make a coop quilt. So I got started making a plan. Halfway through the process, it occurred to me that their final chicken coop might not have a convenient place to hang the finished product. Then my boyfriend suggested I hang it on the fence for everyone, chicken and human alike, to enjoy, so the name evolved again.

When I last showed a progress update, I had finished painting the block design and was utterly flummoxed with the sealing phase. I am pleased to announce that after sanding off the spray enamel, I was able to successfully add three coats of satin polycrylic and I could not be happier with the end result. I opted for a satin finish because I didn't want to be blinded by the dang thing whenever harsh South Texas sun was shining, which is basically always, btw.

So this is what I see when I go out the back door and turn left. 

This is what the chickens see from the front of their coop. I think everyone has a great view.

Here is a closeup shot that really illustrates the colors and the awesomeness that is the satin finish.

And since I coudn't get the lighting correct anyways (I told you harsh South Texas sun was ever-present) here is a fun artsy shot. Look at how well those seams match up! ;)

The quilt was screwed to the fence just in time for the chickens 14th [week] birthday on Monday! Aww! Here they are celebrating with a nice bouquet of babies breath that grew out of the ground just for them (or so they would like to believe). They celebrated by eating the babies breath.


Here are some closeups of my lovely ladies, in no particular order. If you want to read about why they have such odd names, I tried my best to explain it all over here.

First up we have Eglantine (Eggy).


Then here comes Bullroarer (BRthur).


And lastly we have Polydontosaurus (Polly).

Wow! They are growing up so quickly!

Blogger's Quilt Festival Entry 2

This is my second entry into the 2014 Blogger's Quilt Festival! I am entering this quilt in the "Small Quilt" category because it is 60" x 60" in size. You can go vote over here. This was a baby quilt for a friend's new baby, Eleora.

I used a stipple pattern for most of the quilt, since I'm still trying to master that technique. I couldn't resist throwing in a few FMQ hearts. I'm not sure how you are supposed to do this, but this seemed to work.