Cute Attack

Last week my daughter had a dream about baby rabbits. She woke up enthralled with their cuteness and described one to me. She held her hand out, palm up, and petted an imaginary bunny sitting on her palm. My imagination worked perfectly to fill in the blank.



I had to wait a few days as I was all out of grey mohair yarn. But the other day while shopping for a blouse and necklace, I was at Holland Village where the yarn store is, so I just popped in and bought a skein.



For days after my daughter's dream, we would hold our hands up and pet the imaginary bunny there and squeal to each other.



So when she got home from school yesterday, I asked her to hold out her hand and then I placed the bunny on it. She decided his name was Stuart. She never names her pets/toys with pet or toy names.

Needless to say, she loves it.

And now onto other things: Blogger has been a real trial for a few days, but I'm so happy that I can finally get pictures posted this morning. Lately many Google related sites have been giving us problems, but hopefully things are going to improve.

And lastly, I am happy to report that Fizzy Pink Lemonade has sold. Hooray! I would post a picture here to remind you, but suddenly, I can't get any pictures to post. Sigh. So much for technology. I will try again tomorrow.

A Singapore Thanksgiving

Which should rightly be called a Martha Stewart Thanksgiving. Let me 'splain:

A couple of weeks ago, driven crazy with boredom, I decided to browse ITunes and see if there were any free video podcast I wanted to watch, and I found a whole slew of Martha Stewart podcasts. Now, I'm not a huge Martha fan, but I was desperate. So, I downloaded them and began to watch. It took a couple of days to see them all; I didn't just sit in front of the computer for hours. Fortunately, they were all about Thanksgiving. That was when I noticed they had all been uploaded on the 5th of November. That's bad news because it means the podcast isn't consistently updated. And sure enough, it hasn't been updated since. Darn!

Well, I got inspired and here's what we had:


Spicy Sweet Potato Wedges and Brussels Sprouts with Lemon Vinaigrette

Herbed Mashed Potatoes (and sparkling cider)


And then I made the Joy of Cooking recipe for stuffing, adding dried berries and raisins, and I invented this turkey part: cutlets rolled with stuffing inside, glazed with honey.


Here's what they turkey looked like when cut.

You'll notice the small portions; there's only three of us, after all. We also had cranberry sauce, not very interesting.

And then for the big finale (was it the 4th of July? Wrong holiday.)




Rustic Apple Tarts (my daughter made the tiny apple sauce tart.)

Pumpkin Souffles (now I'm just getting silly)

Here they are together. The souffles were a disaster. My husband's was the only one to set up properly. Mine and my daughter's were quite wet inside. Well, you saw my little oven...pitiful. Not good for souffles, anyway.

So, you can tell, we stuffed ourselves. Thanks, Martha!


Oh, and here's our lovely table and my lovely daughter before things got messy.

Layered Fusing Tutorial

A couple of days ago, blog reader Ursula posed the following question:

Q: Do you fuse all the circles on top of each? Are there about 5-6 layers on each square?

Isn't that great? Ursula is just the one for asking pertinent questions. So, I took some step-by-step pictures yesterday and have this tutorial:


Here is the first circle in my block.



And here is the fabric I want to fuse it to.




This surprising tool is a small sliver of bar soap that is left over after the bar is almost all used up. You know the stage: you can't use it anymore because it just breaks. That piece of soap, dried out, is an excellent marking tool.



It's a little hard to take a picture of something that usually takes two hands, but I use the soap to trace under the top piece so that I know where to cut out the bottom piece. I don't trace right at the edge, tho. The soap line would show. I trace a little in from the edge.




Now I have my circle traced onto my fabric.



And I cut that part out.



Then I can fuse the two together.



But in all but the overlap, it is essentially just one layer.



Then I continue on, building up the layers, removing the backs, until I get something like this:



But the back looks like this:




The reasons for doing it this way are
1: to save fabric. Those cut out pieces are being immediately recycled into the next block or blocks in this quilt. And,
2: to reduce bulk. The fusing becomes a little less reliable when there are so many layers sandwiched together, the quilt is heavier and harder to quilt.

And here is the current status:




BTW, all of these pictures were taken with my new camera. Woohoo!

Another Trip Around the Sun

November 20th is my birthday.  Two years ago, I threw myself a party, which I blogged about, and I invited about 12 ladies.

You see, I wanted to have a tea party, and in Singapore, you can't go out and do that without encountering seafood in some form or another.  I'm not interested in seafood in any form, so I had the party at my condo.  I made finger sandwiches and pastries and a good time was had by all.

Last year, my dahlink friend Janis couldn't let the event go by unnoticed, so she hosted a party at her house (also blogged about).  We had chicken kebabs and hummus and salad nicoise (I avoided the tuna) and everything was delicious and wonderful.  And I wondered, "How did I trick my friends into thinking they had to celebrate my birthday every year?"  

Well, it happened again.  Here I was going along, minding my own business, and a call came on Tuesday saying Thursday we were going to have lunch in honor of my birthday.  "It's become a tradition, " I was told.  How did this happen?  What did I do to deserve these repeated kindnesses?  I'm not sure, especially as I have been mostly absent from our gatherings this year.  But sometimes one has to just accept the kindnesses done to them, and be grateful.

Here we are, from left to right:
Mavis McAllister, Janis Douglas (the instigator, I mean our host), me, Marianne Bos (a fellow quilter, a fellow fuser), and Amy Low.
I was treated to a Mexican feast the like of which will live in my memory for at least a month, maybe two. I had a virgin lime margarita, the best mole poblano I've had in years, and a decaf cappuccino. Everything was absolutely delicious and I felt so blessed and honored.



Everything was so delicious, I forgot to photograph it until I was almost done eating!

I have such wonderful friends.

Afterward, I scrambled to meet the DH and we went downtown so we could pick out a new camera for me, as my old one occasionally thinks it's on another planet.
Here's what we got:




The Canon Powershot A1000 IS, in a lovely shade of metallic lavender. I really thought I was going to buy an IXUS, but they cost so much more, and for mostly the same options. This one is much smaller than the old camera, and only uses 2 AA batteries, so it's much lighter.

Every year, I think I don't want to make a fuss about my birthday. Just let the day slide by with maybe a nice dinner or something. But secretly, I'm afraid that if that were to actually happen, I would be very sad. Luckily, no one seems interested in letting me go there. May I be worthy of their love and generosity.

Happiness in Sewing

I am so thrilled with my new sewing machine, it has made all the difference in the world for me.

For those who don't know, last July or August I purchased a Janome 6500 sewing maching off Ebay and had it shipped to my sister's house until such time as I could come and collect it. Well, I had that opportunity recently, and now I have my new machine set up and am using it joyfully. It gives me such better control, handles the different threads so much better, everything about it is superior to the old machine I had. Here's an example.



Over and over again this last year or so, I would come up with a quilt design I was happy with and would execute the fusing part with no problem. The trouble would start when I would go to quilt the durn things. Pay attention to the quilting outlining the circular shapes here - just the outside quilting. The interior quilting I did on the new machine, and it made me want to rip out the exterior quilting and do it over again. So I did.



This machine has allowed me to go from sloppy to meticulous. Now you can hardly even see the outlining on these shapes. And it wasn't any harder than doing it messily. I'm so thrilled!

This has given me new confidence, which I think I needed, and I can't wait to get off the computer and into my studio! Woohoo!

My Mornings

Well, after being diagnosed with kidney stones, I was further diagnosed with a staph infection in my urinary tract, so I have been mostly just convalescing for days and days now. Not much interesting to report about that, but I'm off my antibiotics and have been released to take caffeine again, so it would seem that whole episode is behind me. Funny thing about drinking so much water everyday: your body gets really used to it and you feel thirsty if you don't drink. My doctor didn't leave me with a prescription for how much water I should be drinking now, but 1 and a half to 2 liters a day feels about right, with at least 300 ml of that being tea! Woo hoo!

So, I thought I would talk about what I do every morning. I get up as soon as my husband gets in the shower, to iron his shirt. I actually lay in bed until I hear the water hitting his body before I get up - dragging it out, see? I know, I could iron his shirts the night before or during the day after he's gone to work, but I like having to get up that early because then I can see my daughter before she leaves for school, too.

After I iron the shirt, I sit down at the computer with my breakfast. Lately it's been blueberry yogurt. I have all my blogs open in tabs so I can just click one after the other, and that takes some time to load, so that's when I go to the kitchen and get breakfast. I take my yogurt to the computer, and usually all my sites are loaded. Here they are, in the order I look at them:


Fibermania: My sister's blog. We often communicate about what she or I have blogged for the day, altho I haven't left too many comments there lately.
Exuberant Color: This is a blog I just recently started visiting regularly, and I got to her from my sister's blog. They are friends, and I enjoy reading about what she's making and about the weather in northern Illinois.
Craftzine: This is one I find inspiration at regularly. Always has several posts for each day, usually something catches my interest.
Softies Central: This blog is a little less consistent since the author moved to Los Angeles and seems to hate her job there (poor thing) but when she's on, it's really good. I like soft sculpture.
The Needle: This is a site for softie makers to post their creations, and there's always something cute/interesting/disturbing to look at here.
Create!: This is the blog of a woman named Alicia Kachmar. I first found her site after a google search for amigurumi. Alicia is a crocheter, but her site is about all sorts of things.
From One Chick to Another: I came to this site after doing a search for silver seabright chickens. This is the type of chicken I want to own in some far away someday I dream about sometimes. This blog is created by a Christian woman in Canada, and she has chickens, ducks, goats, horses, pigs, and she takes great pictures. Funny how you can get hooked on reading the blog of a perfect stranger.
CraftyStylish: This is another collection of creative-types posting articles about various things, some of which I'm interested in. Jeffrey Rudell is a regular contributor that I really enjoy - he does amazing art with paper.
The Toy Society: This is a woman in Australia who started this site as a way to keep track of soft toys she's made and abandoned in various places in Australia, with a note saying Take Me Home I'm Yours and instructions for toy recipients to contact her to let her know they've found the toy. Almost as soon as she started the site, tons of people contacted her to ask if they could participate in their own towns, and she agreed. I was one of those people, and I have a toy all ready to be abandoned, but I've been sick and it's been really rainy in Singapore. Hopefully soon I will have something to post about this.
After these sites, I have two blogs done by friends, and I'm not sure they would want me to post a link here, so I wont.
Lastly, it's: Flickr SingPacer: My husband's flickr account. Since he often works on and posts his pictures while he's at work, I'm not always aware that there's something new to look at, so I just check it regularly.

Oh, I almost forgot. I also regularly visit Pixdaus, which is a site like Flickr, except it seems to be managed over on this side of the world as many of the photographs are from Asia and Eastern Europe.
And lately my obsession has been with this Free Rice site. Warning, highly addictive! It's a site created by a dad of a 15 year old boy who didn't want to study for his SATs. Apparently, the dad was a computer programmer or something like that, and he worked with charitable organizations. So he created this site to help high school students study for their SATs (I never took one, you know) and it has all these different categories. For every correct answer, they donate 20 grains of rice to someone who needs it. For every incorrect answer, they give you the correct answer and then they give you the question again, a little later, so you have the chance to learn it.
My favorite categories are English vocabulary, English grammar, Art, World Capitals (I suck at this, but I'm getting better), French, German and Spanish. I never go near the math or science stuff, but then I don't have to. Great site for those of you with high school students! Or not, like me.


Taking a look at all of this blogs/sites can take very little time, or it can tie me up for an hour. Especially Free Rice. But now that I'm feeling better, I plan on visiting one more site on a regular basis: the blogger create page. In other words, I plan to blog more frequently.

I'm back!

Since the UK

I've been back in Singapore since July 14, over a month now since our trip to the UK. And altho I've been slow to post my blog, I haven't been just sitting around. Here's some of what I've been doing:

I don't think I posted a final picture of Release.  Here it is, all ready to upload to my website.  More on that later.

I've also been working on a series of smaller quilts that are fast and easy to make and very fun.

...now I can see that this picture doesn't have the quilting in it.  Oh well.  Look for it on the website.

More on that later.

Detail.

It's difficult to say which picture inspired which here.  Never mind.

I made english muffins for back to school breakfasts.  I got the recipe from Joy of Cooking, and was pleased that it wasn't nearly as fiddly as I was expecting.  Store bought english muffins can't compete with home made.  I'm drooling just writing this.  Unfortunately, we finished them on Monday.  But I will be making them again.

Of course, when I said series, I meant that I was going to make more than one.  You can see the quilting on this one.

And I had to have some cute injected here.  This is Little Orange Hen.  She has a special purpose, which I will write about later.

For those who are still waiting, let me 'splain about the website.

My husband and I are currently working on building my website.  We actually have just one more quilt to photograph, and then we will begin to upload the pages and then I have to commit to prices (urggh) and all that technical stuff.  Naturally I will announce when it is ready here in the blog, and will put a link and encourage readers to go see!  But things are in the works.  Stay tuned.

Creativity

This morning while surfing the blogs I usually look at, I found this very important video clip at BellaDia.  Immediately after watching it, I knew I had to put it on my blog, too, so as to increase the possibility of more viewers.  (If you can't see the whole thing on my blog, click on the link about and see at at BellaDia.)

The clip runs for a little over 20 minutes, and is often very funny.  I hope you will enjoy it and it will make you think about creativity, a wonderful gift.

Small Things

It's the little things that make a big difference, sometimes. My friend, Janis, mentioned to me that she had heard this great idea: get a mouse pad to put under the accelerator (because I forgot what it's actually called) of your sewing machine to keep it from slipping around.
Well, you and I both know how easy it is to go down to Staples and just pick one up, $2. But I don't live in the states. Singapore doesn't have any Staples. But I wont go on and on about that.
I found this rubber pad, intended to keep things from sliding around or off your dashboard, and thought it would work great.
And it does! Not only is my pedal stationary, but it seems the sewing machine runs smoother. Probably all in my head, but there it is.

Technology

My "vintage" Nokia handphone

Yesterday, I got a call from my husband. He needed me to meet him so we could take care of getting our green cards. As I was traveling towards that destination, he called again to inform me that we needed our daughter to come, too. School had just gotten out, but she had not turned on her hand phone. So, I called the school, and a few minutes later, she called me back.
I had to get off the train, cross the platform and go back three stops so that I could meet her. We communicated a few times, via our hand phones, until we were together, and then I called my husband again to inform him we were both coming. She and I got back on the train, and within a few stops, my husband called again to tell me he didn't have the necessary paperwork to complete the transaction, so we would have to do it another day, but could we meet him for dinner?

Long story short, if we hadn't had the hand phones, all three of us, none of this would have been so smooth. As it was, the entire trip took 3 hours, including dinner, but it could have taken much longer.