30 November 2018

November journal

1. Loads of fabric pumpkins. I lost count, but there were more than 30.


2. Two more Squared Away quilt blocks - I did make two of this block, but when I went to take the picture, I realized I'd put one of them together wrong. Fortunately, I just need to take one of the side rows off to turn it around.


3. And it's not sewing, but I made my Christmas letter blocks ...


I'm excited to do a lot more sewing this month! I spent the summer traveling and doing theater and camps. This entire fall has been totally sucked up with editing a book. Ya know what? It's December tomorrow. I'm self-employed, and I don't work during Christmas! I'm doing service, and baking cookies, and sewing for my kids!

If anyone needs me, I'll be in the kitchen. See ya.

29 November 2018

gimme some sugar!

Welcome, blog hoppers, to the Virtual Cookie Exchange hosted by Just Let Me Quilt! Thank you for including us, Carol! We are sisters who live at opposite ends of North America.

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MINDY
Christmas and crafting go together for me. I was just beginning my sewing adventures when I came across this tutorial for a tiered skirt.  I pulled out the small stack of Christmas fabric I had been given by my mother-in-law and tried it out.  Once I saw it on my toddler I was hooked!  Now, five Christmases later, I have started quilting along with making clothes for my two daughters, so many of my holiday gifts are made from fabric.


But this couldn't be a cookie exchange without some sugar!  Our family made tin-foil-covered plates of cookies to give to our friends and neighbors as we went caroling every year.  As we got older, and many of the siblings moved out, Emily was in charge of the peanut butter chocolate chip cookies and I made the sugar cookies.  

I now make these sugar cookies multiple times a year.  I play with food coloring, cookie cutters and cookie stamps.  I've made several cookie bouquets.  Last Christmas I painted them with dyed egg yolk.  And for Halloween I added crushed candies for a stained glass effect.  I've swapped out the vanilla for peppermint extract a few times, or even turned them into lemon or pumpkin sugar cookies.  This is just the best go-to sugar cookie recipe for soft, chewy cookies.



SUGAR COOKIES
Cream together 3/4 cup butter and 1 cup sugar.  Add 2 eggs and 1 teaspoon each of salt, vanilla and baking powder.  Stir until smooth.  Add 2 1/2 cups flour, one cup at a time, incorporating it fully before adding more.  Refrigerate the finished dough for 30-60 minutes before cutting into shapes, or immediately roll into balls and smash lightly to flatten.  Bake at 375 degrees for 8-10 minutes on a non-greased baking sheet.

  • You can freeze both dough or baked cookies.
  • When using food coloring, add it before the flour for even color.  To blend colors make two (or more) batches and then pick small pieces from each to roll out together.  Or you can add color to finished dough - it will be more saturated and will get all over your hands. 
  • To make egg yolk paint, simply add some food coloring (and water to thin it out if you'd like) to some egg yolk.  A little goes a long way, so one yolk can be used for multiple colors.  Paint on the cookies with a clean paintbrush before you bake them!
  • I used lollipops but jolly ranchers or other hard candies would work for the stained glass.  Crush it and use it to fill in the cut out shapes.  Bake as normal with parchment paper on the pan, but let it rest on the pan a few extra minutes afterwards to harden.

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TRINA
There's a back-story with the sugar cookie recipe. Because there's a bit of an age gap between us - I'm the oldest, and Mindy is the 7th of the 8 siblings in our family - it didn't occur to me until we were adults that the recipe story hadn't been shared until one day Mindy said something like, "I heard there's a story about this recipe and a shirt but I didn't know if it was true." Well, I do! Because I was there!

Once upon a time, Tawnia (#4 of 8) was about 2 years old and wearing a shirt with Cookie Monster and a bunch of words on it. Eric and I were 7 and 8, and it dawned on us that those words were a recipe. Did it really work? Was it a real recipe for Cookie Monster Sugar Cookies? So we asked our mom to try it. Tawnia was plunked up onto the counter, still wearing the shirt, while we read off the ingredients and measurements. And it worked! The best sugar cookies! We read it off the shirt at least a couple of times, usually while Tawnia was wearing it, before Mom got around to writing the recipe on a piece of paper. It has been our family's go-to cookie recipe for decades now, all because of a 2-year-old's shirt.

And now - seriously, just last week - I learn that it originally came from a book.

Trina's real-life, un-staged messy kitchen with sugar cookies. 
Bring on the frosting and the sprinkles! 

My go-to is three-ingredient fudge, which I first found on here on Made Everyday with these ingredients:


Chocolate mint is my FAVORITE. I wondered if it would also work with white chocolate and peppermint, so I tried my own variation.


Put all three ingredients - the both entire bags of chips (12 oz chocolate chips) and the full can of sweetened condensed milk - into a microwave-safe bowl and nuke it for a minute at a time for 3 minutes, until it's all soft enough to stir and blend together. Then spread it in a pan lined with parchment paper and let it set. That's it! Seriously!


YUM. If you get super-peppermint-y chips, I've actually had this turn pink in the past. Pink fudge is AWESOME!!! And it won me the Most Creative Dessert at our church's Christmas party a couple of years ago.


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Thanks for visiting - we'd love to hear where you're from in the comments. Please check in with the other blog hop participants as well!

November 27


November 28


November 29

Operation Domestic Goddess - YOU ARE HERE! 

28 November 2018

black friday boycott - craft day!

My sister-in-law and I had an awesome Black Friday! No shopping - we didn't even leave the house. Instead, we raided the bin of blocks that Adam made for the girls years ago that rarely get played with anymore, and played with mod podge, craft paper, and paint. I had some letter stickers for "Joy to the World" and little teeny wood letters for a bit of 3-D-ness on the "Happy Christmas" sign. That one needs to have a couple of holes drilled into it so I can loop craft wire through to hang it up.

My halls are a little more decked now ...





 

20 November 2018

plump purple pumpkins

I'm the Wednesday night activity leader for the 8 to 11-year-old girls at my church, and these kiddos love crafts! They're required to do a certain number of service projects for their award program, and I love it when we can combine the two. My partner Megan and I decided to have the girls make a craft to give to the elderly ladies in our congregation as a holiday gift for Thanksgiving, and we went with these fabric pumpkins.


I cut the fabric in a 9x18 rectangle - I bought a bunch of fat quarters at the fabric store and cut them in half. So quick. I also used fall-ish scrap fabric I have kicking around in my sewing area. I ran the side seam through my sewing machine so the girls would have time to make more rather than spending the whole evening on just one.

At the activity, the girls handstitched the bottom to pull them closed, stuffed them, and sewed the top closed. I have a lot of scrap felt that they used to make stems and leaves.


Each of the girls had time to make two - one to give and one to keep. They were SO excited to keep a fabric pumpkin, and they really were very cute. Both the girls and pumpkins.

The girls LOVED it so much that I sent all their moms the link so they could make more at home to keep for themselves. I was told later that a couple of them did.


When I got them home, some of them needed some extra stitching on the bottom because it wasn't tight enough. I did large side stitches with colored embroidery floss for the pumpkin "grooves." I also made more so our gift bags would have two each.


I loved the variety of colors they chose to put together.
 

I never got a picture of all of the pumpkins in one big pile because we started giving them away before we finished them all. We made more than thirty all together. If you have time tomorrow, or maybe for next year, they make a great little centerpiece or are fun to put on a shelf or windowsill! 

Happy Thanksgiving!