Halloween Cake

I made a cake for a Halloween party I went to. The host was going to make all the desserts herself and wanted to do a black and white cake that was a couple of layers and fancy with a spider web decoration but didn't have time and asked the rest of us to bring dessert instead.  I decided to stick with her black and white cake theme but didn't have the time and/or energy to try to make the fancy cake she wanted so I winged it ("winged", get it? 'cause it is a bat cake?) by using a bat cookie cutter and bat sprinkles to make a black and white bat cake. After frosting the cake with white frosting, I simply put the cookie cutter in the middle of the cake, put sprinkles inside the cookie cutter, and gently pressed the sprinkles into the frosting to keep the bat shape.

Latest Quilt

Here is my latest quilt made for a nephew, M, who was due in late September but decided to come a little early.  One of the bonuses of coming early was I knew what his name was before I was done with the quilt and could applique his name on the quilt.

For this quilt I wanted to do an argyle pattern but I didn't want to figure out how to deal with non-right angle diamonds so I went with a modified argyle where I just used rotated squares quilted through the middle.

Putting the squares on their sides made figuring out the size the squares needed to be difficult. I got out some graph paper and mapped out the quilt and tried to figure out my measurements there but, apparently, that didn't work out very well because all my squares are smaller than they should have been. The original plan was to only have the argyle pattern with the orange border but, since my squares were too small, I ended up having to add the blue border (good thing I accidentally bought too much fabric). However, the blue border came in handy when trying to figure out how to do the quilting around the name applique - so I guess it all worked out in the end.


With this quilt I also did triangles for the first time.  I didn't have a triangle tool and I didn't want to pull trigonometry out of my head so I kind of winged the first few by taking cut squares and trimming them into a triangle where I thought they needed to be trimmed. That actually worked beautifully. Some of the triangles were a little big (maybe 1/8 - 1/4 of an inch too long) but that was fine because the excess was just cut off or sewn into the seam.

Another first with this quilt was having a border on both the front and the back - having both orange borders was planned from the beginning.  This made lining up the two sides and the batting a little more time consuming because I wanted to make sure the borders were nearly perfectly lined up so that the quilting would look good. It took extra time but it wasn't difficult (because everything was measured carefully) and I probably wouldn't hesitate too much to do something like that again.

Overall, I think the quilt turned out really cute. I like the orange, blue, and brown color combination.  I figured that since the colors were so bright I should use a more muted color for the quilting.  I went with a gray and triple stitched the quilting to make sure it showed up well.

I hope M likes it.

Activity Days: Nature Scavenger Hunt

For our Activity Days activity this week we did a Nature Scavenger Hunt . . . kind of.  In a traditional scavenger hunt the hunters take what they find; we did not take anything.  We left nature right where it was supposed to be.

To the right is the hunt list.  A few days before the activity I went out to the lake in the neighborhood and took pictures of some of the different things out there. I wanted to make sure the girls could find everything on the list I made.

Not all my pictures turned out so I Google searched for things that looked like what I saw.

After I organized everything I printed it in color and went to the local FedEx Office store to have them laminated.  Just so you know, laminating a single 8.5 x 11 piece of paper at the FedEx Office store costs $1.99.  That's $1.99 each.  I was surprised but I didn't have a lot of extra time to do some price comparing so I went ahead and did it.

As we hunted, I had the girls use dry erase markers to mark everything they found.  I debated between letting the girls keep their hunt list and keeping them for myself for re-use.  The price of lamination sealed the deal and I decided to keep them for myself for re-use.  Here's to hoping I actually get use out of them.

I think the girls had fun with the hunt.  I know I had fun.  Sometimes it is just nice to get out of the house and in to nature.

Recipe: Pizza Crust and Roasted Red Pepper and Alfredo Sauce

A while ago I posted a recipe for BBQ Chicken Pizza with Roasted Red Pepper Sauce where I also mentioned that I'd eventually post my pizza crust recipe.  Well, here it is.

I got this recipe from some college room mates that I had.  They were sisters and they made all kinds of things from scratch that I never would have thought someone would make from scratch, like tapioca pudding.

I've made this pizza dough a lot and have learned a lot about how to make it easier.  It also makes good bread sticks.

Ingredients:
1 cup warm water
3 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp yeast
3 Tbsp melted butter
1 tsp salt
1 tsp Italian seasoning
2 Tbsp dry milk powder
3 cups flour

Step One (First Image below): Combine the warm water, sugar, and yeast. To make sure the water is warm enough to activate the yeast but not so warm that it kills the yeast, make sure it is warm to touch but not so hot that you can't touch it for more than a few seconds.

Step Two (Second and Third Images Above): Combine the melted butter, salt, Italian seasoning, and dry milk powder.

Step Three (Fourth Image Above): Combine the yeasty water with the butter mix.

Step Four (Fifth Image Above): Add most of the flour until the dough is barely firm but not sticky.

Step Five (First and Second Images Below): Let the dough rise in a warm place, knead occasionally and just before rolling.

Step Six (Third Image Above): Set dough on well floured surface.  Flour the top of the dough ball and the rolling pin.

Step Seven (Fourth Image Above): Roll dough until it is the right size for your pizza pan.

Step Eight (First and Second Image Below): Place the rolled dough on to the pizza pan. Fold over the extra dough.

Step Nine (Third Image Above): Bake the dough without toppings at 350 for about 10 - 15 minutes.  If you are planning on having heavy toppings, bake closer to 15 minutes.  If you are putting just a few toppings on, closer to 10 minutes is probably fine.

Step Ten: When the dough is done baking, add toppings and bake again until cheese is melted.

This time around when I made pizza dough I made a pizza with Roasted Red Pepper and Alfredo Sauce.  I simply pureed a jar of roasted red peppers and mixed with some Alfredo sauce.  I usually also add a good chunk of Parmesan into the sauce but I ran out after about a tablespoon.

I then added some garlic chicken and mozzarella cheese to make a delicious pizza.

Dress Alteration

A few months ago, maybe mid-December, I went to JCPenney's to do some dress shopping.  I probably tried on 30 or so dresses because I went in with low expectations.  I was sure I was only going to be able to find something that needed some kind of alteration.  Well, I found three dresses that looked good on me and (probably) wouldn't need any alterations to make them work.  Unfortunately I only had the budget for two, so the one you see here is the one I didn't get.

Fast forward a month or so and I was at Penney's again. I decided to stop by the dress section and I found that third dress on clearance for $14.  By that time I had $14 in my budget for a new dress so I scooped it up.

While trying it on it felt like it was going to be long enough but the first time I wore it it felt just a little too short.  So I decided to lengthen it.  The original hem used that fancy stitch (I can never remember what it is called) that doesn't actually show the stitching and I don't remember how to do that and I didn't want to figure out how to do that plus everywhere else on the dress had a little black lining, so I decided to finish the hem with a similar black lining.  And it was easy.  Here's what I did.

Step 1 - Take out the hem.

Step 2 - Do some measuring. I measured the width of the black lining on the other parts of the dress (about 1/4 inch) and of the stitching at the hem (also about 1/4 inch).  This led me to believe that I would need at least a full inch of fabric for my lining: 1/4 inch on each side to match the lining and hide the stitching + 1/4 inch on each side for a seam allowance.

Side note: I actually used about 1 1/4 inch fabric just to be sure.

Step 3 - Cut and iron the fabric.  Once I had a long strip of black fabric, long enough to go all the way around the bottom of the dress, I ironed it.  If you are a talented enough sewer, you could probably skip all or part of this step but I'm going to say what I did even if it wasn't necessary.  I started by ironing the strip in half width ways.  After that, I folded the outer sides into my new crease and folded them down.  That is all.

Step 4 - Pin and sew.  I started by laying the black fabric so that the ends that were sewn to the middle were on top.  I then placed my dress hem on top - right side up (this means the dress was inside out and the inside of the dress was toward the black fabric's ends).  Then I pinned.  Then I sewed.  To finish the ends together I did it kind of like I do the binding on a quilt - when I got close, I sewed the two ends together so the black strip was one big circle, then just finished sewing the strip onto the skirt hem.

As you can see in the last image, I got about 1 1/2 inches of extra length on the dress, so it should be perfect now!

New Wall Decor

I actually have something on my living room wall now!

As you can see from this first picture, it was just a big, ugly, beige wall.  From the second picture you can see that it now has decor.  It is just a cheap poster frame with some fabric in it but it sure is better than nothing.

I got the frame from JoAnn.  It was originally $60 but I had a 40% off coupon and a 20% off the entire purchase coupon so I didn't pay anywhere close to $60.  The fabric is left over from when I re-upholstered my kitchen bar stools.

The plan for the future is to paint the frame the same green color that is on the opposite wall, but I don't really want to do that now.  My goal for this iteration was just to get something up there so the wall wouldn't look so empty.

Now for that room all I need to do is replace those ugly folding chairs with actual sitting chairs. I have my eye on some old restaurant chairs that I've seen on KSL that I'll re-upolster and re-paint but I haven't gotten around to buying them yet.  Hopefully they are still available when I do go to buy them.

Latest Quilt

 I've made another quilt. This is the first one I've made for someone who isn't born yet. Barracuda is due at the beginning of March so I tried to make this quilt spring-y.

I chose a subway tile type pattern because, well, it looked fun.  Somehow my longest tiles ended up  being 1/8 of an inch too long each so I had to sew a little extra to all the background rows between but, luckily, the background pattern is really busy so it is nearly impossible to tell that I had to add those pieces.

While I was at the fabric store I chose the paisley fabric first, I just fell in love with it.  From there I chose the other two greens and decided to use the yellow as binding because it added a little brightness to the whole quilt.

It took me a while to decide how to quilt the quilt but I ended up doing a whimsical, curly line around all the tiles.  I did this the same way I did c.b.'s quilt: freehand using the embroidery foot. The biggest lesson I learned was to make sure the fabric was pulled tight as I quilted because I ended up with some loose fabric between tiles.

I also used the whimsical, curly line for my binding.  I thought it would be super cute and, well, it is.  I learned several lessons here (see the next picture for the big, nasty one), one of which is that if you forget to put your sewing machine's feet down when sewing free-hand, it isn't a huge deal.  I also learned that if the fabric is too thick for the sewing machine needle, the machine will beep at me.  I ended up having to do a little of the binding by hand - in some places you can tell but in one place (on the front) it looks pretty good.

The biggest lesson that I learned with this binding was that I didn't do it very well.  As you can see, my tension was off. Even though I did a test with several layers of fabric (I got the tension perfect in the test, it really was beautiful)  I just couldn't get the tension right while actually quilting.  I ended up giving up on trying to fix the tension so I'll just try to convince everyone to never look at the back side of this quilt.

I think a contributing factor was the the quilt side was just two layers of fabric and one layer of 6 oz batting while the binding side was up to 6 layers of fabric plus the binding, so getting the same tension to work on both was a tall order to begin with.

If anyone has any ideas about how I could have done this better, I'd love to hear it.