Jovita's Patchwork Atelier

Thursday, December 13, 2007

They say time flies when you’re having fun . . . personally I would attest to it flying regardless if I was having fun, working hard or just about anytime.

I really can’t believe it’s December, and we’re nearly half-way through with that already. I think I’m a little thrown off because we celebrated a 2nd Thanksgiving on December 1st when Axel’s family came for the weekend. I know I promised pictures, but alas while I was carrying out dish after dish from the kitchen, my husband forgot to pick up the camera. I did make the most awesome apple pie I have to brag, and once again the Broccoli Salad was the biggest hit. Unfortunately this crowd was so big it required a turkey that filled the whole oven, leaving no room for sweet potatoes. I was the only one who missed them.

After dinner I put the “kids” (aged nearly 12 to nearly 16) to work cutting out their gingerbread houses. Finally! I’ve been wanting to do houses with them for 10 years, since I first met them. It was nice, they are now old enough that they needed almost no supervision and my german is good enough that I could still explain what it was all about.

Of course, I still went wrong buying some of the candies. In the hunt for hard candies to crush

for the windows, how was I supposed to know they had a soft center. What a gooey mess! It worked pretty well, doing it in stages. Cut out and baked after lunch.

Then we had a “left-overs” dinner which they all thought was a hoot - turkey, cream cheese and cranberry sauce on one sandwich? They all swore they weren’t hungry but thank goodness I had made a portion curried chicken sandwich filler just in case our turkey didn’t

stretch far enough. This is the first Thanksgiving I’ve hosted where we’ve had nearly no leftovers.

Sunday morning we headed out first to our little market - I swear it’s the smallest village market ever. I let the kids each pick out a type of candy to add to the M&Ms and other things I had bought. I thought Annika’s woodpile at the back of her house was pretty ingenious.

I was quite sad when they pulled away . . . at least I had made too much pie . . .

I’ve also begun teaching my first classes in Belgium. Three very fun ladies have all decided they want to make an Amish 9 Patch quilt like the one that hangs over our fireplace. I’ve taught this class many times in Germany so it should be a whizz once I brush up on a few Flemish words to describe the use of color, etc. Oh yeah, I need to adjust measurements again. Phew! We have it easy in the States - stick with a scant 1/4” and your good. In Germany some ladies sew with 1/4” and some with a .75 cm seam allowance. It gets most interesting when they try to cut with a metric ruler and then sew with a 1/4” seam. In Belgium, it’s only metric, but a 0.5 cm seam allowance. They like to keep me on my toes . . .

Sew - from the sewing machine, what has materialized in the last month . . . I’m sure it has to be more than I can see on my design wall.

After throwing a total tantrum while working on the Stars Galore Houses, I started cutting out a quilt I want to to use as my sample for a class in January. I have an iris print and have collected various greens and purples. For some reason

I've never been able to picture squares or rectangles with this iris print so I'm doing a tumbling block pattern. But some of the diamonds will be squewed pieced blocks like shoo fly, etc. It will be a challenge but beautiful when I'm done. The really bad thing is that I cut all my diamonds too big the other day and now have to go back and trim them all. They were supposed to be 4-1/2" but I cut them 6-1/2". Better too big than too small but still annoying. Aha - so I thought. It turned out they were supposed to be 5”