“Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.” And life happened again, and I had to readjust. I was planning on doing a Christmas post last weekend and then take some time off over the holidays. Then my dad passed away last Saturday. He had been sick for years, it started with a stroke in 2007 and went downhill ever since. He spent the last two years in a care home, fell asleep on Friday night and never woke up again. It was as peaceful as possible, and I am especially grateful that he wasn’t hooked up to any machines and that there was no effort to resuscitate him. Naturally I spent a lot of time going back and forth with my mom, trying to work out the arrangements, book a flight to Germany etc. I will be gone until mid-January. Boy, am I glad that I decided not to start another BOM at the beginning of the year.
We had most of it sorted out on Christmas Eve and were able to have a nice, quiet Christmas with our son, enjoyed good food and each other’s company. I hope all of you enjoyed the holidays as well. Here is a picture of this year’s handmade Christmas cards that I made in a last minute frenzy one weekend in November. I always purchase the fabrics right after Christmas, when the holiday fabrics go on sale, so I have a design and material ready for next year but of course I never find the time to actually make them before I absolutely have to. My Scan N Cut simplified the process a lot this year, it would have been almost impossible to cut out the shapes by hand.
Thank you to all of you who keep visiting and reading and commenting, have a wonderful happy and healthy New Year 2020!
Darlene used up scraps for this quilt, stitching lots and lots of squares together around the centre panel. When I saw the cozy flannel backing she chose, I knew right away that this project needed to be quilted with the “Deer in the Woods” pattern that has trees, deer, moose and bears.
“Sunnyside Up” is the third and last of Elaine’s three Christmas gift quilts for her granddaughters and also the name of the Moda fabric line she used for this project. The cheerful colours and floral fabrics asked for another flower pattern, and “Wandering Daisies” was my choice for this quilt.
This quilt is the second of the three Christmas gifts for Elaine’s granddaughters. The quilting design is called “Ginger Flower”, the floral fabrics called for something flowery. All three quilts have cuddly Fireside on the back.
Elaine got an early start on her Christmas gifts this year. This is the first of three quilts for her granddaughters that she dropped off for quilting back in July. “The Treehouse Club” is the name of the Moda fabric line she used for this project. The quilting design is called “Diagonal Plaid Bias Cut”, I purchased it a while ago, and it is quickly becoming one of my favourites.
Wasn’t that a great Virtual Cookie Exchange Blog Hop last week? So many delicious recipes and inspiring projects, many thanks again to Carol who organizes this event every year. And thank you to all of you who visited my blog and took the time to leave a comment. I always enjoy reading them, and I try to reply to every single one. This was the first time I ran a giveaway with Rafflecopter that I set up myself. I have had a few for the annual Row Along events but in these cases I just added the code I was given to the blog post and had nothing to do with the setup and drawing of the winners, so I wasn’t at all sure how any of this works. It turns out it is super easy and straightforward and not difficult at all. The winners have been drawn this morning, and the patterns were emailed to them. If you are a winner and didn’t receive an email, please check your spam folder. If you still can’t find the pattern, please let me know. Congratulations to
If you didn’t win but would still like a copy of the pattern, it is now available for purchase in the store section. And again I wrote a German version although I said I wouldn’t. Because as soon as I said I wouldn’t offer German/metric patterns anymore, people started buying them. Some kind of reverse Murphy’s Law? I don’t know but I am certainly not going to question it LOL. In any case, if I have time and the project is small I might still add a German version but as a general rule I am going to focus on English/Imperial patterns.
Für die deutsche Version mit metrischen Maßen bitte dem Kauflink unten für die englische Version folgen und beim Checkout angeben, dass die deutsche Version gewünscht ist. Ich verschicke dann per email die Anleitung in der gewünschten Sprache.
Thank you so much, Carol, for hosting the Virtual Cookie Exchange once again. I have collected so many interesting cookie recipes during this blog hop, I will be busy for years trying them all out! I have only been living in North America since 2013, and German Christmas baking is very different from North American Christmas baking. And while I enjoy trying new recipes, our Christmas baking is still mostly German, and I will be sharing another of my favourite German recipes.
Today’s recipe is called “Haselnussblüten” which literally translates to “Hazelnut Blossoms”. They do not look like real hazelnut blossoms though, just flower shaped cookies with ground hazelnuts in the dough. Ground hazelnuts and almonds are staples in German Christmas baking, and while I can get ground almonds at the grocery store here, I have trouble finding ground hazelnuts for my baking. There is a store in Vancouver that carries them but it took a while to get used to having to drive 100 km for some ground hazelnuts. The recipe calls for ground cinnamon and cloves, just a pinch of each. I usually add more. It really depends on what you like, and I love the taste of cinnamon. (I also double the amount of spices I put into my pumpkin pie, not just cinnamon but also ginger and cloves.) Feel free to add more or less, depending on what you like. The original recipe also calls for some hazelnut glaze that you can buy at German grocery stores. I have never seen anything similar here, not even at the German deli, and we substitute semi-sweet chocolate for it which works just fine. My husband is usually the one who decorates the cookies, and he has developed his own system of how to use the liquid chocolate to glue the hazelnut to the cookie which always makes me laugh.
A Christmas tradition that I very much appreciate is baking cookies together with my son. I started getting him involved as soon as he could stand, guiding his little fingers with the cookie cutters, and we made cookies together every year. He turned 20 this year and is in his third year at the University of British Columbia. He will be coming home next week, and I really enjoy that he still wants to bake cookies with me… and not just eat them 🙂
A few words of caution/disclaimer: This is a German recipe. Germans measure only liquids by volume, solid ingredients are measured by weight. And everything is metric, of course. With the help of the internet I have provided the imperial measurements but there is no guarantee these are correct… it’s the internet after all. So if a number looks suspicious to you, please double check the math. Another difference are North American ranges. Having to choose between “bake” and “broil” doesn’t really translate to German full convection ovens. So please keep an eye on the cookies and decide for yourself if they need longer or are done faster in your oven than required by the recipe.
Being a longarm quilter, this is my busy season, so I haven’t had a lot of time for working on my own projects. But I came up with a little mug rug design that I call “O Christmas Tree”. The pattern will be published next week, here is a little preview. And I am also giving away five digital copies of the pattern. If you would like to win one, please leave a comment and enter the giveaway. Entries will be accepted until Sunday (December 8, 2019, 11.59 PST), and I will draw the winners on Monday and email the patterns. The patterns will only be availabe in English and with Imperial measurements. This is my first time hosting a giveaway with Rafflecopter, and I hope it all works as planned. If there are issues, please be patient and let me know, and I will try to fix them ASAP. Please scroll down to the end of the post for giveaway rules and guidelines.
Comment moderation is turned off for today to make it easier for you to enter the giveaway. But please don’t leave your email address in the comment text. It is not necessary to do so, and the spam protection software will kick in and not publish your comment, so it will have to be moderated after all. I will be happy to manually publish it but please keep in mind that I am in the Pacific time zone and will still be asleep when this post publishes.
Thank you for visiting today, and please make sure that you visit all the participants of this blog hop and look at their fabulous projects and mouthwatering cookies. Once again here is the full schedule of all five days of this event.
You must leave a comment to enter the giveaway. If you don’t leave a comment, your winning entry will be ignored and cancelled.
You are only allowed to enter once.
The winners will be announced either on Monday, December 9 or Tuesday, December 10, 2019.
You must give a valid email address when you enter the giveaway. Any email returned to me loses the ability to win automatically.
I will email the digital patterns to the winners right away. Please check your spam folders if you are announced as one of the winners and didn’t receive an email. Especially Gmail likes to send anything I send straight to the spam folder.
No purchase whatsoever is necessary.
You must be 18+ in order to win a gift.
All winners are chosen at random.
All winners will be announced on the blog via the Rafflecopter entry form and a post. All winners must allow for their first name and first initial of their last name to be announced on this blog.
Odds of winning a prize are based on the total number of rafflecopter entries.
Another year has come and gone, and it is time again for Carol’s “Virtual Cookie Exchange Blog Hop”. She has five days of fun planned for you. My turn to post is on Thursday, so today I am only going to share the schedule. Be sure to visit these amazing bloggers for cookie recipes, Christmas projects, giveaways and other fun stuff.
Welcome to December and the last block of the Tuxedo Cat BOM. This pattern includes instructions on how to make the sashing and assemble the quilt. If you missed downloading any of the blocks, now is the time to get them. The Black Friday coupon code is still valid for 20% off until tomorrow. (Scroll down to see the Black Friday Sale post for the coupon code.)
In other news, I am not going to start another BOM on January 1. I really, really want to but I have decided to be reasonable and not jump into another big project right away. All year long I have been complaining about how busy I am and how I am always behind. In addition to that I have been having health issues for the second half of the year and I also took over as president of the Chilliwack Piecemakers Quilting Guild. Don’t ask me why… somebody had to step up and do it, and I like doing it but it does add to my workload.
But the main reason is that I just need to take some time to catch up. If you downloaded all my BOM blocks you might have noticed that I changed my layout earlier this year. I had a reason for this, and a big one as well. My patterns were accepted by QuiltWoman.com last December for sale on their website. If you haven’t heard about them, they sell patterns in digital and printed formats, and they sell to everyone – retail, wholesale, distributors and also chains like JoAnn’s. But they have certain format requirements including fonts and page layout. Almost a year has gone by, and I haven’t managed to edit very many of my patterns to match their requirements. So instead of working on new things (which would be much more fun, I admit) I will take the time to edit my patterns for their website before another year comes and goes and I still haven’t made any progress. We will see how long it takes, I am hoping that maybe by April I will be ready to start another BOM project. But if not, I will just work on it for as long as it takes. (And for those who keep telling me I don’t owe any of you an explanation… I know 🙂 This is mostly pep talk for myself. My main business is still longarm quilting but I almost enjoy the pattern part more and have to keep telling myself to focus.)
But enough of my ramblings, here are the links to the last patterns with the finishing instructions.
EDIT: The month of free download is over, and the block has moved to the pattern store where it is now available for purchase.
Für die deutsche(n) Version(en) mit metrischen Maßen bitte dem/den Kauflink(s) unten für die englische(n) Version(en) folgen und beim Checkout angeben, dass die deutsche Version gewünscht ist. Ich verschicke dann per email die Anleitung(en) in der gewünschten Sprache.
