So You Think You Can Sew

Sometimes I don't know what posseses me to try things like this. I'm really not that great at sewing. I can do some basic things and make some (almost) straight seams. But sometimes I get a little overly ambitious and wooed by lovely pictures, like the one in Tone Finnanger's Sew Pretty Christmas Homestyle book, where I found the pattern for this bag. I saw her beautful bags and thought I'd give it a try. And here it is.

Truthfully, I'm extremely pleased with myself. On the whole, the bag wasn't hard. I'm just not great with my sewing machine. But I had some gorgeous fabric from an outing to Cottonweeds in Freeport last weekend and a pattern I was dying to try.

I resolved to follow all the directions exactly but therein lies my primary problem with sewing - I'm not great at following the directions. But I really did try and I really am very happy with the bag, though there is no closeup photo for a reason. There are a plethora of errors and not-so-perfect seams but on the whole, I'm happy. I even plan to take this baby to work with me tomorrow. Proudly.

Hope you had a nice weekend.

Cozy Time

It's snowing again. That means it's a good time to get cozy. I'm about to sit down with two of my favorite things: a hot cup of coffee and my new heating pad.
To my utter delight, and my checkbook's utter chagrin, I discovered that Candlelite Quilts carries a fantastic selection of Moda fabrics. Among them was this delightful flannel (Cornwall, by April Cornell) and when I saw it I knew it was destined to become a heart-shaped heating pad.
I got the idea for the pad from a Martha Stewart project where they made heating pads and filled them with dried cherry pits. (Yes, you can actually buy dried cherry pits. Who knew?) So the project was on my mind because I thought it seemed very useful and cozy, a good winter project. And then when I saw this flannel I thought "why not make it a heart shape?". And why not, right? So here it is. My kids are loving it too. The novelty of heating it up in the microwave and having a toasty thing to cuddle up with is really floating their boats. Annika has selected several fabrics and would like me to make one of each. We'll see.
For now, I'm going to do what my great-grandmother used to do and "sit a spell" with my warm heart (both literal and figurative) and my hot coffee - that is until the kids come barreling back in from the snow.
Have a cozy day! - Kate

These Are Hearts - Trust Me

My very creative friend had a great idea - red velvet heart-shaped whoopie pies. Outstanding! As soon as I read her email I started mulling over the idea. I've never been all that successful with red velvet but then again, I've really only tried once. I saw a recipe on the Better Homes & Gardens site at Christmas so I decided to give it a go. I made the cake recipe here and it makes a rather thick cake. If you tried my chocolate whoopie pie recipe you know I'm partial to something a bit more light. But what the heck, I plowed ahead. The batter tasted delicious so I put it in a pastry bag and piped hearts with it. Trust me, these are hearts and not butts. My color is slightly off, probably because my only cocoa on hand is dark chocolate and that is too dark for these. I'd recommend the regular cocoa. I couldn't make the filling recipe that BHG suggests because I didn't have any marshmallow fluff/creme on hand so I turned to Magnolia and used their red velvet cream cheese frosting recipe. My lesson there is that the frosting is too thin to work well as a filling for a whoopie pie. Overall I rate these as a semi-success. They taste good but I need to work on creating a lighter cake and a fluffier filling to get the textures right for a whoopie pie. This is a project that I will certainly make again, with a few modifications. I hope you try these and please let me know how yours turn out!

A Failure

Pride goeth before a fall? Yes. Good grief. I fell. Not literally, thankfully. In the kitchen I figuratively fell in quite a big way. I recently learned about the amazing cake pops that Bakerella makes. Amazing! Have you seen them? See them here. True baking genius. I so desired to be that fabulous that I thought "I can do that" and I set about fantasizing that I would make these lovely morsels for everyone I know and that soon I would be getting calls from Bakerella herself asking if we could be best friends. It was a short-lived fantasy. I baked up a cake. Burned it around the edges. Oops. Made some frosting. It was gross. I'm still not sure why. Mixed the burned cake and gross frosting together in the wrong proportions and ended up with these. Cake turds. Oh sigh. I hate when things go horribly wrong. I made a second attempt two days later and this time the cake and frosting were much more edible, downright tasty even, but then I remembered that I absolutely stink at dipping things in chocolate. I can't even bring myself to show you the results. I haven't decided yet if I'm calling this a permanent defeat and accepting that I'm no good at chocolate dipping or if I will persevere. Right now I'm going to just sit on the couch and nurse my wounded pride with a cup of hot tea. I hope you are having a nice warm drink right now too.