Dahlia Pillow with Flowers from my Book!

Donna Seegmueller sent me some pictures of a beautiful pillow she made using  dahlias and leaves from my book and gave me permission to share it with you.  Isn't it beautiful!

Here's what she said about making it:

"As for some construction details, I reduced the pattern to 75%.  I selected the colors from my stash of batiks and applied fusible interfacing, then fussy cut each petal, mirroring the images a couple of times to achieve directional movement one would see in a garden. For dimension on each flower, I heat set all the petals, then using coordinating variegated thread I stitched each petal from its center to its edge only to secure. The hummingbird on the left is an applique, adapted and mirrored from the 3-D embroidery on the right. That design came with my Husqvarna/Viking embroidery machine, in case you need to make note of it. Finally, I quilted the background by tightly stippling between the stems and then switching to outline quilting of the humming birds wings for the sky.

I hope your readers enjoy my creation. I enjoyed the challenge and thoroughly enjoyed working with your design.

Donna Seegmueller
Auburn WA"



I love seeing everyone's projects!

Knitting, Spinning, and Quilting too!

Last night I finished knitting a Paris Toujours shawl!  It's a wool / cotton blend that is light, soft and fluffy, and I'm hoping will be comfortable not only in the winter, but also on cool winter evenings.

Before Thanksgiving, I finished spinning this Waterlilies roving from The Yarn Wench on Etsy.  Since I had two braids, I combined them and chain plyed, to keep the color changes as clean as possible.  It still needs to be wet finished (soaked and dried), but love how it came out.

After Thanksgiving, the spinning wheel was out, along with braid of wool called Young and Old from Three Waters Farm.  It looked like this while it was being spun:

and this once it was chain plyed:

In 2010, Bunny Hill Designs was doing the Snowbound Block of the Month on her  design, and although I was able to keep up with it for a while, I did fall behind, put it away, and have just pulled it out again.  (If you remember, my book was released in October, 2010, so it was a busy year!)  If I keep working on it, it should be finished in time to hang before Christmas next year.

That's it for now....

Handmade Skin Care for Gifts

As promised, here are the skin care projects made for this past Christmas:

Lots of recipes were tried, most of them made wonderful products that I could gift friends and relatives.  A few came out nice, but need to be tweaked to play nicer in our climate, others were great as they were.  Lip balms were one of my first adventure into making skin care products, along with melt and pour soaps, then there were scrubs made with sugar or salt, and then bath bombs, and then  recently I tried making the bubble bars, and finally lotions!  Most of the recipes came from the Soap Queen Blog and Bramble Berry website, but the solid bubble bath bars are from a recipe I purchased from Two Wild Hares on Etsy.

Of course I made lots of soap this past year since I tend to immerse myself in any new learning adventure, even creating a few of my own soap recipes and participating in soaping challenges.  As a fun challenge, I even tried making soap cupcakes and they were so much fun!

Along the way I ran out of space to dry and store all the soaps I was making, so bought a rack from Home Depot and added extra shelves (husband is using this shelving in our greenhouse for smaller plants, but didn't need all the shelves).  The additional shelves make it great for drying soaps, since I don't have to turn them every day, and it holds a lot!

Because I've made so many different types of soaps and skin care products, and it has gotten way past being able to remember what is in each one, I decided it was time to create labels so my recipients and myself would know what is in each one.  This was my biggest challenge, and luckily, I'd been keeping a soaping journal, and printouts of the skin care product recipes with my mark-ups, so knew what changes I'd made to each recipe!  It took a while to figure out a design that would work and look nice in In-Design software, but I finally figured it out and designed labels for almost everything before it got too late to ship boxes before Christmas!  Whew!!!!

This past year in knitting and more, part 2

Another shawl (Haley's Comet), this one for a friend:

Yet another shawl (Ashburn) for a friend:

Another hat (Rainy Tuesdays) for my hubby (it's really more blue):

My Peak color cowl is knit, but still needs blocked.  At least I have a modeled picture for this one:-)

This one was given to a friend earlier this year, but I forgot to post a picture, it's the 2015 WestKnits Mystery Shawl:

Our dogs have long hair, so no knitting for them, but one of our sons has a whippet who is always cold, so she was measured and this is my first time knitting a dog garment, so I'm amazed it fits!

Also finished another hat for me, just a quick one:

Knitting, soaping and more...

It's been a busy year and since my last post, much time has been spent baking loads of Christmas cookies that were gifted, making gifts and other secret things that can now be unveiled since they've been gifted, mailed, or wrapped, waiting for a belated exchange!  This post only has the hand knits, since there were many this year.  I'll have to do another with the handmade skin care items that were gifted to others.

An Antler Hat for my hubby:

A cowl (Snowshoe) for a sister:

Apparently, in my haste, I neglected to photograph the cowl for my other sister:-(  At least it was finished and shipped in time!  It is a Brain Frieze cowl.

My future daughter-in-law received several hand knits:

a Nora G. cowl,

Shallows cowl (sorry, this one was also taken while blocking, but the best one I have),

and the SknitsB Mysterie cowl:

An Autumn Blush shawl for Tammy (this was while it was blocking):

More to come, as I had to chop this post in half, because it refused to publish.  Crossing my fingers it works this time!

Great Cakes Alternative Liquid Challenge

As usual, I'm trying to beat the deadline, and I'm running out of time as I'm writing!  This month it took three tries to get something worthy of the challenge.

My alternative liquid is coconut water.  I'd been wanting to try it, but hadn't gotten around to it, so now was the time!  I wasn't able to find much out other than it is hydrating and contains lots of potassium when you drink it, so I'm hoping it can do the same for our skin!

For my first soap, I decided to also try calendula petals in the lye water, as it imparts a slight fragrance and is skin loving.  The other colorings are madder powder and spirulina powder and I decided to use Bergamot Essential Oil for the fragrance.  It soaped like a dream, maybe a bit too liquid, and I tried a swirl.  Although it did come out way better than I thought it would, it didn't have the contrast and bold coloring I was looking for.

Second try:  Same oils and coconut water, but this time I decided to use Karma Essential Oil blend from Bramble Berry, even though it  discolors the finished soap to brown.  Since I knew that, I decided to color it with darker colorant, alkanet powder, in a large enough amount to hopefully be dark purple.  For a lighter contrast color, I used a combiation of Kaolin clay and annatto seed powder.  Since I wanted to use my column mold again and had seen others make a yinyang with plastic, I thought I'd try that, putting alkanet on one side and the other would be kaolin colored and annatto colored in a faux funnel pour.  With so much planned, I forgot the essential oil, so this one is unscented, but I like the design!

Third time's the charm!  I repeated the same recipe, including the Karma Essential Oil for fragrance this time, although I didn't have another cylinder mold, so used a loaf mold and did a swirl like I did the first time.  The difference was that this time the soap batter was a bit thicker from the fragrance (and a little more stick blending) and the top was sprinkled with cranberry seeds and strawberry seeds for a little additional color.  This is my favorite!  I never thought I would be able to get such a beautiful soap with all natural ingredients!

Pink Applesauce and more!

Yep, my applesauce really did come out pink!  It's a blend of pink fleshed and white fleshed apples from our trees, and we ended up with 18 jars!!!.

Now we don't just have apple trees, we have a variety of different fruits, but they're really just baby trees that are starting to produce more than we can eat fresh, so I have to find more ways to use and preserve them. Before making the applesauce above,  The pears were getting way too ripe, so I made spiced pear butter and spiced pear sauce, and before that it was the pickles, so the cupboard is getting filled up!

Today was the day to make something with Asian pears, so I tried the recipe - Asian Pears in Honey Syrup from The Joy of Jams, Jellies and other Sweet Preserves.  A couple ginger slices are at the bottom of each jar and the syrup has not just honey in it, but also lemon, so it's not too sweet and there's plenty of lemon flavor in there.  We'll let these sit a little while to soak up some of the ginger flavor and then they'll be ready (of course, they're ready now, but time will blend the flavors better).  After two batches, there are now eight quart jars cooling on the counter!

Have a bit of cast-on-itis, since this month is Plucktober, celebrating Plucky yarns in their Ravelry group.  Of course I had already picked out about four projects to work on, but then some people started making cute sheep hats and I had to make one too!  It's called the Baa-ble Hat.