lemon curd, sewing, dogs and a quilt

I had an urge to make some lemon curd so dug through my recipe book to find the recipe I used to make many, many years ago. Here's the result. Oh my goodness, it was delicious. I say "was" because it didn't last long. I really need to make some more!

In case anyone's interested, this is the recipe.

Lemon Curd
Makes 2 x 250 ml jars.

4 lemons
200g granulated sugar
100g unsalted butter cut into cubes
3 eggs plus 1 egg yolk

Method
Zest and juice the lemons and put into a heatproof bowl along with the sugar and the butter.

Put the bowl over a pan of simmering water. Stir now and again until all the butter has melted.

In a separate bowl, whisk the eggs and egg yolk. Add to the lemon mixture and stir until everything is combined. Leave to cook for about 12 minutes stirring every now and again.

When the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon, remove it from the heat and pass it through a plastic sieve to remove the zest and any egg white that hasn't mixed in. Set aside to cool, stirring occasionally.

Once cooled, spoon into sterilised jars and seal.

Keep in the fridge for up to 3 weeks if it lasts that long!!

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ I made myself some trousers. I used the old faithful pattern which I've used many times before - the Jalie pull-on pants. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!! I forgot to take a photo of them before I wore them so took one after I'd taken them off hence all the creases! LOL They are black, by the way. It doesn't look like black in the photo, but they are black!

Next, let me show you what we did with the frame for our old swing which finally gave up the ghost. Well, the swing part did. The cover needed replacing - it would have been the third time I'd recovered it - but, before I even got the idea in my head to make another one, Douglas sat on the swing and one of the metal parts holding the seat part together sheared off making it unsittable-on. (I'm sure that's not a word, but you get the idea!)

We had put it beside the side gate with the intention of taking it to the tip when our big bird feeding station bent over in one of the storms we've had recently depositing all the bird feeders and seed and suet balls all over the grass. I wondered if we could re-use the frame of the swing as a bird feeder thingy. It's not perfect but it works. The birds don't care what it looks like - in fact, I think they like it!!

Next, let me introduce you to Maisie. Debbie (and her family) got a new puppy. She's a Cavapoo and a wee terror by all accounts but then she is a puppy so that's her job! Isn't she adorable?

I was chatting on FaceTime the other day with both Joanna and Debbie and both their dogs put in an appearance. I suspect Tilly was quite glad that Maisie was in Canada. She really isn't sure what those funny little squeaking noises are. We're just telling her it's Maisie's Canadian accent! LOL

Lastly, Jo's neighbour is expecting her first baby so I offered to make them a baby quilt with all the appliquéed squares like one I made before shown here. This is the pile of all 49 appliqués. It took me nearly 2 weeks to make them all!

Here's the quilt all finished.

And here's the fleece on the back and the label.

If I make this again, I need to remember that it takes a l-o-n-g time to make all the squares but that it's worth it in the end. I just LOVE this quilt and hope Jo's neighbours and their baby will too!

January makes

I haven't got as much sewn as I usually do this month as we're doing up our kitchen and it's taking up a lot of my sewing time. I'm really hoping we're now on the home stretch with that so that I can get my kitchen put back together and also get some time in my sewing room!

Here's what I did get made this month. A starry wallhanging:

... with its embroidered label.

I had a notion to try sewing some leather things - nothing huge, maybe a coin purse (not that I have any coins these days!) or a card wallet or similar wee things like that. I found some leather off-cuts on Amazon here - I see they're out of stock as I type this but I paid all of £5.19 for a 2kg bag of bits. With free P&P, I reckoned it was a fab price to pay to do some experimental sewing. Here's a picture of the leather that came - mostly black and dark brown with some lighter brown and maroon in there too.

My first experiment was to make some letters to fit on keyrings. I made mine first then one for Douglas and one for Joanna. They were a bit fiddly to make but I was really happy with the way they turned out.

When Tilly saw Joanna's J, she wanted to bite it. Not to eat it but to just hold it. She did that once with an old leather glove of mine. She held it in her mouth for what seemed like days only dropping it to eat, drink and sleep! I decided to try another experiment and this one worked even better than the letters.

As you can see, Tilly LOVES her new bone!

I then did a bit of a re-purposing thing. I had 3 nighties that I had bought last year - or maybe it was 2020! - from Asda's. I was really disappointed with them as they were quite short - and shrunk even more after washing! I'm only 5'4" and they barely covered my behind so people taller than I am would have been displaying parts of themselves they probably would rather keep hidden! I dug the nighties out of the back of the drawer, cut off about 8" and hemmed them and I'm now wearing them as jammie tops. I'm wearing them with mismatched jammie bottoms but I reckon it's dark when I'm wearing them so that's fine!

Lastly, I was going through my "needlecrafts" folder on my computer and throwing away all sorts of stuff that I know I will never make. Boy, that was freeing! As I was doing that, I found this which I had made up all by myself years ago. 15 February, 2012 to be exact! Wow! 10 years ago! I originally drew it in Photoshop and I haven't had that on my computer for a long, long time but, luckily, the file can be used in Pixelmator which I have now.

I decided it was time to try out my design so I wrote out what each quarter of the Supernova star would be -

- and started gathering the fabrics. I took this photo when I was still in the middle of getting all the pieces ready. They're now all sitting in the four baskets - one for each quarter - and I'll hopefully get on with it soon. It'll finish at about 56" square so more a quilt than a wallhanging but, if it looks anything like my plan, I'll be very happy!

lots of stuffs!

I thought I'd better write a blog post but didn't think I'd have much to show. How wrong was I? I'll show you!

First of all, I made a couple of dressing gowns for Emily and Isla for Christmas. (I'm showing them on here because neither Emily nor Isla read my blog! 🤣) This one is Emily's:

And this one is Isla's.

As I was cutting them out, I remembered when my girls were wee, I would usually make their dollies a similar garment with the leftover pieces. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough of either of the fleeces to make a dolly dressing gown but I had some fleece in my stash that I used instead. Grace kindly offered to model them.

Then it was back to making more Christmas stockings for the tartan bee. These all sold within days of me listing them.

I've now closed the tartan bee for a well-earned break over Christmas and New Year.

Next I made Molly and Tilly - my girls' dogs - each a monster for their Christmas. (I'm showing them on here because neither Molly nor Tilly read my blog! 🤣)

My original idea was to do these on my embroidery machine but, when I printed out the template, it was barely bigger than my hand which I felt would be too small so I needed a change of plan. I enlarged the template on the printer, cut out pieces of fleece and then just cut out bits of felt for the eyes and mouth, sewed them on, sewed the fleece bits together leaving a gap for stuffing, stuffed them, sewed the gap shut and called them done. To be honest, they could have been bigger but the dogs will love them and probably have them covered in spit within minutes of opening them!

On one of the many days I walked to the post office with Christmas stockings to post, I took photos of skeins of geese flying south for the winter. The noise was amazing!

When I got home, I showed Douglas the photos and he said he'd been talking to an old man when he was out for a walk who said that, when there are so many birds like that, it means we'd be in for snow. I just rolled my eyes thinking "yeah right!". Well, turns out the old man was right as this was what we woke up to the next day!

On that same walk, I passed these lovely beasts. I so wanted to stroke them but didn't think it would be wise considering the top wire of the inner fence between us is electrified!

And finally, I dug out an old image I made way back in my signature making days. I still love it as much as I did back then!

Please be safe! See you in 2021!

at last! 💕

I watched a video on youtube which fascinated me - see it here. I had to watch it more than once because it wasn't in English and I found it hard to watch and read subtitles at the same time! Anyway, I made an attempt at the block she made and was pleased with it but it could have been better. Here's the block:

It took me about 3 days to make it trying to decipher what the subtitles meant and also converting from metric measurements to inches. I know I could have just made it metric but I don't have any metric patchwork rulers and it was a fairly easy conversion anyway so I went with inches.

As I was quilting it, it dawned on me it could be made using half-square triangles. That's what us patchworkers call a square that's made up of 2 triangles. So the squared paper came out and a plan was drawn. I am delighted with this version.

The corners of the squares match much better. The red square in the centre matches better. All in all, it is a much neater version!

I made a couple of masks for Douglas using a different pattern.

This one is curved over the nose, not flat like the previous ones I made. Douglas is happy with them so that's all that matters.

Debbie asked me to quilt some Christmas panels for her. It really didn't take long.

She's delighted with them so that's good.

She also asked me to sort some Sindy clothes.

I did NOT enjoy this job. Far too fiddly and finicky and a general pain in the behind! But they're done so that's that! Let's hope she doesn't find any more for me to sort. I did find it interesting that all of these were bought clothes - ie none of them were made by me!

Another job for Debbie - is anybody else seeing a theme here?? - was to make some coasters from leftover fabrics I had previously made tablemats with for her. When I'd made them, there was still some fabric left so I made a couple of bigger mats which could be for a water jug or bunch of flowers or some such thing.

I made myself a new blouse with a new pattern. It's the Gilbert top by Helen's Closet patterns - here.

It fits me beautifully so I'll be using this pattern a lot, methinks!

So, why the "at last" as the title? Well, at last we are allowed to get together as a family. It's wonderful to be able to hug my girls and the wee girlies again. Isla - the baby - was a bit wary of us at first but is already getting used to us. When you think of it, she's spent nearly half her life in lockdown so the only people she knows is her own wee family. A strange thought, eh?

Here's Debbie with both her girlies.

They both loved playing with Auntie Jo but Tilly wasn't so sure why Joanna was lying down so she had to have a sniff to make sure she was okay! Emily and Isla thought that was really funny!

an everlasting hug

I've finished the heart quilt and, I have to say, I am chuffed to bits with the way it's turned out. It's definitely worth all the unpicking I did. By the way, the borders are the same width all around - the photographer seems to have cut it off at one side!

I had quilted it diagonally in sort of heart shapes. You can maybe see that better on the back - the pink heart fleece just seemed appropriate for this one.

I was going to go with a pink binding but none of the ones I had in my (vast) collection was quite the right pink. When I noticed that this one had hearts on it, I thought it would be perfect. I think I was right!

I was going to put a label on the back saying something like "a quilt is like an everlasting hug and this one has family at the heart of it" but I decided just to go with my own label (as opposed to a tartan bee label) as it's a gift. The gift will actually be from Joanna so I suggested to her that she could write something like that on the gift tag if she wanted.

Now, when Douglas was photographing me holding up the quilt, Tilly - naturally - wanted to know what I was doing back there. Silly Tilly! :oD

another catch up post!

I got into trouble yesterday when we went to see Debbie, Jason, Molly & baby bump for not blogging. Debbie told me in no uncertain terms she was fed up refreshing the page only to see the same photo of hyacinths again and again. Okay, next time you refresh, you'll see a photo of my sale jammies. Happy now? :oP

Yes, I bought some jammies in the sales - you just can't make jammies for £8 these days. Crumbs, a dressmaking pattern costs more than that! Anyway, I wore them for one night and *had* to do something about the buttons. They were so small that they kept coming out of the buttonholes - not good in this chilly weather! So, I went to replace the buttons and didn't have enough of the right size. Isn't that always the way? I have thousands of buttons - no word of a lie - and it's crazy how many times I don't have enough for what I want to do! Then I had a bit of a brainwave - why do they need to be the same? They don't! So the replacement buttons don't match and I don't care one hoot. I love these jammies. They are so comfy and cosy - especially now that they stay shut!

I made a couple of lemon cakes. I doubled the quantity as I had a lot of lemons to use up. They're all gone now but they were delicious! My mouth's watering just thinking about them!

I decided to stop crocheting the ripple blankie I was making for the new baby - blogged about here. I've not ripped it out, just put it away for now. Instead I've made the same kind of blankie I made for both our girls when they were babies - your good old traditional granny squares.

When we found out Debbie was pregnant, my next door neighbour asked me if Debbie would like a traditional shawl. Debbie was delighted at the idea and C gave it to us last week to give to Debbie. Oh. My. Goodness. It is absolutely gorgeous. What a lot of time and effort she's put into it! Debbie - having been brought up well ;o) - has already written a thank you note. She just loves it!

When Debbie and Jason went on holiday to Canada last year, a friend took her to the quilting shop we'd gone to in 2011 - blogged about here - and bought her fabric to make a quilt for the baby. At that time, Debbie didn't know what sex the baby was so the fabrics are non-gender-specific. I've spent the last week or so making them into a quilt top.

It's now pinned on to a fleece for the backing so I hope to get it quilted together this week.

One of Joanna's work colleagues was admiring her diary cover (blogged about here) and oohing and aahing and drooling over it. Maybe the last bit isn't quite true but it was a close thing! Joanna asked me if I'd make a cover for Gail. Of course, I said yes.

Here's the front:

The back:

The inside front cover showing part of the quote Joanna chose:

The inside back cover with the rest of the quote - I did the quote using my embroidery machine. So easy peasy!

I hope Gail likes it - I'm sure she will!

You might have noticed some wee paws in the photo showing the back cover. That's because Tilly decided she wanted in on the act. Butter wouldn't melt! :o)