OMG January Crossroads quilt

My January challenge for the One Monthly Goal of Patty's Elm Street Quilts was to start the Crossroads quilt in the original colours. I fell in love with it when the Fat-quarter shop announced this QAL. Now that I work with the fabric my love grows. The fabric is so nice to work with. Also, as I really enjoy quilting I have added some useful tools since to help me. The batik crossroads quilt was cut on a super small cutting mat, and I have since upgraded to larger one. What a difference this makes. I thought I would aim to cut the fabric for two months, with the hope of cutting a third month. Happy dance as I cut the fabric for the five months. I decided to take half an hour a day to cut, or even 20 minutes, one colour at a time. And then of course I had to fulfill my goal and cut the background fabric for the first two months. I ended up cutting for I don't know how long and finished for all five blocks. Happy dance again.

In addition my machine is back so I can start sewing. Well that, is once I have access to my sewing room. We are having isolation work done in the room behind my sewing room to make it in to a bedroom for our eldest. So this week and maybe one day next week before all the work is done and we can move the furniture back in to the room. After that I can bring order again in my sewing room, get rid of the dust and start sewing.

New recipe 3 Lentil soup with butternut squash

Mondays we eat soup, especially in winter. In the evenings I have Taiso, so not much time to eat nor cook. Also after the weekends thought it was a good way to balance the larger meals we have on Saturday and Sunday evening.

We all love lentils, and wanted to try a new way of preparing lentils. I did a search online and found the following recipe at Good Housekeeping of green lentils and butternut made in the pressure cooker. I did not have spinach so just omitted that.

Ingredients
2 onions, chopped
1 tbsp. vegetable oil
1.5 tsp ginger powder
1.5 tsp. ground coriander
1.5 tsp. ground cardamom
1 small butternut squash, peeled, seeded and cut into chunks
500 gr of green and blond lentils
6 c. chicken or vegetable broth

Preparation
In pressure-cooker pot on medium, cook onions and ginger powder in oil for 5 minutes or until onions are golden, stirring. Add coriander and cardamom; cook 1 minute, stirring. Add squash, lentils and broth.
Cook for 12 minutes in the pressure cooker.

The soup was great, everyone loved it.
We did not finish the soup, so I added some potatoes and carrots to have enough for 5 people and ate that three days later.

New recipe 2: Lemon cake with creme fraiche

I had made goulash and still had creme fraiche left over. I did not want to throw it out, nor eat it straight out of the pot (I so love the taste of creme fraiche and I so should stay away from it due to my lactose intolerance). Baking with creme fraiche is the perfect way to use it up and I went online to look for a recipe. I came across a recipe for a Lemon and Crème Fraiche Cake at Honest Cooking and decided to give this cake a try.

The original recipe calls for 1 cup of creme fraiche, however I had easily 1.5 cups of creme fraiche and adjusted the recipe to:

Ingredients
3/4 c vegetable oil
3 eggs
vanilla sugar
1/4 c of lemon juice
1 3/4 c of sugar
2,5 c of flour
1 sachet of baking powder
1,5 c of creme fraiche

Preparation
Mix the oil, eggs, vanilla sugar, juice, creme fraiche and sugar
sift flour and baking powder ad add to the mixture
Bake 60 min at 160degrees C(or longer as needed)

The taste was delicious, the kids loved it and took a slice to school as their after school snack

Project 4 Block 6 Ross blanket

Block 6 is done, it went rather quick as I "dedicated" all my free time to finishing it. I wanted to do block 6 before block 5 , so I could crochet block t5 directly on to block 6. That is a lot of the word "block" in one sentence.

The link to the patterns is on the Stylecraft page.


Am getting closer to my finishing the blanket, hurray

10 January

New recipe 1: poffertjes

I never had made poffertjes making the mix myself. So took my very old cookbook (Het nieuwe kookboek, bought in September 1982) )and made the following recipe:

Ingredients:
100 gr flour
100 gr buckwheat flour
2 gr salt
8gr yeast (fresh)
3,5 dl milk
butter for the baking

Preparation:
Prepare the batter with the fresh yeast and let stand for one hour. Use a poffertjes skillet or use a regular skillet making small pancakes blini size. Dust with icing sugar and indulge

The kids loved the poffertjes and shall definitely make these again

Project 3 Quince jelly

Last year I froze over 4 liters of quince juice. I had already used one part (2 l) and there was still another bag waiting in the freezer. I now had enough empty jam jars to fill up. I weighed the juice and had 2.6 kg of juice. I added 2.6 kg of sugar, juice of two lemons and let it boil.

The result is 14 jars of jelly - some will be gifted as I now have over 20 jars of quince jelly.

8 January

Project 2 Covering Alesya's judobag + little bag for her slippers

Alesya has the cutest backpack that her godfather brought her from one of his travels. She uses it for her judo kimono and slippers. The inner side of the bag was all coming apart and leaving a black residue on her clothes, not good. So I lined the bag from the inside with some African batik to keep her kimono clean. In addition I made a little pouch bag for her slippers.

This is one of the projects I had lined up since last year and I used my stash.

6 January

OMG January

It is the beginning of the month, and it is OMG planning time again. Patty from Elm Street Quilts continues the One Monthly Goals and I love participating. It helps me finishing off projects and be inspired with all these lovely projects other quilters make.

For this year my main quilt project is making the Crossroads quilt from the Fat Quarter Shop in the original version. In 2016 I participated in the Quilt A Long using African fabrics and was really happy with the end result. So I allowed myself to purchase the complete package.

Unfortunately my sewing machines are not functioning (one is easily 33 years old and in desperate need of a servicing, the other one of 23 years old has a sizzling pedal and needs to be repaired) so my OMG challenge for the month of January will be to cut the fabric for at least two set of blocks. A bonus will be if I cut a third set of blocks. In February hope to have at least one machine fixed for the sewing of the first two sets of blocks.

Project 1 Block 4 Ross blanket

Somehow I only manage to work on Ross during holidays, maybe the fact that I have time to sit down and concentrate helps. My aim was to finish block 4 of the Ross blanket between Christmas and New Years' Eve, but no ... not enough time or maybe I crochet too slow.

In the end block 4 is the first project of the new year that I finished. It fits the requirements of being a WIP. Hurray, so far so good.

More information is on Stylecraft's website

A new year with new challenges

A new year has started.
In 2017 I had challenged myself to finish 52 projects - and I managed. Some projects were chopped in sub-projects as they were quite large.

For 2018 I am setting myself two different challenges:

Challenge 1:
Making 52 projects in total, however with the added challenge that at least half should be finishing off Works in Progress (WIPs) using existing stash. I started making a list of projects to finish. These include my Ross blanket that I started crocheting last year, the red silk jacket that I started maybe already three years ago and just cannot seem to finish. The project also includes some knitting projects such as the blue cardigan I made two years ago and then frogged. On the quilting front it includes making the Crossroads quilt in the original version.

Challenge 2:
Cooking 52 new recipes this year. I have over 80 cookbooks and some never used. At least 5 times a week do I prepare our meals so this year will try at least 52 new recipes, using my cookbooks as much as possible.