A Pinterest Housewarming

Tonight we visited my brother-in-law and sister-in-law in their new home. I hunted around on Pinterest for ideas and I put together a little housewarming gift-bag for them.(Here's the link to the post.)

On the card I wrote:

Bread so you'll never go hungry. 

Candles so you'll always have light through the darkest times. 

Honey so you'll always enjoy the sweetness of life. 

Olive Oil so you will be blessed with health and well-being. 

Salt so there will always be flavor and spice in your life. 

Wine (or Orangina since we aren't wine drinkers) so you will always have joy and never go thirsty.

If I was at home I would have scrounged around for a basket to put this all in, but instead bought a cute gift bag and some tissue paper. We had a lovely evening and had the honor of being their first dinner guests!

Great-Niece

Recently, my nephew and his wife added to their family with a sweet baby girl. She made her entrance right in the middle of the Super Bowl.

I had done some pretty sneaky Pinterest stalking and "innocent" questions on Facebook and figured out what colors and design the baby's mama would like in a quilt.

I was so happy with how it turned out! (The mama was too!) I sent it to The Missouri Star Quilt Company for the quilting. I got it back in ONE WEEK! This is the fourth quilt I've sent to them and this was the fastest turn around.

I just love the bubbles in contrast to the angles of the zig-zags. So fun!

I always like doing something kind of fun for the backing.

Welcome, little one!

Fondue for Two

I have been having a lot of fun trying out some of my new gadgets. With Christmas and my birthday being a little more than two weeks apart, I get blessed seemingly all at once with  more than a couple gifts from my loves ones. I don't mean to brag. Just, you know, one of my love languages is gifts...giving and receiving. So the whole Christmas and birthday things are exciting to me.

For a few years I have talked about wanting to try fondue. I think it would be a fun treat when we have guests. I fondly remember having fondue in the 70s at my parents' house. Pretty sure their fondue pots were a lovely shade of burnt orange and avocado green. :/

This year for my birthday my sweet hubby gave me a fondue set. He couldn't find any in a store (and I looked too) so we ended up ordering one online. A couple of days after it came we decided to try it out.

Our first attempt was meat/oil fondue. I had a pork loin in the freezer, so that got sliced into cubes and marinated.

We read the directions closely and cooked the pieces of pork in the oil. Each fondue fork is a different color on the end of the handle, so when there are a lot of people partaking, it's easy to remember which fork was yours.

I learned that I need to cut the pieces of the meat a little bit smaller so it would cook a little more quickly.

We had some rice and mango salsa with the pork. It was so good!

The next night we tried some cheese fondue.

I think this was my favorite between the two. What's not to like? Hot melty cheese with a little wine mixed in and some homemade crusty artisan bread. Mmmmm!

Next we'll have to try some chocolate fondue. Come visit and make a request!

A Christmas Gift

I have a thing for dishes. When we lived in Singapore I discovered a kind of outlet store for dishes. It was basically a warehouse with the dishes piled on the floor all over the place. What was being sold there were seconds of dishes that were manufactured in Indonesia. Some of them had very obvious flaws, others were more difficult to see. The best thing about those dishes is that they were very inexpensive! A dinner plate was around $1.25, a salad plate was 75 cents. Over the course of the three years we lived there I bought four or five (five or six?) sets of dishes. If you come visit me for a weekend, I can serve you each meal on a different set of dishes.

So you'd think I would stop looking at dishes, huh?

Well...

Last fall I was wandering through a Crate & Barrel store (one of my favorite things to do) and a set of dishes caught my eye. They had an Asian theme to them. On a whim, I added those dishes to my Christmas list and my sweet hubby spoiled indulged me and gave them to me for Christmas.

Last night I fixed Fried Rice with some egg rolls and thought it was a perfect time to use those dishes. (See the bottle of soy sauce with the price tag sticker on top? It's one I bought when we lived in Singapore. I keep refilling it. I left the sticker on the lid because it says "Tanglin Market" the name of the grocery store I shopped at. Call me sentimental.)

Sooo many things I love about the dishes: The green square plate, the ginkgo leaf shaped plate and motif on the other plates, the little ginkgo bowls for sauces.

It just makes meal time fun when the dishes are fun.

(I like Ginkgo trees. I bought an artificial one when we live in Singapore  You can see it behind Megan in this photo.) (She's working hard on a Christmas craft.)

Table Runners

A few day ago I wrote about spending a lot of time sewing. I have finished a couple of table runners and thought I'd post some photos.

Remember my post about using a  die cutter to cut up some of my stash and how I ended up with this pile of 5" squares?

Here's a table runner I've made from just a small part of that pile: (I made this one for my sister.)

I made just a little label for the back. 

I like how using the same fabric as the backing blends in so well.

I bought a charm pack called Breeze from my one (so far) visit to The Missouri Star Quilt Company. I just love the colors. This is the table runner I made from that: (I made this one for my daughter.)

For both of these table runners I sewed the binding on the back and brought it around to the front and sewed it with a running zig-zag top-stitch. I like the added texture and it's a bit more durable.

It feels good to finish some projects. And yes, I already have the next one laid out and ready to go. :)

The Golden Package

Two days ago, my baby turned 22 on the twenty-second -- so it was her Golden Birthday! I thought for a long time about what I wanted to do to celebrate that momentous day even though I am 450 miles away from her. I went to a party supply store and found some gold wrapping paper, bows and shredded paper. I also bought a Golden Anniversary card (a 50th wedding anniversary card) and crossed out words and added words to make it fit a birthday. Cheesy, but fun!

I packed the gold wrapped gifts, gold shredded paper and some gold wrapped chocolates all in a box and even put some gold stars on the box. (The lady at the post office got a kick out of the stars.) 

Don't you like my oh-so-professional editing to remove her address?

Megan said she loved all the gold and had fun opening the gifts! Happy Birthday, again sweet-pea!

When I Don't Plan Ahead

I am going to a baby shower tonight for this sweet angel girl.

I just had to take a picture of the gift bag.

It was the only gift bag we had that was big enough.  But please notice the green polka-dot and purple tissue paper. That's kinda girly, isn't it?

Gotta eat supper and then head to the baby shower. Just had to share. :)