When the Sewing Bug Bites....

I spent the weekend sleeping and eating, with some honest to goodness sewing chucked in. Friday night I caught up with some girlfriends for dinner, and Saturday night we went out to my favourite Chinese restaurant to celebrate a family birthday. On Saturday I was all set to get together with the Not The Farmer's Wife sewing girls for our monthly sewing sesh but a fortuitous message at 8 am , advised me that I had the date completely cocked up. Good thing I saw that or I would have rocked up at Claire's a full week early ( which given my usual Modus Operandi for being woefully late to sewing group , probably would have resulted in her having a heart attack) 

I've been avoiding some long neglected quilting projects for far too long and have added a couple more starts since I last looked at the unfinished pile and then promptly ignored them.  This past week, I decided to take stock of where my projects are at and how many UFO's I have laying around. It felt like I had an overwhelming amount of things in progress but once I got them all out it wasn't too bad at all. 

Marrakesh...sitting in the lounge waiting for me to decide if the centre rectangles need quilting....

Charming Stars has been living on the sewing room floor for about three months ...and has cat puke on it I think...

Miss Elizabeth hasn't been touched in about two months ....

I started this HST quilt a few months ago but progress had stalled.

Holiday Happy has been living in this box for about two years now in a state of unfinished-ness. There's nothing happy about that ....

And my Swoon blocks are driving me slightly mad , but at least they're only a couple of weeks old....

Something magical happened once I had all those projects out - the sewing bug bit and my motivation to sew came back with a vengeance. Happy Day!  

I finished half the HST quilt and decided to go with a more traditional layout for convenience(plus trying to work out setting squares was doing my head in) Yeah, I know I'm a wuss, and I will do setting squares at some point - just not on this quilt...

I picked up the cat puke quilt from the floor and got on with the quilting ....FYI it wasn't as bad as I thought...

And I decided that Marrakesh didn't need any extra quilting, chucked it in the wash and ended up with my first finish of 2015 ....

Here's the front ...

And here is the pretty part of the back ...

Now to sustain the momentum! 

In Search of Chocolate Chip Cookie Greatness

Thank you to everyone who has recently sent me chocolate chip cookie recipes. Because I'm all about evidence based research,  I'm working my way through them and consequently I'm starting to look like a whale. Because making them means you have to eat them too. But Van Gogh suffered for his art and I'm applying the same sort of rigorous commitment to my chocolate chip cookie quest.  And yes - an arse the size of China is a small price to pay for finding the perfect chocolate chip cookie. 

P at The Way I Sew It sent me a recipe which called for Crisco which isn't easily obtainable here, so  I went online and had some sent over from USA Foods In Melbourne. It arrived on Thursday so I set about making her recipe on Saturday. You Americans just love to make shit difficult don't you? The recipe called for all purpose flour and baking powder. Why don't you guys just use self raising flour so you don't have to drag out two containers? That's what I did, because I'm lazy. I also couldn't be bothered doing accurate conversions, so instead of the 3/4 of a cup of butter , I chucked in 200 grams. I'm just not up for stuffing butter into a cup and then digging it out again with a spoon. That's just madness. I did chuck in 1 and 3/4 Aussie cups of flour which is about 50 grams more flour but I figured that would cancel out the extra Crisco. And I put in extra chocolate chips , because you can never have too many right? Then I duly plopped tablespoons onto trays. By the way,you guys can't do maths at all, because the recipe said I would be get three dozen cookies and I only got 18. 

The first batch of cookies went into the oven ...and came out looking like this...someone on Facebook commented that they looked like they were trying to escape. 

The recipe said they would take 8-9 minutes for chewy cookies and 11-13 minutes for crispy cookies. Mine took about 25 minutes. What's up with that ? Its not like time moves slower Down Under. Although I accept that my baseball sized tablespoon plops were probably to blame. And, no wonder my cookies were trying to escape - they were being burned alive- slowly. 

Round Two and Three went a little better...although I got distracted by Pinterest and Cupcake Mania on my iPad so some of my cookies got baked for 15 minutes and some were in there for about an hour, so I had all the colours of doneness by the time I was finished. 

I must say,that even though Crisco is not actual food per se, (I checked the history of Crisco and I kid you not they used to make candles out of the original incarnation) the cookies were pretty bloody good, and I reckon I can tweak this recipe ( and take a vow of not being distracted by games on my iPad) and if I measure things a little more carefully, maybe this could be the recipe of my dreams. If I can get over the guilt of using Crisco. But I'm not backing off on the extra chocolate chips because that would just be wrong. 

Happy Mother's Day to all of you. I spent a fabulous afternoon in The Jungle with my Mum having lunch. Mum's are just awesome aren't they?