Little dresses for Africa

My dear friend, Emily, is hosting a wonderful event: Little Dresses for Africa.

It's a sewing event where you can learn some basic sewing techniques, sew a super cute little girl's dress using a pillowcase, bedazzle it to your liking, and then donate it to Africa. Did I mention there will be delicious baked goods?

Jenn and I will be teaching the sewing workshops! For more information, click on the image below. No sewing experience necessary!

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The chewiest cookies in the world

In my last post, I raved about Elizabeth Hartman from the blog Oh, Fransson!

This post gives a shout-out to Joy, from the food blog Joy the Baker. Joy's blog is full of great recipes accompanied by great photos of her food. She's got a great quirky personality that shines through in her posts, always really fun reading. Plus, she has freckles. Freckles are cool.

I've had Joy's Chewy Molasses Chocolate Chip Cookies recipe bookmarked for a while now. I'm not usually on the hunt for a cookie recipe, since my usual recipe is so tasty, and probably the healthiest you can get given that it's a chocolate chip cookie. But when my good friends Tammy and Trev were so kind as to lend us a whole whack of baby stuff, it called for an extra special cookie recipe. The healthy whole wheat ones just wouldn't cut it.

The best thing about this cookie recipe is that you don't have to remember to soften the butter to room temperature. It calls for melted butter. (You don't have to keep the pot on the stove until the entire cup of butter is melted. Once it's about 2/3 melted, turn the heat off and swirl the melted butter around until the last 1/3 melts.)

The next best thing about the recipe is that it uses molasses. And although I don't always have molasses in my house, buying a small carton for this recipe guarantees that I will make this recipe another 3 or 4 times. The molasses stays good in the cupboard for... well, for a very long time.



I've made a couple really tiny tweaks to Joy's recipe. I don't have bread flour in the house, so I used all-purpose flour. Use 2 1/4 cups of all purpose flour. Instead of 1 egg and 1 egg yolk, I just use two eggs. Why waste the egg white? I also find that 1 1/2 cups of chocolate chips is plenty. Finally, I skip the sea salt, but I bet that would be a tasty addition if you're not planning on bringing them to an office potluck where the sea salt will likely go unappreciated.

The result is a truly magical cookie. Like the kind you get from a gourmet cookie shop. Leave lots of room between the balls of cookie dough because it really spreads out to a thin, chewy cookie. I highly recommend the use of a small ice cream scoop (I have this one). If you don't own one (or two), add it to your Christmas list! It's a huge time-saver, not to mention an integral part of portion control...

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Kitchen window quilt

If you love quilt blogs, Oh, Fransson! is a must-read. Elizabeth Hartman does such a great job keeping her blog clean and crisp, with lots of inspiration and step-by-step tutorials (like the one I used for the laptop cozy.) I bought her first book "The Practical Guide to Patchwork" and recently found out she is writing a second quilting book called "Modern Patchwork".

This is the only quilt book I've purchased to date. Usually, I would take a quilting class at the workroom, use an online tutorial, or figure it out on my own. But classes don't always work with my schedule, and they can get a bit pricey. Online tutorials are not always complete, and having to figure out all the math (how much fabric, how big to cut each piece, how big is my seam allowance again?) is quite a chore, so I ended up buying Elizabeth's book whilst searching for a good modern quilt design to make for my mother in law. My mother in law is a great supporter of my quilting hobby; every year since I've found the workroom, she has given me a giftcard in my stocking. It never takes long for me to spend the gift cards...

When I saw the "kitchen window" quilt design in Elizabeth's book, I knew it would be the perfect quilt for me to make. I didn't want to fuss too much about matching fabrics, making sure there's enough contrast and coordination, so this pattern works perfectly. Each chosen fabric is framed (like a kitchen window) so I was able to pick a loose colour palette and just go nuts buying really pretty fabric.

The feature fabrics I chose were generally things you'd see outside your window: birds, bugs, leaves, flowers.

I used:

Cut Out & Keep by Heather Moore
June Bug: Songbirds by Alexander Henry
June Bug: Malt Bugs and Birds by Alexander Henry
La Petite Ecole in Faded Red Word by French General for Moda
Martinique: Bisque in Brown Floral by 3 Sisters
Westminster Navy Patterned Floral by Fabric Freedom

I framed them with deep-brown Evening Mist by Sentimental Studios and then kept the borders clean with a cream Kona Solid.

This quilt came together relatively quickly; I mostly stitched-in-the-ditch to machine quilt it together with a little bit of artistic stitching inside each frame. I did a bit of a scrappy back and then bound it with a blue and gold star fabric.

I gave the quilt to my mother in law in October for her birthday. She loved it. It's definitely a quilt pattern that I would try again!

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