Design Floor Monday

Tipsy Tumblers!

The Missouri Star Quilt Company featured the Tipsy Tumbler tutorial way back in November, and I put it on my list of quilts to make.  So I started this the other day and it is such fun:  mindless with no points other than fitting the blocks together.  

I'm using a charm pack and a layer cake of white.  I have some yardage of the blue fabrics and I'll use them as borders and binding. 

What's next

Another string quilt.  These are my go-to, relaxing, mindless quilts.  Cut up a bunch of strips in varying widths, sew them diagonally onto Missouri Star Quilt Company's neat 10" papers, trim and that's it. Beyond mindless.  The best part is that you get to make choices of which fabrics to put next to each other.  My kind of patchwork.

The blocks are 10" square,  and they are easy peasy to assemble.  When Miss R visited us for her week, she picked out the fabrics to go with her newly painted bedroom.  The colors on my monitor are pretty accurate.

So now I need to sew them together, then the strips, and then I'll have a pretty flimsy.  It's got to wait in the queue, because I have 3 other flimsies spoken for.

So what to do next?  I'm thinking another log cabin but this one with 2" strips and not curved.  I found tons of fabric that's calling me.  Hmmmm.

So, a question for you quilters out there:  What do you do with your quilts when you have too many of them.  I am making for family and friends, so I'm not at that point yet, but it's coming.  I'm thinking donations to charities.  

Curved log cabin

Here's what's on my design floor, couch, pressing board.  A new curved log cabin.  White strips are Kona, the gorgeous reds/pinks/oranges are Kaffe and company.

The block will get another set of white and another set of colored blocks.

Here is one possibility.

You get the picture.
So now I'm playing with layouts.  Every time I do a couple of blocks, I have to play with them.  I swear this is my favorite part of the process.  Well that and picking out the fabrics and deciding where to put them.

And all the colored strips were cut by my new Shape-cut ruler.  Yay!  Look, Ma, evenly-cut strips!  The whites are from a Kona honey bun.

Tutorial from the Missouri Star Quilt Company, of course.  Jenny's approach is clearly the one for me.

Quilt and Cheese

Quilts and Cheese!  A strange combination, but it is what it is.

Inspired by Jenny Doan's Half-square triangle quilt.

 Ignore the wrinklies, please.  This is the flimsy on top of my bed, and it is not smoothed out.  Any real wonkiness will be quilted and crinkled out.  Yay, washing and drying quilts and getting quilty crinklies!

I liked doing this very much, but had trouble with my seams not nesting in certain spots.  Some of them were going in the same direction.  I have to work on my pressing. 

That's the quilt part of this post.  Here is the cheese part.

Home made ricotta cheese.  A soft, spreadable, creamy white cheese.  (Ignore the parts that look yellow.  It's my photography.  The real cheese is creamy white color).

I've been making paneer, a simple Indian cheese for decades.  Mindlessly easy to make.  Milk with lemon juice as a coagulant.  The other day I found  One-Hour Cheese: Ricotta, Mozzarella, Chèvre, Paneer--Even Burrata. Fresh and Simple Cheeses You Can Make in an Hour or Less! at the library and checked it out.  Holey Moley!  What a book.  Incredible photographs describing every step of making simple cheeses at home.  Not the kind that need to ripen, just the stuff you make and eat within an hour.  

So yesterday I tried a ricotta.  It looks crumbly, but isn't, even after being refrigerated for 18 hours.  It is creamy, spreads well, and is so delicious, I don't have the words to describe it.  The best soft cheese going.

I used lemon juice as my coagulant, but the process is different from making paneer, and I think that changes how the cheese comes out.

In paneer, you bring your milk to a boil.  Shut off the heat, and add in lemon juice.  You can substitute vinegar or lime juice, or even yogurt (which gives a lot of milk solids).  Strain it and let the whey drain off.  And there you have it:  a lovely crumbly cheese which you can then press to make nice firm shapes.

In the ricotta, you add the lemon juice to the milk before cooking it, and then you have a slow cook until it hits 190 degrees.  The curds form much slower than in paneer.  Drain, etc, etc.  It's an awesome cheese.  

I used 2 % milk.  Didn't want all the butterfat of whole milk, but wanted a certain creaminess that skim milk doesn't give.  A total of 6 cups of milk produced about 2 oz of cheese.  

I can see me experimenting with this cheese.  How about putting in a cheesecloth bag of rosemary, simmering it along in the cooking process, then removing it, this giving the cheese that gorgeous rosemary flavor.  Mmmm.  Yummy.

So that's it:  a quilt and a cheese.  Not half bad.

I Spy

I decided to make an I Spy quilt for Benjamin, our toddling grand.  It is such fun!  I'm using the Missouri Star Quilt Co. youtube on the exploding block, and it is easy peasy.

This is the prototype block.  I love it because the corners are deliberately not pointy.  Yay, not having to match that!

Just playing around here.  The blocks need that last bit to make the final block.  Before sewing together, each block is approx 6", and I figure a 50"-ish quilt for the kiddle.

Here are my favorites so far.  They will square up with the second block, so they won't look diagonal.

I love the llama and the doggie on the first row.  The lion and the doggie on the 3rd row.  All the chickens, of course.  We love dopey chicken jokes.  I have another chicken fabric, and a yoke fabric, too.  Plus lots of other fun fabrics to fussy cut. 

Hexies

Well, not really.  "Spools" is more accurate, although I'm not doing this as a spool quilt, but as a Dots and Boxes quilt.

Each box is approx 4".  I'll probably make it wider with more boxes and then with a border.  Or not.  I have a long way to go before making a border decision.  It's slow work, but very pleasant.

On the quick side, I'm doing a floating square quilt, based on instructions by Jenny Doan of Missouri Star Quilt fame.  I saw this YouTube, and had to do it.  When I first began collecting fabric a couple of years ago, I found this lovely charm pack of blues, yellows and white from Moda.  Can't remember the name.   I also bought a bit of yardage from the same line, and found some nice fabrics that live with it in my stash.  The white is Kona cotton white, my favorite.  This is so quick and easy.  I love her videos; they're perfect for me.  I'm afraid that I'm not very good with teensy little pieces that all have to fit together.  I admire those quilts, but I'm just not that precise, and not likely to improve.  But this little quilt is pleasant and mindless and within my capabilities.