The Nigel Slater Project, Winter Block

Sometimes the muse just strikes. The Winter Block for our cousinly Nigel Slater project isn't due to be traded until the first of March. I'd been playing with design ideas in my head ever since finishing the Autumn Block, but I'd been stymied by the challenge fabrics selected by the Andrews husbands for this next quarter.  Scottie Dogs and…glow-in-the-dark Space Bats. Really???

Suddenly my design ideas needed to make a right turn. And then, last week we woke up to this, a perfect day for French Onion Soup. 

The moon on the crest of the new fallen snow, and a big bag of onions, loaf of fresh french bread and red table cloth spawned a new design. These are all improvisational blocks…quirky log cabins, wonky drunkard's paths, and some skewed strip piecings and here it is..

French Onion Soup and Fresh Bread on a Cold Winter's Night:

And the other one in the pair:

And now…on to spring design ideas!

The Nigel Slater Project

Last summer, I had a chance to spend some time with Kris, who you will remember from the Great Cousinly Quilt Project way back in 2009.  We discovered that we both had a full set of Nigel Slater's food writing and cookbooks, and both of us were enjoying exploring various culinary adventures. Before we knew it, the creative juices were flowing, and The Nigel Slater Project was born. 

Here's how the project works:

• Using Nigel Slater's cookbooks for inspiration, we each create a 12 X 18 quilt block. 
• We can only use fabric.
• We need to create two copies of the same block.
• Our husbands each select one fabric to be used in both of our blocks.
• We have three months to create the blocks.
• At the end of each quarter, we send one of our copies to each other, along with the husband fabric choice for the next block. 
• At the end of the year, we'll each have the same set of 8 blocks…which we can then piece into a finished quilt. 

Last weekend, we travelled to Vermont to see Kris, Christopher and delightful little Cole. Amidst the gingerbread houses, legos, hikes in the woods, and studio show and tell sessions, Kris and I exchanged our first blocks! After 3 months of work, it was so much fun to see what each other had created and it was awesome to see how great the blocks look together! 

Nigel Slater's "The Kitchen Diaries"

Pumpkin Tomato Lahksa - it was a yummy recipe for a cold, rainy autumn day!

Pumpkin Laksa!

The fabric palette for the first block.

Piecing in progress:

Tobi's finished autumn blocks:

Kris's finished autumn block: Cathedral Windows hand piecing!!!

 Autumn blocks together, with the husband challenge fabrics for this autumn block. 

Christopher's swirly fabric on bottom center.

Bruce's purple batik on bottom right.

What will next quarter bring??

Ski Condo Gingerbread

For the past few years, our Christmas vacation has included a 6 person ski vacation which requires nothing short of a 12 month planning effort to pull off. The logistics involved in getting 6 people, 10 skis, 1 snowboard, 12 boots, 12 gloves, 6 pairs of snowpants, an entire case of handwarmers and enough carbohydrate laden groceries to fuel an entire naval battalion packed and transported from Connecticut to Vermont takes about all of the energy I have. One thing that the ski trip precluded, however, was our traditional gingerbread extravaganza. So last year, along with the winter clothes packing melee, I packed up all the gingerbread paraphanalia and took it along, too.

One thing we changed, however, is the substitution of graham crackers for real gingerbread. And this small change made a world of difference in my ability to pull this off! I highly recommed it.

Here's the set up:

Note the number of candies stored in tupperware. Doing this ahead of time made the packing and clean up much quicker. Also, key to clean up was the disposable plastic tablecloth that we just wrapped up and threw away at the end of the night. It conveniently kept the rainbos sprinkles out of the carpeting.

With the artistic freedom of graham crackers (which can be broken and cut on demand, rather than gingerbread which needs to be templated and baked ahead of time), creativity ran rampant. Yes, Bruce constructed a volcano...complete with red hot spewing lava (that was made of, well, red hots...you know,the cinnamon candies?). This may be the only graham cracker volcano ever constructed:

I also packed up our icing spatulas, not wanting to rely on whatever odd and assorted cutlery we may have found in the condo kitchen. Here you see Mary, hard at work on her one storey saltbox.

And finally, here is my storybook cottage, complete with christmas lights in the hedges, a pretzel picket fence, and coconut snow in the front yard.

Another baby, another quilt...

Remember the Great Cousinly Quilt Project from 2009? Cousin Kris and I collaborated on a quilt for Cousins Steve and Esther, with Kris piecing one side, me piecing the other side, and swapping fabrics back and forth along the way. The quilt turned out great, and baby Kira
enjoys her quilt today.

Fast forward to 2011. Cousins Kris and Christopher, were expecting their first baby! So, Esther and I decided that another collaboration was in order!

When Esther suggested that she could do some batik animals, I had no idea what to expect. Lo and behold, on one winter day, this arrived in the mail from Esther:

Have you ever seen anything more amazing? Each on adorable and unique! And my stash held an unusual stack of matching fabrics, including some of the remnants from Kira's quilt, made 2 years earlier!

The searsucker batiks were a unique find several years ago. In my normal fashion, i bought only fat squares of each. I wish, in retrospect, that I had purchased at least half yard cuts of these. They are really unusual, and I've not seen them anywhere else. I can't even remember where they came from.

But here's where they are now. Check out Esther's turtle, surrounded by searsucker batiks!

I apologize in advance for this next picture. This quilt was finished while my good camera and laptop were not in communication. This is the best picture I have, however...

The quilt was finished in time to be sent to baby Cole Emerson, who surprized us all by arriving 6 weeks early! Hopefully, Cole's photographic biographer will provide some high quality photos of baby Cole on the second installment of the Great Cousinly Quilt Project.

Rumor has it that another quilt may soon be required...

Gingerbread Villages

This is the time of year when typically, our Christmas shopping is done (yes, really. Don't hate me - I like to get it out of the way so we can enjoy the season) and we turn our attention to holiday fun. One of our favorite holiday traditions is to make gingerbread houses with our godkids. We started this a number of years ago, and discovered that this is an activity that everyone can participate in, regardless of age. We also have amazing conversations as the six of us sit around the table for several hours.

We do quite a bit of preparation for this extravaganza, usually starting a week ahead of time, but you can start even earlier if you freeze the dough. Bruce and I make the dough and use templates to create the pieces of the houses. I created templates using 3" x 5" file cards which turns out to be an ideal size. We can get 6 individual houses from a double batch of gingerbread dough, and the finished house size fits on a bread board with enough room to still have a yard to decorate.

Here's Bruce cutting dough to templates:

Once baked, we store the pieces in zip lock bags for up to a week.

On decorating day, we set up work stations at the expanded table. Everybody works on a cookie sheet with a lip (to keep stray decorations from landing on the 1970's shag carpeting in our dining room. Oy vey.) We have a long shopping list of "construction candies" and I open everything and put it out in bowls for easy access. I make a huge batch of royal icing, and fill 6 icing bags which we stand up in heavy coffee mugs for easy access. Everyone also has a flat spreading spatula. Here's the "before" shot of the work table:

Here's an action shot of the "during"! Evan and Mary are consulting on Evan's liberal use of sprinkles. Caitlin is deep in thought (this is the day she got icing on her back...we still don't know how) and Bruce is in the throws of creating a groovy jalopy out of pretzles and life savers. Sarah is just off camera to the right. My work station is in the bottom middle of the photo.

Graham crackers as interior walls help support heavily decorated exterior walls. We've also used big marshmallows inside to help prop things up. This is Sarah's pretzel log cabin, with assembly in progress. Note her cool fruit roll-up roofing with candy cane beams...

The finished village...

Happy Frosting to all, and to all a good night.

Kira and her Quilt

Kira gets acquainted with her new quilt - dressed to match!

Balance

I don’t remember the first time I ever heard a cello. I do know that my first musical exposure was listening to Aaron Copland’s “Billy the Kid” on the stereo as a newborn. Because my parents are musicians, I was immersed in music early and often, and by the time I was in 4th grade, my instrument of choice was the violin. The reason for this choice was youthfully simple. My next-door neighbor, 4 years older than me, played the violin. Somehow I missed the significance when in junior high he switched to the double bass. Regardless, the violin was the center of my life for 25 years.

And then I changed careers. Forgive me if I don’t recount the whole event here. It makes me tired. I will share a regret from my career change: the selling of my teaching cello when I moved to CT in 1995. It was a good, solid student cello and a pleasure to play. But when I moved to a studio apartment in Greenwich, I didn’t have space for it. In 2009, As Bruce’s birthday approached, I hatched a plan to get him a C-flute as the yang to his Celtic flute’s yin. He was overwhelmed with this gift and immediately wanted me to accompany him on my Celtic harp. I was not so enthusiastic about this idea. The harp is pretty, but hard to play and limited in range.


Somehow, in the wake of Bruce’s Flute Birthday, the idea of replacing my cello was surfaced. With some advice from Mary, the new cello arrived. I haven’t shared too much about it since, mostly because, well, I’ve been practicing it instead of writing about it.

In fact, there is quite a lot of practicing going on at our house. We’ve both found teachers, we’re both working on technique, and we’ve both slipped into a regular practice rhythm that makes our evenings quite pleasant. Jack has made his peace with the flute, and with the cello itself, although he is not too keen about the cello case…

It has been a long, long while since making music was something enjoyable. But now, the cello, along with the quilt projects, my riding lessons, the summer cooking and baking, the lampworking, my godkids, friends and family, are all serving as counterbalance to the stress and strain of work...it feels like achieving balance might, might just be a possibility.