Bunny Ears!

I started these super cute (and easy!) bunny treat bags a couple of weeks ago. 

Great, free pattern by It’s Always Autumn. 

Plenty of time to sew a bunch before Easter, stuff them with goodies, and make all the grandkids happy, right?

The first one took me awhile to cut and sew, but once I broke out the ruler and rotary cutter things went much faster. 

I used a different method to make the box corners since I couldn’t get the seams to line up (definitely user error…) and roped hubby into drilling bigger holes in the beads to make assembly easier.

I want to use these as decorations, so rather than stuff them with candy - and have them torn apart to get at the sweets - I used polyfill batting with a few pennies in the bottom for stability. The littles will still get their treats, just separately.

Aren’t they adorable!?! 

Rachel and I both love the orange bunny. Gotta dig thru the scraps so I can make another one. 

And how many have I made, you ask? The grand total stands at 4… Hoping to get a few more sewn and stuffed before we leave for CO on Saturday. 

Easter FPP

One of the designers I follow advertised a new (new to me?) very cute Easter foundation paper pieced pattern, and since I always wait until the last minute to make holiday decorations (see: last Christmas’ snow globe quilt that was hung on Christmas Eve without binding…) I jumped right in. *

It’s been awhile since I did FPP, so I watched a how to video to get back up to speed. Did it stop me from making a bunch of rookie mistakes? Oh, heck no. But maybe it helped prevent a few? That’s the story I’m going with…

I wanted the egg colors to be in a specific order, and since FPP is done backwards - and my brain is tired - I carefully wrote on the pattern which color went where. 

Then promptly ignored it (you saw that coming, right?) and sewed them according to the not-backwards picture. 

Closer to correct - the greens are reversed but I can live with that

Fortunately I caught it after only 3 pieces. I’d have been really annoyed if I’d gotten all the way done. 

Top half of a 4.5” coaster

Pretty cute, huh? 

* We’re leaving Saturday to go visit the CO branch, returning the day before Easter, so this is right on schedule for ‘last minute.’

No Helpers

The grandkids (and us grownups) polished off yesterday’s epic-fail cake before bedtime. 

Rainbow carrots fresh from the garden of my pal Debbie

I was curious to see if I could duplicate whatever the problem was - plus we had another basket of strawberries in the fridge- so I made another angel food cake today. Can I just say it’s a lot more fun to talk Leo through the process than to do it myself? Separating 12 eggs is a cold, messy job. 

Once it was out of the oven, I surrounded the inverted cake pan with enough pots to guarantee it couldn’t fall over again. And… victory! 

Tall, tasty, non-fail cake. (I still like the taste of fail-cake better…)

Angel food cakes use just egg whites, so I again had 12 yolks left over. Throwing them away bugged me so a quick internet search later, this 12 Yolk Pound Cake (here) was ready to bake. 

The tube pan being already in use was my excuse for trying out the new springform pan (it’s powder blue. So pretty.) I was curious if it would leak (it did not!) or if the shape would affect the bake time/texture (it did not!) As a bonus, there was a crusty, crunchy lip around the cake that was very delicious. 

And no, we aren’t going to eat both cakes ourselves. Mary’s favorite cakes are angel food and pound cake, so half of each went home with them. I’m going to slice and freeze the rest of the pound cake and keep it for snacking after the angel food is gone. Sure has been a yummy couple of days!

Are We Done Yet?

Donovan and Jac kept me company while I did today’s sorting (and by ‘company’ I mean we were in the same room while they played Minecraft and tried to talk me into going downstairs to get them cake 😜).

Today’s stats: 1 big bag of trash, 2 boxes for donation and a home found for some of my EPP projects. 

I know I’m never going to work on them again (or at least the chances are very slim given hand, shoulder and eye issues) but I was having a really hard time letting go. Knowing they’ll have a good home helps. 

Funny for the day: apparently I had (have?) a problem with scrap management (we are not going to call it scrap hoarding…) 

All 4 of these bags/boxes have fabric pieces ranging from teeny tiny to quarter yards, going back to when I started quilting. Most of it went in the trash, a few fat quarter-sized pieces are in the donation box and that small black bin in front holds all I’m keeping. (I still think I might do a string quilt someday.) The funniest part? In 13-ish years I’ve been quilting, I’ve never made a scrap quilt. But some day I might… right??

Duck, Duck, Goose

Today was bake, slime, sort - kinda like duck, duck, goose for grandkids.

It’s Strawberry Season! and we live adjacent to the strawberry growing capital of the world (we saw strawberries from Oxnard when we were in Paris and London) so Leo and I decided to make angel food cake - her first time - while Pop made a run for berries. (And Jac sulked because she had to be off her phone for an hour. Grandma is so mean…)

Everything went well until we took the cake from the oven, inverted it so it could cool for 3 hours…. and within a couple of minutes it fell right out of the pan. 

I’ve never had that happen before and I’m not sure why it did this time (maybe it wasn’t cooked all the way thru and was too heavy? Any other ideas? Same recipe, same pan I’ve used for years…)

A deliciously epic fail. It didn’t stop the littles (and the grownups) from nibbling away at the edges before it was even cool. (Turns out I prefer the heavier, collapsed version to the original, so as Teena said, ‘hey, new recipe’!)

Then Leo helped Jac make squishy shaving cream slime, which Pop may not appreciate come shaving time tomorrow… Jac almost lost it again when I didn’t have the right colors of food coloring but Leo saved the day by mixing in some acrylic paint. Not something I would have thought of but it worked! 

Happy Jac (cake + strawberries + slime = happiness for 8 year old’s) helped me sort another row of fabric bins. 

Two more stuffed boxes are ready to donate and 5-ish more bins are empty. Making progress!

Fun Day

Leia was in charge of Big D today (Matt and Mary were in Del Mar for a reptile show… I see more snakes in their future) so to help entertain him, we offered to take them to the Moorpark teaching zoo’s spring extravaganza. 

 Who’s cuter? Teenager or Gila monster?

Back when hubby and I attended college classes there it was called EATEM, Exotic Animal Training, Entertainment and Management. Now it’s the classier, but less colorful, Teaching Zoo (here).

Donovan announced his boredom before we even got in the gates - and every few minutes afterward - but the rest of us had fun. 

(His attitude changed once he ate lunch. Note to self: protein for grumpy boys before going out the door.)

It’s a very small zoo but they have 2 new tigers, 

a lion, a Gila monster,

multiple apes/monkeys, 

and lots of enthusiastic students and volunteers willing to share fun facts. 

 Blue-tongued skink in the reptile house

The reptile house was the biggest hit - Donovan even forgot to be grumpy while we were there. And it’s amazing how much he knows about lizards and snakes. 

The show put on by first year students 

was silly (deliberately),

but we got great close up views of some cute critters. 

We also saw an in-progress training session 

with what one volunteer called “the smartest animal we have” (the baboon, not the student 😜) Super cool to watch. 

Leia picked our lunch spot, 

Yep, still wearing the fashion-statement glasses 🙄

a very busy, and slow, crepe restaurant which gave us plenty of time to take selfies.

(It was fun and the food was good but I doubt we’d go back - definitely overpriced with very slow service.)

Finished off the day with Leia making her first chocolate chip cake, a big family favorite, 

and hanging out with me while I worked on a new sewing project. 

 Endangered butterfly habitat

All in all, a very fine day. 

And yes, M&M came home with 3 more snakes… a big boa - D wants to name it Banana 😂 - and 2 small hog nose. See the black belly on one of the small snakes? That one’s Donovan’s and he named it Emerald.

Destash Redux

My quilt guild is having another fabric sale at the end of April, so when I finished the January craft room declutter, my plan was to go through the overflow room* (aka OMG how much fabric do you have?!?j and trash or donate a bunch - fabric to the guild and “stuff” to wherever.

“Before” pictures

Then we went to CO for Rachel’s birthday… and came back to 4 solid weeks of (probably) Influenza A… and the ongoing eye drama and… yeah, not much has gotten done. But hubby wants to move forward on installing a Murphy bed in the upstairs guest room, so today I started on the first wall of shelves.

Top shelf will be for oversized Christmas decorations 

Two+ bags of trash and a hallway full of donations later, that part is close to being done. (I cheated and also emptied several center section shelves near the back window since they were easy).

Red to Goodwill, blue to Guild, green to trash.

Then comes the center section where most of my yardage lives - the donation pile should be huge when it’s done; some of that fabric has been around since I started quilting 13+ years ago.

I’d worked on the front section before we went to CO. It was mostly photo albums and supplies from my (long gone) scrapbooking days and most went to a buddy who still scraps. The shelves on the right are almost completely empty, as are the middle shelves on the left. Making progress! And hoping to get some sewing done too…

* its not just fabric, honest! Suitcases, unwieldy vacuums, former craft hobbies and stuff that magically accumulates are all well represented here.