A domestic goddess : sewing and cooking

The Mouthy Stitches swap is producing some absolutely beautiful pouches and ideas. I just hope my partner likes mine.
I've sewn all the paper pieced bits together, next step, to sew it to the front of the pouch.


I ordered zips from Zipit, they haven't arrived yet, but they're not going to be any help as I didn't order zips that are long enough for this one.    *#@!


I've had a look at my local store but they have a limited range of colours, and not really anything that I want to use with this, so it looks like I'll be trekking to Spotlight for a zip hunt.

In the meantime, I've finished the Name Game Swap mini quilt. I'm really happy with it, despite having very little idea of what my partner would like as she has been very very quiet. I've blurred the name just in case, as I want it to be a surprise. I hope it's not too much of a surprise.




It's inspired by an Orla Kiely design, and has my partner's blog name on the front, well part of her blog name. The bit that matters. The blog name is long and it would have taken up most of the quilt space if I had used the full blog name. I hope she likes it.

A close up of the leaves and quilting, I echo quilted around the applique letters and leaves.  Argh there's a bit of fluff below the orange leaf. Why is it that you never see things like that until after you've taken the photo and loaded it to the computer, oh well. that dark speck is a bit of fluff not a mark on the quilt.

I still have to make a label for the back but otherwise it's all ready to go.

Yesterday afternoon, Shay and I had a cooking session a few thousand kilometres apart. Shay found the recipe and suggested we both try it.  We made Peppermint Patties.
Let's just say they were good, but I'm not sure whether I'd bother making them again. Especially in the middle of a Queensland summer! High humidity and heat are not great for confectionery making.  They had to go in the freezer after each step, but that still didn't help much. As you can see from the following photos it's lucky I don't aspire to be a food blogger!

After kneading the fondant

Cutting the fondant rounds, aren't they pretty

Not so pretty afterwards. These were the best looking. The dipping them in chocolate part didn't go very well, they either started melting and stuck to the fork or they drooped over the edge. It wasn't that the chocolate was too hot, it was the temperature of the house and the humidity.  As soon as I took them out of the fridge to take the final photo, they started sweating.  They taste great though.


BP was home for the weekend, hmmm, let me just say, I'm quite very happy that she is living in Brisbane.             Teenagers!

Not what they seem

Don't these look beautiful. I found them in Paris and just had to bring them home with me.  They are the most beautiful shiny olives, except they are not olives they are exquisite chocolates.  Lovely dark chocolate disguised as plump olives. La Cure Gourmande "Olives au Chocolat" you will find photos of the store here. It looks like a film set.

As I am fairly new to blogging, I am going to try posting about my holidays last year, now.  I didn't realize six months ago what a wonderful invention this is. Now I can keep a wonderful reminder and journal of holidays and even daily things that happen in my life.  I have never been one for journalling.  I am not disciplined enough to be constant.  I started a journal on my last holiday and at the beginning I would even stay up late at night, using up precious minutes of sleep time to keep up to date with my journal, in case I forgot anything later.  By the last half of the holiday, I was struggling to remember and then having to write 2 or 3 days at once.  My memory is bad at the best of times, but when trying to remember a jam packed day of sightseeing let alone which city I had been in 2 days before, the journalling became a bit hit and miss.  It will be interesting to see whether I will be more likely to post "stuff" on here, although so far so good.