Swans

The swans are finished. Well, at least the top is finished ...

The pattern is from from 'Burda Patchwork - Quilts & Applizieren Sommer 2013'. The swans are paper pieced, while the water and the rest is all free form patchwork.

In order to make the wall hanging a  little smaller than the original design, I took out some of the water, moving the swans closer together and taking out some stuff on the top and bottom as well. It still comes out almost at 100 x 100 cm (original is about 20cm bigger)

I used up a ton of my blue scraps for this.

Some detail of the left swan's head:

This and That

I got a new pillow for my sofa. I saw a picture of one like this on a blog and reverse engineered the cable pattern.

Yesterday I made some last minute x-mas presents: strawberry-cranberry jam (from strawberries I froze in June and fresh cranberries - it's very yummy)

For the entree at Christmas day's dinner I prepared a terrine with rabbit (we used to make this in my familie many, many years ago, and luckily we managed to dig up the recipe once again. It smells great)

 My swans are making progress, though I haven't had much time to work on them lately, being busy with about a million other things to finish before christmas.

Christmas Cookies 2013

This year I told anybody who asked I wouldn't make any Christmas cookies. Last year I made more than 4 1/5 kilos and even though they were very nice, this was really over the top.
Hence my decision not to make any.
But then I came across this adorable little cookie stamp and as I had to buy it, I also had to make cookies with it.

I used the recipe for Heidesand for this (one of my all time favoriete recipes) and am very pleased how they turned out. They look super cute, have a nice, crispy texture and taste sweet and buttery.

Last week my mom asked if I could get some marzipan as their store had run out. I bought more than I thought she might need and took the rest home with me and made Bethmännchen (a speciality from around Frankfurt)

 So much for not making any cookies this year ...

Design Wall

Yeah, I'm going all fancy with my quilting. Not only has it taken over the spare room / guest room in my apartment, no, I now also have a design wall.
And I have to say, this is very useful for the whole quilting process.
Case in point, a quilt, which would have driven my mad if I hadn't had the wall (which is just two boards of styropor glued together on one side and then covered with white fabric)
Thanks to the wall, I managed to catch a couple of mistakes before they would have been a real problem. I'm sure I've made much less mistakes to begin with.

 The current project is a paper pieced pair of swans from 'Burda Patchwork - Quilts & Applizieren Sommer 2013'.
So far, there's only the left swan. But the wall helps with keeping track (and can be used to store some of the scrap stripes I'm using)