The Whole Package

Mabz was on a budget for her friend's birthday, since she was invited to four birthday parties this month! She chose the cutest little pink and blue polka dot cosmetic bag and filled it with a matching manicure kit and two coordinating nail polishes. The birthday girl is sure to love it! Then, she wrapped it like we always do:

• She chose a gift bag from our stash. Some are from gifts we have received. This one was a shopping bag from Bare Escentuals.
• She covered the logos on the front and back with striped cardstock from her art supplies made it into a sticker with her Xyron sticker maker. (I usually just gluestick it on- the refills for that little gadget aren't cheap!)
• She found pink and blue polka dot tissue paper, also from our stash of recycled wrappings. Unbelievable that it matched the gift so perfectly!
• She made a card and envelope from coordinating cardstock.

Another inexpensive alternative is the selection of cheerful gift bags offered at Dollar Tree for- you guessed it- $1 each. They also have helium-inflated balloons. And their greeting cards are two for $1, but I still like the homemade ones best!

Flammable Foods

Does anyone think it's at all funny that the day after I posted about burning my rice, I received a newsletter from my insurance company including (just what I needed) - an article listing six flammable foods? Has anyone ever even heard of deep-frying stuffed peppers? I was raised in the South and all, where everything is fried, but really?

New Scrap Management System

I'm heading up to my cottage now to work on my scrap bins. I've been reading a lot of articles about different quilters' "scrap management systems" and have combined a few to create one that I think will work for me. So I've been rotary cutting up a storm for a couple of hours each evening this week. As soon as there's enough progress to show you, I'll post more about it.

A Burning Question...

I wasn't planning to post again today, but this topic just happened to come up tonight in my kitchen!

Q: If I burn my rice or sauce, is there any way to save it?
A: Maybe.

Here's how:
Turn off the heat-immediately. 
Resist the urge to stir! (This is the key.)
Let it cool so that most of the burnt stuff sticks to the bottom of the pan. (It will anyway.)
Taste it from the top to see if it tastes scorched. If it does, throw it away. There's nothing you can do.
If it doesn't, spoon it out carefully from the top. Do NOT scoop down to the bottom. Your objective is to transfer all the good-tasting food into another container, leaving the icky mess in the pan. If it's rice, it's probably fully cooked by the time it burns, but if it's a sauce, and it's not done yet, just continue cooking it in a fresh saucepan.

See, it worked for me!

Q: Is there an easy way to clean the scorched pan?
A: No. Soak it in soapy water overnight and scrub like h-e-double-toothpicks in the morning.

I hope you weren't expecting two miracles in one post!

Woven Measuring Tape Fabric

I was supposed to be helping my daughter pick out a birthday gift for a friend at Walmart when I accidentally wandered into the fabric department (I'm not a fabric snob). Can I help it if the fabric is right next to the toys? Then, somehow the girl at the cutting table got the impression that I wanted her to cut me a half-yard, so I had to buy it, even though I am supposed to be sewing up what I already own first. And now I have to figure out what to do with it, I guess. 


How about a sewing tool roll, like I make for my husband's wrenches? Or a sewing apron? Or another tote? Maybe a "dumpling bag"... Eighteen inches is enough to make a few small items, even. Oh, sew many possibilities!


Maybe I'll challenge myself to see how many different things I could make with this adorable  sewing-themed fabric. Yeah, that's it...

Lemon Balm, A Lazy Cat, Butterflies

Milburn Takes a Nap!

I thought the plant on the left, Lemon Balm, which smells like lemon dish liquid when you rub the leaves, was just for looks- until my husband asked if you could eat it. It turns out you can not only eat it, but make tea out of it. I can't wait to try some! The one next to it is Lamb's Ear, but we call it "bunny ears". It's a fun little plant, too, but you can't eat it!

In addition to the beautiful white blooms on our Red-Tips this week, there were hundreds of these colorful butterflies!

Ten Minute Table Runners

We made these fun and fast "Ten Minute Table Runners" at our quilt guild meeting Tuesday night! 

Pictured here (left to right) are Janice, Kay, Judy, Gisela, Karin, Christina, me, Sandy (who taught us the technique) and Kate, with our runners on the table in front of us. Two of the runners pictured weren't quite finished due to a back-up at the ironing boards, but I'm counting it as nine finishes! I think we had more, but they must've slipped out the door before picture time.

Get free instructions here from Sweet Home Quilt Company or here at RGA Design Quilts (this one includes a "Twelve Minute Gift Wrap Bag). 

While it took us a little over an hour to nearly complete these nine runners with six sewing machines, including instruction time, chatting, waiting for irons, chatting, ironing, chatting, posing for pictures, and chatting...oh, and a bit of seam ripping from sewing a seam wrong (OK, maybe that was just me)... I believe that now I could actually make one of these in somewhere close to ten minutes (maybe fifteen)! They would be great for decorating holiday tables at a group banquet or pot-luck dinner. You could even give the centerpieces away as door prizes!

Here's a close-up of mine, completed last night with embellishments from my button jar. Kate cleverly plans to applique on the triangle ends of hers. Tassels could also be sewn onto the points.  

Any project completed within 24 hours counts as a success in my book!

Taming the Scrap Bin(s): Part 2

Another Scrap Quilt!

Since I had so much fun digging through my scrap bins in Part 1 of Taming the Scrap Bins (and since I never finish a quilt without starting another one first), I dug out a bunch of "strings"  (anything at least 6" long and no wider than 2" or so) and some used dryer sheets to use as a foundation, and started this. Like my "bricks" quilt, every scrap has a memory attached to it. While sewing the strips onto the dryer sheets, I grabbed strings from the pile totally at random, making sure only that I was using a variety of widths and that no fabric was repeated within a sheet. The strings didn't all have straight, parallel edges- so it's a little "wonky", which I like. This is such a liberating exercise- you should try it!

Once each sheet was full, I trimmed it to 6" wide and straightened the top and bottom edges so they can be sewn together in long strips (as shown above) later. Right now I have no idea how big this thing is going to be, but I am thinking about sashing between the strips in a color that will bring all the scraps together, and some kind of scrappy border at the top and bottom instead of all the way around.

For this and the "bricks" quilt, I plan to piece a backing out of fabrics left over from many years of projects. I'm not too worried about having all those seams in the backing, since I will probably just machine quilt it in a large meandering pattern. Wish me luck- I'll let you know how it turns out!