butterfly quilt

I should have waited for some sunlight to take pictures of this, but after walking around it for weeks on the floor, I just wanted to box it up once it was done.



the pattern is free from JoAnn Fabrics.  I thought it would go together easily, but it ended up being way harder than expected.

part of it is that I am my mother's daughter and can't follow a pattern as written.  for instance, I couldn't bear to make just a solid back, so I made a second butterfly for the back. I didn't have enough solid brown fabric to have the body mirror the front, so I ended up piecing the body section here instead.  it took some extra time then to get it all to line up right.  the paisley print is an old Prints Charming print I had in my stash that I was once going to make into a skirt.



I also just made my own version of the antennae instead of copying the pattern, and then placed them randomly on the head such that he kind of looks like a bunny.  oops.



some tips if you wanted to make one:
1. borrow a projector or just enlarge it on the computer rather than taking the pattern to a copy shop to enlarge.  the copy job was too much for the folks at Staples and the FedEx folks needed several attempts to get it right.  they ended up printing it on blueprint paper and it cost me $10 and more than an hour of time.
2. transfer the markings to the fabric.  I did for the first few, but it seemed not to matter.  so I stopped and just pinned it.  at the end, it was a misaligned mess.  I spent an hour or two tearing out most of the seams and then went back and transferred the markings and sewed it all again.
3. you don't need nearly as much fabric as the pattern suggests.  Five-eighths is needed for the biggest pieces, but the smaller pieces need only a couple inches.  check your stash and plan your color scheme in advance if you want to avoid having lots of extra yardage.

pixel snail quilt

this was a weird hermit weekend for me, where I barely made it out of the house and haven't had a conversation since Friday.

despite failing to make progress on work that I needed to get done, I did finally box up a baby quilt to send to some friends.  it has been done for a couple weeks but I somehow never got around to putting it into the mail, so now it will be even more belated.

anyway, it is a riff on the snail quilt from the Dare to Be Square quilting book.



I followed the pattern about half the time.  I pieced the eyes rather than embroider them, and I added a striped landscape both to make it a little more interesting and to enlarge the dimensions a bit.

the color scheme was originally inspired by the backing fabric, some old stuff from my stash that I got at eQuilter during one of their big sales for $5 or something. 



I ended up adding in a bunch more colors though because it seemed drab to use only peaches and purples.  I think I overdid it in the end - too much contrast, and that purple was the wrong choice. it looks better in real life than in the picture but it is still too dark, either way.

whatever

you were probably thinking that blempgorf was getting a little light on posts about muffins.

fear not, another damn post about muffins.

the good news: I am going to quit making muffins for a while anyway.  I have one box mix left and it will keep.

I made these today - cinnamon apple muffins.


last week, almond poppyseed with dried cherries and a light streusel.


the week before, scratch made blueberry muffins.  they would have been better if I had heard the timer go off.  they ended up a little crispy.  recipe is here, it is one I keep in my recipe file now.


the week before that, choco-banana muffins...



and lemon poppyseed.


I made some more cornflake cookies at some point.  I added some dried strawberries too - might revisit that part of them, but in terms of the rest, one of the less dazzling options in the King Arthur cookie book.


summary judgment about the art of baking muffins:
1. muffins are most successful with fresh berries.  alternatives like dried fruits, non-berry-fresh fruits, cream cheese, and vegetables tend to be insufficient to make a muffin tasty.
2. Krusteaz box mixes are not very good (any flavor).
3. the main virtue of muffins is that most recipes generate only 12-18, a more manageable load to lug to work, and they save time by not having frosting.
4. because they lack frosting, they will always play second fiddle to the cupcake.
 

random food post

so I think we can agree that Easter is the best holiday for candy, right?


it's weird but for some reason I have had this stomachache all weekend.  hmmm.

I occasionally eat healthy things.

I am slightly addicted to Noosa yogurt at the moment.  it is not really mind-blowing yogurt or anything, but I am not much of a yogurt fan so they are doing something right since I keep buying it.  good flavor, nice texture, filling portion.  better than greek yogurt.



I bought a sumo tangerine.


mostly because of this sign at King Soopers.



it didn't change my life but it was quite good.

ridiculously cute fabric

I broke from my Tuesday night baking trend and spent the last two hours reading a novel that turned out to be quite dreadful.  but it was nice to spend a big block of time just reading - I haven't done that in months and months.

now I am web surfing for nonsense instead of doing work.  I found an impossibly cute fabric that I might need to get. via Equilter - "It's An Amigurumi Life" by Trans Pacific Textiles.

random

somehow I got the idea in my head this morning that I should make a dessert from corn flakes.  I don't know why - and I should have talked myself out of it - but I nonetheless went forward.

I settled on a cookie recipe, via Momofuku and available from Martha.  chocolate chip, marshmallow, and corn flake cookies.



the reviews for this cookie online range from mediocre to poor - bloggers noted its complete failure to maintain a cookie shape and the mess it became in the oven.  (HINT: if baking bloggers admit to a recipe fail, it has to be a bad recipe.)  but I like marshmallows so much and I thought I could make it work.

I quadrupled the vanilla, used frosted flakes instead of the cornflake mix nonsense, subbed out half the butter for shortening, dumped in bonus flour, only mixed it for a quarter of the listed time, and made the cookies half as big and cooked them half as long.  they ended up looking better than most of the ones I saw in blogland, but the end flavor is nothing all that special and I just felt disloyal to my King Arthur cookie book and its reliable awesomeness. I will need to see if KA has a corn flake cookie.

panda awesome time

sweets

so I am losing interest in muffins because I think maybe muffins can never exceed the threshold of "fine."  I have made various blueberry streusel muffins over the years that have reached the level of amazing, but all the other varieties reach "good" at best.  my latest experiment was a tough test of the muffin - a carrot muffin with cream cheese filling, via King Arthur.  if a muffin with cream cheese in it isn't dazzling, then there is really no hope for muffins probably.



they are a good looking muffin for sure, and a solid four star muffin - maybe five star in the subclass of carrot muffins.  but I was not dazzled.  I think the problem is my unrelenting sweet tooth, and the fact that muffins just don't get to over-the-top sweetness very often.

what makes my sweet tooth happy today is this little gem I got at the grocery store:


chocolate bumpy cake, the $5 Friday special.  I love grocery store sheet cake - the shortening filled butter cream, the spongy chocolate cake mix.  but it is hard to find a good version - as the store closest to me seems to think that white frosting goes with white cake and chocolate frosting goes with chocolate when OBVIOUSLY the best combination is white frosting on chocolate cake.  so I was jazzed when I got my box cake home and realized that white buttercream lies under the chocolate frosting on a bumpy cake.  yay!

muffinsanity

I continue to make lots of varieties of muffins and I am to the point now where I am not sure that I even like muffins.  I haven't really made a batch yet that I thought, "oh my gosh, this recipe is a keeper."  they have all been, "so yeah, these are fine."

some of my muffin crazy town:

banana muffins.

7600 reviews on Allrecipes and a five star average.  so boring that people had to ask me what flavor they were, including one who asked if they were muffin flavored.

oatmeal muffins with dried fruit:

probably the best of my scratch-made muffins so far, but not all that exciting and I have come to expect more from King Arthur recipes.

raspberry blueberry streusel muffins:

from a modified Lehi Mills box mix.  among the better outcomes of muffin-palooza.

oh, I take it back. these are my best scratch-made muffins for sure.

after selecting all these well-reviewed recipes online with limited success, I gambled on this one with only five reviews and four out of five stars because I wanted to use up some strawberries I bought.  strawberry banana muffins via Pillsbury's site - reminds me of my grandma's blueberry banana bread and my favorites so far in muffins.  probably would be even better with blueberries.

oh, yes, there is still more.  (one of my students said that he has been packing a lighter lunch because I keep bringing in so many snacks to the office...)

orange almond poppyseed muffins.

from a box mix, but tweaked out with orange rind, orange juice in the mix, and a marmalade glaze.  the almond is powerful enough to make the orange a subtle piece still.  they were fine.

why did I dump marmalade on top of a muffin?  because I bought a $6 bag of clementines that were too sour to eat and was mad that I wasted the money on them, and rather than pitching them, threw three dollars more of Sure-Jell plus several hours of peeling clementines and slicing out the fruit from the segments in order to make an orange marmalade freezer jam out of them.  I struggled with getting the right ratio of rind in there - it was too scant on first go, but adding more rind gave it some bitter notes I did not care for.  thankfully I have some coworkers who like it so it will find a good home.


oh, I made some cupcakes for a Super Bowl party too.   the hosts are gluten-free so I attempted my first intentionally gluten-free baking.

I just used a box mix but then adding some cream filling.  the family recipe for cream filling has flour, so I just used a shortening-based buttercream as the filling instead.  I also made a dozen using a regular glutenous cupcake mix, as shown below.


The gluten free mix seemed like a meatless hotdog - fine if that's what you have to do, but not even close to the real thing in terms of flavor.

I did a little sewing today, but nothing finished yet.  I have this happy stack of fabric waiting for me for my next project though.