Project Quilting 10.6 – Craving Chocolate

Yum! Chocolate!  Who doesn’t crave chocolate at one time or another? (or, ahem – ALL.THE.TIME!) But chocolate for a quilt project?  That takes some imagination!  The rules did say that it could be chocolate the candy or chocolate the color, as long as it is inspired by chocolate.

I was super busy during the week of the last challenge, but at least I was home.  This week, I will be leaving for a quilt retreat with my guild on Wednesday, and I won’t be home until after the deadline on Sunday.  I will have plenty of time to quilt, but the camp doesn’t have internet access, and I won’t have a computer with me anyway.  The project has to be done, blogged about and linked before 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, when my ride shows up. 

I remembered that I had a small piece of fabric that showed boxed chocolates, so I thought that I would be a great place to start.  I knew that it wasn’t a big piece, but this week’s project was going to have to be small anyway due to my time constraints.  So the search began…

You’ve all been there, I’m sure.  You know you have it, you know where you saw it last, but you just can’t find it!  The first hurdle was the fact that my sewing room moved from my son’s bedroom to our family room and nothing is where I remember it to be.  The second hurdle was the fact that I vaguely remembered that I might have used it.  I wasn’t sure, but since it was such a small piece, I thought that I might have thrown it in with my scraps and put it into a block.  Since I couldn’t find it in the scrap bin with the other similarly sized pieces, I started looking at my WIPs.  (Works in Progress).  Just f.y.i. – by my definition, they don’t become UFOs (Unfinished Objects) until I lose interest and set them aside.  

Sure enough, I found it, already incorporated into a block.  ARRRGGHH!!  That’s the danger of using fabric.  You never know if you are going to need it for something else.  But that's the chance you take.  It you never use any of your fabric, someday someone will pitch it, which would be true waste.  So use it to create something beautiful!  Or something useful. Or both.  Just use it.  Lecture over, back to the topic at hand.

There it is, in the lower left corner of a scrap block.

Here is a closer view, so you can see just how perfect it would have been for this challenge:

See those lovely boxed chocolates?

Well, I wasn’t about to tear the block apart so that I could use it in my Craving Chocolate challenge, so I went back to the drawing board.  

I decided that my inspiration was going to be neither chocolate the candy nor chocolate the color.   I actually chose something slightly different – chocolate the beverage! 

If you look into the history of chocolate, you’ll discover that the original use of chocolate was as a beverage.  The ancient Aztecs used the cocoa beans to make a bitter drink that was used for ceremonial occasions. 

The hot chocolate or hot cocoa that we drink today is not very similar to what those ancient people drank, but it is one of my favorite beverages on a cold day. The commercially available packets that come 10 to a box are fine in a pinch, but I like the real thing! Start with unsweetened cocoa powder and some sugar and just a smidgen of salt.  Then you heat milk to almost boiling and stir it into the dry ingredients with a little bit of vanilla extract.  Topping it with whipped cream is optional, but highly recommended! 

My project this week is a mug rug for my favorite hot chocolate mug.

Notice the whipped cream dripping down the sides.  That was unintentional, but that’s what always happens to my whipped cream, so I left it that way. ^.^

Project Quilting 10.5 – Abecedarian

Unlike the last few challenges, this week I knew almost immediately what I wanted to do for the Project Quilting challenge.  For about 15 minutes, I wasn’t too thrilled about the topic because all I could think of was appliqued letters on something.  Sure, some kind of cute saying would be nice to hang in my sewing room, but I just didn’t have any enthusiasm about that. 

Then it hit me!  I have been saving novelty fabrics in order to make an I-Spy quilt for my grandson.  I figured that I could make the quilt with a block for each letter of the alphabet.  There wouldn’t be any actual letters on the quilt, but since each block would represent a letter, it would be suitable for the challenge.

I could have completed an I-Spy quilt quite a while ago, but I was unhappy with the letter J.   Honestly, there are not too many fabrics out there that show something that starts with J.  I thought that I might be able to find jelly beans, jets or jacks, but after looking for over a year, I gave up.  The only ‘J’ fabric that I found featured jalapeno peppers.  I wasn’t sure that a four-year-old who is just learning to read would get the connection or if it would confuse him   So, the fabrics have been sitting there patiently waiting for me to find a better J fabric. But when this challenge was posted, I decided that the jalapeno pepper fabric would be a learning experience for him!

I browsed around the web and Pinterest looking for ideas.  I found a pattern that had been published in Quiltmaker Magazine several years ago which looked promising.   It called for 49 charm squares bordered with solids and set 7 x 7.   I immediately decided that I could use two of each of my alphabet fabrics and make it not only an I-Spy quilt, but a ‘find the match’ quilt.  Since 2 of each alphabet fabric makes 52 blocks, I added four blank squares. Setting them 7 x 8 made a nice 42" x 48" quilt.  Voila, pattern decided on and all the fabrics were already in my stash and it was only Monday!

I wasn’t sure that I could finish a quilt in a  week, especially this week, but decided to  give it a try.  Some weeks, there is  nothing extra going on, but this week is one of those that are extra challenging, time-wise.  I belong to a concert chorale and this coming weekend is concert weekend.  We have a concert Saturday night and one on Sunday afternoon. We also have 2 extra rehearsals during the week in addition to the regular Tuesday evening rehearsal.  Lent starts this week, and with it the Fish Fry fundraisers that our church holds on Ash Wednesday and every Friday in Lent.  I’ve been volunteering there for the last few years, so I didn’t want to tell them no.  My rowing club’s quarterly member meeting falls this week.  The quilt guild has small groups that meet on the second Saturday of the month – yep, this week! Oh, and we lose an hour on Sunday morning due to daylight savings time starting. 

   

My Abecedarian-I-Spy-Find-The-Match Quilt 42"X48"

But in spite of all the other commitments,  I actually finished it early! I worked on it every spare minute and am posting this on Friday afternoon. Which means that I have time to go over the concert music and work on those rough spots before tonight’s dress rehearsal.  Win, win!