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. ^.^