Eye of Newt and Toe of Frog

It was a spooky day of quilting for my Valentine's Day, and I'm happy to say that the entire center panel of Hocuspocusville is finished. Next I'll be moving to the embroidered blocks. The center panel was the hardest part for me, and so I'm glad to have it this far. The rest should be fairly easy.

So I alluded to my method yesterday, and I'll show you what I did right now. Here's the thing about quilting. It's hard for those of us who can't draw worth beans. And so I always have some great ideas about what I'd like to quilt, but no real ability to translate my ideas into a quilted motif. Some of you might remember when I quilted "We Are the World."

I used a purchased pantograph and then traced it onto Press 'n Seal so that I could quilt each block individually.

It was a bugger getting all that Press 'n Seal out from under the stitching, and I swore I'd never do it again. On the other hand, I was preparing to do some small motifs in the setting triangles of Hocuspocusville. How bad could it be? So here's what I did. I first found some spooky Halloween motifs on the internet, and then resized them to fit the space I had to work with. The spiders were about 2 inches square.

Then I printed it out and cut it out to be sure it fit in the space I had. It does.

So then, I traced it onto the Press 'n Seal using a sharpie. (I switched to a finer point later.)

The Press 'n Seal adheres to the fabric pretty well, but I pin mine just to be sure it doesn't shift as I'm stitching.

Then, I stitched right through it. I've had no problems with this gumming up my needle.

After that, you just tear the Press 'n Seal away. I'm not gonna lie and say this is easy, but for small motifs, it is doable.

It's hardest to get out of the little spaces, like between the spider's legs. A pin and some sharp tweezers are your best friends here. With a little patience and persistence, you can get it off in a few minutes. And there you have a nice little spider to sit down beside her.

I have to write fast this morning, and so I'll just show you the pictures of the rest of them. There were 12 setting triangles, and the 4 corner setting triangles. The hardest part was coming up with different motifs for each one.

First, the skull and crossbones:

Flying witch:

Quoth the raven, Nevermore.

I put a spider in each of the four corners.

This is the one motif I stitched free-hand...the witch's broom.

This one is a partial pantograph I found online for a ghost. It's a little hard to make out. I might decide to change this one.

A jack-o-lantern. This one was seen on The Inbox Jaunt from Lori Kennedy.

Scary Halloween Cat:

For that one, I asked my furry model to help.

You see, you just arch your back up like this, and fluff up your tail...oh, Smitty could probably show you the tail better than I can.

Oh, and I kind of like this purrsition. Look what I can do from here.

See? And then...just like magic...I can apurr on the other side. Cool!

Okay, and then a tombstone.

Batman.

This ghost. I wasn't happy with this one. For one thing, it was too small, and I decided to take it out.

Instead, I put in a witch's cauldron.

A witch's hat...

And a witch's shoe.

And that was my day of quilting.

From there, it was Valentine's Day cooking. Mike brought me these pretty tulips.

I made us a dinner of Sea Scallop Risotto. What you see here is a heart-shaped risotto with some asparagus over the top and scallops all around, with Newburg sauce over all.

I was wishing I'd taken a picture of the heart-shaped risotto before I smothered it in other stuff. But then Mike asked for seconds and so I took a picture then. I just loaded the sticky risotto into a heart-shaped cookie cutter, lift off the cookie cutter, and voila! Just like the soux chef would do.

For dessert we had the warm carrot cakes with cream cheese sauce. Yum! This is a dessert for two, and so you can have a piece of carrot cake without having to eat the whole cake.

The recipe says to bake the little cakes in 4-oz. ramekins, and mine were 8-oz., so they didn't bake up as tall. Mine were more like muffins. It didn't matter. They were yummy. I'll definitely make these again.

Okay, so time's up. I'm walking with Sue, and I need to get going. It's going to be wet this morning.