One Piece at a Time

Quilt Lady Cooking: Chicken and Wild Rice Salad with Mango Dressing

I thought I was out of ideas for Quilt Lady Cooking since it is now summer and over 100˚F here but then I had an idea. How about minimal cooking. THAT would leave plenty of time for quilting (and blog writing as the case may be). What better way to not cook than to visit your local grocery store and pick up a rotisserie chicken. I have several recipes that involve these chickens so here is our new favorite around here, Chicken and Wild Rice Salad with Mango dressing. It is so easy, just pick up a chicken, some veggies, make a little rice, let it all cool and…well…YUM.

Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients:

One rotisserie Chicken cooled

2 6 oz. boxes long grain and wild rice mix (I like Near East or Uncle Ben’s brand) prepared according to directions and cool

1 red or yellow pepper, sliced

4 green onions

4 cups of salad greens

1 cup mango chutney (I like Pataks  Major Gray brand)

2 Tbsp cider vinegar

2 Tbsp canola oil

1 cup frozen peas, thawed

Directions:

Remove all the meat from the chicken and chop coarsely

Mix rice, chicken, peppers, peas and onions.

To make the dressing: place the chutney, canola oil and vinegar in a blender or food processor and puree.

To serve, place a generous helping of salad greens on a plate, top with a scoop of the chicken and rice mixture and drizzle with the dressing

To download a printable version of this recipe just click  here.

Block Six: Alternate Colorway

Here is Block 6 in the alternate colorway. Since I’m using this yummy dark brown for a background I needed to find a way to prevent it from showing through my light pink flowers. In a previos post I talked about cutting away the background fabric from behind the appliqué shape. This wasn’t going to work here because the petals are just a little bit too tiny. In situations like this I resort to a lightweight woven fusible interfacing. Here’s how I did it.

First lightly trace the petal on to the non-fusible side of the interfacing and cut out the petals. These bits of interfacing need to be slightly smaller than the petals so make sure you cut INSIDE the lines.

Place your petal wrong side up on your pressing surface.

Place the petal on top with the fusible side down (very important to remember that unless you just love to clean your iron).

Iron to attach the fusible interfacing.

Now assemble the flowers and you shouldn’t have any dark fabric peaking out.

Block Six: The Specifics

As I mentioned Friday, Block 6 has A LOT of petals. For this reason alone it’s a good idea to pre-assemble the flowers before assembling your appliqué block. If you are new to this I did a post about this earlier this year and you can find it by clicking here.

Here’s a rundown of how I got those flowers together. To make the petals I stitched around the seam allowance of each piece of fabric.

To gather the petal, place the template on the wrong side of the fabric. Hold the starting and stopping point of the stitching.

Pull the thread to gather the seam allowance and get a nice clean petal.

Dab it with a little starch.

Press until the petal is dry (don’t forget to turn off your steam…OUCH!)

The flower will look better if you give your petal a trim.

I found it was really important to stuff the center so it would cover up all those layers from the petals. If you are unsure how to do this, read this post.

 

Place the center wrong side down on a drawing of your flower. Here I am using a piece of circular graph paper to make sure the petals are evenly spaced. I have to mention here that I am VERY anal sometimes (most times actually).If you have the need; I found this site where you can generate circular graph paper. I set the number of divisions to 5 because my flowers have 5 petals.

Put a little dab of glue at the base of each petal.

Place on center and hold for a couple of seconds until it’s attached.

Keep repeating until each center has five petals.

Florabunda Block 6…..LOTS of Petals

 

This block turned out to be a little trickier than I thought when I designed it. There are A LOT of petals. Sixty if you are not counting the tulips. I took tons of pictures when I was making it so there will be some tutorials on “The Specifics” next week. I really wanted to get the pattern up today so I’m leaving those out for now.

As promised here is Florabunda Block 6.The pattern has two formats. The first is a full size pattern (12” square you can download here) that you can save to a USB drive and take to a copy place to have printed. The other is a ¼ size drawing (download here) that should print on a regular printer. You can make 4 copies of this one and tape it together for a full size pattern. For those of you who are printing 4 copies, once you have taped your patterns together rotate the pattern so that the three flowers are at the top (I couldn’t find a nicer way to do this…sorry).

For all you who like to share pictures you can join our FLICKR group at

http://www.flickr.com/groups/florabuddies

Have Fun and

Happy Friday

Photoshop Elements: My New Favorite Design Tool

If you’ve been reading any of my blog this past year you will know that I have a serious thing for picture taking as well as quilting. I don’t really call myself a photographer because, personally, I can’t stand the pressure. Just know that I’m never far from some image capturing device and that I can irritate the crap out of my family with my constant clicking.

I use Photoshop Elements (PSE)to do all my post processing and I have to say that it’s turning into my new favorite quilt design tool as well. Pretty much EVERYTHING you have seen on this blog has been done in Photoshop Elements.

Here is an example of how I used it today to try to figure out my next step on a quilt.

Here is a block I recently finished.

Here is the fabric I had as an inspiration.

My first thought was to see what it would look like with multiple blocks so I did this.

YIKES, way too busy for me.

My second thought was to have it be a medallion so I tried this.

Than this.

Than this.

Then I decided I wanted it to be set on point so I tried this.

Than this.

Than this.

With just a little work I had six different versions of the quilt. I can look at them up close or far away to see if I like the design proportions. I can change border colors and fabric. The best part is that I did it all with one finished block and a piece of fabric. Pretty cool isn’t it? I haven't decided anything yet except that I will be putting more applique between the sawtooth borders. I'm favoring the on point setting right now.The beauty of it is that I have lots of images to ponder as I go forward.

Would anyone be interested in learning how to do this? I’ve been thinking of developing a set of tutorials on the various techniques I use in PSE. Leave a comment if you are interested and I will see what I can come up with.

Check back tomorrow for Florabunda Block 6. Can you believe it? We are on BLOCK 6 already!

A Yummy New Book

While I was coming home from Quilt Colorado I stopped in one of my favorite quilt shops and found this.

Since I’ve been doing more and more of my own quilting I’m always looking for inspiration. I love feathers in all their forms and this book had me literally drooling (well not drooling actually but my heart did skip a few beats). It’s called Feather Adventures by Patsy Thompson.

Just look at these examples.

I’m hoping I can get something close to this someday.

Sigh.

And the WINNER is....

Jantine who wrote

"I am not sure if I am still in time, I was away for the weekend. My favorite color scheme would be anything that included red! Like, red, pink, brown... Or red and white..."

Congratulations Jantine, your e-mail is on the way.

Thanks Again Lovely Blog Readers

Quilt Colorado 2010

Every two years the Colorado Quilting Council puts on a big quilt fest in Estes Park Colorado called Quilt Colorado. They always have really great teachers and classes and a vendors and a quilt show too. What’s not to love? The next one is in 2012...anyone making plans yet?

There was just tons of great quilt and inspiration so I’m going to let these pictures speak for themselves.

These were from the teacher’s gallery.

This quilt by George Siciliano was very impressive. VERY VERY impressive when you realize that it’s total size was 10”. (yep that’s INCHES)

I love Ricky Tims and his quilts. I could have looked at this all day…just look at those feathers in the quilting.

Here is one from Elly Sienkiewicz. I love her too and have all her books. It was so cool to see this in person.

This quilt by Sharon Schlotzhauer won Best in Show.

Just Look at this quilting detail.

This was my favorite of the day. It’s called The Fairytale Bird by Natalia Majors. It was stunning.

On my way I home I just HAD to stop in Lyons and visit the quilt shop there. When I stopped for lunch I saw this funny sign in the parking lot.

I’ll be back tomorrow with the winners of my 200^th Post GIVE-AWAY so hang tight until then.

Thanks’ to all of you for your comments, now I’m going crazy with color inspiration.

 

200th Blog Post GIVE-AWAY

I can hardly believe that this is my 200th blog post. To celebrate I’m giving away this very cute fat quarter bundle from the Breeze collection by In the Beginning Fabrics and Wendy Slotboom. I just love these colors and designs. I’m also partial to dragonflies and other “cute” bugs (as in NOT real bugs). To enter leave a comment telling us what your favorite color scheme is. I will use the handy dandy random number picker to select a winner on Monday.

Now I’m off to finish my Miss Ronna quilt. Here are a few shots of the machine quilting motifs I am using.

Playing With Color: Part Two

Another really fun way to play with color and color schemes is the Adobe website http://kuler.adobe.com

There are a couple of different ways to explore color on this website. The first is to just browse through the Themes. There is a huge number of color schemes in this section and it’s easy to waste hours doing this but I have found it very inspiring. When I find a color combination that I really like I save a digital copy of it for further use.

The second really fun way to use this website is to upload a picture. Here I’ve uploaded a picture of a dahlia I took a couple of weeks ago. 

The color picker uses this picture to give a color combination and there is a small circle around each color it picked. I saw that one of the colors from the picture was the beige from the pot. I didn’t like that too much so I clicked on the beige in the color combo. The corresponding circle on the photo is highlighted when you do this. I just moved that spot to the really bright pink of the flower and here is what I came up with.

Here is an example I did with a peony.

I also played around with some fabric pictures to see what it did with those. Here are a few examples of those.

Doing these two activities with color will give you a really great way to learn what you really like as far as color goes.