Engagement Placemats

Over the Christmas holiday, I was excited to learn that one of my best friends had gotten engaged!  A. is one of those wonderful people who is incredibly motivated in her work life, but is also a genuinely kind person.  I met her at college where we were both training to be music educators (she is now happily leading 1^st-3^rd graders in music lessons all day!).  Her fiancé is also a teacher; let’s face it, everyone I know is either a musician, a teacher, or both!  I am truly happy for this most recent, great development in A’s life and I know that her fiancé is a good match for her. 

At the end of this week (just in time for Valentine’s Day) one of our mutual friends is throwing them an engagement party. Since they haven’t thought about creating a registry yet, I thought I’d make something small and useful for their house: matching placemats and coasters!

            I used a heart-print for the backing, and a music-print for the center rectangle in the placemats with blue fabrics (since A. is a musician and likes blue), but you can use any color combinations or prints that you want! Please let me know if there are any errors, so that I can correct them. The final dimensions of the placemats are 16 in. x 12.5 in.  Happy Sewing!

Materials:

All batting and fabrics are cotton.  Do not use polyester materials, as they may melt with exposure to hot dishes!!! 

Dark Blue: 1 fat quarter

Medium Blue: 1 fat quarter

Print: 1 fat quarter

Backing fabric: ½ yard

Cotton Batting: at least 40” square (I used scraps from an earlier project)

Quilter’s Thread: 1 spool blue, 1 spool cream (I used 100% cotton, but you can also use a Cotton-Polyester blend.)

Binding: 1 package bias tape/ 3 yds (or make your own; instructions found here)

Cutting:

Quilted Square:

Print:

-          Cut 2 rectangles of 10.5 x 7 in

Medium Blue:

-          Cut 4 rectangles of 3.5 x 10.5 inches

-          Cut 4 rectangles of 3.5 x 7 inches

Dark Blue:

-          Cut 8 squares of 3.5 inches

Backing Fabric:

-          Approximately ½ yard of fabric

Batting:

-          Approximate 40 inch square

Notes:

-          The amounts of fabrics listed are for making 2 placemats.  You will need to use more fabric to create more placemats.

-          Be sure to wash all fabrics before you begin sewing with them.  Some fabrics may shrink at the first washing, while others do not.   Even more problematically, the dyes used in vivid fabrics (especially reds and greens) aren’t always set when purchased, which means they may bleed on to the other fabrics giving you some strange spots on lighter fabrics. 

-          You’ll want to use a rotary cutter and quilting square/ruler to cut out the fabrics for accuracy.

-          All seam allowances are ¼ inch unless otherwise noted.

-          After sewing each seam, iron it flat, with the seam allowance pressed towards the darker colored fabric.

Assembling the Placemat:

1.       With right sides facing each other, sew the 3.5 x 7 in. rectangles of medium blue fabric to the left and right sides of the print square.

2.       With right sides together, sew one 3.5 in. square of dark blue fabric to each end of each 3.5 x 10.5 in. rectangle of medium blue fabric.  

3.       Being sure to match up the seams, sew one of the strips created in step 2 to the top, and another to the bottom of the print fabric strip created in step 1.

4.       Stretch the placemat top over the batting (do not use polyester batting as it may melt with exposure to hot plates) and backing fabric and pin.  Leave some extra backing and batting around the edges of the placemat top, and be sure that the wrong sides of your fabric are placed towards the batting.

5.       Quilt as desired. 

6.       When quilting is completed, trim the excess batting and backing fabric, squaring the placemat to its finished dimensions (16 x 12.5 inches).

7.       Pin and sew the binding (bias tape) to each raw edge of the placemat.  (For a good explanation of sewing on bias tape as a binding, click here.  I use mitered corners for a clean finish.)

 

8.       Pin and sew (by hand) the bias tape to the back side of the placemat.

9.       Place your finished placemat on your dining room table and celebrate your sewing success!

 

Hide your Groundhogs!

Well, it's almost Groundhog Day, really.  With all the snow that the Midwest has been experiencing lately, I thought that today would be a perfect day to hibernate in my apartment and make delicious baked goods.  Mostly, this has been a good plan, as I have been looking out the window to increasingly high drifts of snow (I ventured forth around 3 pm to take out the garbage and experienced the feeling of wind hitting my face like thousands of icy needles; I have not been brave enough to go outside since).  The only flaw in my plan has been that I just used up all the sugar making biscotti, which means no more baked goods, at least, until the snow clears.  Has anyone else noticed that people keep combining the word snow and Armageddon or catastrophe?  Neither snowmagedon or snowtastrophe are words, people!  That's why we call it a Blizzard.  (For the record, it has snowed a bunch, but not enough for this disaster-speak.  Maybe we get one of those tomorrow?)
Correction: I wrote this before we recieved the next 20 inches of snow.  It was a Blizzard!

Biscotti

When most of us consider the tasty biscotti, we imagine coffee shops and Italian cafes.  However, the biscotti got its start with the Romans, as a convenient, nourishing, travel food for soldiers.  The cakes were baked once to cook their ingredients and a second time to dry them out completely.  In this way, the cakes would last for many weeks without going bad (think Roman-style Twinkies).  It wasn’t until centuries later, during the Renaissance, that bakers thought of the cakes as yummy desserts. 

In Tuscany (birthplace of the biscotti) bakers added the common almond to the cake batter with delicious results.  As the biscotti was spread throughout Italy by merchants and travelers, it became immensely popular, with each region developing a recipe featuring local flavors and ingredients.  Today you can find biscotti of many flavors, with different dried fruits and nuts and covered in chocolate or sugar glazes.  They are enjoyed most commonly with coffee or Vin Santo, an Italian dessert wine (a practice started by the Renaissance Italians).

As a big coffee fan (specifically espresso) I have tasted a variety of biscotti cookies at restaurants and cafes.  I've found most of them to be slightly stale, but had never thought about making my own until I crossed this recipe while idly surfing the net.  It's really very simple to put together; I added dried cranberries and chopped pecans instead of pistachio nuts to the dough (chopping the nuts coarsely really helps when you go slice the biscotti loaf after it's first baking).  Then instead of baking the dough on parchment paper (one of the things I forgot at the grocery store this week) I used a silicone baking sheet, which worked really well. 

One of the reasons I like using www.allrecipes.com for cooking and baking is that other users post suggestions and variations on each recipe.  For the biscotti, one user recommended covering one end of the cookies with chocolate, which I did (for half the cookies) and then rolled them in chopped pecans.  I’m not sure which version of the cookie (chocolate-covered or not) I like better, but they are both delicious treats with coffee (and very fresh tasting!).

Click here for more information on biscotti:

http://www.thenibble.com/reviews/main/cookies/cookies2/the-origin-of-biscotti.asp

http://www.mscotti.com/history.html