Rouenneries by French General

I’ve been waiting to see this fabric for MONTHS.  I’ve been stopping by my local quilt shop WEEKLY since the first week in October to ask the same question:  do you have French General’s line in yet?  And they kept telling me to come back next week.

Then, finally, on Halloween, I walked into the shop and saw this:

Rouenneries by French General on the bolt

Oh my!  “Forget Halloween!”  I thought.  Let’s do some sewing!


So beautiful!  I love the reds, the neutrals…

Rouenneries fat quarters

I seriously stood there, just looking at all of it, unable to decide which prints I liked best or which to purchase some of, for at least 20 minutes.  Finally I just got out my camera, because I couldn’t really decide, and I can’t afford all of it (not to mention the fact that my fabric stash is already too large).

Rouenneries on bolts

The wovens were amazing.  That one above, with the red dots on a neutral, is so classy!
These linens with the birds are also beautiful.

Rouenneries birds

And can I just say that this little dot and stripe pattern near the selvage on each bolt is the cutest thing ever?
What a classy way to introduce yourself to the world of fabric designing!  In case, you’re not familiar with French General, you can visit their website and learn more about Kaari Meng here .  I promise, you’ll love looking at all of the vintage beads, baubles, millinery and so forth that she sells.  Really beautiful.

Rouenneries selvage

I’ve never seen a line of quilting fabric before where I actually wanted a piece of every one.  This time, I’d love some of everything, thank you.

The bummer is, though, that none of the quilt shops near me ordered the print that I liked the most (based on pictures).  It’s an oyster stripe with big bold neutral stripes of equal widths.  I had this project all planned out in my head and it was built around that print, but nobody has it!  Thank goodness for the internet, where at length I was able to locate an obscure quilt shop which has some of it.  (What would I do without the internet?  It makes possible so many treasure hunts that could never happen otherwise.)  When it arrives, I’ll get to work on my project.

In the end, I went home with one of these:

Rouenneries layer cake

A layer cake, which will provide a nice sampling of the beauty.  Something about seeing a stack of fabric bundled up like a fresh pad of paper really gets me.  I’ll sew a simple quilt with it, supplemented by some 1/8 yard pieces of a few wovens which I purchased as well.  With this line, I’m preferring the patterns that let you just look at the fabric, instead of having the prints themselves overwhelmed by the design of the quilt.

There’s also a kit for one of these with my name on it.   So simple, but gorgeous.

Rouenneries quilt

And don’t you think that dotted fabric would make a smart looking one of these?
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I’m thinking I might need to grab one of those patterns and make one, since my current purse is, literally, threadbare.  You can find it at Fig Tree Quilts .  I love their patterns.  Someday I’m going to make this one .  Every couple of months I get the pattern out of my stack and look at it and sigh.

Seriously, everything I’m seeing lately I’m thinking would look lovely with the Rouenneries line and it appears that I’m not alone.  So wherever you are, Kaari, well done.  I love it.

Thanksgiving Penny Project

In our home, 2009 has been the Year of the Penny.

Why?  Well, I happen to love history, especially American History, and so there are just some dates I pay attention to, like February 12, 1809.

Anybody know what happened that day?  It was Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.  Which means that February 12, 2009 marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of one of our nation’s most influential leaders.

So here’s how it went.  I started mentally planning the celebration about 9 months in advance.  I won’t bore you (or perhaps make you laugh) with details of the wonderful things I envisioned and the number of people I planned to involve.  And then, about 3 1/2 months before the party was to occur, I got pregnant with baby number 8.  This means, of course, that suddenly I was so tired that I was afraid I’d fall asleep at the wheel driving kids to and from school.  It means that suddenly I was buried under a mountain of housework that wasn’t getting done.  And the closer the calendar crept to February 12, 2009, the more sad I felt.  I just couldn’t pull it off, unless my family agreed to just quit eating and wearing clothes for a month or so.  Which, of course, didn’t happen.

By the beginning of February I was feeling like perhaps I should just scrap the whole thing, but I knew that I’d never forgive myself, that I won’t be around for the 300th anniversary, that I’d always be sorry I didn’t try.  So I threw something together (a sorry shadow of what I’d envisioned), invited a couple of families to join us, cooked up some hoecakes (his favorite breakfast) and went for it.

It was ok.  I mean, how many people thought to have a birthday party for him anyway?  But I felt a little sad at not being able to do what I’d dreamed.  Still, it worked out, and at least we paused and marked the day for our children.

And I’d found these:
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They look like pennies, don’t they?  They’re not.  They’re chocolate coins, and they’re more than 1.5 inches in diameter.  And, they taste much better than any chocolate coin I’ve ever tasted.  When I saw them for the first time at a little children’s museum in Temecula, California, I was smitten.  I had to have them for my party.  I had to have them so badly that I was willing to order 10 POUNDS of them, because that’s the only way to get them!

I liked using the penny as the symbol for our year for two reasons.
1.  Because they have Lincoln’s profile on them, and this is the year of his 200th birthday 2.  Because one of the great lessons of Lincoln’s life is that one person makes a difference.  Small efforts yield results.

It’s so easy, living in today’s world, to feel like one person doesn’t matter, can’t do much, won’t be enough.    That’s kind of how pennies are, too.  Just one penny isn’t worth much, can’t buy anything, doesn’t matter.  In fact, inflation has made the penny so worthless that the US Mint has considered ceasing to make them.  Pretty worthless, right?

Wrong.  Last I checked, 100 pennies still add up to one dollar, and 1000 pennies still make $10.  “Out of small things proceedeth that which is great.”  I kind of like having Lincoln on the penny.  It seems to me that they both stand for the same thing.  And it’s a principle I really want my kids to understand and live.

We used these chocolate pennies at our party, and I still had a ton of them left.  So I’ve been using them all year long with my children as a reminder of the power of one person, one act of goodness.  It’s been kind of fun to have this year-long theme weaving itself through our lives.

Fast forward to a week ago.  I was wishing that we could just skip Halloween and go straight into November.  I really love Thanksgiving, and I was dreaming of all that I’d love to do for the holiday.  Suddenly it hit me that November would be the perfect time to use our pennies again!

Thanksgiving is a holiday which we usually celebrate by remembering our Pilgrim heritage.  But did you know that it wasn’t a national holiday until President Lincoln issued  a proclamation calling for a national day of Thanksgiving in 1863?  What better year to remember that we have him to thank for the holiday than 2009?  (If  you’d like to read the text of the proclamation, which I personally find inspiring, you can find it here.
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Thus was born our Thanksgiving Penny Project.  Each day between now and Thanksgiving, our family will award two Thanksgiving pennies to individuals who have been observed that day doing something positive that makes a difference in our family or in someone’s life.  After being awarded a penny, that person is responsible for selecting the next day’s recipient.  So, we’ll have the children awarding pennies, and a second penny will be awarded each day by the parents.  In addition to giving a penny, at the same time we will place a penny in a  jar and write down on a little notepad the person who received a penny and why.  Then, on Thanksgiving we’ll have a lovely jar full of pretty little copper pennies to use in our Thanksgiving celebration and a list of  blessings we’ve given each other throughout the month.
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Today we also bundled up notepads and bags of Thanksgiving Pennies, along with a copy of Lincoln’s proclamation and a letter explaining our project and delivered them to some families we love.   We hope that they will also enjoy a Thanksgiving Penny Project like ours, and that they’ll let us know how it turns out.  I love Thanksgiving so much, and Abraham Lincoln too, that I wish I could bundle up these adorable treats and send them to everyone I know!  Anyone who wants them!  My first thought included a trip to the post office, but since I still have Christmas gifts I never mailed last year, I crossed that part off my list pretty quickly.  My second thought was to do a giveaway here on my blog, which would mean that IF one person stumbled upon my post, they’d have oh, about a 100% chance of winning, but I’m not sure I have the confidence to do that, so it hasn’t happened.  I figure if anybody finds this and is dying to have some chocolate pennies, please contact me and I can help you out.   So, (not that anyone’s reading this) if you want to start a Thanksgiving Penny Project of your own, grab a roll of pennies and a pretty glass or jar, and get going!  Just be sure to write it down.  It’ll only cost you a few pennies, but it just might add up to a holiday season brimming with gratitude for the simplest of gifts:  individuals.

Blue bowls… what a find!

All of a sudden, whenever I need a bowl I find myself reaching for one of these little blue ones.
And every time I put something in one,  I want to take a picture.
And several times I have.  Perhaps you’ve noticed these little beauties in recent posts.
I really like these bowls.
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Today was no different.  Not only are they the perfect size, I’m loving how food looks in them.
It’s a color thing.
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Do you want to hear something funny about me and hard boiled eggs?
Earlier this year I set out to come up with a Potato Salad that I love.  Well, we all know that potato salads need hard boiled eggs.  For years I’ve tried to get my hard boiled eggs to be perfect, without the ugly greenish-gray color in the yolk, without any cracks, and so forth, but perfection always eluded me.

Until this summer.  One day I put a bunch of eggs on the stove to cook, and then promptly forgot about setting my timer and went to do other things until suddenly I remembered the eggs.  I figured they must be done so I removed them from the heat and placed them in ice water.

They were the most perfect hard boiled eggs ever!  The funny thing is that this has happened to me every time I’ve cooked eggs since.  Now I’m at the point that I don’t know if I dare to actually pay attention to how long they’re cooking for because I’m just sure I’ll ruin them.  Today was no different.   And the eggs were perfect.

But I digress.  We were talking about my blue bowls.
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Let me just say here that I bought these bowls over a month ago, and have stored them stacked like this in my pantry since then.  Every time I look at them I have to smile because they’re so pretty!  And every time I’ve looked at them I want to take a picture.

So today I gave in and did it.  Some a pale blue and some are a deeper aqua color.  I like them together.
Here’s the best part of all:  I got them at the dollar store!  That’s right, Dollar Tree.
Like I said, I found them about a month ago and bought a nice, tall stack of them (remember dishes need to come in sets of at least ten at my house).  This morning I was there looking for something else and they had a few more.

I bought them all.  Okay, it was only five of them.  I couldn’t help it!  They were so cute!
And, I must say they’re a pretty amazing find for $1.
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Did I mention that I love the colors?  Wow, I’m such a sucker for blue.

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