Cocktails, crusts and creases

Fellow Quilters,

Yesterday was a sea day on our Stay-at-Home-and-Cruise.

Banana daquiri was yesterday’s cocktail

While Hubby prepared the cocktail-du-jour – a banana daquiri – I prepared turkey pot pie.  Back on Day 9 of the Time to Quilt quilt-along I also made turkey pot pie and mentioned that I would show you my pastry tools the next time I make pastry.  Well, I almost forgot!  I quickly snapped a couple photos before the dinner went into the oven.

Making pastry for my turkey pot pie

My 4 essential items for pastry-making are:

• a pastry blender (the U-shaped wire thing) used to cut the fat (shortening, butter, lard) into pea-sized pieces into the flour
• a rolling pin – I prefer a longer one to make bigger sheets of pastry
• a sleeve to cover the rolling pin. This is a knitted tube.  It prevents the pastry from sticking to the rolling pin, and they’re really hard to find.
• a pastry cloth – mine is a piece of muslin that I picked up at the fabric store (I serged the edges to prevent them from raveling). This prevents the pastry from sticking to the work surface and makes it super easy to roll the sheet of pastry around the rolling pin to place it on the pie.
  

  Essential pastry-making items: a pastry blender (U-shaped thing), rolling pin, pastry cloth and sleeve

My mom used to make pastry regularly and did not use a pastry cloth and sleeve – we didn’t know they existed. My dear sweet MIL was not much of a baker however she had a set and gave it to me – bless her heart.  What a godsend! No more scraping pastry off the counter or rerolling the pastry because the rolling pin grabbed a corner and now a swath of pastry is wrapped around the rolling pin.  My go-to recipe is 2 cups flour, 1 cup shortening, ¾tsp salt (combine with the pastry blender until you have pea-sized pieces of shortening) then with a fork add a mixture of 1 egg, 1tbsp vinegar & 2tbsp water and combine with the flour mixture just until blended. I sprinkle 2-3tbsp of flour on the pastry cloth, roll the sleeved rolling pin through it once, then roll out half my pastry.  Easy peasy!  I store my cloth and sleeve in a ziplok bag in the fridge.

So, on to Time to Quilt Block 22.  More HST units, and a square-in-a-square in the center.  I thought of another tip for sewing this unit.

Today’s tip:  To correctly align my triangle pieces on opposite sides of my center square, I finger-press my square in half vertically and horizontally.

I finger-press my center squares in half vertically and horizontally

Then I line up the point of the triangle with this crease mark.

I align the tip of the triangle with the crease

Fast and easy!  That square-in-a-square unit is done in a flash!

Repeat with the remaining 2 triangles

Next thing I knew my blocks were done.

Block 22 done 🙂

You can find my instructions for Block 22 here.

A couple days ago I mentioned the current issue of Love of Quilting magazine and the great article on disappearing blocks.  One of the blocks shown in the article is very similar to Block 22 – the only difference is the center unit – a pinwheel instead of a square-in-a-square.  When I was pressing my blocks, I thought how fun they would be in an on-point layout in a quilt, so in Electric Quilt I whipped up 2 samples.

The positive and negative versions of Block 22, the similar disappearing pinwheel version and 2 on-point quilts showing these blocks

One has just Block 22 in positive and negative, and the other has Block 22 combined with the disappearing pinwheel block from Love of Quilting.  How fun!

On Facebook today Northcott has used the same blue Shimmer fabric in their sample as I used in mine – this is totally serendipitous!  Banyan has used Scott Hansen’s Ocean Park for a summer-fresh look.  On her blog today Daphne has also played with the layout options and even thrown in some color changes to add interest.

Enjoy your day.  It’s a wet one for me- perfect for quilting!  Sewing machine, here I come 😊

Cheers,

Patti