Smiles all round

What a day we had for our St Mark's Quilters Christmas break-up lunch recently! 

The sun shone brightly, if a little too warmly, and we had all the essentials: puppies, yummy festive food, and lots of fabric. 

Michaela's smile said it all, as she obligingly posed with her web-pieced kindy quilt (in progress) to show Linda Hungerford how well she's put into practice her Stitchin' Mission lessons learnt seven years ago.

The only stony face in sight was this rather pensive fellow on the church wall.

We welcomed our newest recruit, Elsa, Di B's new golden retriever puppy, and I'm happy to say Chester was a complete gentleman. He even dressed for the occasion in his Christmas bandana, made by Di B. 

After a tentative introduction the two of them went on to play happily all day.

Chester even allowed Elsa "win" their wrestling match.

With our Autism Puzzle quilt for The Marcia finished, this was the perfect opportunity to photograph it in the garden where the children play after church.

 We're very happy with the way it's turned out. It's been a long time coming (we designed it ourselves) and in the new year we plan to present it to the KU Marcia Burgess Autism Specific Early Learning and Care Centre to hang in their reception area.

Of course there were other beautiful new quilts too. Like this Blanket of Love from Sue M.

And this sunshiny one donated by our quilting friend Claire who made it in memory of her friend's little bub who passed away in childbirth. 

Her friend didn't want a Blanket of Love for herself, preferring to have Claire donate it instead to RPA Hospital, so in a thoughtful gesture, Claire also made a perfect miniature version of this (already tiny) quilt to give to her friend to keep.

Gail O ran up this pirate quilt, sure to be a hit with a little person at The Marcia next year.

And Gillian couldn't "bear" to stop at just one teddy Blanket of Love.

There were more, but I'll pop them on our Blankets of Love and Kindy Quilts pages in the next few days where you can see them. Here's a little taste.

 Lunch was a fancier affair than usual, as we co-ordinated to bring delicious food, both sweet and savoury, to create a Christmas party. The table looked wonderful!

 I'm continually surprised to meet quilters, and hear that they follow Snippets 'n' Scraps and look forward to seeing what our St Mark's Quilters have been up to. It's incredibly heartwarming to our group, so we want to say a big "thank you" and wish you all a wonderful Christmas, wherever in the world you are.

May you know God's love for you at Christmas and always.

A little unfinished business...

I was rolling a batch of ginger and macadamia balls tonight and jigging to a happy Christmas tune when it hit me.

Not a rolling pin, just the memory that weeks ago I promised some Instagram friends that I'd share my recipes here for Lemon Passionfruit Slice and Apricot Oat Bars - and I forgot!

So here we go...

 Lemon Passionfruit Slice

Ingredients
1 cup self raising flour
1 cup desiccated coconut
1/2 cup caster sugar
125g butter, melted
395g can sweetened condensed milk
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice
1/4 cup passionfruit pulp, plus extra to serve

Method
Preheat oven to moderate, 180 degrees C. Lightly grease an 18cm x 28cm lamington pan. Line base and sides with baking paper, allowing paper to extend 2cm above the rim of the long sides.

Sift flour into a bowl. Stir in coconut and sugar. Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients and add the melted butter, mixing well.

Press firmly into the base of the prepared pan. Bake for 10-12 minutes, until slightly golden.

Meanwhile, in a bowl combine condensed milk, lemon juice and passionfruit. Pour over base and bake for a further 8-10 minutes. Allow to cool and chill overnight.

Lift the slice from the pan. Peel away the paper and cut into 24 squares. Drizzle with extra passionfruit before serving.

Apricot Oat Bars

Ingredients for Base

1 cup Plain Flour

1/3 cup sugar

1/2 cup rolled oats

4 oz butter

Method

Melt butter and combine with the remaining ingredients. 

Press over the base of a greased 9 inch square pan. Bake in moderate oven for 15 minutes.

Ingredients for topping

6 oz chopped dried apricots

2 eggs

1 cup brown sugar

1/3 cup Self Raising flour

1 cup coconut

Method

Cover apricots with hot water, stand 5-10 minutes, then drain.

Beat eggs well,and combine with remaining ingredients.

Spread topping over the partly-cooked base, and bake in a moderate oven for a further 20 to 25 minutes (until firm to the touch).

Cut into bars when cool. Makes 24.

  If you've made it this far without falling asleep you deserve a reward, so here's the recipe for the Ginger and Macadamia Balls I was making tonight.

Ingredients
100g raw macadamias
1 x 250g packet of Gingernut biscuits
3/4 cup sweetened condensed milk
1 tablespoon Golden Syrup
90g butter
1 and a half cups coconut

Method
Place nuts on a baking tray and bake in oven 200 degrees C for 5 to 6 minutes until golden. Roughly chop nuts.
Crush biscuits in a food processor. Place biscuit crumbs in a bowl with the chopped macadamias.
Place the condensed milk, Golden Syrup and butter in a Pyrex jug and microwave on High for 2-3 minutes or until the butter melts.
Pour this mixture over the crumb/nut mixture and mix well.
Roll teaspoons of mixture into balls, roll in coconut. Refrigerate until firm.

Almost no-bake - if you don't count toasting the macadamias.

The good, the bad and the ugly

Yesterday was Twelfth Night, and as I packed away my Christmas decorations for another year I thought back over a particularly turbulent December.
There was much to smile about.

A pre-Christmas family wedding gave me the opportunity to have a happy snap taken with my lovely mother and sister

For the third year in a row I enjoyed the privilege of an Access All Areas pass to photograph Sydney's Carols in the Domain for my friend Robyn's (Event Founder's) personal collection. This was my stage side view of The Wiggles, Captain Feathersword and Henry the Octopus!

This beautiful girl arrived home after three years working in the USA and Botswana. 

For the first time since 2010 all of my precious children, my daughters-in-law and my grandchildren were here for Christmas.

My sister and I had a little bit of fun on Christmas Day too. In the past we've been known to turn up in the same outfit, quite unplanned, as we have very similar tastes in our clothes and shop the same favourite online shop. 

When we recently discovered we both owned the same top, but in different colours, we decided to wear them on Christmas Day, with identical white pants. To complete the picture we both pinned the sequined felt Christmas trees I had made for us, in different colour ways, a few years ago.

Not at all fun was the mercy dash I had to make to the vet with Chester after he ate a 485gram box of Lindt chocolate balls, wrappers and all, six days before Christmas. Chocolate is toxic to dogs, and can kill them.

Fortunately Chester is large, and had eaten an assortment of milk, dark and white chocolates so he hadn't ingested too much theobromine, the chemical found in highest concentrations in dark chocolate and cooking chocolate.

 An hour after an injection to make him very sick indeed he skipped out of the surgery with an empty stomach, completely recovered, though my bank account might take a little longer. I'm still learning not to leave food where my sensitive-nosed pooch can reach it, even if it is wrapped and sealed.

Here's my naughty boy, as we were about to leave for the vet. He must have had a very sore tummy!

Sydney's Martin Place is usually the centre of our city's enchanting Christmas decorations, a giant tree covered in winking fairy lights and swathed in electronic banners. Families make the trip into town and children gaze, open-mouthed, at the magical scene.

This year Martin Place became famous for another, very ugly, reason. Just ten days before Christmas an extremist gunman took seventeen customers and staff hostage in the Lindt Cafe as morning coffees were being dispensed. The very ordinariness of these circumstances rocked us, and for sixteen hours our city held it's breath as surrounding offices were evacuated and riot police stood by.

The waiting game ended suddenly, around 2am the next morning, when the gunman shot and killed the manager of the cafe, Tori Johnson, and after a loud exchange of gunfire between the riot police and the gunman he and another hostage, solicitor Katrina Dawson, were shot dead and the rest fled, terrified, to safety.

The next morning the flower tributes started, just a few at first, propped up against nearby office buildings. But soon the outpouring of public grief gathered momentum and it was not long before a huge area of the top end of Martin Place was covered in a fragrant carpet of flowers, candles, soft toys, cards and messages, particularly to the two families who had lost loved ones.

Everyone wanted to surround these families, and those of the surviving hostages, with love. 

Quilter Joshua Helms (under his pseudonym Molli Sparkles) wasted no time mobilizing the worldwide quilting community to make 5inch hashtag blocks, and the response has been nothing short of amazing, with more than a thousand blocks having arrived by New Year, and many more since.

Batting, backings and longarm quilting services have been donated, and the plan is to make as many quilts as possible from these little 5 inch rainbow coloured blocks, initially for Tori Johnson's parents and partner, and for Katrina Dawson's husband and three young children.

Hashtag blocks have arrived from Germany, the USA, Alaska, the UK and all over Australia, and I'm proud to be able to play a small part in Molli's heartwarming initiative by making up these hashtag blocks.

Di B has been particularly industrious and made twenty!

All the details, including the time frame for this venture, are here.

As you've seen from my previous post, when compassionate quilters work together we can do great things!

Quilts in the Church

What better season can there be than Christmas, when we celebrate Gods great love for us, to festoon our church with quilts, gifts of love made by St Mark's Quilters.

These larger, crib sized quilts, will soon be off to the KU Marcia Burgess Autism Specific Early Learning and Care Centre at Liverpool where each little boy or girl will be given one of our quilts when they start there this year.

I love how our quilts look with such a beautiful backdrop!

Then there are the Blankets of Love, around 60cm square, each destined to one day wrap around a tiny baby in Royal Prince Alfred Hospital's Newborn Intensive Care Unit.

Some of these bubs will be struggling to live. But some will not have survived their birth, and the quilt will either go with them when their parents say goodbye, or become a keepsake, a lasting memory of their precious little baby.

Either way, these grieving parents will know that a quilter at St Mark's cared enough to stitch love into a quilt especially to comfort them.

We hung up to nine quilts on each sandstone column, suspended by their corners, and the overall effect was amazing. 

With fresh flowers up in the sanctuary, red bows on the pew ends, and a glittering Christmas tree beside the font, the church looked incredibly beautiful, all dressed for Christmas.

Here's how it looked later that evening, as the choir processed in to our Carols Service by candlelight singing "Once in Royal David's City".

But it was when the lights were turned on that our quilts really shone.

Our quilters choose their own colour combinations from the stash of appropriate fabrics we've collected, even sometimes adding fabrics from their own stashes to achieve the end result. What you don't see, though, is the metres and metres of batting that goes inside  our quilts, something that would be very expensive indeed if our quilters had buy their own.

We like to think of this cuddly inner layer as the heart of our quilts, making them soft and comforting.

Ever since we began, the members of Rotary Inner West have given us a generous donation towards our batting each year, for which we're incredibly grateful. 

While the quilts were hanging in the church Di B and I invited President Fay Thurlow, along with Sandra Bloxham, member of the Board of Directors, for a private tour to see the quilts hanging in St Mark's, followed by morning tea in the church garden. 

We were delighted that they presented us with a cheque, in memory of a member of our church family, Peter Crooks, who was also a member of Rotary Inner West and passed away in September. Peter was very supportive of the ministry of St Mark's Quilters, so it was quite an emotional occasion for us all.

This year we hope to keep on encouraging our keen group of quiltmakers to keep trying out new quilting techniques as they develop their creativity and, at the same time, bring a warm quilty hug to those who need it.

We love because God first loved us.

Christmas

HAPPY CHRISTMAS

to all of you, my friends across the world.

May God bless you - as you've blessed me!