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It’s been time to decorate for Fall for a few weeks now. I’ve enjoyed seeing so many Autumn-themed bunting projects in my jaunts around blogland. I decided to ride the wave of inspiration and create my own. Here is a tutorial showing how I made my Falling Leaves Bunting.
 Draw leaves of various shapes on a piece of freezer paper. better yet go on a nature walk and collect leaves to trace on your freezer paper. Think about how large you are going to make each triangle in your bunting and how much you want your leaf to fill up that space.
 Choose your colors of knit fabric and iron the freezer paper leaves to the cloth. I used the t-shirt sleeves to leave the rest of the fabric for other projects.  Iron Wonder Under or a similiar product to the opposite side of the fabric. Cut out your shapes.
 Cut a template for your bunting triangles. I used a piece of stationary and traced from each corner at the top to the middle of the bottom edge. I then traced this shape onto a cereal box and cut it out.  Figure out how long you want your bunting to be and how many triangles you will need. I made mine 3 yards long, the length of one package of bias tape. If you prefer you can make your own bias tape following this tutorial by Dana of MADE. For my bunting I needed to cut 8 triangles.  Trace your stencil on your fabric. I cut out a few layers at a time so after I traced on the top layer I pinned the layers of fabric together and cut it out with scissors. A rotary cutter would work better for regular fabric, but I was using old pants and a shirt that I didn’t want to bother cutting carefully all apart beforehand. My third fabric was an antique linen napkin.  Peel the paper off the Wonder Under, place your leaves as you wish and press with a hot iron. Sew leaf vein details onto the leaves. I sewed up from the stem through the center of the leaf to the tip, turned the leaf and as I traced my way back down the center vein I stopped to stitch out and back for the side veins wherever I wanted to put one. Once I arrived back down at the stem I began stitching around the outer edge of the leaf. I used a variegated thread that changed from beige to dark green and back again. I like how the effect is similar to the variations of color on real Autumn leaves.  Next sew a single line down each side of the triangle to add a bit more color and to stop any fraying from the raw edge of the fabric.
 Tie off and snipped the ends of the thread on the back side of the triangles. Put the triangles through a wash and dry cycle to give the edges a soft frayed look. After the dryer, iron them well.
Lay out the bias tape and positioned the triangles evenly spaced along its length. Sandwiching the top edge of the triangle within the double fold bias tape, pin each triangle in place.
 Almost done! Finish the ends of the bias tape by opening the tape flat and folding it back in on itself leaving the raw edge inside when you refold it. Pin in place. (Sorry, I forgot to take a photo of this step.) Lastly stitch down the length of the bias tape, reversing back and forth a couple of times over the ends.
Here is mine displayed on a mantle. Happy sewing!
 If you should wish to purchase this one instead of making your own you can find
it in my Etsy shop, Folk Haven Creations. But really, they are so much fun to make you should probably make your own!
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Never Fail Baked Custard
October 6, 2011 at 1:04 am (Recipes)
Tags: custard, Fall, goat's milk, recipe
Today was a day I have imagined for many years.
When I was a child my Aunt Mary lived just up the hill from us. She still cooked on a wood burning stove and almost always was making or had just made custard to use up the many eggs their chickens produced daily. The smell was heavenly! I always wished I had asked for the recipe before she died, but I later found this recipe in an old 1975 church compilation recipe book that tastes much how I remember her custard tasting.
During a time in my single years that I lived alone I could never use up a gallon of milk before it would turn, so every Saturday morning I would make custard that would bake as I did laundry and other chores, beautifully steaming up the kitchen windows and making my apartment smell like Aunt Mary’s kitchen. And I dreamed of the day that I would have little ones for whom to make custard.
Along came Eli, with his milk allergy in tow. I have thought for a while of making the custard with goat’s milk, but he really dislikes eggs and I don’t like goat’s milk so I was afraid it would go to waste. But today it is raining and chilly… a perfect day for custard, so I decided to make half a recipe.
There are only four ingredients: sugar, eggs, milk and salt.
The most time consuming part is to scald the milk first. This is difficult for me as I tend to get distracted and then it boild over. Thankfully that didn’t happen today.
Slowly mix the hot milk into the egg mixture a little at a time so that the eggs don’t cook with the addition of the hot milk.
Bake in a bain marie for about 40 minutes.
Will he like it?
Yes! And actually I do too. The goaty flavor of the milk is quite tamed by the addition of the other ingredients.
Fall is now truely here. Let there be custard!
Folk Haven 