Easter isn't complete without a little chocolate

Or, in this case, a lot of chocolate. My favorite Easter treat are these giant chocolate eggs. Cafe Konditorei Schall in Böblingen makes these. It's a chocolate shell, filled with their pralines.
Lasts a good long time.

Look who's in my fridge today!

Happy Easter!

Nespresso coffee is wonderful (but expensive)

Years ago I received a Nespresso machine as a present. It was a total luxury, because I knew exactly how much the capsules cost, but I wanted one, mostly because it was pretty.
Yes, that's a terrible reason to buy a coffee, but have you SEEN how pretty they are?
Each color represents a different flavor. Sometimes they have special brews and offer limited time coffees, like special flavors at Christmas.
OK, I'll admit it. I sometimes mostly almost always choose my coffee based on color and not flavor or country of origin.
What you should NOT buy from Nespresso is the Aeroccino cappucino milk foamer. Piece of expensive crap that broke within a month of the warranty expiring.
But the coffeemaker is fun. Here's a picture of a latte I made recently. Heated the milk in the microwave, then brewed a capsule, which settled mostly on top of the milk, and then added a shot of hot water, which is the lighter layer, and then the crema is on top. Mmmm. 5 layers of beautiful browns and whites.

Easy Angle Ruler is easy to get the right angle

For the Bonnie Hunter class, it was required to have the Easy Angle ruler, and we were shown how to use it during the class.
This is a GREAT tool to use if you are constantly having to trim down half-square triangles. You save fabric, because you cut at exactly the width of the finished HST. You save time because you are not squaring up and trimming the HST. You reduce the potential for a corner of the fabric to get stuck in the feed dogs, because the leading edge is not a teeny tiny point, it's flat.
Both Sue and Birgit have these in stock.

An easy faux binding handle

Tina's friend Jerri showed me a quick way to create a strong strip that can be used as a bag handle, or a strap for most anything. On top of that, it looks like the strap has binding, but it is created much faster then real binding.
First, you take 2 strips of cloth, one about an inch wider than the other. The wider one will be the binding fabric.

 To give the added strength, take a piece of this sturdy batting and layer it in. it doesn't matter much if the batting is the wide or the narrow width.

Line up the left sides of all three pieces and sew.
Now comes the tricky part.  Take all three right sides, line them up, and sew them as well. It's tricky because the wider piece will sag open. Don't worry, it will pay off later.

 Turn the strap inside out. Adjust the fabric so the narrow piece is centered onto the wider piece, making it look like binding.  press and stitch down.

 I experimented with some decorative stitches. Number 163 is the nicest stitch for this handle.

 You can vary the widths to get wider straps and/or wider binding. I like the binding best when the wider piece is one inch wider.

Some less blog-o-genic activities

While I have made a couple of small finishes, to be posted later, mostly I've been working on things that are less suited to blogging (less blog-o-genic, like photogenic. Made that word up myself).
That includes spending WAY TOO MUCH TIME on photo puzzles at Jigsawplanet.
There are lots of quilt pictures there, and I just uploaded my GFG as a large hard puzzle. Hint: the pieces must be rotated.
Links:
     Jigsawplanet
To play puzzles I've created, go to http://www.jigsawplanet.com/karenotto

Do a search on the keyword quilt. Lots of nice puzzles there. I mostly search on the keyword color.

Other activities:

• Inching along on projects like my Mola and Ula Lenz BOM
• Organizing my sewing room a la Flylady
• Going through a major change at work  (we're going Japanese)
• Administrating the web page for our local Blackforest Quilters guild 

That last item takes unpredictable amounts of time. I thought that adding a photo gallery (sorry, members only) would be hard, but it was easy. But then setting up all the needed email addresses was easy, but time-consuming. And a million other things. At least we are using the site, and very well. We have tens of thousands of hits a month - makes it all worthwhile.
And we have a free page now, so go take a look. http://www.blackforestquilters.de/free_public.htm