January brought more pillow fun. I’ve been coveting this beautiful fabric for months, but didn’t have a project in mind so I kept leaving it at the store. Finally I decided to just buy it and as soon as I walked in the house I knew it would replace the now faded pillows on the couch. It’s a Chinese red and not at all in line with the orange I normally pick for the living room, but it was beautiful on the grey couch, so it was time for a change. Conveniently I still had a giant piece of grey felt for companion pillows.

I decided this fabric needed a special treatment so I stared at many, many beautiful pillow examples online and finally decided to try my hand at pin tucking. It looked fancy, but I quickly came to believe everyone who said how easy it was. I put a band of pin tucking on the print pillows and three widely spaced ones on the felt.

And thanks to this great tutorial, I even added zippers to all my pillows for the first time ever! (I can’t believe I’ve been adding buttons all this time thinking they were easier…)

I managed to stick to my comfort zone of only sewing straight lines and ended up with beautiful, fancy pillows – what a bonus! And I have to admit, I love this fabric even more and catch myself just looking at it every now and then and being happy it’s on my couch 🙂

I couldn’t let any of the fabric go to waste, so I borrowed from this example and used the last piece to make another pin tucked band to put on a grey felt pillow for the chair in the room.

And just because I was on a roll with my fancy new straight lines – I made this pillow reversible, here’s the back:

It’s my favorite time of year, yes I love the holidays… but my favorite tradition is my annual chocolate making extravaganza. We decided to give ourselves a break and skipped the molded chocolates this year (and saved ourselves a good 2-3 hours). But we still tempered the chocolate and dipped and poured like crazy!

First we made some chocolate praline hazelnuts and dipped swedish fish, pretzels and apricots (with a little chilli sea salt on top).

Then – this year’s masterpiece. Handrolled dark milk chocolate truffles, dipped in bittersweet chocolate with a few nibs on top.

The remaining chocolate gets poured into bark. This year: mango and cashews with curried mango salt, toffee & sea salt, and toffee with cashews.

At the end – it was quite a display of chocolates!

And of course, day two was the fun part… packaging them so they look as good as they taste!