Yobittles

Recycle more than plastic bags at the grocery store

2009-06-17T19:40:00.005-05:00

So, awhile ago I was dropping off my plastic bag recycling, I noticed a sign attached to the bin telling me that I could be recycling much more than just the plastic bags I normally drop off. Now, secretly I have been adding things like the huge amount of plastic around big cubes of toilet paper and stuff like that for years, but now I know for sure that it is actually ok.

Curious, I did a quick internet search and found these guidelines, courtesy of plasticbagrecycling.org. In addition to plastic grocery bags, you can also include:

newspaper bags
dry cleaning bags
bread bags
produce bags
toilet paper, napkin, and paper towel wraps
furniture wrap
electronic wrap
plastic retail bags (hard plastic and string handles removed)
grocery bags
zip lock bags (remove zipper/hard bits)
cereal box liners
Tyvek (no glue, labels, other material) This is the rip-proof stuff USPS makes their Priority Mail bags from.
diaper wrap (packaging)
plastic shipping envelopes (remove labels)
case wrap (e.g., snacks, water bottles)
Bags with sealed air for packaging (like the ones Amazon.com uses, but pop them first)
All clean, dry bags labeled #2 or #4

The site also includes things that aren't recyclable this way:

NO food or cling wrap
NO prepackaged food bags including frozen food bags (e.g., prewashed salad bags)
NO film that has been painted or has excessive glue
NO other bags or films
NO bio-based or compostable plastic bags (e.g. Saver's bags are now biodegradable and therefore not recyclable)

On a different site, I also found the following are not recyclable:

Chip bags
Bubble wrap
Window plastic
Swimming pool covers
Plastic bread tags
Bacon packages
Cheese slices & outer wrap
Pasta packages (crinkly plastic)
Chocolate bar & candy wrappers

It seems like the guidelines vary quite a bit from city to city, though. For instance, some cities say the following are ok, some say they are not:

Soil, sand, peat moss & fertilizer bags
Washed frozen vegetable bags, french fry bags, etc.
Downy pouches - rinsed
Milk bags & pouches

It is all very confusing... And the wrong kind of plastic added to this recycling can contaminate an entire batch, so you don't just want to guess and see.

I would suggest doing a search for your particular city's recommendation. I know I am going to be spending some time reading on the Minneapolis city website to make sure I have it right. I will probably print up a list and put it on the fridge so I can remember...

Growing potatoes in 5-gallon buckets

2009-06-15T22:52:00.008-05:00

This year, in addition to creating three 4-foot "square foot gardening" cubes, we decided to try to grow potatoes in buckets. I really, really like fingerling potatoes but am way too cheap to buy them more than once or twice a year (even at the farmer's market they can be $4-6 a pound), so we thought we would grow them and see if doing it ourselves is actually cheaper.

We got the buckets really cheap ($1/bucket) off of Craigslist. These previously held corn syrup for a candy store, so they are food safe and don't have any nasty paint residues or anything. We drilled a bunch of holes in the bottom of each for drainage.

A package of Swedish fingerling starts from Burpee was about $18. The instructions said to cut fingerling seed potatoes into 3/4-ounce pieces, but most of the seed potatoes were 1 to 1 1/4 ounces, so they couldn't really be cut up. Nonetheless, we still got 16 seed pieces, which we planted one per bucket and then covered them with 3-4 inches of "garden soil for vegetables", which was about $2.75 per 1-cubic foot bag at Menard's. We will need about 11 of these bags, but they will be reusable from year to year.

The two really great things about growing potatoes in buckets is that then they don't wreck your garden soil (lots of things don't like growing where potatoes have grown), and they are ridiculously easy to harvest--just dump out the bucket on a tarp.

We planted the potatoes May 12 (last frost date here is May 15, so a little late), but they are doing great! They took about two or three weeks to come up, but now they are growing like crazy. (They are already much bigger than in this photo I took 4 days ago.) I think they have grown a foot in just the last week. We have filled most of the buckets over halfway with soil now, and I think by this weekend almost every bucket will be full of soil.

Toddler chef's costume

2009-06-10T00:05:00.005-05:00

My nephew's third birthday is in a couple of weeks and apparently he likes to dress up. I sewed him a chef's hat and coat and superhero cape (I'll show that later). I tried so hard to get Johanna to try on the chef's coat and she just refused. I don't know why she hated it, but at least now I don't have to make one for her :) I made this from a crisp poly/cotton thrifted sheet and a thrifted black men's shirt.

I do not consider myself an advanced sew-er and this pattern nearly killed me. Specifically, the stick-up collar on the coat nearly killed me. The facing would not lie flat no matter what I did. I nearly resorted to glue, or cutting it off. In the end I placed a few tacking stitches--folded the facing over on itself and stitched to reduce some of the bulk and pouf-iness. I think this was one of my first attempts at set-in sleeves and they were not that easy either. Pattern was Simplicity #3650.

I did manage to get Alfred in it (however briefly) and was kind of surprised to see that he is now a 4T in girth. Maybe these patterns run small... :)

I delayed mailing these costumes for four days, hoping to get some good light to photograph the children in them. No such luck, we have had nothing but rain and more is to come. At least the garden is happy.

Antique button beaded necklace

2009-06-01T20:16:00.005-05:00

I did eventually finish this necklace for my Grandma last summer. It is based on the cover of the October 2007 Bead & Button. I left off the fringe because I didn't like it; I thought the simpler bezel around the button showed it off better. Keeping with the simpler theme, I also made a pretty but rather plain spiral rope to go with it. The very pretty metallic Tohos matched almost perfectly to the aged brass on the button. I really like the way this one turned out--and so did my Grandma. She's 82, and was tickled that the button was older than she is. (It is supposedly from the 1890's.)

Tree green hand-dyed fabric joy

2009-05-30T15:29:00.004-05:00

I am sewing a quilt for my nephew for Christmas and just picked a pattern from the book Modern Quilt Workshop (it has several quilts I want to make...). He will be 7 at Christmas so I didn't want something too baby-ish--something that will grow with him into pre-teenhood at least. His favorite color is green, so I chose "treehouse", which looks like this, except I am making it in greens and browns, kind of like the original in the book.

I decided this would be a perfect opportunity to make some more hand-dyed fabric, but I didn't have any undyed fabric left, so I started pricing out Kona cotton PFD all over. Turns out it is cheapest at Joann's with a 40% off coupon, so I got 7 yards the other day.

I ripped it all into fat quarters and made up some complicated scheme for getting 28 different shades of green. Two of the fat quarters turned out kind of maroon and will not make it into the quilt, but the rest look beautiful, especially all lined up together. I wonder how long it would have taken me to find and purchase so many hand-dyed greens? Anyway, I am very pleased with how they turned out and am excited to start cutting them up soon.

Of course I didn't think (before I ripped up all my fabric) that maybe I should check what size I need to cut the blocks. So of course the size of the blocks in the book is totally incompatible with my fat quarters--I would wind up wasting a ton of fabric. So, I am going to have to modify the block size and make them a fair bit smaller. Hopefully this won't affect how the quilt looks at the end too much.

Joann's restocks their fabrics fairly quickly (yay!). It took only a week or two for the Kona PFD to come back after I bought it all. I promptly bought the entire new bolt too (8 yards) and have ripped it into fat quarters already. I need a few different browns and don't have recipes for them yet, so I will have to do some experimenting (oh, misery :), especially trying out some blue/orange and purple/yellow chroma bridges, which I have never done. Once my entire family gets over this ugly cold we all have, I am sure I will have the energy to get into a 3-4 hour dyeing session. Right now it is all just sitting on the buffet, the gleaming white squares taunting me as I sniffle, passed out on the couch.

I finally signed up for Twitter.

2009-04-21T11:26:00.004-05:00

So, I finally decided to get with it and investigate twitter this week. I admit, it had seemed really dumb to me until I watched the little intro video. I think for now this might be easier to update than trying to fit in an entire blog post more than once a week... So, I added a twitter widget to the sidebar. We'll see how this goes.

"Frugal" Olive of the month club

2009-04-18T20:40:00.001-05:00

I thought I would show the olive of the month "club" we gave to Tyler's Mom for Christmas this year. I decided to DIY-it because the "real" clubs can run upwards of $200! I got 12 different jars of the fancy, yummy olives and sewed 12 little drawstring bags for them all the same size. I attached a tag to each indicating which month they were to be opened (and made sure the expiry dates on the jars didn't fall before then!). It seemed like she liked them.

If she gives me the bags back, I will probably do this every year since it is seems like it is getting impossible to find Christmas gifts for parents who are trying to pare down lately. Edible gifts are such a good idea :)

Start of the new gardening season

2009-04-17T12:49:00.010-05:00

Ok, I have no idea how 3 months have gone by since posting. I am going to stop feeling bad about it, though. The last three months have been full of little sleep, a hyperactive preschooler, a fussy baby, teething, rolling over, crawling, pulling up, getting into EVERYTHING, and me trying to get anything done whatsoever.

So. why don't I not even bother trying to recap what has happened just yet and talk about now. I have started some of the garden plants for the summer: tomatoes, hot peppers, tomatillos, eggplant, watermelon, and herbs are all happily growing in my back cupboard under grow lights.

We have been working hard raking, raking, and raking the lawn to get it prepped to add some grass seed this weekend, hopefully before it rains on Sunday. We were thinking now that we have kids running around back there maybe we should have some semblance of a lawn... The one we have right now is hideously thin and pocketed so it is easy to trip and fall. It was crappy when we moved here, but then two years of completely ignoring it has made it even worse.

Oven fries are incredibly delicious.

2009-01-20T20:48:00.000-06:00

We made oven fries today, for the first time. Why did I wait so long? These were the best fries I have had in my entire life. Russets, peeled and sliced, tossed in a lot of olive oil, salt, pepper, and seasoning salt. 450F for 45 minutes, stir once halfway through. Yum. Next time I will probably put them on parchment paper so they stick a little less.

Changing a fabric's color after piecing a quilt

2009-01-20T20:26:00.010-06:00

So, today has been somewhat eventful. I have been working on the "bad" quilt. I had finished piecing the top three years ago, but then stopped because I hated the way the fabrics looked together. I finally got around to figuring out what to do about it. I decided to "paint" fabric dye onto the offending olive drab fabric.

I used Procion dyes at a concentration of about 1/8 tsp. dye per cup of water. I added 1 Tbsp. urea to slow the drying and intensify the colors. I also added about 1/2 tsp. or so of soda ash. It took four coats, but the result was worth it, I think. What a huge difference--the photos don't really show how big of a change it is. It transformed the top from something I was probably never even going to finish into something I am eager to finish and use--I really like it. I now have it basted to the backing and am going to try to finish quilting and binding it soon.

Before:

After:

Decluttering, and 32 things progress

2009-01-09T16:11:00.007-06:00

I managed to do a large amount of decluttering in the "bad" closet earlier this week. It was full floor to ceiling with stuff we never dealt with after the move (in Aug. 2007) and now it is mostly empty. I figure if I haven't needed it in the last year and a half, I don't need it at all, with the exception of the Christmas decorations and a couple of sentimental item bins that hold stuff like letters and yearbooks.

I moved forward on one of the 32 things this week, too. I signed up for an 8-week watercolor class through St. Paul community education that starts in a couple of weeks. I know it won't be art school-quality education, but at $17,000 minimum for a degree, I thought the $70 class was a better start. I also signed up for a 2-week bookbinding class, but that doesn't start until April.

Also in the spirit of finishing up all my started projects, I pulled out one of my old almost done quilts (#1 in this post) and decided to finally figure out what to do with it. I have been brewing tea and coffee and pulled out my fabric dyes to see what can be done with it to change the god-awful olive colored fabric. I am currently waiting for all my scrap experiments to dry so that I can make a decision.

#20: Contribute to society.

2008-12-20T22:09:00.004-06:00

#20 on my list is to figure out some way to contribute to society. I thought about it a lot and did lots of reading. I decided to set up a second blog that will accept ads and be essentially working as an Amazon affiliate where I donate all the proceeds to charity. I'll work on it for a little while and see how it goes, I guess. I might actually try to promote that blog, whereas this one I haven't bothered at all to do anything. (I don't really care if no one is reading this... it is more for my own use anyway.) Anyway, the new blog, thankyoudinosaur.blogspot.com is named for Johanna--since Halloween she has been dressing up in her dinosaur costume and likes to be called "dinosaur". So when you talk to her, it has to be, "Hello, dinosaur", and, "Thank you, dinosaur". Very cute.

Making toddler-sized bath bombs: the super easy/lazy method.

2008-12-14T12:00:00.006-06:00

I wanted to make something fun for bathtime for Johanna for Christmas that wasn't full of nasty chemicals or really expensive. I made these bath bombs, and she is crazy about them! They are a little bigger than the diameter of a quarter, so they are quite small. But, so is she, so that works out nicely :) And I just happened to have a Lock & Lock that fit four batches (64 bombs) perfectly.

I talked about making bath bombs earlier in the summer when I made some for my Grandma, but they were really time consuming and didn't really turn out the way I wanted. It took several attempts to even get a half-decent batch out. The failed batches I gave to Johanna to play with in the bath, and she went berserk.

I made previous batches of the bath bombs by hand, whisking in the water (tedious and inaccurate), but this time I had the bright idea to use the food processor and it worked like magic! Perfect results, and extremely quick. I used 2 parts baking soda to 1 part cornstarch to 1 part citric acid. I whirled the baking soda and cornstarch with a few drops of food coloring, then whirled it with the citric acid, making sure it was totally mixed. Then, with the processor running, I sprayed about 5-7 light sprays of water in the hole at the top and let it mix for a minute or so. The mix was still extremely powdery and would not hold together, which was the key. If you add so much water that it looks like it will mold into a ball, you have activated the fizzy reaction too much and you will not get good results.

I pressed it very firmly into a butter mold that I have and baked them at 350 for 5 minutes or so to speed up the drying. After they have cooled a little, you can just pop them out. They should be rock-hard, just like the ones from the store. The ones I made for Johanna are unscented, but you could add a few drops of essential oils with the food coloring if you wanted to, although then I probably would let them air-dry instead of baking them so as not to lose the scent.

You can use any mold, but the one I used is a silicone butter mold that I got off Amazon. It just about perfectly holds a mix of 1/2 cup baking soda + 1/4 cup cornstarch + 1/4 cup citric acid and makes great domed flower shapes.

Have I mentioned how much I like my new camera? I don't even think I mentioned it when I got it. I got it right before Alfred was born, a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XSI. I cannot say enough good things about it... What a difference a digital SLR makes versus a point and shoot.

Reading: Getting things done

2008-12-14T00:05:00.010-06:00

So, one of the first of the 32 things I wanted to work on was to whittle down my absolutely enormous to do lists. I have gotten very little done in the last six months or so and have been feeling kind of stressed about it lately. I kind of puttered around trying to figure out how I would fix the situation and happened upon the book "Getting Things Done", which I took out of the library. Well, the book is not amazing or anything, but did have some pretty good ideas. I spent two days reading it and compiling a massive written to do list (16 pages on those little legal-type pads), which I then typed into "now" and "someday" lists in Google Documents. Now I can keep track of all the little things and I have gotten at least 16 things done in the last couple of days, which is probably the most I have done in months. I am really, really liking the to do list in Google. I have a bad habit of losing and re-writing endless to do lists and they never really work. Hopefully this will make some difference.

32 things, or, I am terribly unoriginal.

2008-12-08T00:20:00.001-06:00

I just read on andrea's blog her list of 37 things she wants to do before she turns 38. I think that since it is so close to the new year and am feeling resolution-ey I want to make a similar list of 32 things I would like to accomplish before I turn 33 (or, probably more realistically because of the two little ones, by the end of next year). This is going to be full-out overly ambitious just to inspire me. It will not depress me at the end of the year if I don't get it all done. Really.

Make an advent calendar and set of stockings for next year's Christmas. I didn't get to it this year, but since the kids are just 2 and 4 months, they didn't notice.
Be more successful at gardening next year, including reconfiguring the garden into square foot style plots.
Get a fence around the back yard so the kids can play without me worrying about them dropping off either the 8-foot retaining wall into the neighboring sixplex's parking lot or down the 21 front steps in the front yard. Then, actually play with the kids back there most days when it is nice out. And sometimes when it is not so nice.
Build up my Etsy store to 60-100 items, no duplicates.
Submit a query letter to Lark publishing about my book.
Learn to bake killer ciabatta and pugliese.
Bake chocolate chip cookies with Johanna.
Somehow figure out how to incorporate some exercise/yoga into my day so that I can stop throwing out my back and then complaining about it for a week to anyone who will listen.
Stop feeling like I haven't accomplished anything "real" in several years. Making babies takes work, too.
Make another pilgrimage up to Canada so the cousins can all play with each other.
Play with and pet the dogs more. They have really gotten the short end of the stick since I got pregnant with Johanna.
Finally decide how many children we are going to have. Are we going to have another, or are we going to say two is enough.
Build up an awesome dress-up chest to play with Johanna and Alfred. And then actually use it.
Really pay more attention to what we are eating. Stop eating so much crap and eat more salad and fruit.
Visit the farmer's market most weeks when we go to the library.
Potty-train Johanna.
Start working on baby scrapbooks before I have forgotten everything.
Become a US citizen. Or at least get my application in.
When the weather gets nice again, take some nature walks with the kids around the neighborhood instead of staying inside all day, every day.
Figure out what I am going to do to contribute to society. I have so much desire to do charity and good work, but no follow-through.
Explore more of what the city and surrounding areas have to offer. Visit the beaches and parks.
Take a real vacation. For real. Somewhere cool, but not necessarily far or expensive, probably by car. I have not taken a real vacation since 1999. (I don't have a job now, but it is not the same as going somewhere.)
Perfect a few more of our favorite foods, like dolmas.
Get a load of firewood and actually use the woodburning fireplace for heat some nights over the winter. And for meditation--a fire is so relaxing.
Declutter the house. Something I have been meaning to do since we moved here a year and a half ago and saw that we had kept way too much, but I have not had time yet being pregant and then having a newborn and all. I would like to see empty space in every part of the house.
Take an art class, either in real life or online. I have decided that I like drawing, but with zero training I feel like I might be making obvious mistakes.
Make a quilt for Alfred. I have already started hoarding fabric from goodwill for this.
Finish or let go of most of my existing craft projects. I cannot take the constant, endless to do list. When I see a new project I want to be able to just do it, without feeling guilt about the several dozen other projects that I should be finishing first.
Similarly, finish or let go of most of the things on my gigantic regular to do list. I hate constantly feeling like I should be getting more done instead of relaxing and enjoying my babies' childhood.
Take more photographs of things other than the kids. I really enjoy photography as a hobby and have not been doing much of it at all lately (except shots of the kids). I even got a spiffy new camera this year and have not used it outdoors as much as I'd like.
Appreciate my children more, instead of sometimes feeling like they are an obstacle to getting anything done during the day. Play with them while they still want to play with me and I am everything to them. Read to them every day.
Think more about what I want to do with the rest of my life. My children won't need constant attention forever, and I am not the type that will be happy just lazing around once they are off at school. I don't think I would be happy just puttering around all day, crafting, cooking, gardening, cleaning, etc. While I would like to do a lot of that sort of thing I don't think that is enough to hold me. Do I want to go back to school at 37 (or later if we have more kids)? I probably won't come up with the answers, but I should at least spend some time thinking about who I want to be.

Wooden German tree ornament

2008-12-07T19:11:00.009-06:00

Many inches of snow. December in Minnesota. Ugh. We drove to the library today and it took forever.

I am always amazed at how I can overcome an idea block by just getting off my butt and doing something. I have been trying to think of a new idea for some more illustrations for my Etsy store, and have bemoaning a lack of ideas that I actually felt like working on for about a week now. Last night I actually sat down with my sketchbook for a couple of hours while I was watching tv and feeding Alfred and came up with a fun one. Very Dr. Seuss inspired. I am trying to finish a series of four at least and then I will upload them into my store maybe by next weekend.

Anyway, here is another terrible photo of a very cute ornament I made maybe 4 years ago. (I see our hideously awful spackled Boston walls, so sometime between 2004 and 2007.) It is a tiny German/Scandinavian wood tree. It is a miniature version of the big ones I had done earlier--this one was only about 6" tall. I bought the dowels and wooden beads at Michael's. The ornaments I bought at Michael's, too, I think.

You just glue the beads onto the ends of the dowels, paint them all, then use wire and hot glue to attach the dowels all together. Choose any small ornament to hang from the branches, add a hanging loop, and you are done!

Ready for Christmas! And a temari.

2008-12-05T18:34:00.007-06:00

It is now less than three weeks until Christmas and I am pretty much completely finished everything except getting a tree and cleaning for visitors. I shipped off the package to Canada a few days ago and also finished sewing the 12 little bags for the "olive of the month club".

Why is my baby so big? He is 1 week shy of four months old and he is 21 pounds already. Yes, you read that right. 21 flippin' pounds. That is very off the charts, weight-wise, and he is about 95th percentile for length. He is as big as Johanna was at about 10 months old, and she was not small. He is essentially out of his carseat, Baby Bjorn, bouncer, and only has about 3-4 more pounds left on the swing. I so wanted a cute little baby to hold etc. and now I can barely lift him, never mind carry him around. He is not formula-fed, so the pediatrician says he is fine. I really wonder how big he is going to wind up being later...

So, I have not been doing much other crafting due to lack of time. I thought I would post something I did awhile ago instead.

This is a pair of bad photos of a temari ball I did many years ago, I think for my Mother-in-law. I would guess maybe Christmas 2002? I would really like to do more temaris someday. They are so stunning. But very time-consuming...

Shop update and Christmas beading

2008-11-27T13:00:00.005-06:00

I have finally finished the seven sets of notecards that I wanted to get into my etsy store (click on my store to the right to get at them). I am uploading one per day this week. I have another 4 or 5 notecard designs drawn, but they still need to be digitized and printed etc.

I am printing all these out with my shiny new Epson R1900 printer. I have had a b/w laser printer for 4 years and have never had a color printer before. This one is just gorgeous. And HUGE. It can print up to 13" wide, so when I finally get around to doing some scrapbooking like I want to, I can print out 12" pages.

Anyway, I finished all my Christmas necklaces for the year. Seeing as how I have very little time and am very tired I only made four this year (most years I make more like 8).

This one, for my Mom, is made with 4mm glass pearls, firepolished drops and 15/0 seed beads. It is almost right out of a magazine (Beadwork, Feb/March 2007).

This one, for my Grandma, is made with 4 and 6mm firepolished beads and some Delicas. The pattern is essentially from "Step-by-Step Jewelry: Gifts for the Holidays 2007".

This one is also for my Mom. Very thin hexagon-shaped faceted garnets. Impossible to photograph--it looks all wonky, but it is very beautiful in person.

This one is also for my Grandma. Swarovski pearls, 4mm crystals, and some 11/0 Tohos. Beautiful Swarovski pendant.

I am busily working on more stuff for my etsy shop during my one free hour a day, and also trying to get all the Christmas stuff wrapped up. I am stupidly undertaking scrapbooks for each of the Grandparents so I need to get on that before last mailing date of December 11.

And the holiday portrait this year has to be delayed a couple of weeks as Johanna fell and has a bump on her head and a black eye that is lingering on...

Floral watercolor paper quilt

2008-11-09T19:07:00.008-06:00

This is a paper "quilt" that I made the year before Johanna was born. I drew all of the "blocks" on separate pieces of watercolor paper in ink and then painted them with watercolors. At the end, I glued them all onto a 16 x 20" matboard and framed it. This is one of my favorite things I have done... Although the photo kind of sucks. I should really retake old photos in natural light.

Exploding pyrex lasagna

2008-11-09T18:55:00.000-06:00

So, tonight's lasagna dinner that took me an hour to put together and probably cost $10 in food was cooking happily in the oven for about half an hour when the glass baking dish it was in *exploded* in the oven. I am so irritated. It looked so yummy, but it and my oven are now filled with thousands of shards of glass. And I have to come up with something else to eat.

At least my sketches for Etsy are coming along nicely. I was aiming to finish 10 before I load them into my store (and get a decent printer). I am now done 8, so maybe by Thanksgiving. I am quite happy with how some of them are coming out, and I can't wait to share!

Beaded carnations

2008-11-03T10:40:00.007-06:00

Ok, why don't we start out with something fun today. These are some beaded carnations I made for my Mother-in-law a few years ago.

Made from 11/0 seed beads, complete with floss-wrapped stems.

I liked making these because they were just loops instead of the French technique of petals--they were a little less fussy and faster.

My gigantic baby.

2008-11-03T09:42:00.001-06:00

I guess I haven't managed to get back into a posting (or any kind of) routine yet, even though Alfred is nearly 3 months old now. He is sleeping better now, thankfully, but I am still exhausted because he is still eating all the time. I was not kidding when I complained before. He is 19 pounds now at 12 weeks, which puts him a whole pound off the percentiles chart. At our last appointment they just wrote 100% for his weight percentile and the nurse chuckled. Apparently since I am breastfeeding I "can't" overfeed him, so this is what he needs, I guess. He is in the 90th percentile for length, too, so he isn't just fat, he is big all around. I am really sad that I only had my nice, small newborn for about two weeks. He is almost out of his carseat already and is into 6-9 month clothes. *sigh*.

I wonder a lot about how this is going to translate into how big he is going to be later. I have some really tall Swedish relatives, and Tyler's family has some tall and heavy relatives, but Tyler and I are neither really tall nor heavy. I guess we will have to see.

Johanna really liked her wooden kitchen set and her felt food (and more). She has a bunch of stuffed Sesame Street characters and is now constantly feeding them the food :)

Trying to simplify Christmas this year

2008-11-02T18:23:00.001-06:00

So lately I have been working on both Christmas presents and a series of artwork/sketches that I want to eventually sell on Etsy. For Christmas crafts this year I am keeping it very very simple. Three beaded necklaces for each of my Mom and Grandma. I am already pretty much done two for each (though no photos yet) so I just have two more and I am done.

I have already talked about simplifying the Christmas insanity, but now I am totally determined. I watched "What would Jesus Buy" yesterday, and while the movie itself was only ok, it did have several scenes that got my attention. Being Canadian, I don't have a lot of experience with "Black Friday", as there is no such thing up there and I have never gone out on that day. The closest thing in Canada is "Boxing Day" (December 26th), which usually has the best sales of the year and is a big shopping day. (Many people cynically refer to Boxing Day as the day you go out and get everything you didn't get for Christmas...) Anyway, the scenes of people stampeding into the stores and screaming made me physically ill. I have vowed to do no shopping whatsoever (except groceries) between Thanksgiving and New Year's this year.

I have managed to get most of the people we exchange gifts with on board with not exchanging gifts at all, exchanging only tokens or consumeables, or donating to charity, so I am feeling some relief. Gifts for the children, though, still have no such arrangements and I need to think about how to bring up that topic. People like getting gifts for kids, but we already have so much I don't want much more...

One of the more fun ideas I had was giving an "Olive of the Month club", to a relative that is crazy about olives and really doesn't need any "stuff". However, since the actual club itself is around $200, I figured I would DIY it--buy 12 jars of fancy olives and sew 12 fancy pouches, labeled with months, to put them in. I will definitely photo this when I get done.

Holy tomatoes!

2008-10-16T19:50:00.003-05:00

So, the extra long Indian summer is coming to an end this week. We pulled up all of the tomato plants and this is the result. Granted, not all of these will ripen, but wow... I like how you can see Alfred's little arm waving in the pack & play behind the table :)

So, the summary of the tomato growing season. We grew 5 different types of tomatoes, 2 hybrids and 3 heirlooms: Big Boy and Big mama, and Tomande, Black Krim, and Golden Mama. The Big Boys were woefully neglected and did not produce much as a result, but what little they did produce was perfect and fairly tasty. The Big Mamas were huge and prolific, but many succumed to end rot by the end of summer and they didn't taste as good as plain Romas. The Tomandes were delicious, prolific, and about the right size for just making a sandwich or something. The Black Krims were a little sweet for me, didn't produce much, and what was produced was often huge (close to 1 pound!) and prone to severe cracking. The Golden Mamas were tasty and prolific, but very small and a little bland--peeling hundreds of them takes a lot of time.

Of the five, I think I will only plant Tomandes and Big Boys again next year. Now that I have a better idea of what I am looking for I would imagine it will be a little easier picking out some new varieties for next year.

Almost done the purple raggy quilt

2008-09-30T19:34:00.004-05:00

I have almost managed to finish the purple raggy quilt. All the pieces are together, I just need to clip all the seams and wash it to make it all fringe-ey. I really like how it came out.

I especially like the fact that it is reversible. The back turned out really nicely, too. That way if Johanna ever decides she doesn't like purple, she can have blue/green instead. The dogs of course have adopted it immediately. Here is Kubla lounging away.

Other than that, really not much is going on. Alfred had a really, really bad night last night where he didn't sleep at all so I am just dead.

I actually managed to make the freezer paper pattern for Johanna's birthday apron yesterday. Maybe I will get the apron done this weekend. I am also thinking of making some little oven mitts since she seems to like the grown-up ones so much :)

Thoughts of Christmas... already?

2008-09-26T21:29:00.003-05:00

So, in the last week I have been reminded almost daily that Christmas is coming soon, even though it is still three months away. I am so sick of the overwhelming consumerism that plagues the entire fall every year. I was at Menards (hardware store) this week and they already have hundreds of plastic Christmas trees and anamatronic pre-lit plastic reindeer and other various enormous crap for your yard on display. Blech.

This year will be our first Christmas that we stay home. There will be no travelling hundreds of miles to spend it with our families. We are going to be in our own house with our own children and get to start our own traditions. Tyler and I have already had extensive discussions on what we want Christmas to be for our family, and that is going to continue a lot as I go through "Unplug the Christmas Machine" and "Hundred-Dollar Holiday" again (thankfully my library had both of them). I read them years ago, but being at the mercy of family Christmases we couldn't really implement much.

To be fair, neither of our families is excessively materialistic. At least not in ways that I read about other families being, with mountains of presents and people going into debt to pay for the holiday--so much so that it takes until summer to pay it off. But, the holidays have really been lacking in meaning for us. We don't really do much other than a family dinner, tree decorating, a little baking, and present-opening. We would like to change that to incorporate more meaningful activities that go through all of December, including after Christmas, so there is very little focus on the gifting.

One thing I am going to do for sure is to make an advent calendar for the children. Instead of filling it with trinkets or gifts, I am going to fill it with activities. For example, the activity for a day could be "bake Christmas cookies with Mommy" or "Go sledding" or "Make Christmas cards or gifts for the grandparents". Anway, this is not an original idea; there are thousands of others like it on the internet, but I really like it. Now I just have to find the time to at least sew something with 25 pockets...

Anyway, on the topic of Christmas, this is a beaded ornament I made many years ago for my then boss. I wish I had more time to make more handmade ornaments of this or even greater complexity.

My baby is so big

2008-09-24T18:53:00.015-05:00

Six weeks old and very, very cute, but also very round :)

The quilting challenge kind of went by the wayside when my pregnancy was interfering with my ability and motivation to do anything, so I would like to get back on that soon. I will have to have a more generous set of deadlines now, though, as if I get an hour of crafting a day (stuff that can't be done on the couch) it is a miracle. I have pulled out the purple raggy quilt again and have pinned more strips together. I don't believe how close I got to being finished and then just put it away. I think maybe three more hours of concentrated effort and the sewing will be done. Then I will just have many hours of seam snipping and a wash to make it fuzz.

Last weekend I did a major clearout of my craft room. I am starting to realize that with two small children my crafting time is going to be extremely limited for the next few years, and I just won't have the time to do everything I want to do. I really don't want to have to shuffle all this stuff around for the next 5+ years until they are in school and I do have more time (and I will probably have different interests by then, anyway), so I decided to get rid of a ton of stuff. We are talking 9 garbage bags of stuff and fabric off to goodwill and freecycle, and 6+ boxes of books and supplies to sell. My craft room is feeling very nice and open again. I was kind of getting claustrophobic, as well as it was becoming an enormous pain to shove everything in the closet when it was time to convert it to a guest room.

Birds I have managed to see in my yard

2008-09-23T16:57:00.000-05:00

I live smack in the middle of the twin cities in Minnesota. I live fairly near the river in an older neighborhood with lots of trees. My yard, in particular has four oak trees that are probably as old or close to as old as my 96-year old house. My yard is also a double lot, and the previous owner just kind of let the yard go (except the lawn) for about 6 years. As such, we have an insane amount of wildlife visiting us even though we are in the middle of the city.

I lived in apartments for the 14 years before I moved here two years ago, so I got kind of interested in actually identifying all the birds that were visiting our feeders and our yard, with the help of the Birds of Minnesota Field Guide. This is more for my reference as I am sure most people don't care, but this is a list of what I have seen so far (I will update as I see more):

American goldfinch

American robin

Baltimore oriole

Black-capped chickadee

Blue jay

Brown-headed cowbird

Chipping sparrow

Common grackle

Dark-eyed junco

Downy woodpecker

European starling

Hairy woodpecker

House finch

House sparrow

Indigo bunting (male)

Mourning dove

Northern cardinal

Northern flicker

Pileated woodpecker

Pine siskin

Purple finch

Red-breasted nuthatch

Red-winged blackbird

Rose-breasted grosbeak

White-breasted nuthatch

White-throated sparrow

Wild turkey (yes, really. see the photo below.)

Yellow-rumped warbler

Felt food set--or, what to make when you are trapped in a chair for 16 hours a day.

2008-09-23T16:35:00.019-05:00

So, as I said in my last post, I made a set of felt food for Johanna for her birthday a month from now. Making play food is totally addictive and is a nice activity for when you are stuck in a chair for 16 hours a day feeding your newborn.

This is what I have finished so far:

Pizza + toppings. The toppings are all removeable so she can make her own. We have red and green peppers, onions, mushrooms, and black olives.

Veggie burger + fixin's. Again, all the toppings are removable. We have a sesame seed bun, lettuce, tomato, pickles, onion rings, ketchup and mustard splorts, and a burger. I still want to make some fries to go with it.

Ravioli + sauce.

Green salad. There are lettuce leaves, carrots, and tomato slices.

Fruit salad. It has mandarin oranges, kiwifruit, pineapple, banana, apple, and strawberry.

Pancakes with syrup and margarine. The syrup and margarine are attached.

Set of six cookies with "sprinkles" (beads).

Bento lunch, packed into a 7" double-decker steamer.

The first layer has spring rolls, snow peas, carrot flowers, an onigiri, some soba noodles in a lettuce cup, and sushi grass.

The second layer has sushi rolls, pickled ginger, potstickers, a sad little octo-dog, and more sushi grass.

I finally got motivated to finish the pita sandwich today that was almost done. I made pita pockets, spinach, avocado, more tomatoes, hummus and tzatziki blobs, cucumber, and falafel balls.

I picked up a set of round Lock & Locks a couple of weeks ago on sale that work perfectly to contain everything.

Now I just have to do the fries to go with the burger. And then start working on the two hundred other craft projects I have on the go.

Exhausted, but still here...

2008-09-16T22:57:00.004-05:00

I haven't given up here; I am just kind of overtired and undermotivated. Obviously now that it is a month after my due date my little guy has arrived. What a cutie!

I like how he is already a little nerdy making "live long and prosper" in his sleep. (I am not a super-trekkie, but I do like the movies and watched TNG when it was on the air.)

We named him Alfred. We are expecting to take a lot of static for that, but I don't care. I like the name and once you get used to it, it is actually kind of cute. We keep getting asked who he is named for :) We wanted something less trendy than the "Kalen/Caleb/Braden" etc. that is going on now--a name that he wouldn't share with a million other babies born this year, but not really so wierd he would get teased for it. We'll see if he hates us for it soon enough...

I read so many stories about how the baby after a difficult baby is usually really easygoing and sleeps a lot. Not so much. He is over 5 weeks old now and still maxing out at 2.5 hours straight overnight. And he is eating about 16 hours a day. I am not kidding. He was 8 pounds, 8 ounces when he was born, dropped to 8 pounds even by 2 days, and was 12 pounds even at his 1 month appointment. Even the doctor made big eyes about that kind of growth.

The result is I am attached to the baby almost all day and night and am barely sleeping at all and Tyler is back at work so I am trying to watch both of them during the day. I am really really really tired...

I am barely doing anything other than watching tv, except making a set of felt food for Johanna for her birthday next month to go with the wood kitchen we got for her. So far I have made a pizza, hamburger, bento-type lunch, fruit salad, pancakes, and ravioli. I still want to do a pita sandwich and some sweets.

I have been procrastinating posting again because there is so much to post about that writing it all would take hours. I figure I'll just post in bits and pieces as it comes up or I will wind up never posting again.

37 weeks... and what were we thinking when we planted so many tomatoes?

2008-07-23T19:45:00.014-05:00

So, my parents and Grandma were visiting and they left this morning. Now I just get to relax (sort of) for the next three weeks until the next batch of relatives arrives...

A shot of my lovely Birthday flowers.

Our peas have started flowering.

And, we are about to have a serious tomato situation here. I would estimate there are at least 100 fruits and at least another 2-300 blossoms spread over the 58 plants. We are starting to eat through the freezer pretty fast to make room...

This is a tiny "Big Mama hybrid".

This is a larger Big Mama. They are supposed to grow up to 5 inches long!

A really ugly (but probably going to be tasty) Tomande heirloom.

A pair of nice looking Black Krims.

Still no fruits on the Big Boy hybrids, but they have a few blossoms. They just haven't grown like the other plants. The tallest Big Mamas are over five feet tall now, and they are supposed to keep growing until first frost. But the trellis they are growing on is only 5.5 feet tall. We are not sure what we are going to do about that.

Anyway, I am another year older, another couple of weeks closer to having the baby, and I have really not gotten much done. I like this point where you are so close that you just don't care about anything except not being pregnant anymore :) This week I have very little planned as this last week with my parents was very busy so I am really tired.

We are eagerly awaiting a cast iron griddle that I ordered with my birthday money. It is supposed to arrive tomorrow, and in anticipation today I went and got some tomatoes, zucchini, portabellas, and tofu. I am really looking forward to dinner. Every day I am so happy we have a gas stove, finally, after years and years of crappy semi-functioning electric apartment stoves. I don't believe what a difference it makes.

Baby raccoons!

2008-07-23T18:30:00.001-05:00

We saw a family of baby raccoons (4) in the yard. The size of a small cat, they are so cute!

First tomato sighting

2008-07-13T00:05:00.014-05:00

This is really getting sad. I haven't done anything really crafty in quite awhile so I have not had much to say here. I am tired and uncomfortable and completely unmotivated to work on any crafty projects. I am having a lot of trouble even getting my Grandma's necklace done, and she is going to be here on Thursday. With my parents. Yikes. And my birthday is next week and I don't know what to do for it. I will actually have babysitters (parents) here, so I can do whatever I want. Hmmm...

We saw our first tomato today! It is the size of a pea and revoltingly cute. Of the 5 types we planted, the "Big Mama" hybrid is the first to fruit, even though it had the longest harvest date.

Stone paver mosaic finished

2008-07-12T22:52:00.003-05:00

Tyler finished the dog run mosaic this week, too. I think it turned out really well--it looks a thousand times better than it did before, anyway. It will also be so much easier to keep clean, especially in the winter. The best part? This project was free! We just harvested a bunch of random, mostly broken, paving stones from all over the yard (and some from the path in the dog run) and broke them into the right size pieces. Apparently previous owners were too lazy to dispose of these old pavers and just hid a bunch under daylilies and such. There are still more after this!

It poured rain a few times this week and all the water seeped quickly into the ground. Before we did this, there would be flood-ey puddles all over and the dogs would get so muddy... Why don't we just use gravel, you say? One of our dogs refuses to walk on gravel and would never go outside again. That is the price of having prissy dogs :)

We found a small amount of moss near the deck and made some moss/beer soup in the blender and poured it all over the stones. Hopefully moss will fill in all the cracks, because that would be even prettier :) Remember, this is what it looked like before. Ick.

Not much else is happening. I am still waiting on a couple of ingredients to arrive to make any cleaners or bubble bath stuff. We are going to take Johanna to the Ramsey County Fair tomorrow and let her play in the petting zoo. She really likes animals (like most kids), so we think she will get a kick out of it.

On homemade cleaners and bath bombs

2008-07-06T22:20:00.002-05:00

On the way back from the farmer's market yesterday, we stopped at a brewery supply place for some citric acid, which they were out of. I am trying to make bath bombs for my grandma's birthday and this is the third time I have gone to a store to get the acid and it has been either closed or they were out. Bath bombs are obscenely expensive to buy and it appears to be almost as obscenely easy to make them. I hope when I finally get ahold of the supplies that they work out.

I have been doing lots of reading in the last few days about making my own cleaning supplies etc. This was spurred on by how quickly we are going through non-petroleum/scary chemical based baby bubble bath (which, at $1/ounce even for the cheap stuff, is pretty pricey). I was curious as to how hard it really is to make a natural basic bubble bath yourself, and it turns out it is pretty dang easy (there are dozens of sites out there that discuss it so I am not going to bother repeating things). I am ordering some castile soap and glycerin off of Amazon, and I already have some nice citrus-ey essential oils. I will post back as to how well it actually works...

As for the cleaning supplies, I am trying hard to track down all the random things I need. In my 5-store search for canning jars yesterday, I did manage to find some washing soda in Rainbow Foods. That is supposed to be one of the hardest things to locate. I am going to start out pretty small and just make up some cleaners to replace the stuff I am out of or very close to out of anyway. I really really hate the smell of commercial cleaners so we barely had any anyway. I have for years found that most messes clean up just fine with soap and a little elbow grease without polluting the air. All we have to use up is a little bit of "Vim" (Canadian "Soft Scrub"), some laundry detergent, dish soap and dishwasher detergent, some window cleaner, and some Method wood cleaner (which although it is supposed to be fine, is fairly expensive so I would rather make my own).

I am very curious to see how these homemade cleaners work out. I am not extremely picky about how clean things are, so I would imagine they will work just fine. The only thing I have reservations about is laundry detergent--I have tried numerous "eco-friendly" laundry detergents that just don't work at all, so I have been guilty of buying brand-name (Tide). The eco-detergents really do not get linens clean. I was reading yesterday that it is probably because our water is really hard, so there is an easy solution to that--and then hopefully the homemade concoction I mix up will work.

Ruby necklace

2008-07-06T22:02:00.001-05:00

A necklace I made for my Grandma a couple of years ago--real rubies and sterling silver. Very simple design, but it wound up looking very nice. I almost kept it since rubies are my birthstone, too :)

Freezer Strawberry Jam-ey goodness

2008-07-05T23:13:00.015-05:00

So, today was very, very busy. We got up at the crack of 9 and headed off to the St. Paul farmer's market. We picked up a few lettuces, a couple pounds of baby potatoes, and a flat (6 quarts/8.5 pounds) of strawberries. I had been planning to go u-picking this year, but between my back hurting, my lack of energy, Tyler's unenthusiasm for picking berries alone while I watched/waited with Johanna in the car, and increasing lack of freezer space, we figured out that it would probably just be easier this year to have someone pick the one flat for us, especially when we calculated it would cost $12 just in gas to get out and back from the berry farm.

The idea was that I was going to make freezer jam tonight with most of the strawberries. Freezer strawberry jam is the most delicious thing ever, especially with fresh, local berries. However, even though I have been planning this for months, I did not think through getting jars or certo or lemons or even enough sugar in advance. Apparently trying to buy 1/2 pint canning jars in the midwest during strawberry season is very stupid. All 5 stores I went to were completely sold out. At the last store I went to, they had one flat left of pint jars, so I had to use those instead.

So, tonight we made almost 7 quarts of jam, plus a few containers for slicing and freezing, and a whole quart leftover for eating in the next couple of days. They are really, really good berries. The jam they make should be amazing...

Anyway, we had the potatoes in butter and fresh dill from my little herb planters for dinner. Yum!

34 weeks, and a few tomato buds

2008-07-03T22:44:00.011-05:00

Well, posting is still not going too well :) This week I have a sudden illness (2 days lying on the couch) and an unexpected houseguest (2 days of cleaning and then the stay) to blame. I am going to try not to complain about how uncomfortable and tired I am and how much my back hurts and how I am so ready to have this baby but still probably have 7 weeks left...

A few of my tomato plants have buds on them! I am amazed we made it this far with only losing two plants. So, we have potentially 58 plants about to fruit. Our tomato patch is in an area that doesn't have as much sun as they probably would like--our neighbor said he was going to cut down some trees back there but because they are intertwined with the power lines he has to wait for the power and cable companies to come out and do some trimming first. Next year there will be much more sun for the little plants. Or should I say giant? A few of the tomato plants are well over three feet tall again already! The ones that were the leggiest before planting are now doing the best, probably because they have two feet of roots...

Other things in the garden are sort of hit-and-miss. Two of the three varieties of peas are doing great, the other maybe only had 10% germination (or maybe the birds/squirrels/chipmunks got them?). A couple of the peppers, probably weakened by weeks of neglect, are succumbing to some kind of wilt. The carrots and beets and onions look iffy, but the zucchini looks good. The watermelon and sunflowers aren't sprouting much yet.

We are still not done the mosaic dog area yet... Almost. We have about three feet left to do. We are going to try to finish in the next couple of days before we get the 90-degree weather wave that is on its way next week.

And I have not been doing much of anything crafty at all to post about. Tonight I am finally working on my grandma's button necklace that I posted about awhile ago. Her birthday is tomorrow, so it seems like an appropriate time to start :) She is coming, with my parents, to visit in a couple of weeks so I will give it to her then.

Has it been 8 years already?

2008-07-03T22:08:00.001-05:00

Yesterday was our 8(!) year anniversary, so I will post a photo of the veil I made for the occasion. I had originally wanted to sew my own dress, too, but my sewing skills were severely lacking and I was in the middle of trying to finish University so I didn't really have time. The veil is three layers of tulle with a wavy scalloped edge sewn to a comb. It was my first project with a serger and let me tell you there was a LOT of swearing trying to get that edging right. I wanted something really airy and light and not like any other veil I had ever seen.

To get the wavy edge you serge a thick fishing line into the edge, and then when you are done, you run your fingers all around the edge to stretch out the stitching over the fishing line. In hindsight, it probably would have been easier to serge around the edge and then just thread the fishing line through afterwards...

Orizomegami eBook is finally finished!

2008-06-24T10:40:00.000-05:00

I finally finished the orizomegami book that I have been writing off and on (mostly off) for the past 4 years. I listed it on Etsy, so we'll see what happens. My original plan was to try to get it published, but I really don't have the time or energy for that right now. I might change my mind later. It is tough putting something up on Etsy that I know I would like but I don't think people will even find because it is a little obscure. Indeed, not many people are even finding it to look at it. I am not sure what to do about that.

Creative re-use of stone pavers

2008-06-23T22:43:00.002-05:00

This morning I got all excited because I thought I saw a new kind of bird in the yard, which wasn't in my little "Birds of Minnesota" field guide. Turns out that juvenile robins have lots and lots of spots. Who knew? Now I feel like an idiot.

This yard we got last year seems to have no end of badly neglected areas. We have a small dog run at the side of the yard that is in terrible disrepair--we are trying to fix it up this week. It has a row of cracked pavers that are really old down one side, some dead sod that we tried to install last year but that didn't take because that side of the house gets no sun at all, and lots and lots of weeds. We are taking everything out, leveling it off, and putting the broken pavers back in a mosaic-ey pattern. I am hoping to fill in the cracks with moss or some other creeping green. This is it just after we have started. The dogs seem to approve already :)

Garden update

2008-06-23T11:06:00.012-05:00

Yes, I am still here. It is getting harder to get the energy to post as I get bigger and less mobile and have so much less energy but the list of things to do keeps going on...

We haven't been doing much more in the yard. Everything is planted now, finally, and most things are sprouting. We have peas, carrots, beets, and zucchini plants happily growing in the back garden. I also planted some onions, sunflowers, and watermelons last week and they have not come up yet. The harvest time on the onions is 168 days, so I am not sure what will happen with those. I didn't see that particular tidbit, of course, until after I was home with the seeds. My tomato plants are getting very tall. Some of them are almost three feet tall again. Others are still only a foot or so tall. I wonder if we will actually get any tomatoes out of these.

Other than that, not much is new at all. I am feeling really tired and run down and have not been up to anything, really. There is so much that I wanted to get done before I lose another six months when the new baby comes, but since I only have maybe 7 or 8 weeks left, it is not looking like much more than basic house cleaning and probably some freezer cooking is going to happen.

Lazy samosas for the freezer

2008-06-23T11:02:00.000-05:00

This week we made 90 samosas for the freezer. Yum! This is some of them before deep frying. We were lazy and used two layers of egg roll wrappers instead of making our own dough. Just a note--spring roll wrappers don't seem to work at all for this, at least for us.

A break in the weather

2008-06-07T23:35:00.012-05:00

So, it has been raining and thunderstorming etc. here for several days, so we haven't been able to do much outside. All photos I take inside are not turning out well because of the bad lighting, and I have been feeling icky so I haven't really been doing much anyway.

A few of my poor little tomato plants look like they are not going to survive, (3 or 4 of them), so we are down to about 56 plants left. They either didn't take to transplanting or were damaged in the severe weather we have been having. I think one's stem might have been broken while planting, too.

Yesterday we decided to tackle the front "lawn". It was not lawn anymore... I don't think we have ever mowed it and we have lived here for almost a year! Needless to say it took over 2 hours just to do a first pass with our spiffy Brill push mower. I am not exaggerating how bad it was... I am almost surprised the neighbors didn't say anything. Probably because we live near the end of the street and no one really sees our house, anyway.

Making burritos for the freezer

2008-06-07T23:06:00.001-05:00

Yesterday I decided to tackle something else for the freezer stash--burritos. I like the ones from Trader Joe's that come frozen, but at $3 something for 2, they are kind of expensive. I thought we could easily make our own for much, much cheaper. I think the whole batch cost about $6 for 20, which means they are about 30 cents each. Not bad!

We made a huge batch of refried beans (new recipe, based on this one, but no beer and modified more to our tastes), some salsa rice, and just portioned things out quickly with a disher (my favorite kitchen tool). My wrapping technique still needs some work, but they look ok. We had some for lunch today to test the thawing/reheating/flavor of them. Much better than Trader Joe's, I have to say. We baked them after thawing them in the microwave and the tortillas got really crispy and yummy.

Today we also went to the Indian grocery store and got some goodies--kala chana (the really, really, good kind of chickpeas), wet tamarind, amchur powder, more coriander, lots of tamarind chutney, and a 10 pound bag of Zafarani Reserve aged basmati rice, which they assured us was the best tasting of the bunch. We just made another test run of the curry base again last night (yum!), so it will be a couple of days before we want to try the rice. We also stopped a few blocks down at the Middle Eastern grocery store and got two huge jars of grape leaves for much cheaper than at the regular grocery store, so now I can make dozens of dolmas when we finish eating through the first batch.

The curry we made yesterday was really good; we tried adding kala chana for once. I had a 2 pound bag of them left from my last trip to the Indian grocery but never wound up using them because they take so long to cook. I solved that by cooking the whole bag at once (no presoaking) in salted water for about an hour and a half maybe? Then I froze them in 1-cup portions for easy addition to curries and soups. Why didn't I think of this before? I have a bag of pot barley that is neglected for the same reason--when I am hungry I don't want to wait an hour for it to cook. Tomorrow I am going to cook the whole 4 pound bag and freeze it for easy soup additions. I bet I could save a fair bit of money and sodium by processing other beans this way, too. It doesn't take so much more energy to cook 5 pounds of beans as 1, and then they are ready to go.

Preparing the garden and actually planting something, finally!

2008-06-04T22:11:00.004-05:00

What we have been up to:

Planting raspberries and blueberries. This is them along the fence before mulching. We wrapped a soaker hose around them under the mulch for a very low-tech watering system.

Finally planting my tomato plants in the ground. Here they are right before planting. You can see that the largest ones are over three feet tall. We cut off all but the top 8" or so of leaves and planted the whole stem, as I guess you are supposed to with leggy tomatoes.

Here they are after planting. We forgot to water the holes before planting so they wilted terribly the next day. Then it rained twice and they are better again, so hopefully that didn't damage them too badly. Today we mulched the tomatoes, too.

We finally got the peas in the ground, too. 9 rows of peas. Yay! Johanna helped by dropping peas in the holes we made. It was sickeningly cute :)

Colossal batch of lentil-nut loaf turned into "meatballs"

2008-06-04T19:56:00.000-05:00

We finally made our 9x batch of lentil-nut loaf/balls. Here are the base components before assembly. They are huge! Clockwise, from top right: breadcrumbs, walnuts, sauteed carrots/onion, tofu/broth/seasoning mix, lentils, and huge bowl of Nature's burger mix (14 cups worth!). We didn't realize until all these pieces were on the counter that we did not own a larger mixing bowl than the one that is holding the burger mix, so we had to assemble it in thirds. It was a total of 44 cups of ingredients!

Here is a mixed 1/3 batch.

Here are two trays of "meat" balls, left side uncooked, right side baked for 25 minutes.

All in all, we got 250 balls and 16 mini-loaves to store in the freezer. Yay!

Wholecloth quilt. First attempt at free motion quilting...

2008-05-31T00:16:00.003-05:00

Tonight I am going to finish a wholecloth quilt/blanket for Johanna. Last week at Joann's I couldn't resist two dog-themed Robert Kaufman prints (can't find them online, so photo will have to wait until tomorrow). Johanna is on a real dog kick, and has been for months. I figured she would really like it, but I can't bear to cut into the pattern, so it will be just one piece per side.

I am really excited to play with the free motion quilting foot on my new machine. I just hooked it up for the first time this afternoon and it was utterly, completely, amazing what a difference my machine makes for this. I can just set the speed to what I want, unplug the foot pedal, and push the "start sewing" button, and go. I don't have to focus at all on the speed of the machine, just the speed at which I move the fabric. Before, for me it was like trying to pat my head and rub my stomach, trying to control the speed of the machine and draw some kind of design. Not to mention the feed dogs just were covered with a plate instead of actually being dropped.

Anyway... hopefully that will just take a couple of hours and not stretch out like the number of other projects I have on the go right now. I am getting a little frustrated with some of the small Etsy projects because I am getting caught up in details and procrastination instead of just starting to list stuff as I can. My goal is by the end of next week to have listed at least two different things, but we'll see how that goes.

I didn't get much else done at all. Mostly spent the day researching what kinds of things we need for the new baby. We have pretty much everything leftover from Johanna, but a couple things made it onto the list, in particular non-polycarbonate baby bottles, which I spent quite awhile trying to decide what to do about. We also need a new swing, as the one Johanna used constantly for almost 4 months died. We could not have lived without that thing. I don't believe how happy I am that they plug in now. Changing rechargeable batteries while the baby was trying to sleep was not fun at all and usually resulted in her waking up.

I haven't fallen off the face of the earth...

2008-05-29T19:28:00.011-05:00

I don't know what was up this week--another bad week of no posting. I guess because any small amount of crafting I did manage to get accomplished is stuff that I want to put in my Etsy store, but it is not ready yet. I am trying out a bunch of things and most of the projects, while they are going to be really good (I hope), I am still working out all the kinks for them.

That and the gardening has really taken a toll on me. We have been working as many hours as possible out there (with a bored toddler, this is a maximum 4 hours a day), but the going is very slow, the work is physically very hard, and at the end of the day I am just wiped out. I have not really mentioned this before, but I am also 29 weeks pregnant today (with a boy!), so the fatigue, back and hip pain are really making things more difficult than usual as well. Tyler is having to do all the really, really labor-intensive stuff like digging up trees and lugging trash bags around, so he is pretty wiped out, too.

This is the very back of the yard before we started. It doesn't look that bad from here because you can't see the 8 feet of daylilies and weeds that extend back to the fence behind those evergreen trees. (You can see Tyler starting to dig up the first tree, though.)

This is the back as of yesterday. Total of 8 trees and the (full) compost bin moved, 80 billion daylilies and ivy suckers and roots and other various weeds pulled. Result: 40 by 10 foot patch of garden that will grow tomatoes, peppers, carrots, peas, beets, and zucchini. Oh, and a rabbit fence installed because we have a pair living under the deck, I think, and I don't want them eating all the carrots. I am kind of in shock because our garden has the same square footage as our apartment in Boston did!

This is a small side area at the back of the house where I want to attempt to grow watermelon. Of course, daylily removal had to occur.

This is that same area after. And all the yard waste for the week. At least in Minneapolis they compost it all, because our huge compost bin is completely stuffed. Total about 20 garbage bags full. Good lord. The garbage people are going to like us so much this week.

But the daylilies are staging their comeback from the back of the deck and the side/neighbor's yard... We aren't going to deal with this lot until we have planted all the garden and worked on the lawn a bit. We still haven't mowed and the lawn is a good 8 inches tall in the front and going to seed. Thank god we live in a neighborhood that doesn't care so much. If we had lawn police I would have to move.

My raspberry and blueberry bushes are arriving tomorrow for sure, and the garden area is finally prepped, so there is going to be much planting, staking, and watering in the next few weeks. I am finally going to get my tomatoes in the ground this weekend! Many are almost three feet tall already. I am going to plant them really deep, like many sites have suggested in dealing with leggy tomatoes. At this point, if I get any tomatoes at all this year I am going to be happy :)

Veggie goodness--First week of our CSA is finally here!

2008-05-22T18:46:00.008-05:00

We have been working very hard to get the garden ready for planting--moving trees, digging up thousands of daylilies, etc. We have almost finished digging out the main planting areas; it will maybe take two more days to finish. Then, next week we get to plant some seeds!

My herb containers are starting to sprout a bit. So far, the dill is the biggest.

I am about 1/3 of the way through making the 200 potstickers, we have done a test run of the curry (still needs a little work), and are having another test run of samosas later tonight. Making some progress on the freezer cookery, but it is slow as at the end of a long day of yardwork neither of us is really in the mood to spend several hours cooking.

And, we got our first CSA bounty today. I don't think I posted that we finally wound up choosing Webster Farm Organics. It had the most weeks, and smaller weekly loads which will probably be good for us to start out. We can always supplement with the farmer's market, if necessary. This week, we got asparagus, Egyptian walking onions, sprouts, and a seed sprinkle (mix of toasted sesame, flax, cumin, poppy, mustard, sunflower, pumpkin seeds and quinoa that reminds me a little of furikake). We ate steamed asparagus with the seed mixture sprinkled over some rice for dinner. That was incredibly tasty! I will have to come up with my own "sprinkle"; it added really nice texture and flavor to the rice.

Mosaic pencil cup with shattered tempered glass

2008-05-18T22:36:00.001-05:00

This is a pencil-cup type thing I made for a recycle swap a while ago. It is just a regular can that I mosaic-ed on broken bits of tempered glass from when we were removing the hideously outdated brass tub doors from upstairs and Tyler broke one. Billions of little pieces of glass were everywhere, but none of them were too sharp, so I saved the bucket of them to use for mosaic work later. I applied a little bit of green watercolor paint in the grout underneath the glass so it looks a bit like coke bottle glass. I would like to do another project with the stuff where I use darker colors, maybe using acrylic paints instead to get the richness. I just used a pot of the pre-mixed thinset/grout from Home Depot, and everything adhered just fine. I lined it with black felt. I really liked this thing--the glass gave it a lot of weight so it wouldn't tip over easily.

The start of gardening week insanity

2008-05-18T22:06:00.004-05:00

So, Tyler is finally back, after being delayed a day due to a strike at the Norway airport starting the morning he was supposed to come home. Today we didn't do much--there is still some jet lag and both of us are really tired. Johanna has another cold and was up every hour last night so nobody slept well.

Tomorrow marks the start of gardening week craziness. Tyler is taking the week off and we are going to get all of the gardening for the year started. I am assuming that my raspberry and blueberry bushes are going to arrive, so we will plant those. Also, we are going to move a set of 6 small-ish trees from the back of the yard where I want to put my vegetable garden to the side of the yard. That is going to be ugly. Then, we need to mark out and dig out a garden bed that is about 10 feet by 40 feet (as big as our old apartment!) for planting carrots, peas, and tomatoes. We also need to transplant the pepper plants to the front of the yard, dig out a small side-yard area for zucchini and watermelon, and actually plant carrots, peas, and transplant my tomato plants outside. And set up trellises. Maybe getting all of this done in a week is optimistic...

We tried making samosas for the first time recently tonight. We used "potsticker wraps" from the asian grocery; they are really thick. Not bad, but not quite right still. I might not be happy with them unless we make our own dough. They are supposed to freeze really well, so I want to get this recipe right and make a million of them. Samosas (done the way I like) are one of my favorite foods.

Two more days until Tyler gets back...

2008-05-14T23:06:00.008-05:00

... and of watching Johanna by myself. I will be so glad on Friday night!

Anyway, I spent most of today doing more research/fooling around on etsy/fooling around in Illustrator and Photoshop tweaking my banner, avatar, and making up some business cards in Word. (I hate Word, but I already had a template set up from my ebay days, so I might as well use it).

No crafting was done, but supplies were purchased. It is going to take a few days, I think, to get anything listed. I need a good 2-3 hour chunk of uninterrupted time to get into my craft room and just work at it. And I need to wait for the few things I needed to order to get here to finish everything. Like shipping envelopes. Naptime I am usually too busy eating and decompressing to really get much of anything done.

I remember back in my ebay days I came across a good deal on #000 bubble mailers. I bought them, without really thinking through how big 4200 envelopes would be. The UPS guy was so pissed that he had to take 14 huge boxes of envelopes up the stairs to my Boston apartment while he was double-parked :) It took me about a year and some to get through all of those... They took up a good chunk of the storage room and Tyler was not pleased with me either. Not going to do that again, even if we have the room this time. With the volume that I am hoping for, maybe one order per day or so, it would take me 11 years to get through that many envelopes!

Also, getting overexcited by the extreme birdey-ness in the yard today, I added a list of birds I have seen in my yard to the sidebar. This is probably more for me so that I can keep track and easily click on them to hear the calls as well. I am sure that no one cares which birds I have seen!

Paper punch "art"

2008-05-14T22:46:00.002-05:00

A card I made several years ago for I don't know what. I was really into making designs with various punchies. I still have all my paper punches and would like to do a large piece someday. The "Punch your Art Out" book series and "Color your punch art" still rank in my favorite craft books, even if I haven't done anything with them for quite some time.

Wool felt swirl-ey pincushion

2008-05-13T23:40:00.000-05:00

For a swap I mailed last week I had to make a pincushion. I made it out of a thrifted Gap sweater that was slightly felted. I nested swirls of strips inside an (empty) can of blueberries from a muffin mix (a little bit wider and shorter than a tuna can). I wanted to do something a little different from the "cupcake" type of pincushion, but I like the idea of using bits of sweaters still and was running low on energy, time, and ideas. I think it turned out pretty well, and the can gives it a nice weight so it doesn't just flop around or slip away when you try to stuff pins into it.

More thoughts on Etsy

2008-05-13T21:30:00.008-05:00

Ok, so Tyler is in Norway this week, which means that I am pretty much busy watching Johanna all day and then totally spent at night by the time she goes to bed. I haven't really felt up to doing much of anything, so hence the lack of posting. I could post about really boring things, like we are starting to have an ant situation in our kitchen, or silly things, like Johanna said "octopus" today, but nothing really of interest is happening.

When I have felt like doing anything more than just sitting, I have been reading and doing research on what I want to do with my etsy store. I have hundreds of ideas; I am just trying to focus my energy on a few at first and trying to polish the store's concept/theme. I am also trying to work out details like shipping and prices. I remember it took me a month or two of this kind of work, working 12 hours a day, to set up my ebay bead store, but I also remember that it was worth it. While I was a seller, I saw many other people with similar stores not doing well or even going out of business because they hadn't thought things through, done calculations, or market research. While I am not planning to try to gear up to anywhere remotely close to that size of operation again (packing and shipping 12-20 packages a day is a lot of work!), I don't want to waste time, money, and effort doing something that no one is interested in.

It would be nice to have a store "brand" or concept or unifying theme, with a clear focus and maybe a few superfluous items instead of a schizophrenic collection of random items that makes my shop look like a garage sale instead of a store... I think people take you more seriously if you have a brand. Then you look more like a professional instead of a hobbyist (which is what I am, but I don't need it to be obvious).

I also updated my banner to something more spring-like. This rose-breasted grosbeak flew into our kitchen window and sat stunned on the deck for several minutes, allowing Tyler to get a good photo instead of the normally crappy through-the-window photos I get of the birds in our yard.

More dirt-ey work, complicated by needless procrastination

2008-05-08T23:33:00.005-05:00

Very exciting today. We dug up another huge patch of daylilies (I really hate those things), and made 18 holes that are just waiting for the blueberry and raspberry bushes to arrive. I think they are going to arrive next week when Tyler is in Norway, so we wanted to prep everything so all I have to do is plop them in the ground and water them.

I also finally potted up most of my tomato seedlings tonight while watching tv. (Though they really aren't seedlings anymore...) It took me over 4 hours. Ugh. I ran out of potting soil and stakes, so I will be off to get that in the morning so I can finish the last 18 of them. This was a really annoying, tedious job that I should have done 4-6 weeks ago. Then it would have taken me maybe a fifth as long because all the plants wouldn't have been tangled together and so difficult to extract semi-intact from the tray. It was also taking a long time because I decided to make my own paper pots instead of buying all 72 peat pots. Very cheap, but a little more time consuming than the instant pots. The roll of newsprint that Johanna has for artwork from Ikea turned out to be about the perfect thing for making those pots.

I am really, really tired and my back is really hurting, so I am going to bed.

Etsy and giant peppers and tomatoes

2008-05-07T23:01:00.006-05:00

I have decided that I should probably start earning some of my craft money instead of slacking off and have decided to open an etsy shop. I don't have anything in it yet, but I am working on it and should have a couple of items listed in the next week or so. I had fun today creating a banner and avatar, etc.

I spent most of the day either working on misc. stuff in Johanna's room and trying to decide what it is exactly that I want to sell on etsy. I have a huge list of ideas, but I have to start somewhere.

I thought I would post some photos of my pepper plants. They look so happy, if terribly leggy. Those stakes are 2 feet tall.

My tomato plants, on the other hand, look much less happy :) I am going to re-pot them possibly tomorrow.

Autumn tourmaline necklace

2008-05-06T22:45:00.000-05:00

A necklace I made for my sister-in-law for Christmas a couple of years ago. I am pretty tired, so I am having trouble remembering if it is tundura sapphire or "autumn" tourmaline, but whatever. I think it was tourmaline. Very, very pretty. This photo really does not do them justice--they are faceted and very sparkly and beautiful in person. I think I hoarded away a strand of these for myself, too :)

Attempt at making dolmas and burnt muffins

2008-05-06T22:39:00.008-05:00

I spent most of yesterday researching recipes for freezer cooking, like veggie lasagna, dolmas (seasoned rice wrapped in grape leaves), and refried beans. I spent hours going through every such recipe online, reading all the variations, and making notes on what I wanted to try out.

I first became addicted to dolmas after having them from Trader Joe's in the deli section. They are kind of expensive, even there (I think $3 for 9 or so), and they also just recently stopped selling them, so I have to learn to make them myself. I knew we had a couple of small jars of grape leaves hoarded in the cupboard, so I tried making some today. The first pass didn't quite taste right, so I added some vinegar and cooked them longer. They definitely turned out better after the second baking, but are still not quite right. I think my big mistake today was using converted rice instead of regular long-grain or even medium grain rice. The flavor was close, but the texture of the rice was way, way off and I didn't like them really. I will still eat them, since I made 31 of them. I laid them all out on a sheet pan and popped them in the freezer. We'll see how they defrost again tomorrow.

Then later today I managed to burn two pans of muffins. I don't do much baking at all and I thought I remembered something about cookies burning if you try to do two pans at once, but for whatever reason I ignored the little voice and did it anyway. I re-made a batch later tonight and now at least I can have blueberry muffins for breakfast.

During the day today I managed to pick up a couple of things for upcoming mass freezer cooking. The asian market gave me 300 potsticker wrappers (round this time), and the local co-op gave me 8 pounds of french lentils. I am going to make a 20x batch of lentil-nut loaf mix in a couple of weeks when Tyler gets back from Norway. We can use this stuff for everything--meatballs, crumbles, mini-meatloaves, whatever. I ordered a case of Nature's Burger mix off of Amazon to go in it, too. It was pretty cheap compared to someplace like at Whole Foods...

Finally, some gardening

2008-05-04T21:36:00.005-05:00

Today was spent mostly outside playing in the yard. It was so nice out today--a wonderful change from the totally crappy weather we have been having lately. Today the large, random circle of daylilies in the middle of the back yard met its demise. Tyler took a garden claw and about four hours to rip out, by the roots, about 200 stupid orange daylilies. I wish I could smack the person who thought that was a good idea. This is a bad aerial photo of them from last summer; they are the patch at the left. (From the upstairs deck.) This patch looks small, but is really about 10 feet in diameter.

Also accomplished--herb seeds planted in containers on the deck. This year: basil, dill, oregano, thyme, rosemary, parsley, and chives. I planted a whole container of basil in the hopes of making pesto and good tomato sauce later this year. I planted a lot of dill, too, because I am growing thousands of carrots and one of my favorite treats is pickled carrots.

I also finally transferred my pepper seedlings to peat pots and stake them up. They were so tall they tipping over and blocking the sunlight for all the tomatoes. I don't believe how tall/leggy they are--I think most of them are over 12", and a few are closer to 18". They look so much happier in their own pots. I need to finish thinning the tomato plants tomorrow, and some of those are going to go into peat pots as well. I didn't know these tomato plants were vines, and that vines grow something called "adventitious roots". This means the tomato plants that tipped over have put down roots in other cells of the planter that come out of their stems. I don't know how I am going to get them all out without damaging them. I should have potted these up a month ago. Next year I won't make the same mistake.

Upcycled grocery totes are finally dyed and ready to use

2008-05-02T15:19:00.006-05:00

So, I finished the tote bags this morning. I am pretty happy with the way they came out--the colors aren't as deep or saturated as they would have been if it would have been PFD fabric, or maybe if I would have used a heck of a lot more dye, but they still look nice, I think. The weather here sucks today, so unfortunately, so does the photo... If I get up the energy, I will replace them with better photos when the sun comes out.

That stray smaller bag turns out to be the perfect size to hold the other 5 to carry in the car/bring into the store so I don't have loose bags everywhere. I am probably not going to fold them this neatly every time, though :)

This would be such a great gift! Too bad I am keeping this one for myself :) If I actually enjoyed crafting for money, I would make these to sell, I think.

I am off to try to finish/make significant progress on my mom's brooch before Johanna wakes up from her nap.

And, I haven't forgotten that I am two weeks late for this quilt to be finished for the challenge. I have set up my machine again and have sewn four more rows this morning. 10 rows to go and I am done. I am really motivated to finish this one because even though I am sick of it, I have four projects waiting to use the sewing machine until I take the stupid walking foot off. I really don't enjoy changing out the walking foot, so I tend not to do it until what I was doing with it is either done or not going to get done anytime soon.

A mother's day gift of flowers

2008-05-01T23:08:00.000-05:00

A photo frame I assembled for my mom for Mother's Day a number of years ago, probably 5? Photos were taken with my spiffy Nikon SLR before I went digital. These were all flowers in California. I miss California :(

Finally getting around to dyeing my tote bags that I started two months ago

2008-05-01T22:49:00.005-05:00

I have finally had it with the 300 paper bags we have in the pantry, and have decided to get on with it and dye the tote bags I made and posted about March 3 (!). Not bad, it just took me two months to get around to it. To be fair, there were a lot of obstacles: all my dyeing stuff was in the basement and not really cleaned up from my class, I didn't know what I did with my class notes, and we have had a lot of other stuff going on, like nearly three weeks of visitors. I have not used the bags yet, even though they are sewn and finished, because I had washed them in Synthrapol I didn't want to get them dirty and then have to wash them again.

Paper bags don't totally go to waste--in Minneapolis you have to use them to sort your recycling in or they don't take it. But, I think we have enough bags for recycling now for at least the next six months, if not more, and they are getting to be a pain to store.

I have them all sitting in gallon bags in dye now. There they will stay overnight, to be washed tomorrow and then ready to photograph and use. Yay! I decided to make a 6-step chroma bridge between brick red and earthy green. I hope they don't turn out totally hideous so I am not embarrassed to use them!

Grocery overload again.

2008-04-29T20:38:00.004-05:00

I don't know why I can't seem to calm down the food hoarding instinct. In the last 24 hours, I have been to Trader Joe's, Sam's Club, Costco, and Super Target. Our house is bursting at the seams with food. And there are only two and a half of us (plus two guests). I had to go to Costco because my in-laws are here and I don't actually have a membership, but they do, and then they wanted to go to Sam's Club, of which I am a member (at least until August when my membership will expire and I am not renewing again, at least for awhile).

And I am thinking of cooking a bunch of freezer meals starting next week when they go home! I took another cooking class on the 23rd, called "Curries of India" that was really good. She broke it all down into a flowchart/system/master recipe that you can customize to your liking. Really cool. You can stop halfway into the cooking and you have what you basically buy when you get those $5 jars of "Vindaloo curry paste" and whatever else they are called. This paste apparently freezes really well, so we can have tons of curry starter that we will only have to add veggies and liquid to. If we make and freeze rice as well, a really good dinner can be ready in 15 minutes with very little effort. Especially if we ever get that kulcha recipe down and manage to freeze a bunch.

I think next week I am going to start with obscene amounts of potstickers, since that is what I like to eat a lot of and they are so easy to cook after freezing. I think I will try to make 6 months worth, I am thinking maybe 2-300 or so? Then the next week will be the spring rolls.

Spiral rope necklace with pearls

2008-04-29T19:43:00.000-05:00

I have been cleaning off my computer because it actually ran out of space on the 80 gig hard drive and starting being really, really slow and driving me insane. I found a huge stash of old crafty photos that should get me through the next little while without having to actually work on anything new :) A lot of the photos aren't the greatest, but whatever. Most of the stuff has been given away so I can't re-do it.

This is a simple spiral rope--bronze 11/0s and 4mm glass pearls. I really like this one. I gave it to my aunt a few years ago, maybe 3 or 4? In person the color is a lot warmer and richer.

Sick again? Really?

2008-04-27T21:36:00.003-05:00

This is so unfair... I have had more than my share of colds this season. I think today's brings us up to 6. I am going to bed. If this one lasts two weeks again I am going to lose it, because Tyler is going to Norway in a little bit and looking after Johanna for a week by myself while sick would just be the end of me.

100 posts already!

2008-04-26T22:30:00.006-05:00

Well, I finally hit 100 posts. I was planning to do some big thing, but here it is, 10:30 at night and I think I am coming down with Johanna's cold. I am not sure how well I am going to be able to handle both my allergies and a cold, so I am going to bed. The last cold I had lingered on forever, so I am really hoping this is not going to be the same thing.

We didn't really get much done outside today, seeing as how it was maybe 20 F with windchill. It was so miserably cold out. I hate winter, which is still is here, even though it should be summer soon. Anyway, instead we went to Menards (a big hardware store) and got a bunch of things for the garden. We got a "rabbit fence" for around the vegetables, pots for my herb garden that is going on the deck, along with many stakes, twine, and peat moss. We tested the soil in the yard and fortunately the pH is at a good level for everything except the blueberries, which like really acid soil.

Everyone in my family is freaking out that I am planting 60 tomato plants. Is that a lot? I just filled all the cells in my "seedling starter kit" and assumed that was an appropriate amount. I guess we will see come August. I might be making friends with a lot of neighbors. I thought that heirloom tomatoes have very low yields per plant, so that wasn't going to be completely excessive.

Black and white fabric inchie swap

2008-04-26T22:14:00.000-05:00

Awhile ago I talked about being in a black & white fabric inchie swap. I forgot to post a photo of them. Here they are... I put beads on most of them, and two have little flowers crocheted out of fine weight tatting cotton sewn onto them. I really like how they turned out. It was hard to give these up, too. Maybe I should just look at swaps and make the items for myself instead of giving them away :) Although, I probably wouldn't get much done without a firm deadline...

Starting to think about gardening for the year

2008-04-25T23:40:00.005-05:00

So, even though it is supposed to snow tonight (I am really starting to not like Minnesota), we are going to attempt to do some kind of yardwork tomorrow while the in-laws are watching Johanna. It may only consist of marking out where we plan to dig out the garden, raspberry/blueberry bushes, and tomato plant spot and heading out to the hardware store for chicken wire and stakes. We have two bunnies living under our deck, so whatever we plant is going to have to be somewhat protected... We can start planting outside in just over two weeks. (90% sure last frost date for here is mid-May. Ugh.)

I am still very tired and thus not accomplishing anything, and Johanna is sick, which is making everything sadder and more difficult. We took her to the Children's Museum today, and she had a lot of fun. I won't even start on a rant on other children's parents and how much they suck. This one girl, maybe 5 years old, flung a bunch of soapy bubble water in Johanna's face three times (by accident) and the parents did nothing. Stupid @$*#ing people.

Large garnet glass pendant necklace

2008-04-25T11:51:00.000-05:00

This necklace I made for my Mom this year for her birthday. I seem to recall basing the center part on something I saw in a magazine, but I have since completely forgotten which one.

Go ahead, be jealous of my Singer treadle machine

2008-04-23T10:07:00.020-05:00

So, my in-laws have arrived, and with them they brought my Grandma's old Singer sewing machine, along with a bunch of junk I had stored in my parent's basement. My Mom inherited the machine from her mother and wanted it out of the house, and I was more than happy to take it off her hands :) Looking up the serial number etc. reveals that it was made in 1948 in St. Johns, Newfoundland. That is fun that it is a Canadian machine.

It came with a lovely cabinet--on this one museum website it is called "Singer Drawing-room cabinet No. 21". I couldn't find another one like it in my brief search on the internet; most cabinets seem to have the open cast-iron legs. Maybe it is just that mine isn't as old as a lot of the other ones I found? Apparently the model it is (15-88) was the last purely treadle model they made, although this one has room to add a motor if I ever wanted to. I wish I could tell what kind of wood it was made of. I am kind of useless at differentiating wood varieties.

I really like the cabinet, even if it is not in perfect shape. I didn't show it in the photo, but the top is pretty scratched. I am going to try to use some kind of polish/scratch remover-type thing on it. I don't really want to refinish it. The little drawers are so cute!

It also came with the manual, the key to lock the cabinet, and all these crazy feet/accessories. I don't believe I have a ruffler foot! I am curious to see if it would attach to my newer machines. There is also a binding foot that looks interesting. I have never seen anything like it.

Also stuffed in the cabinet is this huge attachment to do buttonholes and all these cast buttonhole templates. I have no idea how this would work...

Anyway, I am happy. I will likely eventually get it running again. The wheel and stuff turns just fine, but the treadle belt is snapped. The machine also has not been used since the '60's, so surely needs a good cleaning and oiling before I attempt to use it. Will be fun to try a little later when I have more time.

Fat-free pita bread

2008-04-23T09:53:00.000-05:00

As for the fat-free stuff, it all turned out pretty well. I am not in the mood to type out the recipe, but I essentially used this pita bread recipe off the internet, replacing 1/4 cup non-fat yogurt for the oil, and threw it all in the bread machine on the dough cycle because I don't have a mixer. Out came very chewy, delicious pita bread that made excellent pita chips. It was fun to see them puff in the oven--I have never made pita bread before. I made half the dough into a small loaf of bread and then made croutons out of it. They were also extremely tasty.

And, we are getting a new roof, because this one is in bad shape. The roofers arrived this morning at the crack of 8 and started pounding on the roof right above my head. It will be good to have that done, though. Apparently the last roof re-do 16 years ago was a pretty shoddy job and it was just a matter of time before we had leaking through the ceiling. For the next two days I am going to have such a headache... And good luck getting Johanna to nap today!

A quick break between mother-in-laws' visits

2008-04-21T23:45:00.005-05:00

So, Tyler's Mom has gone back home, and Tyler's Dad and Step-mom arrive tomorrow afternoon. This is a lot of visiting! This next visit is tricky--they are on a special no-fat, low sodium diet that has me a little stressed. I have no problems cooking low fat or low sodium, but cooking with no fat (not low fat, no fat), and low sodium is really, really hard. Tomorrow for dinner I am making stuffed peppers (stuffed with veggie rice pilaf), fat-free home made hummus and pita chips (yes, I made fat-free pita bread from scratch. It is actually very tasty :), and a huge green salad with berry/juice smoothies for dessert. That is a lot of cooking, most of which I did tonight. I will see if I can post some photos of the goodness tomorrow.

Not much else blog-worthy has happened in the last few days. I have still not finished the purple quilt, although I have re-set up my craft room and sewing machine so that I can work on it soon.

Johanna's 18 month pediatrician appointment is in the morning. I am excited to see how tall she is now. She seems like she has grown a lot recently. She is starting to pick up so many words now. Today it was 'purple' and 'fire fighters'.

No more cleaning :) and a Swarovski beaded bead necklace

2008-04-17T20:33:00.003-05:00

I am so glad that is done. Tyler's Mom arrives tomorrow morning, and tonight we are just planning to relax and get caught up on some of the DVR. Posting will probably be sporadic over the next couple of weeks.

I posted about this necklace before; I made one in purple and teal for my Grandma. I "auditioned" several combinations of seed beads before making all of the beaded beads. The pattern is from Bead&Button (April 2007). I am going to have to restring it eventually because the Swarovkis near the back irritate my neck after just a few seconds, so I can't even wear it :(

Progress on getting Johanna to sleep later...

2008-04-16T23:30:00.005-05:00

Yay! Johanna slept right until 7:45 this morning, and woke up in a good mood and played by herself in her crib for 45 minutes without intervention. That very rarely happens. I guess the blackout boards are working! The last few weeks she has woken up too early, from 7-7:30, usually in a surly mood and with bags under her eyes. Today she looked well-rested and happy, and so did Daddy. I, on the other hand, while definitely sleeping somewhat better without being awoken 4 times by unhappy toddler, still was gripped by an allergy attack at 3am and took a long time to go back to sleep. It is almost like that thing where Johanna went from waking up every hour and a half all night to sleeping 8, 10, 12 hours straight. I kept waking up anyway for whatever odd reason. I still don't think I have slept through the night since I found out I was pregnant with her well over two years ago now and started having to get up several times a night...

Today, as expected, was mostly full of last bits of cleaning and organizing, and dismantling much of the craft room to set it up for a guest room and such. Tomorrow should be just a few more hours and then I should be ready for visitors on Friday. It really sounds like I have been doing an insane amount of cleaning, but I go through this deep cleaning only once or twice per year, and don't keep up the house very well inbetween, except for maybe the basics like dishes and vacuuming because the house is intolerable if you start letting those slide...

It looks like I am going to miss the deadline for my purple quilt unless I somehow miraculously get 3 hours free to finish it at some point tomorrow. Maybe this weekend, and I will cut down on the amount of time I get for the next one to compensate.

For whatever reason, the Blogger "add post" page is malfunctioning so I can't add any photos. What a boring post with nothing to look at and only me blathering on about stuff no one cares about!

Recycle swap: making a lidded box out of a toilet paper tube

2008-04-15T22:57:00.004-05:00

This is a tiny little gift box I made for one of my recycle swaps. It is fashioned from a toilet paper tube and masking tape, painted with acrylics, and topped with a vintage button. Very cute.

I am still not sleeping. Johanna has been getting up earlier and earlier with it getting light out early in the morning. Yesterday was the last straw when she woke up for the day at 6:30 and would not go back to sleep (this has changed from 8-8:30 over the winter). We have resorted to blacking out her windows with some hardboard to make it completely, completely dark in there (not even a pinhole of light). She still woke up at 6:30 this morning, but went back to sleep until 7, then 8--something she hasn't done previously. We are also moving her bedtime half an hour later to see if that helps. In the meantime, I am _still_ in the midst of allergy hell and have to sleep propped up and wake up many times a night not breathing right. Ugh. I don't believe I was ready to go to bed at 9 tonight.

I went to regular Goodwill today ($1.49 day) and found some great stuff. If I am up to it, I will post about it tomorrow, but seeing as how I only have two more cleaning days left and I feel like crap, it is not looking good :)

Swap: Crazy-quilted needlebook

2008-04-14T19:02:00.008-05:00

I have been busily cleaning the house for all of my in-laws coming to visit this weekend and next week. I also finished my two recycle swap items and my fabric scrap packages, so I am free of having to do anything for a swap until May 13th at the moment. It is not looking good for finishing my purple quilt on time...

I can post this, finally. I made a needlebook for a swap. It was the first thing I did with my new machine to test out the new stitches. I had crazy-pieced it the week before and decided that it would be the perfect size for a needlebook. You can tell I had trouble letting it go because of how many photos I took!

Recycle swap: tiny zip pounch from thrifted pants

2008-04-12T21:59:00.005-05:00

This is a tiny (about 4") zip pouch I made for a different recycle swap. The fabric is from a pair of dockers-like pants from Goodwill Outlet, including the zipper. It is lined with the fabric from a cotton sundress, also from G.O. My first attempt at a zip pouch. Things would have probably gone smoother if I had used a regular fine nylon zipper. On such a small item, the heavy-duty metal pants zipper was kind of bulky and difficult to work with.

Today was mostly spent cleaning and organizing the house. Not too exciting. I am now done sewing up four out of 17 long seams on the purple quilt. I also cut out all the pieces I need for two swaps I am in that I am making the same thing for--I am supposed to sew something out of a thrifted item for one, and the other is supposed to be recycled, which amounts to the same thing... I will probably sew those two projects up tomorrow so I can mail them on Monday. Then I am free of swaps until May 13 so far.

Tomorrow Joann's is having a sale so I will be running off to get things like thread and tablecloth fabric. Johanna has a nice little oak table that was a gift that she keeps coloring on, so I am going to make a tablecloth for it before it gets wrecked.

Recycle swap: heart ornament from a thrifted sweater

2008-04-11T22:04:00.004-05:00

This is a small heart ornament I made for one of my swaps out of a thrifted sweater. Very cute; I will probably make another few for my tree this year if I get around to it!

Today I at least finished piecing all the row strips of the purple quilt. I then managed to only sew up two out of 17 long seams. They are taking almost half an hour each because I have to pin them so carefully, so this is going to take a few more days yet. I probably would have finished a couple more if my new sewing machine hadn't totally malfunctioned, taking me a long time to fix. It had something to do with huge chunks of lint in the bobbin case and then the automatic cutter getting stuck.

Anyway, I managed to make two dozen banana muffins today, though. I don't actually like banana muffins, but Johanna really likes bananas and so does Tyler and we had 5 pretty much dead bananas. They said they turned out really well, so that is good. Trying to get the bananas into the bowl while Johanna watched was tough. She was crying for banana but they were way past their prime and we didn't have any more. So sad.

It is going to be a pretty busy weekend trying to get ready for the oncoming visitors and I am still totally allergy-stricken. I am actually going to bed now, two hours early, and I had a two hour nap this afternoon. And I am still totally exhausted.

Turquoise coins wrapped with silver beads necklace

2008-04-10T21:16:00.007-05:00

Here is a necklace I made for my Mom for Christmas this year. It is extremely similar to the one I think in a recent issue of Bead Style, maybe? That one had danglies and used chalcedony--I didn't like the danglies and I don't remember but I think I either couldn't find chalcedony coins or they were too expensive. Turquoise is nice, anyway. This one was very trying to put together. Wrapping the little beads around the turquoise was very fiddly.

Can we have some spring, please? Today brings thundersleet. It is below freezing. And mid-April. Blech.

Well, I only have one more week to finish the purple quilt and it is not moving along very well. I am having one of the worst weeks of allergies ever and it is making it really hard to concentrate because it is preventing me from sleeping much at all. I still have 6 rows to piece together, I have to assemble those rows, and then I have to do all the snipping. Sewing up the rows is going to be difficult because I have not been particularly careful or accurate in my seams so they are probably not going to line up very well. I think there might be a fair bit of fudging.

I am so tired I could pass out any second. It has been almost a week since I have slept much consecutively. And Sudafed gives me massive headaches, but without it I can barely breathe at all. I have got to get back on allergy shots. I think that is why they are getting really bad again. I stopped them last summer when I moved and never started them again.

This next week is going to be really bad, too. I have to clean and dust the house from top to bottom--my mother-in-law is visiting next weekend and then my other in-laws are coming a week from Tuesday. (Yes, I have two mother-in-laws, and thankfully they are both nice people :) At least my picking at the organization of the house has been working. There isn't much left to do but clean. Of course the house looks like crap every day because within 5 minutes of Johanna getting up for the day all of her toys are strewn across the house and all the books are pulled off the shelves.

Recycle swap: greeting card and thoughts of freezer cookery

2008-04-09T21:35:00.006-05:00

This card I made for my Recycle swap. The strips on the front I cut up from a page in a magazine. Such pretty colors!

So I got a book called Frozen Assets out of the library last week. I have been wanting to stockpile a bunch of meals in our large freezer for lazy nights, but have not had a great deal of success so far--most of the food we make, while good fresh, when reheated is not particularly delicious. The book offered a few suggestions to fix that and now I am excited to start experimenting. Tonight we made a double batch of risotto and are going to try unfreezing it later this week and see how it goes. The main idea is that you don't cook things all the way before you freeze them, and then finish cooking them after you thaw them. I am hoping it works out. Especially for things like frozen minestrone, which in the past has just been nasty reheated--all mushy and tasted weird.

We are also trying out food processor pizza dough after watching the Good Eats pizza episode again (we don't have a mixer). We usually make pizza dough in the breadmaker, and it is good fresh, but it makes too much for the two of us and the frozen half never cooks up right--it is always kind of sticky and gummy in the center. I am thinking it is because the breadmaker doesn't knead it enough to really get the gluten going. We will see how this works out. We are going to freeze half immediately and proof the other half overnight in the fridge. It would be so nice to have a big stash of frozen doughs! We really like breadsticks, too, and those are good made out of pizza dough.

Too bad potatoes don't freeze well. I really like potatoes :)

Still feeling terrible, and wasting way too much time on the internet looking at felt food.

2008-04-08T23:08:00.006-05:00

I am still feeling crappy. It is almost like a cold, but it is probably just a really bad allergy flare-up. I have a really bad headache that is not going away and my whole head is stuffy, making it hard to do anything at all, particularly sleep, which I have not done even remotely well in coming up on five nights in a row now. My patience is starting to thin... And all of this crap is while I am taking sudafed and claritin.

I only got two more rows done on the purple quilt today. I am going to really try to get the remaining 9 rows done tomorrow, though.

Last night I made a felt banana slice, piece of pineapple, and mandarin orange wedge. I am trying to make a fruit salad for Johanna because she really likes it and the Wiggles song of the same name. She is so funny, you ask her if she wants fruit and she bounces up and down and says "Yum yum" :) I have cut out all the pieces for more of these plus some kiwi, apple, peach, and strawberry. I lost at least a couple of hours in the last couple of days looking at felt food on Flickr and Etsy. Some of the stuff is amazingly cute. There is one particular felt bento box on Flickr that has potstickers, spring rolls, etc. I am going to have to make my own version of.

Anyway, here is to feeling better tomorrow.

Small amount of progress on the purple raggy quilt

2008-04-07T20:39:00.006-05:00

I laid out all of the purple quilt sandwiches for Johanna's raggy quilt and pinned them in place:

They look so pretty! This looks extra huge because each seam has a 1/2" allowance, so it will shrink quite a bit after piecing.

I have only managed to get 7 out of 18 rows pieced, and then have to piece together all of the rows. My back has been really bugging me so I moved my nice rolly chair from my craft room temporarily downstairs.

I stopped in at Joann's today to get some felt. I am going to sit on the couch now and try to make some play food for Johanna. I want to make her a large set for her birthday or Christmas this year.

Random facts about me. Probably more than you want to know :)

2008-04-06T23:03:00.006-05:00

I used to have a page of random facts about myself on my website, and I was thinking since it is late and I am tired I can just pillage it instead of coming up with new content today :)

Favorite color: Denim blue
Least favorite color: Autumn orange

Favorite flower: Stargazer lily

Fears and Phobias: Spiders, heights, and flying in an airplane.

Astrology: I am a Cancer. In Chinese astrology, I am a Fire Dragon.

What I am allergic to: Cats, dust, dust mites, dogs, and cottonwood trees.

What is the perfect outdoor temperature: 68-72 degrees. 60 is too cold, and 75 is too hot. Just like Seattle weather: not too cold, not too hot, lots and lots of rain.

What is my Kiersey/Myers-Briggs personality type? INFP. Every time I take the test it is the same, even since the first time I took it at age 14. As far as opposites attract, in this case not so much. Tyler is the same type.

What are my political views: I don't pay much attention to politics (I can't even vote down here, not being a citizen yet and all). A few issues I feel very strongly about is that I'm against the death penalty, abortion, war, destruction of animals and the environment. Also, the treatment of the poor down here is pretty shameful. I think that makes me pretty liberal for the most part...

Languages I speak: 2. English and French. I also know a few words of German.

Target or Wal-Mart? Target. Definitely. I hate Wal-Mart and never shop there if I can help it.

Number of animals I have owned: about 37, not including fish

Dogs: Casey (soft-coated wheaten terrier), Yoshi (current, shih-tzu), Kubla (current, shih-tzu)
Birds (cockateils): Dork, Clinger, Richard, Murylee, Floyd, Ariel, Cleo, Charmed, and Strange. All were standard gray except Cleo, who was lutino (yellow).
Rabbits: Bucky, Mommy, Bucky&Mommy's 7 babies, Orphie, Annie, Alphie (Orphie and Annie's baby), Gus, Gordie, Molly, Frankie, and at least 3 others that I can't remember their names.
Hamsters: Moonshine (Moonie) and J.D.
Frogs (African Dwarf): T, Rex, and 2 unnamed because we couldn't tell them apart

Favorite class in high school? Esthetics. Then Physics. Esthetics was not offered at most high schools. It was actually a class where you could learn how to do manicures, facials, hairstyling, and analyze fashion trends through history. This is the class that made me want to be an Esthetician. Various things made me change my mind, including that I would have to talk to people all day, every day. I like my solitude... I liked physics so much because of the teacher, I'm sure. He was really great.

Least favorite class in high school: Social Studies. without a doubt. I think I managed to sleep through nearly every class in grade 12. It didn't help that I hated my teacher, and that I think she hated me. The way that history was presented in that class was b-o-r-i-n-g!

Did I enjoy high school? For the most part, no. Does anyone?

What was my major in University? Chemistry. And Pure Math.

My favorite area of chemistry? Probably inorganic, although organic and analytical were also fun. The only area I hated was physical chemistry. Theoretical chemistry was a lot of math, so it was alright, but not that fun.

My favorite area in math? Probably number theory.

What options did I take in University? Most of my non-science options were anthropology, which I really liked. My favorite option was medical anthropology, and the second was anthropology of gender. What eye-opening classes. No class in university changed my outlook on the world more than the anthropology of gender.

However, I didn't so much like the Method and Theory in Primatology class. In fact, it was mind-numbingly boring. Watching primates for hours, and writing down what they are doing at 10-second intervals, and then doing statistics on what they were doing is not my idea of fun. I did get to spend a lot of time at the zoo, though.

The only other non-science options I took were a full-year english (literature) class, and communication studies. Communication studies was all about technical writing (what I did in California). Funny, I really liked that class.

How did I pay for University? A combination of student loans and part-time work. I also lived in my own apartment or with roommates for all of it as I was not getting along with my family. It took me just under a year after graduating to pay off my huge loan. I definitely pride myself on the fact that I paid for it all myself.

What did I do in my off semesters in University? Go to more classes. I attended classes in every semester over 5 years, 18 straight semesters. I did this to lighten my courseload during the year. I would only take 4 classes instead of the maximum of 5 in each of the fall and winter semsters, and then 2 classes in each of spring and summer. I was usually working more than 20 hours a week, so I didn't always have a lot of time for homework.

Jobs I have had:

Business office assistant (age 15-18)--I would do random odd jobs around the high school like deliver packages and copier paper, fill up pop machines, and sign out textbooks.
Cook/Server/Manager Pizza Hut (age 16-24)--started as a cook (1 of only 2 girls), after a year or two, started picking up serving and shift manager shifts. I worked there a long, long time. I don't miss it at all... It did give me a lot of respect for those who work in the customer service industry, though. It was great working there during University because I could ask for a certain number of hours per week and not work during finals.
Courtesy Clerk, Safeway (age 18)--This was the worst job I ever had. The people were awful awful awful. I lasted only a few months.
Concessions cook, Saddledome (age 18)--This was the shortest job ever. I worked one game and then the hockey league went on strike for a long time. I never went back.
Teaching assistant, Math department at University of Calgary (age 20-24)--This job was good for the most part. It certainly paid well. I mostly did CT's, where I sat in a room and first-year math students asked me questions. I also did two stand-up labs, one for linear algebra, and one for beginning calculus. It was here that I discovered that I will never ever ever be a teacher. I was so nervous I was shaking before every class. It did get me a bit more used to public speaking, though.
Technical Writer, Thermo Finnigan (age 24-27)--Mostly alright. The company paid for me to take lots of classes, especially Photoshop and Illustrator. I learned lots of software, including FrameMaker and Dreamweaver. I learned html, javascript, xml, etc. I even got to go to the Photoshop World conference up in San Francisco. That was lots of fun. The challenge of the job was pretty much gone by the end, though.
eBay seller (Age 28-30)--I was selling beads on eBay (username bouquet-of-beads) as a part-time thing so I didn't have to go to work anymore. I sold mostly Czech and Toho seed beads, but also various other findings and beads. I worked on average about 2-4 hours a day. I really liked it at first, and actually made quite a bit of money, but in the end, stupid emails, spending an hour a day packing orders, a new baby, and an impending move made me start thinking I wanted to shut it down. I was a powerseller for two years and got over 24,000 feedback comments with 0 negatives, for a total feedback score of 3600. I was really proud of that.

Favorite candies: it varies, depending on what I feel like, but some of the ones that I cycle through include twizzlers, gobstoppers, and sour gummi peaches (most gummies I won't eat; they have gelatin).

Favorite pop: Sprite or Hansen's Mandarin Lime. I will also occasionally drink gingerale, raspberry gingerale, orange pop, cream soda, cherry 7-up, and root beer. Almost everything else is gross, especially Coke and Pepsi.

How I like my pizza: crispy crust, very light sauce, with thin leaves of artichoke hearts, sliced green olives, and banana pepper rings.

Most memorable food overdoses: skittles, nutella, nutmeg.

How often do I eat out: when I'm at home, at most once every three months. For fast food, I like Taco Bell burritos, Burger King BK Veggies, and Subway Veggie subs.

Ok, this is getting way too long. I think I will continue this some other day!

Ok, that was too much quilting for one day

2008-04-05T20:31:00.007-05:00

I finished quilting the 392 purple raggy quilt sandwiches today. That didn't actually take too terribly long, but my machine decided to malfunction in the middle and I had to rip out 15 squares because all of a sudden the top thread was wonky but I didn't notice because it only showed up after I had chain-quilted 60 pieces in a row. Ugh. I quilted them only in a very simple "X" across the middle because I am feeling lazy and I am trying to get through these older projects as quickly as possible so I can move on to the dozen or so new projects I want to start.

I say it is too much because my back is hurting now. My new machine is still downstairs on the dining room table, and those chairs are not really at the right height for using the machine ergonomically.

Here are the quilt sandwiches, ready to go this morning. Johanna made sure my machine tasted ready :)

All quilted. I like the way a bunch of quilt squares look stacked up.

I will probably start assembling rows and such tomorrow. I should take advantage of Johanna being in bed to work out the layout on the floor. This would be impossible with her awake because she would want to participate and tromp through the layout, start picking things up and wandering off with them, and so on...

I am also working on an idea I had to fix the problems I am having with the corduroy quilt. I am still stopped at assembling only one square out of 20 because it was just not working. I will post about it tomorrow if it works out. I am excited, because I was starting to think I would either have to scrap the project or accept that it was going to look like crap.

Ok, this photo really, really sucks (taken through a dirty window), but it made me so happy to see the male goldfinches have changed back to yellow and yesterday there were two at my feeders at once :) (The second one you can only barely see the tail on the larger feeder, lower level).

(The "broken" thing in the background is a compost bin that we built late last year and never got around to attaching the hinges to the doors. Both sides were completely full of leaves from our four huge oak trees, and you can see we didn't even almost rake them all up. We also need to build a lid for the thing because whenever we throw out kitchen scraps, the squirrels spread them all over our yard and our neighbors' yards, too.)

Recycle swap: Another pincushion made from a thrifted sweater

2008-04-04T15:34:00.005-05:00

I made this pincushion out of a small fruit cup can and bits of a thrifted, felted sweater (It was red with a large black strip running across the bottom). I had originally made the pink one I posted about before for this swap before we were assigned partners, but then my partner was very adamant in her description that she did not like pastels, so I had to make another one... This is kind of based on the cupcake pincushions that Betz White makes in Warm Fuzzies, but slightly modified. As I have posted before, I like adding a can for support to the inside--they seem to stand up much better.

I really like the small size of this, actually. I have hoarded away a few such cans to make some more for myself :)

I managed to finish up and mail four swaps today. I was just too tired to finish the fifth, and didn't want to make a new mess in my craft room to get at what I needed.

I really need to get going on organizing the last of the house--my in-laws are arriving two weeks from Tuesday. My craft room is going to take another day, and then I still have some work in the kitchen, Johanna's room, and the linen closet. Then I get to spring clean the house. Joy. I wonder if this house would ever get a deep cleaning if I didn't have family coming to visit!

I am still working away at the purple raggy quilt. Last night I assembled hundreds of tiny quilt sandwiches that I can now quilt and attach together as I have a few minutes. I suspect, Johanna permitting, I will get this one done this weekend.

Beaded medallion necklace, and trying to organize the chaos in my craft room

2008-04-03T20:08:00.008-05:00

I made for my mom this Christmas. The pattern is basically from a Japanese beading book (one of my absolute favorites) "Beads Accessory Part 2", ISBN 4529033457. I really like the beady medallions near the center. They would be so pretty in different colors--they kind of look like little flowers.

So, I didn't write yesterday that I am in the middle of a week-long (so far) ripping apart of my craft room to totally reorganize everything. When we moved here last summer, most of my craft stuff had been in boxes for three years, and so I wasn't sure how to unpack everything now that I had an entire room with tons of shelves to fill. I apparently did not do a very good job because every time I wanted to do something, the supplies I needed were somehow at the back of the closet or bottom of the pile and it was getting very irritating. Not to mention nothing was getting put back because I didn't want to dig out the place where it was supposed to go...

Anyway, I decided that since I only occasionally use my craft books, they should not be front and central in the room, taking up 80% of the shelves in the room. I moved them all downstairs to a built-in cabinet that was basically just holding a bunch of misc. that never got sorted after the move. That freed up tons of shelves in the craft room to neatly sort and stack my increasingly huge Goodwill fabric stash and small bins of various supplies that will now be stacked only three bins high instead of twelve, making accessing them so, so much easier. I am really, really liking how it is turning out. I have shelves for cottons, linens, denim, corduroy, etc., and I can see exactly what I have at any given time instead of having to dig through the closet for something that I thought I remember having.

The problem is that now I am at the worst part of the organizing job--dealing with all the leftover bits at the end that have no place to go and don't really fit into the system. I hate this part and so am procrastinating terribly :) I don't really want to post photos until I am finished. Everyone who posts photos of their craft room has such amazing spaces that my utter lack of decorating talent will not allow me to achieve, so I at least want the room to be clean before I show it.

That and I am kind of unhappy at how many unfinished projects I found while digging through everything that I had forgotten about. I organized my beads yesterday, and now they are more organized than they have ever been by miles, but I also have a nice little pile of at least 20 unfinished beading projects. I am thinking after the quilting challenge (or if I get bored anytime soon, which isn't likely), I should do a beading challenge and try to finish all of that up, too. My beads are so nice now! Part of the reason I have been avoiding them is that they were in a huge mess and I couldn't find particular beads because they were just in a huge pile of plastic baggies...

I still have to go to Ikea in the next little bit because I am going to install some wall shelves to hold a few lighter items above my desk.

And today I started working on the third quilt in the challenge--I decided on the purple raggy quilt after all. This one is definitely not going to take two weeks, either, so yay!

Two out of thirteen: Christmas wall-hanging/quilt is finished

2008-04-02T22:06:00.006-05:00

Last night I was far too tired to do anything but mindlessly hand-sew the binding and hanging sleeve onto the little Christmas wallhanging. Now I am done two out of the thirteen quilts I am trying to finish as quickly as possible.

The quilting on this is not as nice as I would have liked, but I just could not be bothered to attach my walking foot for sewing around four squares...

I am somehow signed up for 7 swaps right now, so I spent a lot of today working on stuff for that. I finished a needlecase and am now wondering if I should keep it (I really like it). I finished 20 black and white "zentangle" inchies. I also finally finished the items for the "double your fun" swap, where surprises are supposed to be wrapped in other surprises. I also packed together parcels of assorted beads for two people. That means four of the swaps are pretty much wrapped up today, I just have to photograph and pack them up.

The other three swaps aren't too bad--one is just a fabric scrap swap. The other two involve making something green/recycled/repurposed, and the last one is my swap where you sew something out of something you got at a thrift store. That one isn't due until May, so I am not going to bother with it just yet.

One out of thirteen: Crazy-quilted Christmas tree skirt is finished

2008-04-01T17:05:00.007-05:00

The first "quilt" in the challenge is finished! Yay! Now I just have to put it away for 8 months until Christmas :) It is far from perfect, but it is done, which is way better than perfect...

I am trying to decide which quilt to start next. I am almost done the small wallhanging (#8), but I feel like doing something less difficult for this one. (Not that hand-sewing is difficult, just not much fun.) I am thinking of doing to purple raggy quilt, but I am not totally sure yet.

Johanna appears to be mostly over whatever illness seized her yesterday, but is still kind of cranky. Poor baby. No one got much sleep last night and I don't feel like doing anything else today. Shoving six rolled-up hearts through the arm of my sewing machine is the absolute maximum amount it can take and now my shoulders hurt. Poor Kristin :)

Almost done the Christmas tree skirt

2008-04-01T00:15:00.000-05:00

Anyway, I am so so close to finishing the tree skirt. Probably one, maybe two more hours tops. This morning I made 10 yards of piping. That wasn't so bad. What was bad was attaching said piping to an odd shape like a heart, which has both inner and outer corners. Then attaching the backing to the hearts was also bad. But, it is done now. I am so enjoying my adjustable piping/zipper foot that came with my machine, even if I wasn't paying attention at one point today and managed to break a needle by trying to drive it through that foot. This foot made creating and attaching the piping so much easier.

This afternoon I finished the backing hexagon. It is backing fabric, cotton batting, and then top fabric, sewn around the edges, reversed and double-topstitched. Curious feet are watching mommy play with fabric :)

All I have to do tomorrow is attach the hearts by ditch-stitching around the piping, add a dozen decorative quilting lines to the top, and add two pieces of velcro to the little tabs. Then I get to start another project. Yay! 5 days early!

So sad when your toddler is sick.

2008-03-31T23:58:00.000-05:00

I am starting to dislike Minnesota. Today brings another blizzard and another many, many inches (looks like at least 6) of heavy, wet, slushy snow. The previous snow had just melted a day or so ago. *sigh*.

It is probably one of the most pathetic things in the world when your toddler is sick. Johanna has some kind of bug--a mild fever, crankiness and fatigue, but no cold symptoms yet. I wonder if it is the same thing Tyler and I got over the last week or two. It rips you in two when you walk into her dark room when she has awoken unhappy for the eighth time since bedtime and you hear "dada" and a little whimper.

Crazy quilted hearts done

2008-03-30T16:27:00.006-05:00

Anyway, here are the finished crazy hearts, all arranged in a circle. I have cut out the tree skirt backing fabrics now, so hopefully I can get that all quilted tomorrow. I have also cut and stitched together 10 yards of bias strips all ready to make into piping tomorrow.

I am really really liking the monogramming my machine can do. How cool is it to be able to stitch your name and the date in a few seconds? (I blurred out my last name.) You might have to zoom in to see it.

Ok, Johanna has decided to start getting up at 7:30. Ugh. It is physically impossible for me to go to bed before midnight, so this is becoming a problem. I am so tired I feel ill.

Today was a busy day of cleaning up my craft room so I can at least use the cutting table and ironing board, finishing organizing my craft books, going to Goodwill Outlet (deserted today, found a bunch of really great stuff), and giving my dog Yoshi a very long overdue bath and haircut. I think his last haircut was at least in October? He was the hairiest I have ever seen him.

I have almost finished the little Christmas wallhanging. All I have left is handstitching the binding and hanging sleeve, which I finally got instructions for. I will probably finish that off tomorrow, making me early for this week's challenge.

Very sparkly Swarovski pendant

2008-03-29T13:08:00.006-05:00

Here is a pendant I made for my Mother-in-Law for Christmas this year. Swarovski crystals... mmmm... sparkly. I think the crystal copper ones are 10mm? Anyway, there was a similar pattern in the gallery of designs on Firemountaingems, but I modified it a bit because it wasn't working like I wanted. There is a small loop of beads on the back so you can slide it through a chain and hang it vertically.

Anyway, I have finally finished crazy embroidering all six hearts, but it is late so a photo will have to wait until tomorrow. The decorative stitches are amazingly nice but sooo s-l-o-w...

I am having mixed feelings about my new sewing machine. Yes, it is a very nice machine and I am enjoying the fancy stitches, but perhaps the first project I am doing--fabric crazy-patched onto cotton batting--is making a few of the satin stitches go haywire. Last night I did a really long seam in what should have been a lovely satin-stitched braid, but when it went over an area with more than one seam, the alignment got all wonky. Result: me with a seam ripper and pliers ripping out tiny stitches for 2 hours. Grrr...

I am also extremely grumpy about my craft room right now. I decided a week or so ago to reorganize, and so I started pulling stuff out into what was already a pretty big mess. Today's result: now I can't walk, cut fabric, or use my ironing board. It is going to take most of tomorrow to fix what I have done. At least I still have another week to finish the Christmas tree skirt to keep on track with the challenge. The next step is making 10 yards of piping, so I kind of need my cutting mat and ironing board cleared off...

That is about all I managed to do today. I just got "The Cute Book" and "Last Minute Fabric Gifts" out of the library today and am excited to read them before bed tonight. I was going to buy The Cute Book until I realized that I could preview it for free :)X

Brand new sewing machine

2008-03-28T13:30:00.007-05:00

So, I did wind up getting my new sewing machine yesterday. I don't have a lot to report yet because I wanted to read most of the manual before I broke anything and so I haven't really done much with it.

This morning I have been playing with some decorative stitches and such, trying to get on top of all of the little nuances you need to learn with any new toy. I expect tonight if my back isn't hurting too much I will start the crazy embroidery on my tree skirt hearts. I don't think it will take more than an evening or two--this goes pretty quickly by machine!

I have to say if this turns out well I am extremely excited. I have been wanting to do crazy quilting so badly but my needlework skills are just not great and I don't really even enjoy it, so I was put off. If I can do the embroidery on the machine, I will be ecstatic!

And, my seedlings are sprouting! The peppers and one kind of tomato started yesterday. How exciting!

Thread crochet amigurumi dachshund

2008-03-28T01:56:00.000-05:00

My thread crochet swap has been received, so I can now post about it. The person I got said she liked daschunds, and had a brown long-haired one, so I figured I would bust out the amigurumi books and try to find a pattern. There actually was one! This is what resulted:

This guy is crocheted from #5 perle cotton with a 1.65mm hook. Making the little loops on the chest, tail, and ears in thread was a major pain. I also had a lot of trouble with the eyes; I wound up using 4mm onyx beads from my stash.

Hind view.

He turned out not too badly, at least for my first attempt at a thread crocheted animal. In the smaller size his head looks strangely large to me. (In the original pattern he was made of yarn.)

I added a tiny bandanna to try to balance his head size, and because it would be cute :) He is lying on a Swedish Christmas heart that I also made for the same swap.

Iron-rich Raisin-Bran or Total muffins

2008-03-26T21:56:00.006-05:00

After cleaning out the pantry, I found two boxes of Total cereal that I bought awhile ago to make iron-rich muffins for Johanna. Procrastination making everything look like more fun, I actually made a batch today, which is unusual because I think I have made muffins only around a half-dozen times since I left my parent's house in 1994... (I cook a lot--several times a day--but I don't bake very often.) Gosh, was that 14 years ago already? Sometimes I feel so old, even though I know I am not really.

Anyway, the muffin recipe actually called for Raisin Bran, but I just added some dried fruit medley from Trader Joe's that I boiled in the microwave for a couple of minutes to soften. They actually turned out really well, which is also unusual because I don't bake with milk or eggs so stuff doesn't always turn out quite right. Johanna wolfed one down as a snack, so I was happy that she liked them too. In the next few days I will probably make a mega-batch to use up the rest of the cereal and then freeze them for future use. I just have to get another muffin pan first, as baking huge amounts of muffins with only one pan would be kind of a pain.

So, I spent most of the day cleaning out and organizing the pantries in the kitchen, and sorting out a bunch of my craft books. I am slowly trying to get the house organized so there isn't a frantic week-long freak out right before my in-laws come to visit near the end of April. Getting my craft room in decent shape is also a high priority because it is getting difficult to work in there because I never seem to put things back where I found them when I am done with them. I have moved most of my books downstairs to free up some space for my rapidly expanding Goodwill Outlet clothing collection, which I have been using some of, but not nearly as fast as it is coming in :)

I am procrastinating thinking about which sewing machine to get tomorrow because I am feeling a lot of guilt about how much money the one I want would cost. Even though technically we can afford it, it is still a lot of money. It seems so hard to justify such an expensive "toy"!

Trying to decide on a new sewing machine and crazy-piecing some hearts

2008-03-25T21:46:00.005-05:00

All six hearts are now done. I didn't manage to get anything else done today because I had to run off to the chiropractor and then went sewing machine shopping. This was brought on by the thought that I could do a better job on the crazy embroidery if I had more types of stitches, wider stitches, and a less tempermental machine. This wasn't completely impulsive; I knew I was getting a new machine very soon, I just didn't think it would be this week exactly.

I tried out a Viking Sapphire, a Babylock Quilter's Choice, and a couple of Brothers. I was originally thinking of getting the Brother Innovis 80, but I watched the lady demo the Innovis NX-650Q and it was pretty dang nice... Now I just have to justify in my head spending twice as much as I had planned :) I was thinking the automatic thread cutter seemed kind of frivolous at first, but now that I think about it, it would be very handy in many situations. It also comes with a bunch more stitches, sideways feed (way way cooler than it sounds, especially combined with decorative stitches), automatic top tension, knee-presser foot lifter, customizable stitches, adjustable presser foot pressure and an extension table. I will be thinking about it tomorrow, and probably picking out the machine I choose on Thursday. I am so excited!

Making a sewing machine stitch sample sheet

2008-03-24T17:18:00.005-05:00

So, quilting update. Last night I finished two more crazy hearts, bringing me up to three out of six. I also finished blanket stitching around two more squares of the little Christmas wall hanging. This is going more quickly than I thought!

I can see that if I am going to make more crazy-pieced things, I am going to have to work on my color selection process a little. I am happy with how they look, but am also aware that the one in the book looks much better...

Anyway, after taking an hour to embroider two seams on the hearts, I realized that I don't really want to spend 30+ hours intricately stitching this thing that is just going to get dirty and covered with tree sap. So, I thought I would use the few decorative stitches on my machine to decorate the seams instead. While Johanna was napping today, I put together some sample pieces of muslin that show most of the variations of my sad little 11 decorative stitches (varying length & width). That way I can choose a stitch, length, and width easily by just looking at the sheet.

I found about 7 combinations that are acceptable, so that is what I am going to do instead of doing it by hand. If I were making an heirloom baby quilt or something, I might be convinced to spend the time, but I just have so much to do right now that doing it by hand just doesn't seem like a good use of my time.

New swap! And the first "quilt" for the challenge chosen.

2008-03-23T15:53:00.005-05:00

Was it just yesterday that I said I wasn't going to be doing any more swaps? I started another one, not due until May 10th, where you sew something out of a thrifted article of clothing. See it here. I was thinking this would be just a small distraction--a nice change from all the quilting I will have been doing :)

So, quilting progress: First project is the crazy-quilted tree skirt. The pattern is from the book "Quilted for Christmas" (Volume 1, which, for whatever reason isn't listed on Amazon, but volumes 2, 3, and 4 are. The link is to half.com.). I had it out of the library in Boston and scanned the one pattern I wanted to make for sure. Here is an image of it:

Mine won't be as green as most of the fabrics I got are pretty red... Anyway, last night I took the scanned pattern pieces and assembled them in Photoshop so I could print them out. I then cut up the batting and backing. The crazy patches are foundation-pieced right onto the batting (?) so I didn't have to cut up the muslin after all. You have to make 6 crazy hearts total and attach them to a solid-colored hexagon base; I managed to do one out of six and dug out my crazy quilting book for some stitching ideas. I will probably be doing the stitching for a long time--I am very new and slow to embroidery.

I also pulled out the smaller of the two Christmas wall hangings that needs blanket stitching and blanket stitched around one of the four applique squares. Three more to go!

Other than that, I am still miserably sick :( I hate colds that drag on and on. Usually I am improved by day 3 and better by day 4, but today (day 4) has been the worst yet! I hope I am not getting a sinus infection. That would be very unpleasant...