I’m a Desperate Knitter.

(No Pictures, unfortunately, as I forgot the camera cord.)

1) I forgot my fourth double-pointed needle and have been knitting a sock with three DPNs and one plastic coffee stirrer from the airplane.

2) I have a mosquito bite on my thumb. This is what I get for mocking Tristan for getting all the attention from the little creatures.

3) I’m inheriting a Saxony-style spinning wheel that KB’s grandfather built. It’s never been used by a spinner, so his father and I are having a time trying to correct the very few errors that come from his never having spoken to a spinner. Basically, I’m getting a wheel for the cost of a drive band, a replacement scotch brake, and some oil.

4) We are, accidentally, staying with KB’s aunt & uncle and little cousins at the moment. She:  “Hurrah! I thought I’d never get to talk to you, and now I have you captive!”

Also:  They have cats.

5) The more people I meet who have married into Tristan’s family, the more I realize that EVERYONE has to go through the gauntlet of meeting absolutely everyone descended from his great grandfather, and then some, including introduction to the pictures of those who have now died. It’s nice to have some company in the madness.

6) It is SO WARM. We’ve gone swimming in island bays too days in a row. Both days they were like swimming pools. Yes, this is the northern Pacific.

7) I’ve been staying in the bedrooms of several displaced teenagers, and I want to know: am I the only person in the world who still has a twin bed? Really?

Fun With Paper: Homemade Postcards (Tutorial)

(This post was supposed to be part of a series on paper crafts… but was interrupted in the writing by a hard drive crash. Thanks to WordPress’s autosave, this post has been preserved, but I’ve probably lost all the photos I took for the other posts. We’ll see.)

I think it’s safe to say the Kilted Baker has not agonized over how to ask his party to be a part of our wedding in the same way I did. “But what if they say NO?!?” I moaned.

“Nobody is going to say no,” said my Dad. But I didn’t listen. What does he know of the exhaustion, expense, and stress of being in a bridal party? Nothing, that’s what. Nor did he know what a terrible correspondent I am, even with the girls I love so much I wouldn’t dream of having a bridal party without them.

Well, when Kolya left some white pastry boxes behind, I thought to myself (inspired by iHanna’s pizza-box project), “I know! I’ll make POSTCARDS to ask Suki(e) and Steph to be in my bridal party!”

After much agonizing and struggling with my inability to draw, I remembered that I have a color photocopier on my printer. So I took some of my favorite fabric:

And photocopied it.

(Note the rectangle of pastry box for the postcard-base. And the evidence of help.)

Then I did a bit of free-form embroidery on another beloved fabric:

And photocopied that.

Cut the background design to fit your cardboard, and coat the cardboard with mod-podge (available everywhere, even the Wal-Mart craft aisle).

Now that you’ve covered the post-card with the background, feel free to collage whatever you like on top. I cut a valentine-shape and traced it over my photocopied embroidery:

I cut it out and covered the back with mod-podge:

And then gave everything another coat and put it to dry in a cat-safe location:

Suki(e) got her postcard already, so I know they’ll go through both the USPS and Canada Post. Scrapbook your postcards away!

* * * * * *

Writing about Suki(e) inspired me to check out her family’s blog for news of her older sister’s wedding, and I’m happy to tell you that she, her mother, grandmother, and sisters are running a wonderful, informative blog about their own domestic projects. It’s the kind of blog I wish this one would grow up to be… Like Mother, Like Daughter is almost as pleasant as sitting in their kitchen having a cup of tea with the family. But not quite.

So I want to talk to you about cooking. At the moment, KB and I alternate dinner duties based on who has class the next day (this, as with so many things, is going to be more interesting next year when we have more classes together). He’ll cook at his place one night, and then the next place he’ll come over and have dinner at my place. We each get a certain number of food-responsibility free nights for working, and we get to share a meal in the middle of our hectic academic schedules. But there’s a problem: one of us is better at menu planning than the other (he keeps saying he’ll improve), and even I don’t always take the time to plan out what I’m going to make. Which leads to panic, waste, time wasted in the grocery store pondering what to make rather than, say, comparing prices, and a whole lot of pasta.

So: Honestly, I think Mrs. Lawler’s series on menu planning should be required reading both for under-nourished poor graduate students with the bad habit of giving their money to overpriced pubs AND for couples in marriage prep classes. I’m planning on interrogating Tristan about his favorite menus once I meet up with him in BC.

For another view, on the spiritual effects of a well-planned diet, check out Conversion Diary’s post on The Saint Diet.

We All Have Our Finished Projects…

In April, I finished a pair of socks for my friend Brianna. She’d had a hard year and deserved some pampering, and STR’s colorway “Highland” seemed perfect for a former highland dancer considering going to St. Andrew’s for her PhD.

I really disliked the way the yarn pooled and obstructed pattern work, though, so I decided to break up the color changes with a basic slip-stitch pattern: k1 sl1 all the way around, knit plain, sl1 k1 all the way around, knit plain. Repeat.

I’m rather pleased, and so was the recipient. I need more friends with size-3 feet.

Around the same time, friend Greg finished his trebuchet (‘trebuchette,’ corrects Chris).

This is somewhat more impressive, as it’s not seen as appropriate to bring your wood-working tools for crafting at pub.

In Which I Learn To Chill Out About Pie

(I was recently going through the photos on my computer, and found photos for all kinds of blog posts I’d never written. Lucky you!)

Some people who know me might say that I have a bit of a… fixation on pie making. A complex, perhaps, developed from a simultaneous love of the process (and product!) and fear that my pies will never achieve the technical achievements of those of my mother and grandmother. This has had the effect of making me appear pie-crazed to some of my friends (I may have threatened to anathematize Greg when he said that the filling was more important than the crust) and of creating a dependance on written recipes, whether on stained recipe cards passed down from grandma, or in the Big Book of Cookness (as my former roommate called it.)

So, a few months ago, my friend Brianna’s suggestion of a pie-baking afternoon for her send-off party had me getting wound up into a familiar state. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll get crisco, and more flour, and check the cookbook…what kind did you say you want to make? But, wait! What are you going to do? You can’t eat pie, you’re celiac!”

While I once made a crust-free pumpkin custard for a celiac friend who had to skip the pie I’d made for dessert, I couldn’t see the same trick working with a summer fruit pie. But Brianna had other plans.

“I’ll bring the ingredients,” she said, “you provide the kitchen.”

When she showed up, she showed up with this:

(I don’t have any pictures of the process because a) I was too busy having conniptions and b) I didn’t want to send her back to the West Coast and then around the world thinking I was a crazed woman who took pictures of gluten-free pie crust mix and apples, even though I am the kind of crazed blogging woman who will take pictures of the empty container of gluten-free pie crust mix after her friends have gone.)

And this:

As well as some sweet rice flour (for dusting) some apples (to stretch the filling) and some oatmeal (purpose to be revealed later.)

So she made the crust according to the package instructions (revolutionary! I let somebody else make the crust!) and I peeled and sliced apples and when we’d managed to get the crust in the pie-plate we just poured in the berries, and the apples, and a tiny bit of lemon juice I had, and some sugar– all according to taste and whim–and then Brianna announced she was going to put an oatmeal crumble crust on top.

At this point it was all so easy I just gave up and puttered around offering people iced tea (that’s a whole other blog post) and let her do her crumble-crust thing, so I’m afraid I don’t have detailed notes about what she put in it, though. What I do have, however, is proof that the leftovers which remained behind didn’t go to waste:

(behold, my breakfast!)

Indeed, the pie was so good I  meant to write a post about how you should all make this pie, and make it now, but unfortunately as the recipe is even more helter-skelter than my usual recipes, I can’t quite make that demand (but you should totally try).

So, what does it mean? Am I going to throw out my recipes and proceed on my pie-making path with nary a care? Uhm, my Canada Day why-won’t-this-crust-work-DAMMIT flip out proves that Brianna’s pie wasn’t quite that revolutionary, but it did show me that pie could be purely fun–the smallest of many lessons I’ve taken from our friendship, and certainly the tastiest.

So much crafting going on…

I was complaining to the K.B. about how messy my place has been of late, and he pointed out (which is quite true) “it isn’t dirty. You just have a lot of crafts going on right now.”

Which is true. So many, in fact, that every time I get far enough into a project that I think about blogging it, I’m starting a new project.

So, here’s the beginning of this week’s project round-up.

Item One: Pickled Beets. Started: July 4. Completed: July 4.

Don’t they look pretty? Beets from our local farmer’s market, recipe from Canadian Living. And they get K.B. to eat beets, which he hates unless I’m cooking them. (I delight in this particular pickiness because I am certainly the picky eater in the household-to-be.) Makes it worth the  true and utter madness on this one as I blanched the greens for the freezer, chopped up the stems for the fridge, and boiled the beets… all while wrestling my sewing machine into submission to make the next project…

2) Kolya’s Birthday Handkerchiefs! Started: July 3. Finished: July 4.

I don’t have any pictures of these, but maybe I’ll get some later. (Kolya, love, please don’t get any nosebleeds before I get pictures). It was a pretty simple project. I cut some squares, pressed some hems, and stitched. The most difficult part was, as stated above, wrestling the sewing machine into submission (operator error: I put the needle in with the flat side front. Don’t do that, it’s dangerous.). I traced his initials onto the fabric with a disappearing-ink fabric pen, and back-stitched away with blue pearl cotton. I think he likes them. Total time: two days. Would have been one but I had to wash  the fabric and pickle some beets.

All the same, I don’t recommend combining a cooking project that involves beets and a sewing project that involves light blue fabric on the same day, even if the birthday boy likes both.

3) The Quilt/Coverlet that Wouldn’t Die. Started: June 17. Timeline: 11.5 months left. Progress: 6% complete.

That’s all I’m going to say about that.

4) Pantry Jars! Started: July 5. Progress: Barely Started.

I’ve been meaning to decorate  the leftover pasta-sauce jars I use for storing my dry foods for some time… in fact, for an embarassingly long time. I finally got busy and started experimenting with my tools the other day (maybe it was all the empty tea boxes I had, ready to cut up for labels).

5) 1944 Crochet Doily

We got some very bad news about a family friend this week, which left me gloomy and sad and just wanting to do something really finicky with yarn for a while. A quick google search for “vintage crochet doilies” led me to this pattern, which, while I know is entirely out of style these days, has me completely excited about the finished product. It’s so very, very… not Ikea, unlike the rest of my apartment. But I think they’ll look great with my beloved new Ikea glasses, from which we’ve been sipping our homemade lemonade these days.

I’m sorry to say these aren’t all my projects-in-progress at the moment, only the ones that have been most recently active. If you’re wondering where the knitting is, it’s on time out as I recover from the need to rip out a bunch of stranded mitten-knitting. On size zero needles. Gaaaaargh.

Off to finish my German so I can make more stuff!