Completed-ish project: Kernel

My to - do list this week was threatened by an unexpected trip to William Dam Seeds. I am an over - informer,  especially for things about which i am passionate; I already spend hours looking at seed catalogues, so when I actually get to visit a seed shop that is literally all I want to do. Look at seed catalogues. 

But on my to do list was the blocking of this scarf (Kernel from Knitty), which I finished years ago. Lace knitting generally requires blocking to take its full effect, as blocking stretches out the stitches to show the pattern properly. Before blocking, this scarf was a waste of lace. This is why lace is a magical knit: the blocking transforms it completely.

Consider me impressed that I managed to sew a new thing on my to - do list AND finish a WIP in one week - or at least, it is finished - ish. While blocking I found a hole in it that needs to be patched up.

Triangle

From the to - do list: wetbag

Used this tutorial to make a small wetbag today. Needed something to carry soiled diapers and inserts in. I made it much smaller than the tutorial called for, as mine is specifically for a diaper bag.

This took me about half an hour, including a lot of fiddling with the zipper foot. I lack confidence in my zipper sewing abilities.

The PUL is from Diaper Sewing Supplies. I love it. I love so many of their fabrics. Must use up PUL so I can buy more PUL.

Oh no. I didn't

Despite having less exposure to the public than I have possibly ever had, I am on my second cold of the year. Of course colds are miserable in general, but with a 5 month old baby the experience is even worse. I have  little opportunity to sleep, which is the only way I really believe works to fight a cold. And sleep is absolutely the only way to overcome the restless sense of constant boredom that inevitably accompanies the cold.

So I decided to make the Awesome Allium juice from the Juice Bible. I could have tried a fruit-based antioxidant juice, but I felt like my illness has already proceeded past that. I was both intrigued and horrified at the ingredients, which included half an onion and a clove of garlic. Sure, I have problems stomaching raw garlic, never mind its concentrated juice, but how much could a clove hurt me?

After the juicing I was more confident. It was very green, green is good, right? So I too a taste while nursing my little one. I would down the rest of it later.

No I wouldn't. There would be no Awesome Allium later.

It didn't taste as horrible as it should have. At least, not at first. Yes, it made my eyes water. Yes, it was a bit spicy. But not unpalatable. Seconds later, though, as the garlic and onion spread down into my throat, I regretted my tiny tasting with an infant on my lap. She started crying quietly, as if my onion reek was painful for her to be around. I called to my husband urgently to bring me water. I practiced deep breathing. Read: do not drink this on an empty stomach.

So most of the juice remains in a Mason jar in our fridge. Yes, I want this cold to be gone, but I just can't do it.

Overhang

Bug taggie toy

Finished the bug/bird taggie toy this week.

Made of scraps except for the ribbon, which I bought at Len's Mills. Embroidered the eyes and along the edges of the wings. Good practice but I wish I were better at it. Used a cereal bag in the wings to make it crinkle.

Balancing our house

When we first moved into our house, I started to get the feeling that I would slide out of it, right into the river. Not because of any issues with its construction, but because we spent so much of our time in the back half of the house. I felt like my energy was directed out over our upper backyard, down the hill tumbling 20 feet down to a lower back yard, where the dirt path through the Ponderosa gates slopes down to the Nith.

But the moment I had put our daughter to bed in her own room for the first time, the energy in the house shifted. I felt like we occupied it in a new way. A room in the front of the house was used. It was as though all 15 pounds of her anchored the north east corner of the building down. I shut the door to her room suddenly aware that she would live in it for years to come.

I felt newly aware of the front of our house. The cars passing on the street. The untended section of garden underneath her window. The snake that I saw slip into a crack between the bricks. And with this new feeling comes the knowledge that her growing energy will contribute to the balance of this house.

Pumpkin scones

Made these pumpkin scones today. I had a can of pumpkin open after attempting to make the pumpkin nut muffins they used to make at the Cocoa Bean, and wanted to try a different pumpkin recipe. I didn't double-glaze these as the recipe suggests. Just one glaze is enough. I grew up on plain scones with raisins in them. One glaze already feels like I'm cheating.

I am trying to figure out whether I should grow pie pumpkins this year; I grew regular pumpkins with some success in one particular bed and would like to switch them out for something more practical. So I am experimenting with baked goods just to see how practical I can make pie pumpkins.
I have eaten more of these than is healthy for one day.

WIP - bug crinkle taggie toy

In the crafting and knitting world, WIP refers to a work-in-progress, or a stalled project. Finishing things has never been my strong suit. I have many works-in-progress. I also have a high level of comfort with wearing and using half-finished items.

This is why my baby plays with a partially finished taggie thing.

After seeing her grasping at the short tags on some of her toys, I decided to make a taggie blanket. After looking at pics online for inspiration (so many cute ones, but this cloud and this circle made me smile) , I decided to make a much cooler taggie toy. But I wanted crinkle in it too, so I decided adding wings would be good. I think it was at this point that the project got bigger than a one-hour Saturday night sewing.

Everything is properly secured, but I only managed to sew on one wing, and no face, before I got sick of it. So instead of a character, the toy is really just a thing. Goal this week? To finish the toy.

Reading ABC

In January of 2014 I started reading alphabetically. I chose titles by the author's last name, proceeding through the alphabet one letter at a time. I had a goal in mind: instead of buying a membership card at the much larger library in Brantford, I would try to methodically go through the collection at my local branch. They had more books than I could ever want to read, but I found myself walking around and around through the stacks, unable to find a good title.

I have a lot of unread books on my own shelves as well. I figured this approach would have the additional bonus of giving some focus to tackling my own library.

I'll skip to the ending: I didn't make it through the alphabet. I contend that I was doing fairly well until I got to a non-fiction "P," even though it was late in the year and I had already skipped J and K (Joyce when I was 9 months pregnant? I don't think so). However, I enjoyed the process. And choosing books so intentionally allowed me to notice threads and themes that carried from one book to the next.

My plan is to try and put some reviews up on Bibliocommons, the library catalogue that the Brantford Public Library uses. However, here was my reading list for 2014.

Adams, Richard. Watership Down
Boyden, Joseph. Through black spruce
Coupland, Douglas. Worst. Person. Ever.
DeBerniers, Louis. Birds without wings
Eco, Umberto. In the name of the rose
Franco, James. Actors Anonymous *
Gross, Lauren. The monsters of Templeton
Hay, Elizabeth. Late nights on air
Izanni, Frances. Deafening
Larsson, Steig. The girl with the dragon tattoo
Murakami, Haruki. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of pilgrimage.
Niffenegger, Audrey. The time traveler`s wife
Ozeki, Ruth. A tale for the time being

While my plan is to put some reviews up on Bibliocommons, I must mention here that Actors Anonymous was horrible. I`m embarrassed that it appears on this list. When I was heading to the library my husband joked that "maybe James Franco has written a book," so when I saw he had I couldn't resist. While I don`t like to endorse books without some sort of reader engagement, I feel comfortable recommending quite blindly that people NOT read this book.

Wintry

Macarons at last

At Christmastime my husband appealed to me to stop making macarons. Or rather, to stop trying to make macarons. I was not successful, batch after batch, and he was tired of seeing both the kitchen and my nerves in a perpetual state of disarray. I started Googling "macaron fail" to make myself feel better.

But finally, I have succeeded.

Vanilla-mango macarons. Success.

There are a hundred different ways you can mess up macarons. In December, I suspect my main mess up was trying to "cheat" by using egg whites from a carton. For a real baker this mistake might have been obvious. I am not really a real baker. Of course, the problem isn't just the macarons. I always have problems making meringue, the first step in macaron-ing. I'm using an old hand beater, rather than a fancy stand mixer. It takes at least 10 minutes longer for the whites to form "stiff peaks" than any recipe I've ever used calls for. Some say ageing the egg whites is critical. They also need to be room temperature, which in Canada this time of year can still be rather cold - so I put them on the counter for hours. 

But the meringue isn't the only finicky part. Watch what kind of colouring you add to the batter, as some claim that liquid food dyes change its consistency. I've seen a video stating that you need to blend the dry ingredients in very vigorously, so as to remove the bubbles. A magazine article notes that the batter should flow "like lava" (like I have seen lava to compare!). And if you make it through all those steps without error, you can't forget to leave the macarons out for at least 30 minutes before baking, so that they form a skin and the signature "feet" appear on the bottom of the cookie.

So now I've annotated my recipe with all of the above reminders. For the filling, I used mango jam that I canned in July using Pomona's Universal Pectin (an amazing product that isn't sugar activated). They were tasty cookies, if very sweet. I might have had too many to celebrate.

Tracks

Men who buy too many turkeys

 We just finished a week of eating turkey. A 16 pound bird fed six people dinner on Sunday night, my husband and I dinner four nights this week, and lunches for me every day. Plus I've got three turkey pot pies in the freezer. I am starting to understand why my father buys too many turkeys.

This was my first turkey, and was given to me by my father last year after he bought too many turkeys to fit in their deep freezer. He buys them after Christmas when they are cheap, and in 2013 found it impossible to stop. It started when someone in the meat department messed up the pounds to kilos conversion while calculating the price match, erring in his favour. When he tells the story, he talks about how more turkeys was all he could think about. He couldn't enjoy his beer. He was compelled to return to the store. 

This time another store employee messed up the conversion while price matching. Getting a discount and reaffirming his belief that the Canadian education system failed us in developing our math skills? That is a good day, friends. It's hard to believe he has only been price matching a couple of years; his first price match was legendary, but that is a story for another day.

This year he was banned from buying any more turkeys, by my poor mother who eats turkey soup day in, day out. As my father's daughter, I'm already looking forward to the week after Easter.

Oh hello!

I'll keep this short and sweet: I have started blogging to get back on the "writing" horse. As you can see by that uncomfortable blend of cliche and metaphor, I need practice. After a few years in an academic program, I feel compelled to produce worded output, while my creative side feels stifled and dreary. So I blog, hoping to bring myself through to some sort of recovery. I hope to write about life in Paris, alongside the Nith. I will avoid writing about our cats as much as possible. You're welcome.

Figs for Twenty-fifteen

We have messy gardens. Weeds creep on the ground and stick up high in the air, fighting with each other to dominate the various regions of the garden. Wildflowers run rampant where weeds don't take hold. One year a trumpet vine threatened to latch onto my car. I would come out to find it gently touching my car morning after morning, despite my moving it back each night. Snails feast on every plant they can reach. By the end of the summer, the entire garden looks spindly, burnt, and chaotic. Not a charming chaos, either.

So you would think that this presents enough of a gardening challenge for me. Regardless, I find myself drawn to the more unusual, and often challenging, seeds in the catalogue. In past years, I've tried growing loofah (seeded well, but I couldn't make it grow in the ground),  strawberry corn (some luck, though I let it go by harvest time), and white pumpkins (success all around). This year, I think I would like to try growing figs.

While the landscaping of our "upper" backyard (the not-down-by-the-river area) leaves much to be desired, I do dream of a day when a neat green lawn is framed by artfully-planted raised beds. Instead of a dangerous 4-foot drop off a bumpy stone wall, there is a row of wooden benches fencing off the area. Instead of a weed-ridden dirt patch, there is a pergola laden with grape vines, covering a lovely and photogenic outdoor lounge area. Fig plants in massive pots fit splendidly into this vision. We could enjoy the bright rich fruit as we sit under the pergola. Sigh.

It isn't as impossible as it might sound: in our zone (5a), fig plants need to be brought inside for the winter, grown in pots. I can order them online from Richter's Herbs in Groundwood. Moving the pots is probably the most difficult part, for which I can enlist help (probably). The fact that I have hardly eaten more than a dozen figs in my life is irrelevant. Right?