2-at-a-time socks

I bought this book awhile ago... early summer and today I got it out with some yarn....

I was ready to start my first pair of socks. I've done the first row 6 times. So I decided , maybe, just maybe I should learn how to knit socks first.

So I got out 4 double pointed needles, cheap ones, and learned why my sister said knitting hurt her fingers. Those needles are sharp.

I will not give up, I will not give up, I will not give up.

I have some larger double pointed needles in bamboo....maybe they won't be so sharp and does it really matter if these socks fit anyone?

hawaiian quilt 4

What do you think of when you think Hawaiian quilt. Here's a link to a few traditional Hawaiian quilts. It certainly doesn't look like this;


This is the 4th of similar quilts I have made. For my friend in exchange for hair stuff. Becky is amazing with a pair of scissors and hair but not so good with scissors and fabric. I sew; she cuts, dyes, perms my hair and even throws in some cleaning and wedding consulation in there. Aren't the quilts fun and bright and certainly make a focal point in a bedroom. This one is headed for a college dorm room on Tuesday.

tyler

I've spent the morning day downloading old cd's of pictures and found these that Tyler has probably never seen of himself.

this is ...my favorite children's book

Favorite. I have a problem with the word favorite...I might offend the books I didn't pick. So... this is ....one of my favorite children's books. Written and illustrated by; Gyo Fujikawa. I've recently tried to hunt down some of her books for my childrens' children I have learned that they have gone UP in price. I'd love to have a copy of her Children's Garden of Verses. I'm still looking . Gyo Fujikawa 1908-1998.

My children STUDIED this book. The illustrations are so detailed. So many things to look at and talk about and read about.

There's another page where the children of all nationalities are playing hide and go seek. Delightful.

mug of cake

Everyone left this evening for scouts and I was weak. Very weak. I made THE MUG CAKE. It should look like this.
Mine looked like this. I added 1 tablespoon of miniature chocolate chips and about 5 pecan halves;

but not enough to cause this explosion of cake. I only cooked it for 2.5 minutes. It is a very forgettable cake. I was hoping for fudgy, buttery, yummy goodness. It has promise though...I wonder if I could work with it and improve it. I'd have to make it over and over...
I was actually thinking of Lynn; making it as a gift item for her craft show in Nov.

potholders

Here are some more made by my daughter-in-law.

new shoes?

Just as school was getting out last spring Jeffrey got new shoes. He paid for them and we found acceptable ones at Pay-less Shoes. During the summer we bought him boots for camp; he likes his boots and so instead of getting a new shoelace for his tennis shoes in July he started wearing his boots ALL the time. Imagine getting ready to go ...oh, anywhere and having to wait while he put on his boots, while his brother
slipped on his flip flops and was ready.
Anyway so his shoes did not get a lot of wear this summer and we finally found gray shoelaces (actually we finally looked at Wal-Mart and there they were; he didn't actually tell me he needed shoelaces until he'd been wearing his boots for a month) and he wore his shoes to school the first day.

As he took them off last night one of the lace carriers came off.


This morning while I was hunting thread to match, the ribbon bit got lost sooo I sewed in a bit of an old shoelace.
Do you suppose Jeffrey is the only Jr. High kid in this suburban town with hand sewn tennis shoes?
Quilting thread does come in handy occasionally.

first day of school

They made it home. I DID NOT take them! I refuse to go to the school the first day and get in line with all the other mothers dropping off their darlings. Our traditions have to be different...
Here is Jeffrey with his choice of an after school snack..tuna and crackers...


Andrew choose lemonade.

Jeffrey is proud of his accomplishment, getting into Geometry in 8th grade. I'm proud of him too.
They are in 6th and 8th grade.

pantry

I SHOULD write about the first day of school...and maybe I will AFTER they get home and I can show pictures...meanwhile....

Last week, knowing it was my last week with children to help me with impossible tasks, we tackled cleaning the pantry. I'm pretty sure that it has been cleaned since Brian did it 9, almost 10 years ago but I just have no recollection of it.

Brian had a teacher that came to the house twice a week to do school work with him. The first year he was ill they did school work. The August of 1998 when she started coming again she didn't bother with any classwork, she just did what ever Brian wanted to do. After she wrote in his journal for him they did his choice of activities. They often baked brownies or a cake. One time, it must of been November since he couldn't talk by then, he led her to the pantry. She was puzzled but I knew what he wanted to do. Clean the pantry. So they did. She thought it a funny thing for him to want to clean but that was Brian.

Anyway... we cleaned the pantry last week.
Here it is empty

Here some of the stuff

Jeffrey did a good job lining up all the cans

These 3 items are things I found that I'm not sure what to do with or why I bought them, but need to be used soon. I did a recipe search for the poppy seed filling; so have an idea to use that with. Duck sauce? Raspberry Chipolte Sauce? I had 2 bottle of it; I bought it for Liz's wedding (2006 Christmas time) I poured it on cream cheese and served it with chips, but evidently it wasn't great cause I had most of it left over. I can't eat it since it is too spicy for me...or it would have to be thinned---stretched out, what ever, to get the spiciness down enough for me.

Any ideas? There were other treasures too but I tossed the pickled ginger and the can of cactus.

camp out

Andrew and Roger and 2 other 11 year old Scouts went camping yesterday and today. Andrew was the lead cook.... The food was good; skillet lasagna. The same recipe we did for Jeffrey's camp out but with dried onions instead of Andrew trying to chop onions.




They justified using fans since those camping in cold states use propane heaters....

The boy's enjoy trying to split wood, good thing the wood is almost rotten!

I was a little concerned since there are many alligators in this camp but they stay near the lakes and the campground is not near the lakes....mostly. There is also a visitors center where they got to see baby alligators and the snake.

winding ways

This is the quilt that inspired my Mother to make a Winding Ways quilt. Her mother made this one out of apron scraps (aprons she and others wore while working in the hotel in Silverton, Colorado in her 20's). Grandma didn't make many quilts; this is one of them but if I thought all quilts were this hard I wouldn't have made many either. Notice the whisker guard sewn to the top to protect it from whiskers and hand oil. I love the faded blues. I bought a book and templates and planned to make a quilt someday ...

This is the one my Mother made. She finished it in May 2008. I love the ways the circles shift and move around on this one. I may still make one since this one is eventually going to my nephew....

irish chain 2

When I was a little girl I often slept under a quilt that had been given to my mother when she was 8 by her great grandmother. It was a scrap Irish Chain with a yellow background.

This is my copy of it for my fifth baby. (One of the 5 I made that winter while I tried to get my broken foot to heal and grow a baby). I organized a scrap exchange where I cut strips and sewed strips for 2 full size Irish chains and one baby size. Guess where the full size Irish chains are? But isn't this pretty? I'm feeling some strings pulling me, pulling me to the sewing machine...

The back is from my grandmothers stash that I inherited parts of..well actually I think I inherited all of it. There is a wee bit of this fabric in Austin's quilt even if it does have pink bows on those puppies.

irish chain

Years ago when Christie was a little girl I started a small Irish chain for her birthday, for a doll quilt. Soon after starting I realized that there was noway her mother, Mary, would allow her to play with this quilt. So I quit and made her a different one (no clue what I made her). Years later I finished this one. Those small squares are 3/4 of an inch. I love the blue background instead of white. One of the few times I was able to pull together a quilt from my stash. Christie got married this year in fact I missed her reception this week (in Singapore, just to far to travel to). :(

9-patch and stars

My recipe file has gotten ahead of my quilt file so I have to work to even it up again. Here is a small quilt I made in my 'Little Quilt' stage. This is an exchange I organized before we moved from Baytown 13 years ago. I've really enjoyed this the years it has been on my wall. Currently I have no space for my little quilts to hang so I don't see them as often as I'd like. I dyed the border fabric since I only had a black and white plaid. The corner triangles are a scrap of my Grandmothers.

chocolate pave

Roger and Andrew just left for a camp out. It is so hot (heat index is 103 on the island but only 98 in Houston). Luckily all Brazos Bend campsites have electricity so they took a fan for each tent.
Tonight is a small pot luck; sooo I had a good excuse to make a dessert I've been wanting to make. Chocolate Brick. It sounds better in French; Chocolate Pave. Really easy to make unless you make raspberry sauce to go with it. I made raspberry sauce. I licked my plate. It was so good. simple really, just takes a long time.
Basically the raspberry sauce;
2 bags of frozen raspberries, placed over a tall thing in a strainer, catch the juice, boil it down. sieve the berries to get the pulp, add the pulp to the liquid add a bit of sugar. YUMMY tastes like fresh raspberries.

I'm going to have to make French toast and eat the syrup. Pancakes and waffles here we come. I may have to freeze this stuff. The author (The Cake Bible) claims it freezes and refreezes very well for over a year.. but there is only 2 cups of the stuff so it won't last that long.

new cookbook

So, my daughter created a monster. For the last 2 years I have been typing recipes into a file I labeled; Cookbook. I divided it into other folders and each recipe is a separate document. It worked fine for a while but there is no table of contents and finding a specific recipe became cumbersome. It was cumbersome on a quotidian level. So I talked to Liz about it. She told me how she does it; a much better way and she has a table of contents when she is done. So I have been copying recipes into a new folder called aacookbook and currently have 74 pages.
But it is eating up my life; so if anyone has a better way. Please. Do not tell me about it!

quotidian (a new word Andrew and I are trying to use today)

Okay, I'll be nice a paste a definition here for you.

derives from the Latin word for "daily" and refers to repetitive daily actions, events or routines — yet in typical usage carries a vaguely negative overtone. "Quotidian" is generally used to convey a sense of the mundane; that is, there is an implication of the 'commonplace' — often in the disparaging sense, and at the very least to indicate that there is nothing unexpected or surprising to be found in things quotidian.

In art criticism, "quotidian" refers to art works which reference mundane aspects of everyday life. When used in a negative sense, however, the word denotes art or any creative work that, while reflecting or incorporating everyday life, references something that is a very temporary phenomenon that will date the work.

In medicine, "quotidian fever" is a pattern of daily fever occasionally encountered in persons having malignancies or indolent infections like miliary tuberculosis.

from Wikipedia.

birthday boy

I'm late...I'm late last Wednesday was our oldest son's birthday. I have 2 29 year old children... for about 1 month when Melissa will ...get older.

This is the day I brought him home from the hospital. He was my smallest baby at 7 lbs 1/2 ounce.












This is my latest picture of him taken on my birthday in March with 2 of his siblings. (We visited him in June but only have pictures of his children ;(.)
Having him was the greatest thing. He was funny, loving and cute. I remember him running all day long (he never walked) and me leaving him in just a diaper so I could watch his legs work. His sister is still bitter...he stole her imaginary cookie. ;)

pencil pouch

We have been unable to get on the internet for a week. I have felt like I live on an island since I get my news from the internet and the radio. Since the kids are home I don't listen to the radio when they are with me; I try to talk to them and listen to them. Since they can't get away from me in a moving vehicle and it's a good thing to communicate with your kids (even if they are talking about the wii.)

My Dad made the comment that my last several posts weren't very interesting to him; sewing and recipes... so I tried; we took the camera to the roller skating rink but Roger only took videos and I don't know how to post them. I considered taking a picture of Jeffrey mowing ;) but there was so much whining involved I knew Granddad wouldn't want to hear about that. Actually the whining was justified, he couldn't get the mower to work, neither could I, neither could Roger so we took it to the shop and got it fixed. Our 'new' mower now has another new part and it works so Jeffrey got the mowing done in record time this morning. :)

I made Jeffrey a new pencil bag; modeled off the old vinyl one from last year (he thinks it looks funny and is not sure he'll use it). I used a 22 inch zipper from my stash and left over denim from their curtains/drapes that I finished last week. (Hey, there'd be a picture but someone didn't clean up when I asked them to... )

red bag

The 70 zippers in my sewing room is weighing heavily on my mind. So I'm hunting for worthwhile things to make with them. Here is another zipper bag. Designed to go with the diaper bag I made dd#4 when Carter was born. (She had an assignment to blog about it to show appreciation but I think she never heard that request...)
She mentioned that she wished there was another pocket in her bag. So here is her other pocket. That's about a 7 inch zipper so she could keep her wallet, phone, chapstick etc in it and then use it as a purse when she didn't need everything.

olive garden

How many of you have gone to Olive Garden and ordered their Tuscana Soup? I found this recipe in a Ladies Home Journal years ago and made it. I love it but have not ordered it at Olive Garden...there are too many other luscious things to eat there. I made it for dinner last night:

TOSCANA SOUP
Recipe from Ladies Home Journal & Olive Garden Restaurant
This is sooo good.
Heat oven to 300'F. Bake
3 links Italian sausage on jellyroll pan 15 to 20 minutes. Drain on paper towels; cool. Cut into 1/4-inch-thick slices. Cook:
¾ cup chopped onions
1 slice diced bacon
in saucepan over medium heat 3 to 4 minutes. Stir in
1 ¼ teaspoons minced garlic and cook 1 minute. Add
1 can (13 ¾ or 14 ½ oz.) chicken broth,
2 cups water
2 medium potatoes,
peeled and sliced. Bring to boil. Reduce heat to medium and simmer 25 minutes until potatoes are tender. Stir in:
2 cups thinly sliced fresh kale,
1/3 cup heavy or whipping cream and sausage; cook 5 minutes. Makes 6 servings.

black bean salad

My daughter has been asking for this recipe and I finally found it.

BLACK BEAN SALAD
Inspired by a recipe in a diet book
1 cucumber peeled, seeded, salted and left to drain
3 cans (4 ½ cups) black beans, drained and rinsed
1 zucchini, diced
1 yellow pepper, diced
2 roma tomatoes, cut in half, squeeze the juice into a separate bowl, dice
½ cup green onion, sliced thin
Combine the above ingredients in (except leave the cucumber to the very last, so it has more time to drain) large bowl.

3 cloves garlic, peeled, smashed and diced to almost a paste.
½ cup chopped cilantro
5 tablespoons rice vinegar
6 drops tobasco
Combine the above 4 ingredients, then pour over salad, rinse and add cucumber and stir, cover and refrigerate for at least an hour, then allow to come to room temperature to serve.
Salt to taste

Note: zap garlic in microwave a few seconds, it makes it easier to peel and smash.

We love this salad; Liz wanted to serve it at her wedding...I didn't get to it.

new projects

I have been thinking and gathering the stuff I need to start some new projects.

Yes, I'm going to make paper again. I hope we can find the old deckle Roger made us years ago. Did you know that there is a merit badge for the Boy Scout's of America about paper? So since EVERY boy Scout in our troop wants to make paper I'm going to start again saving every teeny tiny scrap of fabric I can get. Here Jeffrey has cut up some denim scraps into 1/2 x 1/2 inch squares.

Every year I make my Dad a new dishcloth since he washes all the dishes at my parents home but this year it will be knit out of hemp. Isn't that a manly fiber? It should last practically forever so Granddad will not be washing dishes with holey rags. I hope this makes 2 'cause I'd like to try it out too.

I also ordered templates to help me get going on a quilt similar to this that Liz wants for her wedding quilt. Time is running out...I need to get going on this and I hoped the templates would give me an incentive to get going.
I also bought a book on how to knit socks. Roger thinks I'm nuts but I want to figure it out; So look out children your Mom is knitting socks! (You will wear them, right?)

cheese blintz

I remember cutting a cheese blintz recipe out of a Better Homes and Gardens magazine about 30 years ago. I'm sure if I went through my files I would find several recipes for them, they sounded so good but I never made them. I made them yesterday; I guess Mars was aligned with Neptune or something. I didn't even look for the recipe, I read one a week ago and sort of made that one...

Cheese Blintz
Make crepes; I used a recipe that had 2 Tablespoons powdered sugar
Make filling;
put into the bowl of your food processor;
4 oz ricotta cheese (I had some leftover from making this recipe; stuffed roma tomatoes.)
4 oz fat-free cottage cheese
1 egg
3 heaping Tablespoons powdered sugar
a bit of salt
and 3 Tablespoons cream cheese (more or less will work-I just had a tad left over from making stuffed peppers Saturday)
process until smooth.
Chill.

Traditionally (this is a Jewish recipe) these were folded into an envelope sort of and then fried. I baked ours and then served them with strawberries. Yummy.
Next time I'll add some lemon juice and more cream cheese.

This morning I had the 3 leftover with raspberry jam on them...

I have long loved the cheese filled Danish but there was never enough cheese. This is the cheese with no Danish around to spoil it. Andrew with Excalibur the fork.

potholders

I make potholders. My mother-in-law has the first ones I made; the first Christmas we were married. Made from 2 sizes of yellow gingham sewn into a 9-patch. She is careful and neat and her potholders look used but not ... USED, if you know what I mean. Hers and my first ones were made with 2 layers of a thrift store baby blanket. I USE mine and this is what one of my first ones looks like; it was made,years after the yellow gingham 9-patch and looks about 10 years older.



I remember deciding to make it when I realized I had black double wide bias tape and I couldn't figure out anything else to use it for.

I saved old towels and kept them cut in my sewing area for stray children to make potholders; I modified the design after finding out children didn't sew on bias tape very easily.

I helped the 10-12 year old girls at church make them. I helped all my children make them and helped their friends make them as part of play dates.



This is my newest one, made by my then 10 year old in 2005. He was a Webelo and I had 5 9-11 year old boys spend 3 meetings sewing these for their mothers.
Jeffrey wants me to repair this and make it EXACTLY like it was before it got burned.

I considered putting this under finished projects but realized it is not a finished project any longer; these are definitely due for a remake.

Stay tuned...I'll commence repairing them as a tutorial next week when the good camera gets back from a campout.