pies and gossamer thread trees

November 30, 2009 at 12:17 pm | In I love to make things..., books and mags, button it up, chatty, cooking is crafty too, holidays | 8 Comments

I hope you had a lovely holiday (or if you are not here in the US, a lovely regular) weekend! Our Thanksgiving was a very welcome break from an overwhelming wave of work, and we had a nice time cooking way too much food for ourselves and Pearl, and then getting to hang out with friends later in the evening for dessert. I even made my first homemade pie crust thanks to my friend Robin’s expert tutoring — my pie looked like this going into the oven with the pretty swirly crust edging,

pie about to go into the oven with the pretty crust

but it came out of the oven with crazy uneven crust edging.

pie about to be eaten with crazy crust

Regardless of how pretty it was(n’t), it tasted good. I was happy with my first attempt at real buttery pastry dough and I will definitely be baking a pie for Christmas dinner too! Maybe with a little less filling next time.

Gossamer Thread Tree 2

Speaking of Christmas-y stuff, each of the six of us who contributed to Crafty Tree Trimmings (me, Diane, Kayte, Betz, Patricia, and Linda) are making our own versions of another crafter’s ornament this month — to start things off, I hosted a little get-together in my living room for the Portland ladies and our distinguished Philadelphian visitor. Kayte made my ornament, Diane made Linda’s, and I made Diane’s — the gossamer thread trees!

fabric stiffener on the template

Diane’s instructions are marvelous — it was super fun to make my little trees. My additional tips are: 1) use serger thread if you have it handy (it winds more smoothly than a small thread spool), 2) if your fabric stiffener is watery, add a little Aleene’s Tacky Glue to improve the consistency, and 3) if you need holiday inspiration, listen to this box set while you are ornament-ing.

winding my thread for the first gossamer tree

It was a very well-documented craft session (as you can see by three cameras in action) — in fact, you will see posts all week from my fellow ornament-makers!

the very well-documented crafty tree trimmings marathon

I made a set of three trees in mint green, red and silver and varied the sizes by wrapping the thread lower on the cone on some (red, silver) than others (mint green).

gossamer trees on the mantel

I converted Diane’s lovely hanging ornament version to mantel decorations, I like having my tiny forest out before my Christmas tree is officially up.

glitter gossamer trees

I also added a final coat of Sparkle Mod Podge to make mine glittery,

gossamer trees with button stars

and since I can never resist the siren call of buttons in my crafts, I made a little extra decoration for my trees, a white glittered felt star topper with a pearl button on each one. The little tutorial I wrote to make them is up over here on my button blog if you’re interested!

button star toppers for my gossamer thread trees

If you have had a chance to make an ornament from the Crafty Tree Trimmings e-book, please add it to the flickr pool! We would love to see it. Thank you so much to everyone who has supported the project by buying a copy of the book, or posting about it — we are so excited that our donation to Project Linus is growing, and very appreciative of our crafty community!

p.s. The book is only available until December 31st, so if you have your eye on it, be sure to snap it up before then!

kitten finale!

November 13, 2009 at 2:52 pm | In chatty, cooking is crafty too, free crafty, oregon | 1 Comment

Just want to announce (a bit late) that Lee Meredith and Bridget Benton have unveiled their lovely craft projects to wrap up the free Knittn Kitten pattern parade!

Lee designed these extremely cool knitted zipper pouches — they are darling. I love the contrast vintage fabric lining.

CoinPouches13

and Bridget made a great series of pieces with repurposed t-shirts and crocheted doilies — this shirt she said was inspired by Crochet Adorned, and a scarf inspired by Generation T.

Bridget's free pattern for the Knittn Kitten!

All the project sheets are available at the shop, and even better for those who are not local, and probably very sick of these Portland-only posts — Diane is hard at work on turning our projects into a free e-book, which should be coming soon! I’ll post about that when it’s ready to go.

My new Pfaff during class

On another note, I just want to say again how much I love The Sewing Room (fka Sewing Center West). I bought my Pfaff from them two years ago, which has been a dream to sew with. Yesterday it freaked out for the first time ever, and this morning they fixed it for free in less than ten minutes and even carried it to the counter for me while I wrangled Pearl. If you are in the area and looking for a good shop to buy from, or get your machine tuned up (here is a coupon for that by the way), they are awesome.

Also, they are right next to a big giant Fred Meyer, and thanks to the race car shopping cart that Pearl loves to drive around the store for about four times as long as she likes to sit in a regular cart, I got all the ingredients for the sweet potato gnocchi with mushrooms and spinach in this month’s Sunset. Not the worst time my sewing machine has broken down on me, that’s for sure!

kitten projects + enchiladas

October 28, 2009 at 2:13 pm | In I love to make things..., chatty, cooking is crafty too, free crafty, oregon | 1 Comment

I’m happy to announce that it’s my week to have a free craft project sheet at the Knittn Kitten! The week actually started Tuesday (ahem) but I’m a little swamped right now, so here’s a peek at my project a day after Diane and Heather were nice enough to write about it…

pincushions 1

This is an ultra-simple, very customizable little pincushion project — very easy and quick to make. If you buy a half-yard of a cotton print and a half-yard of corduroy at the Kitten you can make 44 of them, believe it or not!

pincushions 2

I’ve included instructions for a tufted version and a button-decorated version, but you can also embroider, gocco-print, or embellish them any way you please. They would also make nice sachets if you’d prefer. Okay, now that I’ve finished the hard sell, the project sheet is waiting for you over at the shop, so stop by anytime to pick up some pretty new things and a project sheet (or all of them!).

Last week’s project was Christine’s darling cupcake patches! I got a copy of her instructions yesterday and they’re fantastic. You can still get hers and the other project how-tos — each one is in its own section with the materials you’ll need for the craft.

Cupcake Iron On Patches/Appliques

In other news, I have a new favorite recipe… we ended up with pounds and pounds of green tomatoes before we pulled our garden out

green tomatoes
(this is after making three rounds of enchiladas — looks like we’ll have at least two more to go)

and the Oregonian ran this great idea for using them: squash, bean and cheese enchiladas with green chile and green tomato sauce. We’ve made three batches, each one slightly different, and the last one was the best. It’s definitely on heavy rotation around here and it’s so easy to double the recipe and freeze half.

My adaptations are: use half black beans and half pintos, use one and a half chipotle peppers instead of one, and add chopped red peppers to the filling. (Oh, and I left out the cilantro, I hate that stuff but you probably like it so feel free to leave it in, of course!)

felt food (and real food)

June 23, 2009 at 11:41 am | In chatty, cooking is crafty too, crafting with kids, oregon | 6 Comments

I just got my package of play food this week from the second swap I did, and wow, it’s amazing!

felt food swap 2!

I loved making those simple little veggie burgers, but I am completely wowed by all the 3D and hand-stitching in the swap mix! I put notes on everything in the flickr picture if you’re interested in a few more details. It all looks so gorgeous in person, Pearl is going to love playing with all this stuff when she’s a tiny bit older. She has already had a lot of fun waving the asparagus stalks around (exactly like she does with their real counterparts).

Speaking of food, we surprised Andrew with some extremely fantastic grilling cookbooks for Father’s Day. The first one, Grill Every Day, is by a Portland author I met at the Oregon Historical Society, Diane Morgan.

grill every day cookbook

With this nice weather, we have been grilling a ton lately — in fact, we made her recipe for salmon grilled on a bed of herbs for dinner that night! It was so good, and so easy to make (thanks to the herb garden flourishing so much, I only had to go about thirty feet to get all the extra ingredients).

father's day dinner

Then yesterday I made the Israeli couscous with zucchini and red bell pepper (pictured on the cover) — also so good, and so easy. (Though I have to admit that there was no grilling involved, it was just a regular old stovetop production.)

We’re hoping to do some camping this summer with Pearl, so I also snapped up a copy of Campfire Cuisine, which is by lovely San Francisco food writer Robin Donovan.

campfire cuisine cookbook

I’ve marked a bunch of things I want to try (Robin has included handy extras for adapting her outdoor recipes to your home kitchen, too) and one at the top of the list is the grilled salmon with balsalmic fig sauce — we had so many figs from our tree last summer and I can’t wait to make that one!

grilled samon with balsalmic fig sauce

A huge bonus is that Robin also offers up some really nice outdoor-friendly sauces (dressings, spice rubs, marinades, glazes, and compound butters ) and sides to go with the tempting main dishes — super inspiring, and super easy.

I found both of these at Powell’s on Hawthorne (the cooks, crafts and gardening annex, if you’re local). As much as I love reading craft blogs online and hanging out on flickr, there is something so amazingly nice about buying a book right off a shelf and cooking from a smooth, inviting page, and these two are gems.

memorial day weekend (inspired by Sunset)

May 26, 2009 at 12:14 pm | In california, chatty, cooking is crafty too, oregon | 6 Comments

This weekend was just amazing. I can’t remember the last time Andrew and I both had three days off in a row (it definitely wasn’t in 2009) and I got to do a lot of my favorite things — gardening, vintage-dress-wearing, barbecuing, visiting the farmer’s market, going out to lunch, taking a long walk, and playing with Pearl. And on Sunday, the three of us headed out to Silver Falls State Park and went for a beautiful hike, right around the curve that takes you behind the South Falls.

Silver Falls

Andrew + Pearl at Silver Falls

me at Silver Falls

We also got some unexpected inspiration for a last-minute Monday-afternoon baby-playdate-cocktail-party-barbecue with some friends in the neighborhood, which turned out to be awesome. Sunset is my favorite magazine, and I’m always happy to see the colorful new copy in my mailbox (and maybe try a new recipe, or file away another place I want to visit — this time, it was grilled corn and bay shrimp risotto, and Boise, Idaho, where Andrew and I went about nine years ago and haven’t been since).

Sunset - June 2009

But the timing has never been better than the June issue showing up just before the long weekend. Aside from falling madly in love with the cover (and putting “find some wooden chairs and paint them an awesome color” at the top of my backyard to-do list), I loved the luau feature, which updated a 1965 Sunset piece on the same topic with some very cool modern ideas and recipes.

Sunset - luau article

We spotted a recipe for pineapple drops in the mix,

luau article with pineapple drops recipe - Sunset

and wow, those are good.

pineapple drop + dark and stormy

We made them along with dark and stormys (my all-time favorite cocktail)

dark and stormy

with a few different ginger beers to try on the drinks table.

drinks table

Neither of the cocktails are supposed to have mint, but it’s so green and fresh in my herb garden right now that I couldn’t resist.

limes + mint

I made the shishkebobs and Andrew did all the grilling.

shishkebobs

Our friends Mark and Mary brought quinoa salad

quinoa salad

and amazing homemade strawberry shortcake

strawberry shortcake

and Andrew found another Sunset treasure, an asparagus summer salad recipe, and made that too.

asparagus salad in Sunset

My plate was gorgeous.

my plate at the barbecue

I only wish I’d gotten a picture of the shortcake stacked up — it was beautiful, but with babies to wrangle, I just couldn’t pull off that one last photo before it was all gone.

There are a lot of other cool things in this issue (those fuschia chairs in that gorgeous backyard are my personal favorite), but super exciting to me is that Sunset used one of my photos for their California Road Trips insert!

Sunset - California Road Trips

They saw this picture I took at the Rose Bowl flea market a couple of summers ago in my flickr,

vintage dresses at the Rose Bowl

contacted me about using it, and here it is!

Sunset - California Road Trips

I was so excited to see it on the page. I love the Rose Bowl, and it’s such a treat to be part of their travel guide (which I really hope I’ll be using myself one of these summer months). Thank you, Sunset!

cupcakes and cookbooks

May 11, 2009 at 2:42 pm | In chatty, cooking is crafty too, crafting with kids, holidays | 3 Comments

Pearl’s birthday party was so much fun! I finished all my craft projects in time (even with a very cool surprise side trip to Astoria in the mix Friday night), our dear friends came over to celebrate with us on a sunny Saturday afternoon, and she loved it all. Well, she didn’t like the cupcake icing so much, but I didn’t take it personally, she is more of a savory type and she did enjoy waving the carrot cupcake pieces in the air. Regardless, they were cute!

pearl button cupcakes

More on all that later…

Speaking of cupcakes, I made our family a gift for Mother’s Day this month: a family cookbook with all of our favorite recipes collected into one place.

my family cookbook for mother's day

I used an awesome blank book by Ex Libris Anonymous, found at the wonderful Q is for Choir, and I’ve been filling it with my most treasured recipes — plus lots of notes and pictures and additions in the sidelines.

my favorite cupcake and shortbread recipes

The button it up chocolate cupcakes and shortbread cookies had to go in, of course!

button cookies and cupcake toppers!

The how-to, which is super simple, is here on CraftStylish. Next, I’ll be adding our Mother’s Day French toast and Pearl’s first birthday carrot cupcakes recipes (and of course mentioning that the cream-cheese icing could go easier on the sugar next time!).

p.s. if you are in the mood to talk buttons, I wrote up our visit to the fabulous Oregon State Button Society show over at my book site today.

Oregon State Button Society Show

thankful

November 29, 2008 at 1:35 pm | In chatty, cooking is crafty too | 1 Comment

Our Thanksgiving was really nice, and I hope yours was too — things were very relaxing and low-key all day and then we headed over to a big potluck dinner with friends later on. I made salmon with chanterelles and leeks and a big pan of vegetarian stuffing, and we got to try about a zillion other delicious things people brought, too. The four-day weekend has some pockets of work here and there but this is the most time off we’ve had together in months, probably since the week Pearl was born, come to think of it. So I have a lot of things to be thankful for.

I’m thankful for Andrew and my precious Pearl and having some nice hours to spend with them, for my family far away, and for cell phones so I can catch up with them all; I’m thankful for my dear crafty friends and the pleasure of reading and seeing all the cool things they’re up to; and I’m very grateful that people want to stop by sometimes to read about what I’m doing, which is a huge compliment. Thank you for reading my little blog in the sea of cool colorful craft blogs! I am thankful for our home and that we have enough to eat when I know that some of our neighbors don’t, and very thankful that there are organizations that work hard to help those who need it that we can support. And I’m thankful that after some scares this year, my family is healthy. I have had other years that have gone differently and I don’t take it for granted.

So, on that note, I wanted to pass on something that’s dear to my heart today. My friend Linda has organized a fantastic fundraiser to benefit her sister Ann’s family while her brother-in-law Jasenn fights kidney cancer. Her Etsy shop, Hope for Jasenn, has a really lovely array of crafty gifts from lots of people in this community, with more on the way. Linda says, “100% of the profits from every item sold in this shop will be donated to Jasenn, Ann and Tegue to help with their everyday expenses. All of the items in this shop have been donated by generous crafters and friends, and I’d love to show my sister’s family just how supportive we crafty folks can be.”

Hope for Jasenn

Linda has a beautiful crocheted hat and vintage bird brooch up for grabs, Kayte and Betsy have donated signed copies of their wonderful books Complete Embellishing and Knitting for Good, Nancy is offering one of her gorgeous handbags, and there are lots more things to browse — I have already done some shopping myself!

My mother is a four-time cancer survivor and it means a lot to me to be able to pass along a bit of support to others who face the same fight. So along with lots of other folks I have donated a signed copy of my book and two double sets of my new kits. If you happen to be interested in either of these things, please head over to Linda’s shop! Thanks so much.

a long walk and some soup

November 19, 2008 at 5:50 pm | In chatty, cooking is crafty too | 10 Comments

Our household is still collectively a bit under the weather so the non-essentials have fallen by the wayside this week. But this afternoon was so beautiful in a low-key fall-but-not-raining-(!) kind of way that I pounced on the chance to take Pearl on a long walk. We looped all around Southeast, dropped her little pink crocheted hat somewhere, stopped at Hot Lips for a slice and a boysenberry soda, retraced our steps to find the hat patiently waiting on the sidewalk for us, met Rachel at Little T for a coffee, and headed back home for naptime. So while Pearl slept I realized I was hungry again, and I had just enough energy left to make myself some soup.

I love soup but it’s hard to find just the right one, if I don’t make it myself… mostly because I don’t eat meat and I’m allergic to potatoes (good times, let me tell you!) so that rules out everything on the grocery store shelves but the occasional can of vegetarian chili. So I made this one up.

fall soup

I’m not much of a food photographer and it was about midnight-black outside by the time I took this, so sorry, it’s not very artful. I also got some seven-grain carrot bread at Little T (hanging out next to the bowl) and oh my god, that stuff is good. I started by neatly sawing off a piece, polished that off, and grabbed the next hunk of it without a whole lot of ceremony. Hopefully there will still be some left when Andrew gets home. Maybe.

Anyway, along the lines of the slack point-and-shoot food photography, here’s my recipe for lazy soup. Pretty much everything I used came from Trader Joe’s, but you can substitute what you have in the cupboard.

Bring one container of vegetable broth to a medium boil and add about a third of a package of celentani pasta. After a couple more minutes, add any vegetables (I used half a package of frozen soycutash, though I have been known to chop and include actual fresh vegetables when I have more in the tank), and after a couple more minutes, add one can of diced tomatoes and a splash of olive oil. Simmer until the pasta is just the way you like it and everything else will hopefully have caught up too. Serve in a big bowl with parmesan and carrot bread.

Milwaukie farmer’s market

October 19, 2008 at 12:32 pm | In cooking is crafty too, oregon | 3 Comments

Milwaukie farmer's market

Milwaukie farmer's market

We went today with Pearl and got apples, artichokes, zucchini, spinach, walla wallas, chanterelles, chard, peppers, brussels sprouts, snap peas, broccoli, green onions, and bagels. I’m so excited to make dinner tonight!

Monday already?

September 22, 2008 at 11:19 am | In chatty, cooking is crafty too, craftivism, crafty events, oregon | 2 Comments

Before I start in with a chatty weekend-and-crafty post I wanted to follow up and mention that the daisy chain tutorial I wrote is up on CraftStylish if you’d like to check it out… grade-school crafting redux!

Wow, this weekend was over way too quickly, and Monday crept up fast. We were out and about a lot now that I think about it. Pearl and I volunteered on Friday afternoon to register people to vote, outside the Race for the Cure registration, which was great. Thank you to the eight people who took the time to update their addresses or register in Oregon for the first time, before picking up their triumphant t-shirts and race stuff! Thanks to everyone who stopped by our table to say hi and that they were excited to vote (yay)! And huge congratulations to each of the racers and the Komen organization for another wonderful and super-successful fundraiser.

On Saturday, we walked all the way up and down Hawthorne to browse a bunch of our favorite vintage furniture stores for cool stuff, and finished the afternoon with a trip to the soaking pool and a dinner for four adults and two four-month-old girls (always a risk factor — but it turned out to be pretty easy, especially since we outnumbered them) at Bernie’s Southern Bistro, which I have always wanted to try as a bona fide Southern girl. It was good, even by my picky Southern standards! And then we had to get an ice cream cone at the end of the night (I picked Cascade Glacier’s Huckleberry Heaven — which was delicious!). Yesterday, we went to Sellwood to walk around, waited out a very long, very un-Oregon wild rainstorm with a slice of pizza, and picked up a 1970s Fisher-Price Activity Center that I used to have for Pearl. She already loves it and bats wildly at the spinning parts and the bell.

Today I am making a huge batch of tomato sauce following Amanda’s awesome recipe,

our first tomato!

working on some things and finishing another project for next Sunday’s CraftStylish tutorial post (hint: it involves jewelry-izing one of these favorites),

my buttons

…and making my gocco screens for the postcard party!

Oregon Gocco Prints

Speaking of gocco: I noticed in my stats that my post from over a year ago has been getting a lot of looks these days as (sadly) gocco printers and supplies are on the wane again. I’m going to do some research and try to find some good resources and stores to recommend and write up a fresh new post as soon as I can. Long live gocco!

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