Cheeky Cognoscenti

So, Who Wants to be a Fabric Designer?

2012-01-26T13:46:00.001-05:00

Custom Funky Door Fabric, Created Online in 3 minutes (don't remember where I got the photo)

Have you ever been searching for something on the Internet and wandered off on a tangent, which led you to another distraction, which led you to an exciting discovery? I have no idea what I was originally looking for online this morning, but I stumbled onto an affordable resource for custom fabric printing, even in small quantities. Starting at just $16.20 per yard, with discounts on orders of 20 yards or more, Spoonflower can unleash the inner fabric designer in all of us. You can order as little as a fat quarter of your custom design on a quilting weight cotton, or you can order 15 yards of your design printed onto a cotton/silk fabric for drapery panels, or you can order a half yard of your custom fabric creation printed on organic cotton interlock for a pair of adorable toddler pajama bottoms; other fabric options are available as well. Are you excited yet?

To create the fabric design shown above, all I did was upload a photo (regrettably, a photo that I copied from somewhere and plopped on my desktop weeks ago -- I have no idea where I got that turquoise door picture. If anyone recognizes it, let me know!). Once the picture uploads, you get a preview and you get to manipulate the way the design repeats. I think I just did a half drop repeat. I didn't crop the picture or mess with it in any way, because I have so many other things that I should be doing right now.

I actually took pictures of quite a few interesting doors when I was in Paris last September, without having any idea what I was going to do with them. How cool would it be to create custom fabric from each photo in fat quarter quantities for a special Doorways of Paris quilt?

I can think of so many cool custom fabric ideas now that I've found this resource:

1. Your kids' artwork

2. Your kids' scary school photos

3. Product photography from manufacturer's web sites (for personal use only). How cool would it be to tile a photo of your favorite gorgeous chair or chandelier?

4. Your business logo

5. Pictures of your dogs

6. Pictures of your annoyed, sleepy husband sticking his tongue out at you -- you know, the pictures you promised you had erased

Tiffany Diamond Rings, images from Tiffany

I used images of "important" diamond rings from Tiffany ("important" seems to mean $600K and up) to create this virtual fabric. There are links on the Spoonflower web site to information about how to prepare and manipulate your photography or artwork in a variety of software programs before using them for a custom fabric design, and I'm sure I could figure out how to change the background color, etc., but for now all I'm doing is uploading a photo and trying out different repeat options. How fun would the Tiffany bling fabric be in a girly "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" quilt?

Okay, back to work for me. I've got laundry going on in the background, I haven't eaten lunch yet, and before I know it I'll be headed to pick up the boys and begin the Cruel Parental Homework Torture phase of my day. Time flies when you're playing on the Internet instead of working, doesn't it?

Mission Accomplished -- Mostly, Anyway

2012-01-21T11:15:00.001-05:00

Lars's bedroom after 4+ hours of blood, sweat and tears

This transformation took me and Bernie over four miserable hours yesterday, working together while Lars freaked out alongside us. My Lars is a little pack rat who wants to save absolutely everything, and he's very emotionally attached to all of his stuff so that it feels like he's personally under assault when we go in there and start going through everything. However, it had gotten so bad that it was overwhelming to him and bringing order out of that chaos was way beyond his abilities, so it was time for some tough love. I confiscated and disposed of a hoarde of hundreds of candy wrappers, amazed and grateful that they had not yet brought an infestation of pests to my home, while Lars wailed that they were a "valuable collection worth a lot of money." We filled trash can after trash can with things like junk mail, empty boxes and toy packaging, scratch paper from last year's homework assignments, business card "souvenirs" from doctor's offices and dry cleaners, and even sticks (but it's a special stick!), and Lars desperately tried to pull things out of the trash cans as fast as we could put them in. He screamed for us to get out of his room, stop touching his things, that we were ruining everything, we're idiots, he hates us, etc. I knew I was in for this when we started, which is why I let his bedroom get so bad in the first place.

I just kept repeating that "the way it was" wasn't working, and we needed to change his room a little if he wanted to keep his toys in there. We ended up moving his bed about 6" to the left, just enough so I could fit the dark brown shelving unit between the bed and the desk. The shelving unit was a temporary fix introduced over the summer and had been shoved in a corner where it didn't fit well, and it was formerly piled with junk on every shelf. The two fabric covered storage boxes on the bottom have padded seat lids and used to be in the toy room, but they fit perfectly on the bottom shelf and they are filled with Transformers. This shelving unit is the first thing I see from the doorway to Lars's room, so I wanted it to be neat and orderly. The dogs can also reach the bottom two shelves, so I didn't put anything there that they could get into.

The oversize books on the next shelf were formerly housed in a wall-mounted book rack with the covers facing out that didn't take up a lot of physical space in the room, but that created a lot of visual clutter. We got that book rack from Pottery Barn Kids when Lars was in preschool and it was great for all of the picture books we were reading at that time, but it was time for that piece to come out of the room. I finally convinced Lars to put his Hogwarts Castle Lego set on the next shelf up (instead of on his bathroom floor, where he preferred to keep it), which was a major victory. Loose Lego bricks and K'Nex pieces were separated from other toys and mixed together in a 15-gallon red plastic storage bin with rope handles (Lars enjoys combining Legos with K'Nex when he builds his own structures), and that bin was placed inside Lars's closet, away from curious puppy rabbits. All of his various trading cards were collected in one of the storage baskets in one of his bed cubbies, every surface was dusted and vacuumed, and the bookshelves were reorganized so that they contain books only and not books plus everything else.

Jubilation! Lars loves me again!

The craziest thing about all of this is that, when it was time for bed time stories last night, Lars told me, "It's like I have a whole new room! It's so much bigger! I LIKE my new room!!" I'm not completely finished with Lars's room yet. I didn't go through the storage cupboards on either side of his bed, and he still has a motley mixture of trash and treasures piled on shelves in his closet that need attention. I have some additional oil paintings and framed artwork that I need to arrange on the wall above the furniture, and I need to come up with that Lego tarp ASAP so that all my hard work isn't destroyed the first time he sits down to play. Then there's Anders' bedroom to contend with, which isn't nearly as bad as Lars's was (and won't be as draining emotionally to deal with, because Anders won't be screaming at me the whole time). But we started with the hardest part first, so all the work that lies ahead will be a cake walk by comparison.

The Lego Store, Concord, NC

Lastly, lest you admire me too heartily, let me tell you where I'm taking my children this afternoon. We're going to the Lego store at the Concord Mills Mall, so that Lars can spend the Lego gift certificate he got from my parents and they can both spend some allowance money. They each also have several little gift-with-purchase boxes from my holiday shopping that they get to fill with loose Lego bricks of their choosing, free of charge. I know; I must be stark, raving mad to bring MORE Legos into my home after what we went through yesterday -- but earning allowance money is only an incentive if they are allowed to spend it sometimes, and this once-a-month shopping excursion to spend allowance money has been on the calendar for weeks. Someday soon they will be teenagers, and this Lego Era will just be a memory, like Thomas the Train, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and super hero dress-up costumes. Legos are just thorns on the rose of childhood, and I wouldn't trade this time away for the world.

Mission Impossible: Finding a Functional, Attractive Solution for the Lego Landfill

2012-01-20T14:32:00.005-05:00

The Lego Landfill Formerly Known as Lars's Bedroom

It doesn't look as bad in these pictures as it does in real life. There must be at least ten thousand Lego blocks strewn across the floors, over every horizontal surface, piled in closets, and mixed in with other toys in the storage bins and clothing drawers of Lars's and Anders' bedrooms. The desks that were intended for homework and drawing are completely unusable, and I have to navigate a Lego minefield just to change the bed sheets or to collect dirty laundry from their hampers.

I used to have a "no toys in the bedrooms" rule, but as the boys started building more complex Lego sets they wanted to keep completed structures on display in their rooms. This turned out to be a slippery slope, and before we knew it the chaos of the third floor toy room had spread down the stairs and taken over the boys' bedrooms as well. If the toy room was too messy to play in, they'd just cart more toys down to their bedrooms and play there instead. Finally, about six months ago, Bernie and I made good on our long-standing threat to invade the third floor play room and reclaim it as an exercise room. We weeded out and donated toys the boys had outgrown and no longer played with, but several oversize bins of Legos, Transformers, and other toys were carried down to the boys' bedrooms to be dealt with "later."

The Culprits at Play in Anders' Room, Trying to Look Innocent

Well folks, "later" is happening this weekend! School is closed for a Teacher Workday today, so we have three days to reorganize these rooms and devise a solution that is acceptable to all parties: functional for the little Brick Master wannabes, attractive, safe, and easy to maintain. Our dogs can't even go in Lars's room anymore -- there's nowhere for them to lay down, and Otto brazenly pilfers Legos and Pokémon cards from Lars's room right in front of everyone. Anders' room looks a little better at the moment, but that's because everything was randomly stashed in drawers and bins. As soon as they start playing in there, they have to dump everything out in order to find the right bricks for the projects they want to build.

Don't get me wrong -- I have nothing against Legos. The 1000+ piece sets are challenging and time consuming to build, and both boys also enjoy creating their own structures, incorporating concepts they've learned from their Lego design books and from experience building sets. The problem is that my kids like to have lots of room to work, so a desk or even a special Lego play table is too small for a workspace. They like to dump the Legos on the floor so they can see all their pieces and sort through them as they are building. And they like to build complex structures over a period of days or weeks, so there are always several partially completed structures in progress in the middle of the floor, surrounded by hundreds of loose Lego bricks and parts. I've scoured the Internet for Lego solutions and, although I found some great ideas for younger children or for those with a much smaller number of Legos, I haven't seen anything that can accommodate the way my kids play with Legos. I also found complex Lego organization systems devised by adult Lego afficionados, where bricks are sorted by both shape and color in a myriad of little drawers, but even if I summoned up the energy to sort through my kids' Legos to that degree there is no way my kids would be able to maintain that kind of system over time. These boys are still struggling to organize their homework assignments in their school planners, after all. What we really need is a Hogwarts-style Room of Requirement addition to the house where we can throw all the toys to be hidden from sight until they are needed again:

Room of Requirement set from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, photo courtesy of Architectural Digest

Okay, back to the real world! Here's my plan: First we need to adjust furniture placement, especially Lars's room, to maximize open floor space in the center of each room. Next, it's time to go through the drawers, shelving units, and existing bins again to cull broken and outgrown toys, and group like items together to assess how much of everything they have -- books, Legos, other toys, trading cards, etc. Then I can devise appropriate storage for each category. For Legos, I'm going to try to implement a fabric play tarp with handles on the corners that the boys will need to spread out on the floor at the beginning of a building session. That way, when they are finished for the day, they can move their structure-in-progress up to a shelf, gather up the tarp from the corners, and dump the loose Lego bricks back into a big storage bin in a matter of minutes.

Wish me luck!

We Survived Lars's Sleepover Party!

2012-01-07T14:38:00.001-05:00

Anders, Peter, Lars and Drew Feasting on Gluten-Free Cupcakes

Lars's birthday is always a drawn-out affair. His actual birthday is the day after Christmas, which is never a good day to throw a party, so I always aim for the first weekend after school resumes to ensure a good turnout. Lars opted for a sleepover party this year, which was a first for us. So we had a total of six little boys "sleeping" (hah!) at my house last night for Lars's 11th birthday party. Lars invited three of his classmates, and Anders invited one of his best buddies as well. Other parents had braced me with battle stories of sleepover parties gone by, but all things considered, I think our night went pretty well.

Sam, Anurag and Anders

Wonder Woman favors for 5th grade boys? I don't think so...

Yesterday morning when I said I had to go to the party store to take care of goody bags, Bernie surprised me by announcing that he had already taken care of that. Umm, Love -- you do know those are Wonder Woman treat boxes, don't you? Bernie said, "What? No they aren't! Those are just stars!" I pointed out the Wonder Woman crown and he was all, "They won't even notice." Hmmm... I decided to invoke my Queen of the Universe Veto Powers on this one. I got Pokémon balloons and party favors instead, and added glow sticks and rock star temporary tattoos along with the leftover Halloween candy that went into each box.

Mom to the Rescue!

Someday, my son owes me a huge thank you for this, don't you think? If we're ever in a life-or-death situation where Lars can only save one parent, I'm totally going to bring up the Wonder Woman party favors. ;-)

The boys played a lot of Playstation and Nintendo DS games, stopping only for pizza and cupcakes. On the advice of moms who'd been in the sleepover trenches before me, I confiscated electronic devices at 11 PM and enforced a lights-out policy at midnight. I had the four fifth grade boys sleeping downstairs in the living room, away from the toys in Lars's bedroom, and away from the two third graders, who slept in Anders' bedroom.

"The Tell-Tale Heart," illustration by Harry Clarke

I offered to read a bedtime story to the 5th grade boys and was delighted when they took me up on it. I read them The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe, the one where the narrator is recounting how he killed an old man, dismembered him, and concealed the body under the floor boards of his room just because he didn't like the way his eyeball looked. It turned out to be a good pick -- none of the boys had heard or read the story before, it was suitably scary in the semi-darkness, and a couple of their vocabulary words from school were in the story. I told them they would definitely run into that story in school again someday, and they'll think, "Hey, that's the one Lars's mom read to us!"

At about 12:30 I told them they could continue whispering as long as I couldn't hear them from upstairs, and when the boisterous boy energy still had not subsided by one o'clock in the morning, I called downstairs, "Boys, you need to start discussing which one of you should be the first to leave." I was thinking they could vote on which child got relocated to another room like on the Survivor television series, but I think they misunderstood and thought I was threatening to actually send someone HOME because they quieted down immediately and I didn't hear another peep for the rest of the night. Bernie heard something around 2:30 in the morning, though, and when he snuck downstairs he caught Lars with my iPhone, entertaining his friends with YouTube videos. I was not pleased about this, and I'll be changing my iPhone password today.

This morning we had pancakes, waffles, and scones, and even coaxed a few parents inside to sit down and have coffee with us when they came to collect their children, which was nice. It's a good group of boys, and we enjoyed getting to know them all a little better.

Now that Lars's birthday is behind me, the holiday season finally feels over. I usually like to leave my Christmas decorations up until Epiphany, but since we decorated a week early this year I'm tired of looking at Christmas trees already. The rest of this weekend will be spent undecorating the house, doing laundry, and cleaning up the clutter that accumulated over the holidays and getting reorganized and back to normal. But first, I need a NAP!

Drunken Dragons Progress Report: Four Rows Assembled, Eleven More to Go!

2012-01-04T23:07:00.000-05:00

First Four Rows of Blocks Assembled

Oh yes, in between all the baking and Christmasing and gifting and champagne drinking, I have been making slow but steady progress on Lars's Drunken Dragons quilt. If you missed the earlier posts on this project, you can catch up by clicking here. I'm trying to sew up one row of blocks one day, then seam that row to the adjacent row on the following day. That's how 30 minutes a day times lots (and lots) of days eventually will result in a new quilt for Lars's bed.

Puppy Rabbits Sleeping in my Studio

Don't you just love how my one-year-old Rottweiler puppies, Otto and Lulu, crash on the floor of my studio to keep me company? I love it when they snore. When they pass what I've heard affectionately referred to as "Rotten Gas," well, I don't love that so much, but I keep a scented candle in my studio in case of emergencies. ;-)

Back to the quilt!

Nested seam allowances, pinned on either side of the seams

I wanted to show you how I'm matching up and pinning my seam allowances as I assemble the blocks. As I made each block, I pressed the curved seam allowance towards whichever fabric was darker to prevent a dark seam allowance from showing through a lighter fabric from the right side of the finished quilt. So now as I'm sewing the blocks together, sometimes I get lucky and I have seam allowances pressed in opposite directions so I can nest them together like you see in this photo -- but other times, the seam allowances have to stack up on top of one another and there's a much greater likelihood that the seams won't match up perfectly.

...Resulting in Perfectly Aligned Seams!

I'm trying not to be too obsessive about making everything perfect on this quilt. I always try to do the best I can, because things worth doing are worth doing well. Also, you get better faster when you always do your best work. However, I know that Lars is going to chew on the top edge of the quilt when he's falling asleep, because that's just what he does. And I know that I want to work on my free-motion quilting skills with this quilt, and if I obsess and rip out stitches and resew each seam until the quilt top can withstand the scrutiny of a magnifying glass, then it will be that much harder to get up the nerve to lower the feed dogs and subject this quilt to my free-motion learning curve.

Not Perfect, but Good Enough!

Here, see? These seams are slightly misaligned, and I declare that they are going to stay that way because they are Good Enough!

Tomorrow is going to be a busy day, with Chess Club for the boys before school and a meeting with a new client for me in the afternoon. Then Friday is Lars's birthday sleepover party (his birthday is December 26th, but we wait until after the holidays have passed for his party with his friends). I anticipate that no one will get any sleep at my house on Friday night, and I'm already planning to put a movie on for our boys on Saturday afternoon so we can have a nap once the guests have gone home. Wish me luck!

Happy New Year 2012! Cheers, Hugs, Movies and Champagne Bubbles Headed Your Way

2012-01-01T21:45:00.000-05:00

Happy 2012, Everyone! No, this isn't the one where I recap the adventures, successes, and missed opportunities of 2011. This isn't the one where I stand up on the Internet and publicly declare my ill-fated resolutions (that one might come later this week... or not at all... we'll see).

This IS the one where I count my blessings and share the highlights of our quiet New Year's Eve celebration, home as usual, with our kids.

One day, I might like to go to a black tie New Year's Eve party in a fabulous, glittery gown, having forced Bernie into a dashing tuxedo against his will, and I shall sip champagne and be devastatingly elegant into the wee hours of the morning. For now, though, we like to stay home for New Year's Eve and watch movies.

Jeremy Sumpter as Peter Pan, 2003

We watched the 2003 Peter Pan movie with the boys, and loved every minute of it. How did I miss this film when it first came out? This Peter Pan is faithful to the original 1904 play and 1911 story by J. M. Barrie, and the film conveys much of the Victorian cultural and historical context out of which the Peter Pan stories were written as well. This was definitely a film that kept our entire family enthralled from beginning to end.

We wrapped up Peter Pan at ten o'clock, and I decided that was late enough for little boys to stay up on New Year's Eve. We tucked them into bed and I annoyed them by singing bedtime songs in French, Italian, German, Latin, and finally, when Anders begged me to stop singing in foreign languages, I couldn't help myself -- I sang Rachmaninoff's Vocalise (a song without any words at all). Don't be too impressed -- I didn't claim to have sung it well! I believe the hounds joined in with my howling towards the end...

Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher in No Strings Attached, 2011

After torturing my children musically, my husband and I cracked open the champagne and settled down to a recent romantic comedy, No Strings Attached starring Ashton Kutcher and Natalie Portman. It was pretty cute as far as these fluffy-feel-good-romantic-comedy flicks go. Funnier moments included Kutcher's character, Adam, presenting his girl with a bouquet of carrots on their date after she forbade him to get her flowers. We were enjoying our movie and our bubbly so much that we lost track of the time and realized, at the end of the movie, that we were half an hour late ringing in the new year. I hope this is not a portent foretelling that I will be late to everything important all year long! Oh wait, that was last year...

Happy New Year, Everyone!

eBook Readers for Children: Kindles for Lars and Anders, 6 Months Later...

2011-12-28T20:43:00.004-05:00

8 year old Anders reading his Kindle

A little over a year ago, I posted here about my search for an electronic reader that would be appropriate for my two sons. I looked at the Sony e-Reader, the Barnes & Noble Nook (it had just come out in the color version), and the Amazon Kindle. I was disappointed that none of the major players in the e-Reader field seemed to be thinking of children, and I was ticked off beyond belief that Barnes & Noble was marketing their color Nook device with Dr. Seuss picture books, yet they had not incorporated any parental controls for the Nook (which is wide open to the Internet, with no way for parents to even filter out porn. Just what you want for a preschooler, right?!).

Based on the traffic I'm still seeing for those posts a year later, many other parents out there are still searching for an acceptable e-Reader for children, so I thought it was time for a follow up post to tell you about what we ended up doing for our boys and how it's working out. I bought two of the Kindle 3G 6" screen devices with Wi-Fi at the beginning of last summer, for about $189 each. I could have gotten the same devices for $139 each with "Special Offers" -- that is, instead of famous author portraits for screen savers, the Special Offers Kindles would have paid advertisements as screen savers. Because I feel that children are assaulted by way too many advertisements already, I paid more for the ad-free versions. Our Kindles also have the free 3-G wireless built in (no additional contract or monthly fee required) because I wanted to be able to download new content for the boys to read when we're out to dinner, driving in the car, out shopping, etc.

Kindle 3G Wi-Fi in Charcoal, just like Lars's

Here's what I love about these Kindles for my boys, now that they've been using them for six months:

My kids love their Kindles and use them every day. I definitely got my money's worth. Children in general are so much more comfortable with technology than adults. They don't have the same biases and preferences for "real" paper books; in fact, they seem to prefer reading on the Kindles to paperback books (and these are kids who were reading a ton of books to begin with).
The boys are using the built-in dictionary to instantly get definitions for unfamiliar words. They would never stop reading in the midst of a good action story to go find a traditional dictionary and look up a word, but the Kindle makes it so easy to just select the word, read the definition, and go back to the story. They are also using the highlighting and annotating features, mostly to leave little notes for each other in books they are both reading at the same time. Which brings me to...
Every eBook I purchase is available on all of our Kindles, all at the same time. My boys are good at lots of things; unfortunately, sharing books is not one of them. Since both Kindles are registered to my Amazon account, all of my Kindle content shows up on both Kindles at the same time. You have no idea how many fights we've had because this one is reading the book that belongs to the other one, or reading the other one's birthday present book before the birthday boy has a chance to read it, etc. With the Kindle, it's like getting two copies of every book for the price of one. My husband and I also use the Kindle app on our iPads, and we can access any of our Kindle books that way, as well. When you open a book that someone else is reading on another device, the Kindle will ask whether you want to sync to the furthest page read on all your devices, so if you don't want it to jump ahead to where your brother has his bookmark, you just select "no."
I was able to get two different color kindles, one white and one charcoal. Some day, one little boy is bound to drop his Kindle in the toilet, and that little boy will not be able to secretly swap his soggy Kindle for his brother's!
For kids, the limited functionality of the Plain Kindle (not the Fire!) is ideal! I don't want them on the Internet, or playing a bunch of games on their Kindles -- I wanted an e-Reader that I could allow relatively unlimited access to, just like with traditional books. Multifunctional electronic devices with email, video and web browsing are great for adults, but the Kindle only has chess, sudoku and a couple of other brainy, low-tech games. It's mostly a reading platform, and that's the main reason I purchased Kindles rather than something else.
The battery life of the Kindle is phenomenal. Unlike their Nintendo DS game devices, which need to be plugged in to charge after just about every play session, we have never had a child unable to use his Kindle because the battery was dead. With the wireless connection turned off, the battery life is something like 30 days. There's no advantage to having the wireless on all the time anyway; you just need it while you're actively downloading content to the device.

However -- Isn't there always a however?! -- the Kindle still isn't a perfect solution. If the head honchos of Amazon ever asked my opinion, here's what I'd ask them to change to make the Kindle into a perfect child-friendly e-Reader that no parent could resist:

1. Password protection only works to lock and unlock the device, with no separate password requirement when purchasing in the Amazon Kindle store directly from the Kindle. For adults, this is convenient and makes sense -- you key in your password when you pick up your Kindle, and you aren't bothered with having to type it in again each time you download a new book. One of my sons is great about following my rules -- no purchasing new books on your own, only with Mom's permission. My other son has repeatedly been caught downloading all kinds of books without permission, sometimes even when he's sitting right behind me in the car. I find out shortly thereafter, because I get a string of emails from Amazon thanking me for all of the Kindle purchases that he has instantly downloaded (and effortlessly charged to my American Express account). I was even getting these emails while I was in Paris in September, until I called Grampa and instructed him to confiscate the offending son's Kindle. Every time Mr. Impulsive goes on a wild shopping spree in the Kindle Store I have to take away his Kindle for a couple of days -- and I didn't want to have to do that. For parents of kids who don't have trouble with impulsivity, this won't be a big deal, but for me, it's a huge annoyance that Amazon could easily resolve by giving me the option of password-protecting the Kindle Store functionality on the Kindle device.

2. I wish there was more juvenile and young adult fiction content available for purchase on the Kindle. It's getting better, but there are still a lot of books that I can't download for them. For instance, none of the Harry Potter books were available for Kindle download the last time I checked. However, the Percy Jackson series is on Kindle, and it was wonderful to have it preordered and then just instantly download on both Kindles the day the latest book was released.

3. Somehow, supposedly, there is a way to borrow digital books on a Kindle for free from the public library, but I haven't figured out how to do it yet -- or whether there are many children's books available this way. This is definitely an area of growth opportunity for child users. I am pretty sure I would have to use my computer to log in to the library web site with my library card number and password, and then I could browse the digital lending library and presumably borrow books by downloading them temporarily to my PC. What I would love to see is a way for my kids' Kindles to connect directly to the public library database the way they connect to my Amazon account through the Kindle store, so that Mr. Consequences-Schmonsequences-As-Long-As-I-Can-Read could impulsively borrow library books instead of running up my credit cards. An added bonus would be having the borrowed library books instantly disappear from the Kindle on the due date -- no more library fines for Mom to pay!

Charlotte Mecklenburg's Digital Lending Library Site

UPDATE 12/31/2011: I finally had a chance to figure out how to borrow Kindle content from the public library last night! Here's how it works. If you have a Charlotte Mecklenburg County library card, you access this website from your computer, not from your Kindle (if you aren't in Charlotte Mecklenburg, check your own public library web site for a digital e-Books link, or ask your librarian to help you). Our library is using a service called Overdrive for digital lending. Once you're on the digital lending web site you can browse for all kinds of goodies including e-Books, videos, and audiobooks. There is content for all kinds of mobile devices, not just Kindles -- the audiobooks would be great for the iPhone or iPod in the car. I found the site to be very easy to navigate.

You can search by title, author, or keyword, or if you click on Advanced Search you can search by format (Kindle Book), language (English), and subject (Juvenile Fiction) to browse the entire Kindle lending collection for children. Then when you're ready to "check out," you're redirected to Amazon to download the content to your Kindle devices free of charge. So, good news, it's easy! Bad news? Guess how many books came up when I searched for all Juvenile Fiction Kindle content at my library? 35! What's worse is that those 35 titles included everything from Dr. Seuss to teen romances and the Twilight Series. There were four or five short Phineas & Ferb titles that Lars and Anders were interested in, and several novels we've already read, but the dearth of digital lending content for children was ultimately pretty depressing.

However, Kindle lending through the public library is relatively new, and I'm sure more titles will be added in time as more and more library patrons take advantage of the digital lending service.

Happy 11th Birthday, Lars-of-Ours!

2011-12-26T11:38:00.000-05:00

Lars-of-Ours, Lord of the Legos, Birthday #11

'Twas the night after Christmas 2000, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring because we were at the hospital -- impatiently awaiting Lars's Grand Entrance to the World! Happy Birthday, Lars! Lars is spending his 11th birthday putting together the Lego sets he got for Christmas. He'll open birthday gifts later this afternoon, when Grammy and Grampa come over. The birthday boy has requested pizza for dinner, and I haven't even thought about the cake yet (not feeling enthusiastic about baking one, either, after last year's fiasco with Lars's birthday cake!). I may resort to cupcakes to play it safe...

Lars at 9 months old

How time flies! It doesn't seem like all that long ago that Lars was content to bounce up and down in this doorway contraption, sucking on a frozen baby washcloth.

Lars's First Birthday Party, 2001

Here he is at his first birthday in 2001, eating a chocolate peppermint cake that I made (successfully, this time!) from a Bon Appetit recipe. He has since decided that he does not like chocolate, but he wasn't such a fussy eater back when he was small, bald, and pudgy.

Happy Birthday, Little One Lars! We love you!

Onslaught of the Christmas Cookies, 2011: Attack of the Ninjabread Men

2011-12-24T12:29:00.003-05:00

Christmas Cookies 2011

The baking frenzy began innocently enough, with a batch of our family's favorite Crackled Molasses Sugar Cookies. Those cookies vaporized within a day or two, and then we had to bake more crackled molasses along with a batch of Norwegian krumkake for the boys' internationally-themed classroom holiday parties.

Krumkake filled with Strawberry Ice Cream

For those of you who do not have Norwegian heritage, krumkake are thin, crispy cookies that are made one at a time with a special iron that imprints a lacy design on each cookie. After baking the cookie for about 20 seconds, you peel the piping hot cookie off the krumkake iron and wrap it immediately around a little wooden cone to shape the cookie. Thanks to the krumkake baking session, I no longer have fingerprints, so it's a good thing they taste good!

Lars Sucking Ice Cream out of his Krumkake

My mom never filled our krumkake with anything that I can remember, but all of the recipes suggest filling with whipped cream, fresh berries, or ice cream. We discovered that krumkake make the best tiny ice cream cones, filled with strawberry Breyer's ice cream. Yummy!

My krumkake were not as crispy as I would have liked, but my internet research suggests that the mild North Carolina weather was to blame. I found an ex-Minnesotan/Norwegian baker in Texas online who claims that crispy krumkake perfection requires baking on a cold, dry day (and when they talk about a cold winter day in Minnesota, they mean zero temperatures or below) yet it was a balmy 68 degrees in Charlotte the day I was baking mine. My cookies came out somewhere in between crisp and al dente, like pasta that isn't quite done yet, but doesn't break your teeth. Not terrible, but not sublime either. I'll have to try another batch of krumkake in January or February, when we get a cold snap. Although I've always thought of krumkake as a Christmas and New Year's cookie, it would be perfect for Valentine's Day with the strawberry ice cream. Also, nothing says I Love You like burning off your fingerprints on blistering-hot cookies, don't you think?

Christmas Cookie Decorating, Wayzata, MN, 1981

Now, to understand the craziness that followed, you need to understand that my mom made double or even triple batches of rolled sugar cookies for us to decorate every year for Christmas, going back as far as I can remember. See evidence above. I'm the one in the red dress whose hair is hanging into the frosting. Susan always made the most beautiful cookies (she's the one in the foreground at left) and the younger ones, Janice and Donnie, would dump a quantity of frosting and red hots on their cookies in inverse proportion to their ages. (In fairness, I must say that Janice the Manice's cookie decorating prowess improved with age, but she's 5 in this picture and I am pretty sure she was still a frosting dumper at that time).

When I have attempted to perpetuate this family tradition with my sons in prior years, we've been frustrated by the difficulty of squeezing the thick tubes of frosting from the grocery store. Looking at the old picture, I see that the store-bought frosting used to come in a different container that was probably easier for little hands to use. I also have a terrible time whenever I attempt to roll out any kind of dough, whether it's for pie crust or cookies. The rolling pins and I are not the best of friends. Finally, after so much effort is put into these shaped and decorated cookies, most of them are pretty ugly and I never really liked the taste. Not making any cookies to decorate would be sacrilege, because it's a Family Christmas Tradition and I can't have my children growing up frosting deprived!

The Package from King Arthur Flour has Arrived

I was determined to improve the Cookie Decorating Experience this year, so I ordered LOTS of decorating goodies from King Arthur Flour a couple of weeks ago. I got every color of sprinkling sugar you could imagine, edible glitter stars, chocolate jimmies, Fiori di Sicilia to flavor the cookies instead of the Almond Extract we'd used in the past. I planned to try my hand at Royal Icing for the first time, because I'd be able to control the consistency and I hoped it would taste better than the stuff from the grocery store since homemade icing wouldn't have the chemical preservatives. So I bought meringue powder to make the icing (instead of raw egg whites) and a variety of contraptions for piping the frosting onto the cookies, certain that at least ONE of them would be easy enough for the kids to use. As a last resort, I even got some edible foodcoloring markers for drawing directly on the cookies or on hardened icing (Anders really loved these).

Anders drew a tuxedo on a gingerbread man with FooDoodler markers

Then I spent a bit too much time trolling the internet for decorating inspiration -- you can see my favorite OPC (Other People's Cookies) here on my Pinterest board. I got a couple of new cookie cutters this year, a large tree with a star on top, and a set of three Ninjabread men. Lars and Anders were very excited about the Ninjabread men. It would be impossible to exaggerate their level of Ninjabread men excitement, in fact. They were downright giddy about the Ninjabread men. If you have little boys in your kitchen, I strongly recommend the Ninjabread men -- and you can get the cookie cutters right here.

Lars Cutting Out Ninjabread Cookies

So, how did it all turn out? My mom had to come to the rescue when it was time to roll out the dough, and her tried-and-true pastry cloth and little knit rolling pin sock won hands-down over my fancy Williams Sonoma silicone rolling pin and silicone pastry mat. My gingerbread dough needed more flour because it was too sticky, and my sugar cookie dough needed a little milk because it was so dry that it was crumbling apart when I tried to roll it. Once the doughs were the right consistency they were pretty easy to handle.

Anders and Grammy Rolling Out Sugar Cookie Dough

Royal Icing, tinted Yellow with AmeriColor Gel Food Coloring

The Royal Icing was an adventure, but it came out okay. I had a tough time getting a true red color until I read this baking blogger's instructions and discovered that the frosting will darken gradually as it dries. I was also grateful that I'd ordered the AmeriColor gel food colors to tint my frosting, so I was able to get a nice, deep black for Santa boots and snowman details, as well as a medium brown for my Christmas tree stumps.

Frosting Tubes Filled & Ready to Go

Another challenge was getting the icing into the little bottles and tube contraptions once I'd mixed it up. My solution was to spoon the frosting into plastic Ziplock sandwich bags, squeeze the air out and seal the baggie, then snip off a corner so I could "pipe" the frosting into the various containers. However, I made the mistake of mixing up and tinting most of the frosting the night before I planned for the kids to decorate, so I could get my "trials and errors" out of the way ahead of time. Unfortunately, the icing really needs to be used right away. The frostings from the night before were too runny the next day.

There's a wonderful tutorial on decorating with Royal Icing on the King Arthur Flour blog here, and an even better updated tutorial by the same author that I just found right here (wish I'd seen these pictures of what the icing consistency should be before I made mine). I decided that the cookie shapes we most enjoy decorating are the simplest ones, like snowflakes, bells, candy canes, and stars. I liked the reindeer in gingerbread because they only needed a red nose, a black eye, and a white tail and then they were perfect. Next year I'm going to get a mitten and an ornament cookie cutter, because I enjoyed making patterns on cookies more than fussing with multicolored Santas and angels that seldom come out looking as good as the cookies you envisioned in your mind. Oh, and I think I'll limit frosting to two or three colors at a time next year, so I can do a thick and thin (for flooding) version of each frosting color. This year I mixed up red, white, green, blue, yellow, orange, black, and brown, all at once, in an in-between consistency. The frosting went on too thickly in large areas that we were trying to fill in, but was still too runny to get really sharp detail.

My Best Efforts: Rebecca's Christmas Cookies

Oh, and all those sugars and sprinkles I bought? We hardly made a dent in them. My favorite was the white sugar that I sprinkled on the edges of my snowman. I also flocked a blue snowman scarf with glitter. And I love how my Ninja Santa came out.

Grammy and Bernie Decorating Cookies

Well, you'd think that by noon on Christmas Eve, I'd be done baking cookies. You'd be wrong. I have a whole batch of crackled molasses sugar cookie dough in the fridge, ready to be shaped into balls and rolled in sugar for baking. I am also in my bathrobe, and -- horror of horrors! -- I have been so obsessed with cookie baking that I am NOT DONE CHRISTMAS SHOPPING YET!!! I have to hop in the shower, get dressed, and then go to the mall, yes, the MALL on CHRISTMAS EVE, to get a couple of last-minute gifts for a certain difficult-to-shop-for husband of mine.

Merry Christmas, everyone! Wish me luck at the mall!

Three Men Quilting: A Father and Sons Quilting Bee!

2011-12-18T13:53:00.001-05:00

Anders, Bernie and Lars laying out blocks for Lars's quilt

With all 150 blocks completed for Lars's Drunken Dragons quilt, I enlisted the whole family to help me determine a layout last night. We crawled around on the floor in the foyer and everyone pitched in to arange the blocks into a 10 x 15 rectangle, trying not to place blocks with the same fabrics adjacent to one another, and making sure none of our dragons or lizards were placed upside down or sideways.

Scrappy Drunkard's Path quilt, c. 1910, Michigan, Wonkyworld

Before I recruited the assistance of my menfolk, I played around with a couple of alternate layout ideas. I considered doing the traditional staggering path layout that gives the Drunkard's Path block its name, as in this vintage quilt at left (featured on the WonkyWorld blog here). However, when I laid out a few of my own blocks in this pattern, I quickly realized that the success of this layout depends on your fabric having enough contrast in values (each block should combine one "light" fabric with one "dark" fabric so the "path" will stand out in the finished quilt).

See what happened when I tried this layout with my blocks, made of similar-valued fabrics? The pathway design disappears and it just looks like a mess. So, circles it is! Just as an aside, I should point out that the pathway design would have been a little easier because there aren't as many seams to match when you sew the blocks together, but hopefully my piecing was precise enough that everything will match up nicely for me.

Here's the final layout for this quilt (drumroll, please...):

Final Layout for our Drunken Dragons quilt

My exuberant puppy dogs were outside while all this was going on, or I'm sure they would have loved to have helped... :-)

Before I let the dogs in, I carefully picked the blocks up row by row, left to right, and labeled them with sticky notes so I that (hopefully) I won't mess up when I sew all the blocks together. I also printed out an 8" x 10" picture of the layout that I can use as a map, and I'll be checking that frequently throughout the process to make sure I don't get confused. If this was a smaller project, like a lap quilt or baby blanket, I would have laid the blocks out on a flannel sheet on a vertical surface in my studio and then I could have taken the blocks down as I needed them -- easier on my knees, and easier to stay organized, but unfortunately impractical this time around.

I can't wait to get these blocks sewn together so I can move on to layering (yuck), basting (double yuck), and machine quilting (scary-but-exciting, like a roller coaster) this quilt so it can snuggle around my little Lars at night!

Merry Christmas 2011: The Christmas Card Post

2011-12-17T10:24:00.000-05:00

Last year I indulged in misty-eyed nostalgia for what I consider to be an endangered species, the vintage Christmas card that is actually a card rather than a photo postcard, and which actually wishes the recipient a Merry Christmas rather than a bland, politically-correct Happy Holiday. If you're so young that you don't remember what real Christmas cards are supposed to look like, you can read last year's Christmas card post and see some beautiful examples of vintage Christmas cards here.

Christmas Past, at least the way we remember or imagine it from the present, was simpler, less commercialized, more personal and more family and community oriented than it is today. It was A Miracle on 34th Street, White Christmas, and It's A Wonderful Life. This year, however, I'm sharing this 1952 Ronald Reagan Christmas ad for Chesterfield cigarettes as a reminder that, then as now, Hollywood is in the dream business, and films are magical mirrors that show audiences an idealized reflection of their society. I mean, seriously?! When I romanticized those magical 1950s era Christmases from The Good Old Days, I wasn't thinking about cartons of "Christmas card" cigarettes under the tree!!

Yes, I still miss real Christmas cards and I still feel annoyed rather than touched by the cards I receive from the HV/AC company and the dry cleaner (wishing me prosperity so I can continue to shop with them). If you are one of my few remaining family or friends who sends me a Christmas card with a pretty Christmas picture on the front, please know that I am absolutely delighted to receive it, even if you just signed your name and didn't have time to write a Christmas letter. Perhaps the newer tradition of Christmas photocards is one that our children and grandchildren may look back on fondly as what Christmas cards "should" be. With families and friends as spread out across the globe as they are today, there are some smiling faces we only get to see on Facebook and Christmas cards anymore. I also realize that it takes a lot of effort and advance planning for families to get that perfect holiday photo and have the cards printed up on time for Christmas (is that what you people were working on while I was obsessing over turkey and side dishes last month?).

Christmas Card Ornament, photo courtesy of ScoutyGirl

If I do get any old-style Christmas cards this year, I'm saving every single one of them. My little sister reminded me the other day that we used to recycle Christmas cards for an ornament craft project at my grandmother's house, and I found a tutorial that refreshed my memory on how to do it right here at ScoutyGirl. In fact, I just had a flash of inspiration for this project -- if I don't have enough Christmas cards to cut up, why not print my own? All those images of vintage Christmas cards that I tracked down and posted about last year right here could be printed on heavy card stock and used to supplement the cards that come in the mail. There are loads of images on the internet that would be perfect for this. I can't wait to do this with my kids over Christmas break -- thanks for the idea, Janice the Manice!

By the way, if you haven't done your Christmas cards yet, there's still time. I just ordered mine online; with express shipping I should have them by the middle of next week. (My favorite online sources for Christmas cards are the museum shops at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago). I'll probably be watching those old Christmas movies while I sign and address my Christmas cards, but I'll try to remember that the best Christmas is always THIS Christmas, this gift of time off from work, school, and other obligations when we can relax with our loved ones and be reminded of what really matters. Yesterday we had The Santa Claus 2 on while I was mixing up cookie dough, the one where Tim Allen has to get married by Christmas Eve or else he can't be Santa anymore. When they got to the proposal scene and Santa said that Christmas would end if the lady didn't say yes, Anders piped up, "No it wouldn't! Jesus would still come without Santa!" Yay, Anders!

Whether your family celebrates Christmas, Hanukkah, or another holiday at this time of year, may God bless you with his gifts of love, forgiveness, and salvation and keep you safe and healthy. Merry Christmas!

Drunken Dragons Quilt Progress: Backing, Binding & Batting Selected

2011-12-12T09:00:00.000-05:00

Backing Fabric from eQuilter.com

Now that the 150 Drunkard's Path blocks are nearly finished (I'll be sewing the last 10 blocks later today), I started thinking ahead to the next steps in this project. Although I have started to accumulate a staggering quantity of quilting fabric, I usually don't buy more than half a yard of anything. The only way I could use fabric from my stash for the quilt backing was if I pieced it somehow, and I didn't want to overcomplicate the project -- so I went shopping instead! I chose a blue fabric with swirly spirals and what reminds me of little orange fireflies all over it for my backing fabric. Since I ordered it online, I hope the colors are pretty true to what I see on my monitor, but this is for the backing after all, so I'm sure it will be fine.

Binding Fabric from eQuilter.com

For the binding, I selected this vivid orange batik with blue ears of corn. My binding will be narrow, and you won't be able to see any vegetables -- it will just look like random blue lines here and there. At least that's the idea.

My batting is going to be Hobbs Tuscany Collection 90/10 Silk/Poly. Wendy Sheppard uses this batting and she says it's easy to work with on domestic machines and it quilts up very soft and cuddly, even when it's quilted very densely. I've never tried it before, so I'm looking forward to it. You can read what Wendy has to say about this batting in her Thread Talk article here on her Ivory Spring blog.

As of this writing I have 130 blocks completed and only 20 remaining to be sewn. Then I have to figure out how I'm going to lay the blocks out and sew them together. According to UPS, I'll have my backing fabric and batting in my hot little hands by the end of the day on Thursday the 15th, but I doubt I'll be ready to do anything with it other than prewash the backing fabric. We have a busy week, with Night of the Notables at the boys' school on Tuesday evening, then a community theatre production of A Christmas Carol on Thursday night, and classroom holiday parties for which I've promised to bake. Bernie and I have to do some Christmas shopping this week, too, while the boys are still in school.

I hope you are all enjoying a beautiful holiday season with your loved ones!

A Rainy Saturday at the Paris Flea Market: Les Puces de Saint-Ouen

2011-12-10T11:05:00.003-05:00

Random Cute Strangers at Les Puces de Saint-Ouen

I was looking through photos yesterday and came across all these fabulous pictures from the Paris flea markets in September that I never got around to showing you. First, a disclaimer: I am by no means any kind of expert on the fleas. This was my first time going, and since I was in Paris for a trade show and was squeezing in as much sight-seeing as possible, I didn't allow nearly enough time to fully explore all that the Paris flea markets have to offer. In fact, I was only there a couple of hours and then we raced off to Versailles, which I was determined not to miss out on again. If you're headed to Paris for some serious shopping, I highly recommend that you download Claudia Strasser of The Paris Apartment's iPhone app "Keys to the Fleas."

Why had I never been to the flea markets on previous trips to Paris? Well, for one thing, when I hear "flea market" I instantly think of the Englishtown Auction where I had my very first job in a breakfast stand in the Red Building, serving Canadian bacon and egg sandwiches to the bargain hunters of New Jersey at the crack of dawn. As my olfactory memory is overcome by greasy breakfast smells, I remember the Englishtown Auction (billed as one of the largest open air flea markets in the United States) as an enormous and overwhelming yard sale full of a mixture of junk and brand-new clothing with tags, recently shoplifted from the nearby malls. You can get in some interesting people-watching at the Englishtown Auction, but did I really need to go to a giant French yard sale and look through French people's junk while I was in Paris?

The answer is oui, oui, OUI!! I can tell you most emphatically that the Parisian flea markets are MUCH more elegant than Les Puces de New Jersey! ;-)

Ventriloquist's Dummy and Vintage, Antique Doll Parts

Another quick disclaimer, before we get started: There are two main flea markets in Paris, Les Puces de Saint-Ouen (where I went) and Clignancourt (where I did not go, although I heard it's more affordable). Then there are all kinds of smaller, less permanent flea markets going on in different places at different times. Again, if you're looking for something specific, check out Claudia's Keys to the Fleas before you head out. My goal was just to get a taste of what the flea markets had to offer in the few hours I was there. I saw much that I loved but bought nothing -- everything I liked seemed to cost at least 3,000 euros and the exchange rate was lousy.

Françoise Schuler, Marché Vernaison, Saint-Ouen

This was one of my favorite stalls. This antique textile dealer had the most amazing things, everything from embroidered table linens to silk damask window treatments (I was tempted to buy the valance in the photo above to hang in my office, but she would only sell it as part of a set with several other matching valances and drapery tiebacks that I wouldn't be able to use). There were also some beautiful 18th century aristocratic garments, embellished with some of the most exquisite hand embroidery I've ever seen in person.

Can't you just imagine Mozart scampering around in this outfit?

Detail of Hand-Embroidered Floral Motif

This vendor also had museum-worthy religious vestments (see above), antique quilts, and tapestries. I feel terrible for drooling all over her lovely things.

Tapestries from Françoise Schuler

All that was just from one stall no bigger than a two-car garage. I was beginning to wish I'd alotted more of our day to the flea market at this point!

This was another fun booth. I think our fearless leader Deb Barrett may have gone back and purchased the vintage Draperies sign later in the day. The vendor at this stall asked me not to take pictures (after I'd already taken this one -- oops!), but then she relented and gave us permission to photograph a fascinating antique window blind that she'd already sold to another customer:

Antique Window Blind; Love the Metal Cornice!

By the way, in the flea market, as elsewhere in Paris, I found that Parisians were friendly, helpful, and very gracious when we were courteous and attempted to speak a little French. Most flea market vendors spoke some English, but not as fluently as the sales staff at the Galleries Lafayette or the cafes. I was happily surprised that I remembered enough French to converse with a couple of vendors in a mixture of French and English that my high school French teacher would have scorned as "franglais!"

Fit for the Queen of the Universe?

This next stall specialized in vintage costume jewelry. Aren't these crowns fabulous? In my house, when I ask my children to do something and they start whining about why, I often reply "Because I said so, and I'm the Queen of the Universe." I got away with this when they were in preschool, but since then they've wised up and now Anders will retort, "Yeah? If you're the Queen of the Universe, then where's your crown?" I think the crown at bottom left with the stars would be perfect for the Queen of the Universe, don't you?

The same stall had a great collection of vintage Chanel costume jewelry as well.

Vintage Chanel Costume Jewelry

Taxidermy Tarantula

Of course there were plenty of odd things for sale at the flea market, like this taxidermied tarantula. I almost bought this for my son Lars because he would think it was unbelievably cool, but then I considered the potential for customs hassels if I tried to bring a dead spider back to the States in my luggage. I don't recall there being a box to check on the customs form to declare deceased arachnids specifically, but I decided to let it go anyway.

Les Perlés d’Antan

Another stall that demanded our attention was Les Perlés d’Antan, where vendor Flora Barlan is selling off the inventory of her family's now defunct trim company.

Look at the hand embroidery and beadwork on this piece! This definitely gives me some ideas. A little bead bling embellishment (with restraint) added to an embroidered drapery fabric could be amazing on a drapery cornice or pillow. Pearl beads, small rhinestones and seed beads could also be added to machine embroidered designs to give them a more unique, three-dimensional flair. The piece in the photo here is an embroidered collar, and Mme. Barlan explained that it would have been used as a sample in a shop where clients could order custom embroidered garments. What would I do with something like this if I had purchased it? Well, it would be stunning framed as textile art. It might be possible to adapt the collar pieces for use as drapery tiebacks, but it would be an absolute shame to destroy any of the embroidery and I would worry about UV damage -- you'd definitely want to invest in UV film for your window before you used a vintage textile for a window treatment.

Embroidered and Beaded Sample Collar

Cutwork and Beaded Sample Collar

Antique Crocheted Lace Trim Samples

By the way, after I returned from Paris, I came across a wonderful idea for these small pieces of antique crocheted lace trims. Of course, now I can't remember where I saw it -- Pinterest, maybe? Someone had framed a piece of fabric stretched over a board, with horizontal "stripes" of different laces, and was using it as a place to organize and display her collection of earrings. These bits of lace would be perfect for a project like that, and they could also be sewn into one of those fabric jewelry travel pouches for the same purpose.

Vintage Crystal Pagoda Chandelier

By the time we came to this lovely courtyard of shops, it was almost time to head back for lunch and our afternoon trip to Versailles. We really only got a glimpse of the treasures to be found at Les Puces de Saint-Ouen. Next time I'm in Paris, I plan to spend a whole day at the flea markets, and I'll be bringing back more than memories and pretty pictures!

Drunken Dragons Update: 100 Blocks Sewn, 50 to Go

2011-12-05T20:25:00.000-05:00

7" Drunkard's Path Blocks, 10 in each pile

I've sewn 2/3 of Lars's Drunken Dragons quilt blocks! If you've missed my earlier posts about this quilt, you can catch up here. I've got them laid out randomly in piles of 10 to help me keep track of how many I've finished. I'm starting to get an idea of what the finished quilt will look like, and I like it!

I'm pinning blocks downstairs while I watch television with Bernie at night, and then I shoot for sewing 10 blocks at a time during the day. Some days I get in the sewing room for an hour or so, and other days I don't, depending on what else is going on that day. In case you're wondering, the answer to "will this be done in time for Christmas" is a resounding NO! Even if I finished all of the blocks this week, I still would have to figure out how I'm going to lay them out and then sew them all together. Then I need backing and batting, which I haven't even thought about purchasing yet, and there's the not-so-small matter of quilting...

Wendy Sheppard's Free-Motion Feathers, photo from Ivory Spring

I wanted to do some free-motion machine quilting on this quilt, but I might chicken out. Free-motion quilting means lowering the feed dogs on the sewing machine and moving the fabric around with your hands beneath the sewing machine needle to create the quilting designs. This is a lot like trying to draw a picture by moving a piece of paper beneath a stationary marker, except that with quilting, the stitch length comes into play as well. Without the feed dogs guiding the fabric steadily, it's up to the quilter to control the length of stitches by moving the fabric at an even speed. If you speed up and slow down, you get ugly, sloppy looking stitches, some short, some long, some piled up on top of one another in a messy knot. Quilting goddesses like Wendy Sheppard (check out her blog and fabulous Thread Talk tutorials over at Ivory Spring) make all of this look easy, but that's because she's amazingly talented and has spent hours and hours perfecting her craft on many, many quilt projects. So when I look at Wendy's quilting and think, "I'd like to do that on my quilt," it's kind of like me watching Tiger Woods on television and thinking, "That looks easy; maybe I should try professional golf!" Now that I've spent so much time carefully cutting and sewing these blocks together, I'm starting to get cold feet because I don't want to wreck all my hard work with lousy, crooked, uneven quilting. We'll see. There's more than one way to quilt a quilt, and this quilt may be a candidate for baby steps and compromises.

Meanwhile, tomorrow's ten quilt blocks are pinned together and lined up next to my sewbaby, all ready to go. I'm really enjoying these fabrics. I actually appreciate other people's quilts with more restricted fabric palettes, but for me, I need to mix up LOTS of different fabrics to fight the monotony of sewing so many blocks together and keep it fun.

One thing I'm discovering is that it's easiest to sew two similar fabrics together on these curved seams. For instance, the batik fabrics in particular tend to be stiffer and more tightly woven than some of the other fabrics. The most challenging blocks have been the ones where I have a batik quarter circle on the bottom and I'm sewing a looser weave fabric on top. So if you're thinking of starting a Drunkard's Path quilt of your own, you might want to keep that in mind when you're selecting your fabrics.

It's time to read to my kids! Goodnight!

Puppy Rabbits at Eleven Months Old

2011-12-03T15:58:00.004-05:00

Lulu, aka Princess Puppy, aka Lulu the Terrible

My puppy rabbits are going to be eleven months old on Tuesday! Can you believe it? We are enjoying them immensely. Rottweiler puppies are not for everyone, and I can only imagine the havoc they could wreak in a home where they were left alone all day with the run of the house, no training, no walks, etc. However, we were committed to training them, walking and working with them every single day, and our dogs have paid us back for this investment a thousand times over. They are the sweetest, smartest, happiest, and best-behaved dogs that either of us has ever owned. We couldn't be more pleased with them!

Now that they're growing up, we can see that although they are both Rotties and even littermates, they have very different personalities. Lulu is the more confident of the two, and she's the pup who is most likely to get into mischief. Bernie dubbed her Lulu the Terrible when she dug up a sprinkler line in the back yard and gave it a Swiss cheese makeover with her pointy puppy teeth. Clearly, someone should have buried the sprinkler line deeper in the first place. Ahem. Lulu is also an instigator; she'll pick up one of Otto's favorite chew toys and wave it around in his face until he'll get up and chase after her. She also likes to take a running start across the yard, leap into the air, and land on her brother's head like she's doing some kind of crazy football tackle. Both dogs love to run, chase, and wrestle in the back yard, but they have learned that this kind of play belongs only outside in the yard, not in the house. This is good news for my floor lamp in the living room.

Lulu and Otto, 11 months

Aren't they just the most beautiful dogs you've ever seen? I love their soft, silky smooth coats. My last dog was a Golden Retriever Shedding Machine, and shedding is much less of a problem with my Rotties, even though I've got two of them. They don't get those awful mats and tangles that the Golden always had, and I don't notice nearly as much fur drifting around on the hardwood floors between vacuuming.

Sweet, Lovable, Otto the Sharpie Marker

Here's my little Otto Pumpkin. He loves to run and chase after his big, blue ball, and sometimes retrieves it (as long as Lulu is in the house -- if she's outside when we throw the ball, she runs after the ball and turns Fetch into Tug-of-War). Otto is more low-key indoors than Lulu; he's very content just to rest in a central location where he can supervise what everyone else is doing during the day.

Both dogs have a rock-solid recall (Come), Sit, Down, Shake, Touch, and Watch Me. Otto's favorite trick is shaking hands (Lars taught him that one), and I just started working on Kisses with him yesterday. Ongoing training is so important with these dogs. It reinforces who is the leader and who is the follower, and challenging the dogs to think and figure out what they need to do to earn a treat keeps them from getting bored and frustrated.

I'm following the training instructions in Kyra Sundance's book 51 Puppy Tricks, available here from Amazon. She has you smear a little peanut butter on your cheek to teach your puppy that Kisses means to lick your cheek. Otto is very affectionate and smoochy anyway, so it's just a matter of having him do it on command and lick my cheek instead of my mouth, nose, or eyelid! Once the puppy gets the idea that Kisses means to lick your cheek for a treat, you eliminate the peanut butter and just reward with the treat. Lulu will not be learning Kisses, however -- she has a tendency to do a lick, lick, LOVE CHOMP! So with Lulu, I'm working on Find Me games instead. I sneak out of the room with a treat, hide someplace else in the house, and call, "Lulu, Find Mommy!" She runs around sniffing and listening, and I'll make kissy noises or tap the floor to help her out if she's having trouble. Once she knows the game well with me, I'll start involving other family members so she can Find Anders, Find Lars, and Find Daddy. This will also ensure that she knows everyone in our family by name, as well as engaging all of her senses in a hunting challenge.

It's actually working out well that we're finally (finally!) listening to our trainer and exclusively walking the dogs separately. Just like children, they need that one-on-one time to really bond with their humans, so while Bernie is out walking one dog, I get to do a one-on-one training session with the other one. Both of our puppies are sweet and friendly around people with very few exceptions, but they still go cuckoo-crazy when they see other neighborhood dogs on their walks. I need to get some really high-value treats and keep them in my other pocket just for dog distractions because we're randomly giving treats throughout the walk for good eye contact, loose leash without pulling, etc. Then another dog saunters into view and our puppy goes nuts, and the treats we've been doling out over and over are nowhere near as interesting as that other dog. I'm thinking of breaking up some freeze-dried lamb lungs (I know, gross, right?) into small pieces for the next walk, or I could microwave a hot dog and cut that up into little treat bites, too -- something has got to work. They are perfect little angels 95% of the time on a walk, but when they see another dog down the street my puppies leap and lunge and bark and do doggy double lutzes in the air, trying to get to the other dog, and it does not feel good to have my arm yanked out of my shoulder every time we see another dog! Also, they look really ferocious when they're behaving this way and I can only imagine what my neighbors must be thinking.

Princess Lulu likes to nap beneath the Christmas tree

Now that Otto is getting close to a year old, I think I'm going to schedule his neutering operation. Lulu was spayed at 6 months, but since larger breed dogs mature more slowly I wanted to give Otto more time for his bone structure to more fully develop and wait to see whether I felt like neutering was even necessary. After all, I'm not about to let my Rottweiler roam the neighborhood in search of females, so the whole neuter-to-reduce-unwanted-litters argument doesn't apply. Neither of my dogs has ever even attempted to escape from my yard, and since it is fenced, no intact female dogs can get in. However, Otto has been doing some intermittent urine marking in the house lately (prompting Bernie to nickname him Sharpie, as in Big, Black, Permanent Marker). I've done some research about male dogs urine marking and I understand that he's just being protective of our family "pack" and our home and that there's nothing vindictive about it, but I'm obviously less than thrilled about it and it could be a hormonal thing -- if so, there's a high likelihood that neutering would reduce or even eliminate that behavior. Also, when he's going nuts about trying to get to other dogs on our walks (and he's much worse in this regard than Lulu, especially when walked separately), that could be hormonal, too. Is he trying to get to a female dog? Is he exhibiting male-male aggression toward the other dog? Either scenario could be helped by neutering. I talked with my vet about it and I'll probably schedule it for the beginning of the Christmas holiday. I'm not looking forward to having to confine him and keep him from running around and playing afterwards, but with everyone home for the holidays it should be easier to give him lots of attention and love while he recuperates.

6 Days and Counting: Cranberry Citrus Compote and a Shiny New Toy

2011-11-18T20:46:00.001-05:00

We're less than a week before Thanksgiving, but the Big Deal Meal is right on schedule. Last night I made the Cranberry Citrus Compote that you see on the left, recipe from Fine Cooking here. The cranberry compote is chilling out in the garage refrigerator, and all I need to do on Thanksgiving is stir in some chopped scallions right before serving.

This recipe is incredibly easy. You can even have your kids make it, although mine were already in bed by the time I started. You just mix fresh cranberries, lemon zest, orange juice, and granulated sugar together, dump it into a 9" x 13" glass baking dish, drizzle orange juice over the top, and then bake it in the oven for about a half an hour until the sugar dissolves and some of the berries pop open. It's so much more flavorful than anything that comes out of a can, and just as effortless when it comes time to serve your Thanksgiving dinner.

-- Wait! I forgot! Two finely chopped shallots (in case you don't know, a shallot is like the Frankenstein vegetable child of an onion and a head of garlic) get stirred into the cranberries with the zest and the sugar. Normally, I would have chopped up the shallots with a paring knife or a chef's knife, but this time I remembered that I own this handy little miniature food processor contraption. I usually forget about the convenience of food processors unless the recipe specifically instructs me to use one, but every time I do, I marvel at how well they work and how much FASTER they are.

So, if you read my previous Thanksgiving meal posts, you know that I had also planned to make an Appleberry Pie this week. My sister sent me a nearly-identical recipe from another cookbook that she swears by, and I did some more research about the pros, cons, and recommended procedures for freezing unbaked pies. I laid out all my ingredients, then I paced around the kitchen for awhile and thought of other things that I could do instead of pie making. I'm such a scaredy-cat when it comes to pie!

I finally got up the courage to take the Pie Crust Plunge yesterday morning. My recipe calls for making the crust with a food processor, which I've never tried before. So I hauled out the 7-cup Cuisinart that we got as a bridal shower gift thirteen years ago, set it on the counter, and then looked at it dubiously. I sent some frantic text messages to Janice the Manice, because she is a pie wizard. She said my food processor is "probably fine." Then I went online and did some more research about the proper food processor capacity for making a double pie crust. Most resources recommended a minimum 12 cup capacity, almost double the size of mine. I also read recommendations of sharp blades (my food processor blade was even duller than my knives) and powerful motors, which tend to be a given with larger capacity food processors. My old food processor also had little hairline fractures in the plastic bowl caused by a certain someone trying to force the bowl into place incorrectly.

So, did I need a new food processor? Probably not. Whatever. Look what followed me home from Williams-Sonoma:

Cuisinart Elite Die-Cast 16 c. food processor, photo from Williams-Sonoma

Let me introduce you to the Cuisinart Elite Die-Cast 16 cup food processor from Williams-Sonoma! My new food processor is cool because:

1. One food processor, with three different bowl sizes! There's a 4 1/2 cup bowl, a 13 cup bowl, and a 16 cup bowl. I'm planning to use the 13 cup bowl for my pie crust, but the 16 cup bowl will really come in handy when it's time to puree the Buttercup Squash Soup. Also, remember my amazing rediscovery that food processors chop vegetables faster than I can chop them with a knife? There are so many recipes that I don't make as often as I would like because prepping all the ingredients takes so long. I had forgotten that food processors can slice vegetables nearly instantaneously, to exactly the thickness you want, with no danger of cutting yourself with the knife. You can grate a block of cheese instantly with a food processor, too -- it took me forever to grate all the cheese for homemade baked macaroni and cheese last week. I am resolving to put the new food processor to work on all these jobs as frequently as possible. With three different bowls at my disposal, there won't even be the fuss of washing out the bowls between ingredients for most recipes.

2. The Cuisinart folks have addressed all of my grievances against the older food processor model. For instance, with this new food processor, the knife blade stays in place until I release it, so it won't fall out when I'm pouring out the soup and splatter food all over the kitchen.

2. With the older food processor, I had a knife blade and two sharp discs to store somehow without creating a hazard in a dark cupboard. The new food processor comes with a cute storage case that holds everything safely, also making it easy to find the parts you need.

3. The new food processor has a seal on the lid so liquids don't squirt out at the top and run down the sides, oh so much fun to clean.

I told Bernie I wanted the new food processor to live out on the kitchen counter, to remind me to use it. Bernie says he would rather look at an empty counter. He pulled the old "I want to enjoy looking at my granite" card. So the food processor is going to sit out on my counter for now, while I get used to using it, and then when I get tired of looking at it and find a space for it in my cupboard, then I might put it away.

Tomorrow is Saturday, and it's going to be another busy weekend. I'm definitely going to make the Appleberry Pie tomorrow, now that I have a shiny new tool to bolster my confidence, and I will also make the roux for the gravy and do some additional grocery shopping for perishables. I'll be supervising Lars's work on his science project and helping Anders get started with a book report project, fighting the never-ending laundry scourge, and might even be hauling out some holly this weekend as well. Our tradition has always been to start decorating our (artificial) Christmas trees on the Friday after Thanksgiving so the house is decorated for the start of Advent, but this year we'll want to spend that time relaxing with our company. Although I'm the first one to complain about Holiday Encroachment, it really makes more sense to decorate the house right before we have guests instead of waiting until after everyone has left. I also know that we are going to spend some time teaching the puppy dogs the Rules of the Christmas Trees (such as Ornaments are Not Chew Toys, and No Urine Marking the Christmas Trees) and keep an eye on them while they are getting used to the decorations. If you have dogs, do they leave your Christmas decorations alone? I welcome any suggestions. Well, we'll just have to see how the weekend goes.

My Son, the Wolf Man, Rages Against Gmail

2011-11-14T20:09:00.004-05:00

I do not draw. However, I had my light box out the other day for Anders to trace a map of South America for Spanish class, and thought I'd experiment with tracing a photo I'd taken of Lars in my car, sipping his favorite Starbucks beverage. At first I thought I'd done a pretty good job, except that he looks like he's had his eyebrows waxed. Lars looked at my tracing and said, "I look like I have a beard, Mom!" So much for my sad attempt at shadowing. If I added little points to his ears, he'd look like a wolf man with a Starbucks habit.

Okay, since I'm embarrassing Lars today, he requested a rant about how Google ruined his day today. I'm going to copycat The Empress, who lets her son dictate blog posts about whatever's on his mind. Take it away, Lars-of-Ours!

_______________________________________________________

Okay, so at the end of the day at school, I was on my Gmail account when suddenly a little pop-up box appeared in the middle of the screen. It asked me when I was born, so I told it. All of a sudden, my Inbox disappeared and in its place was a box saying that because I was not over 13 years old, in 3 days my account will be permanently deleted! It said that if I wish to keep my Gmail account I would have to tell them my credit card number (I don't even own a credit card!) so they could fine me thirty cents. [Mom is raising an incredulous eyebrow of suspicion right now.] I am SO MAD at Gmail that I wanted to hack into their web site, but my friend stopped me just in time. [Note from Mom: No way can Lars hack into Google's web site, or anyone else's. Mom is having trouble letting Lars talk without interrupting...]

Now, I have a Yahoo! account, but when I created it they asked me when I was born. I was so desperate for an email account that I told it I was born in 1990. I will never use Google again and I hope you don't either. From, Lars the Obliterator. --Wait, no! Lars the Conqueror! I'm the conqueror! Goodbye for now, and DON'T USE GOOGLE! Ever!

[More notes from Mom: the irony is, of course, that Lars is ranting about Google through Blogger, which is just Evil Google in Disguise]. Lars again, with eyebrows shooting up to the moon: "It IS?!!!"

Buttercup Squash Soup and Herb Butter, Check!

2011-11-13T22:46:00.000-05:00

Behold, the Buttercup Squash! They are not a figment of the recipe's imagination (who are you to deny the imaginings of recipes?); they actually exist, and this is what they look like. They look so fabulous with my granite countertops that I was tempted to use them as accessories, but alas, I snatched up the only Buttercup squashes that I could find.

Bernie versus The Squash

Because my knives are dull (note to self: get them sharpened ASAP!), and because I hate messy prep work, and because Bernie enjoys hacking viciously away at innocent squashes with a dull knife, I got to take pictures while Bernie peeled the raw squash and cut it into 1" cubes. I am not allowed to go behind him with a ruler, actually measuring the size of his squash cubes. Not if I want him to continue helping with the cooking, anyway.

So anyway, the leeks and the squash get chopped up and put in a big stock pot, and you pour a little white wine and a lot of chicken stock over the vegetables, bring to a boil, and then simmer for 25 minutes until the squash is fork-tender. Here's what my soup looked when it was done cooking, cooling on the stove:

Buttercup Squash and Leek Soup, Ready to Puree

The "cool for at least 15 minutes" step turns out to be important, by the way. Trying to pour boiling hot soup with big, splashing vegetable chunks into a blender or a food processer is a terrific way to burn yourself and make a giant mess.

Something seems not-quite-right with my blender lately, by the way. It has a Burning Motor smell and makes an unpleasant screeching noise when we turn it on. Also my dogs get upset and whine at the back door when the blender is turned on, begging to escape the house, as if they sense impending doom or something. I would love to have an immersion blender like this one from Williams Sonoma for this task, so I could puree the soup right in the cooking pot without messing with the blender or the food processer, but it seems pricey for something I might only use once a year. They say you can use it for smoothies and all kinds of things, but I don't make that many smoothies, either. Back to the soup!

So, ta-da! The soup is done and is waiting patiently in the freezer for it's Thanksgiving Debut. Yes, it looks like baby food, but it tastes really good, I promise! I'll just move it to the fridge to defrost the day before, then reheat it on the stove and add some chives and a pat of herbed butter to each bowl just before serving. Far from being bland, this soup gets a bit of a kick from white pepper. Mmm!

Herb Butter for Soup and Turkey

Speaking of the herbed butter, that's the other cooking task we crossed off the list today. The butter gets creamed together with minced shallots sauteed in sherry and fresh chives. I cut little star shapes out of the herb butter and froze those separately so one can go on each serving of soup, but the rest of this concoction gets smeared all over Big Bird, in between the skin and the breast meat. This makes for a moist, flavorful bird that tastes way too good for there to be any leftovers. Like the soup, the herb butter can be made up to two weeks ahead of time and frozen. However, in years past, the herb butter has not DEFROSTED as quickly as the recipe promises it will, so I'll be moving it to the fridge to defrost a bit earlier this year to reduce Thanksgiving morning panic. There's nothing like trying to smear frozen butter under the skin of a cold, raw turkey.

Tomorrow I've got some work to do in the morning, but I'm hoping to sneak in enough time to make my spiced pecans and at least make the crust for that Crimson Appleberry Pie that we're auditioning this year. Yes, auditioning -- Thanksgiving is THEATRICAL! If you'd like to try your hand at this soup recipe, you can find it here on finecooking.com. I just feel better knowing that, no matter what catastrophes might be lurking between today and the 24th, at least my guests won't starve on Thanksgiving Day now that there's soup in the freezer!

12 Days and Counting: Thanksgiving Menu Ready to Go!

2011-11-12T11:33:00.000-05:00

Photo Courtesy of Fine Cooking

In less than two weeks, we'll be hosting Thanksgiving dinner for my parents, Bernie's parents, my sister-in-law, and teenaged nieces. We haven't all been together for the holidays in a long time, and we're really looking forward to it.

So far, I've finalized my menu, ordered my 20-22 pound fresh, organic turkey from Dean & DeLuca for Tuesday pickup, and plotted out a timetable for what needs to be done when over the next two weeks in order for the meal to come together smoothly. I ordered my spices from Penzey's yesterday and placed a wine order at wine.com that will be delivered this Thursday. I went with four bottles of Oregon's Domaine Drouhain pinot noir for red, and two bottles of Adelsheim's Pinot Cris, also from Oregon, for the white. Six bottles of wine for 5 adults -- do you think that will be enough? ;-) It's better to have too much wine than too little; any unopened bottles can be saved for another occasion.

Most of my Thanksgiving recipes come from a menu published in Fine Cooking magazine in October 1998. What's great about this menu is that it uses all fresh ingredients, and although it's challenging (and impressive!), a lot can be done ahead of time, and the flavors of each dish complement the others so nicely. I really can't imagine ever making anything else for Thanksgiving dinner, so the most I change is to experiment with a new green vegetable side dish or pie recipe each year. In case you are in charge of cooking this year and haven't yet finalized your menu, might I suggest:

Spiced Pecans, recipe HERE

Spiced Pecans. The spiced pecans recipe is used in the stuffing, but makes enough to set some out for pre-feast nibbling as well. Lars loves these. The spiced pecans can be made and frozen up to two weeks ahead of time, and that's one of the things I'm planning to do this weekend. You can find that recipe at Fine Cooking here.

Buttercup Squash & Leek Soup with Herb Butter, recipe HERE

Buttercup Squash & Leek Soup with Herb Butter. Bernie really likes this soup, and sending him to five or six grocery stores to track down the right squash variety has become something of a Thanksgiving tradition in itself. Buttercup squash is not the same thing as Butternut squash, although you can substitute Butternut if you can't find the Buttercup. As for our family, we enjoy the Quest for Obscure Ingredients and the look of puzzlement on the faces of the produce boys who don't know their squash varieties as well as they ought to. To me, the best thing about this soup is that it can be made and frozen up to two weeks ahead of time, and then you just dump it in a pot on the stove to reheat it on Turkey Day. Easy peasy! This soup is on the agenda for me this weekend as well, and you can find the recipe at Fine Cooking here. What's more, I'll be making an herb butter this weekend that will be used to garnish the soup as well as to smear under the skin of my turkey to keep it all moist and delicious. Mmmm...

Roasted Turkey with Apple Cider Thyme Gravy. The recipe calls for a 12-14 pound fresh turkey, but I ordered a 20+ pound bird because of past experience. This turkey is so good, there aren't enough leftovers if I don't get a bigger bird! I'm allowing for an additional hour and a half of roasting time for my bigger bird. By the way, if you've never cooked a fresh bird for Thanksgiving before, there's nothing to fear. In fact, I think frozen birds are much harder. I've heard so many horror stories about frozen turkeys not thawing in time, or not cooking as quickly as expected because they weren't completely thawed, resulting in sub-par Thanksgiving dinners served at 11 PM to grouchy, starving guests. You don't have to worry about that with a fresh bird, and you can order one ahead of time from most butchers or specialty grocers. The recipe for this delicious, knock-your-socks-off Thanksgiving turkey is right here.

Wild Rice, Spiced Pecan & Apple Stuffing. Mmmm... This recipe is fabulous with the Apple Cider Thyme gravy, and it's really easy, too. It uses some of the spiced pecans, and you prep most of the ingredients the night before so you're just folding in the wet ingredients on Turkey Day. Michael Brisson, the chef who came up with these recipes, suggests sticking a fork into the middle of the stuffing to draw the heat into the bird and ensure the stuffing cooks completely. I've done that every time I stuffed a turkey and have never had a problem. The recipe also makes enough stuffing to fill a separate baking dish. You can find that recipe here.

Whipped Yukon Gold Potatoes with Horseradish

Whipped Yukon Gold Potatoes with Horseradish. Yes, horseradish -- the zing of horseradish is the perfect counterpoint to the apple sweetness of the apple cider gravy and the apples in the stuffing. Trust me. You'll find this recipe at Fine Cooking here.

Cranberry Citrus Compote, photo courtesy of Fine Cooking

Cranberry Citrus Compote. This is another one of Michael Brisson's recipes from Fine Cooking. Again, the recipe is fairly easy, the lemon and orange juice elevates these cranberries way above what some people (gasp!) dump out of a can, and this dish can be made up to a week ahead of time and refrigerated. You just stir in the sliced scallions on Turkey Day and dump it into a serving bowl. Try it! You can find this recipe at Fine Cooking here.

Green Beans with Pancetta, Mushrooms & Shallots

Now, Michael Brisson's original menu in the October '98 Fine Cooking included a warm greens salad and a fruit crisp for dessert. We're pie people when it comes to Thanksgiving, so I've never bothered to try out the fruit crisp. I made the warm greens salad with homemade plum vinaigrette dressing the first year, and it didn't go over well enough for our family to justify all the fuss. A salad that gets sauteed immediately before serving doesn't make for good leftovers, either. My mother always made that green bean casserole from the Campbell's soup recipe for Thanksgiving, and last year I discovered this fancy pants gourmet version that scratches the green bean itch but fits in better with the rest of my Thanksgiving Day Feast. This year I'll be making my Green Beans with Crispy Pancetta, Mushrooms & Shallots again using Susie Middleton's recipe from the November 2010 issue of Fine Cooking, recipe here. My mother will think the green beans are not cooked enough (I'm not a fan of mushy vegetables), but she can pop hers in the microwave. Love you, Mom! :-)

For dessert, I'll be making the Cinnamon-Molasses Pumpkin Pie with Pecan Crust that I've served every year since the recipe was published in Bon Appetit in 1999. The original recipe calls for a bourbon whipped cream that I tried once and loathed, so I skip that and serve my pie with vanilla ice cream instead. The pecan crust and molasses elevate this pumpkin pie so far beyond anything I could buy in a store. Every year I work myself up about the pie crust and consider buying an ordinary pastry crust from the grocery store, but it's really not all that hard to make pie crust from scratch and the results are so worth it. I find that a glass of wine for the pastry chef goes a long way towards calming the pie jitters! I couldn't find my pie recipe online at the Bon Appetit web site, but I did locate the exact same recipe (with no credit given to the source!) here in the archives of a Colorado newspaper. Since Bon Appetit published the recipe in 1999 and the Greeley and Weld County, Colorado Tribune published it in 2007, I'm guessing some unscrupulous Colorado baker tried to pass it off as his or her own creation. Tsk, tsk, tsk... I always bake two pumpkin pies: one for me, and one for everyone else to share. And no, I'm not kidding. Momma eats pumpkin pie for breakfast every year on Black Friday.

Since I'll have eleven mouths to feed this Thanksgiving, and since I'm only willing to share one of my pumpkin pies, I'm going to be testing out a new-to-me fruit pie recipe this year. With apples playing a prominent role in the main courses, an apple pie was the obvious choice, but I have never like the super sweet versions. I found a recipe for Crimson Appleberry Pie in Carole Walter's Great Pies & Tarts cookbook, available here from Amazon. I figure the cranberry/apple combo works great for juice, so why not for pie? The cranberries should add just enough bite to the apple pie to keep it from being too cloyingly, annoyingly sweet. What's more, I found instructions on the Baking Banter blog at King Arthur Flour for making any kind of fruit pie ahead of time and freezing it just prior to baking. I would be skeptical if this was coming from just any source, but the folks at King Arthur Flour are fanatical when it comes to baking, so I'm going to give this a try. I'm going to be making and freezing my Crimson Appleberry Pie this weekend, defrosting it the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, and then popping it in the oven to bake the day before the Big Feast. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Meanwhile, it's almost lunch time on Saturday and I need to get out from behind the computer if I'm really going to get anything done today. I need to do my non-perishable grocery shopping for Thanksgiving and make Spiced Pecans, Buttercup Squash Soup, Herb Butter, and Appleberry Pie. I also have my parents coming over for dinner tonight for a belated birthday dinner (Bernie's birthday fell on Wednesday this year) and I'll be baking ziti and serving cupcakes for dinner. Is it too optimistic to think the laundry might get washed as well?

Have a great weekend!

Once Upon a Dining Room: A New Ceiling Reinvigorates an Ever-Changing Space

2011-11-10T12:37:00.000-05:00

The Ceiling is Finished!

Finally, my dining room ceiling is finished! In person, it looks like a midnight sky; pictures (my pictures, anyway) don't do it justice at all. The ornamental scrollwork design around the chandelier is barely visible in this picture. It's subtle in real life, but you can see it much better. It's kind of like a shadow or an echo of the scroll work on the chandelier, and it's embellished with decorative upholstery nails. The crown molding has a metallic foil finish selected to complement the gold drapery hardware and accents on the light fixtures.

Now, this room is not "done." My own home is like a design laboratory where I continually change things up, and frequently change my mind about the Big Plan for a space mid-stream.

So today, I thought I'd share with you The Story of My Dining Room.

This is a photo of the dining room in my last house, taken just before we put it on the market:

I played around with that room a lot over the seven years we lived in that home. The carpet had come from our first home in New Jersey. The first wallpaper that lived in this room was a pale neutral toile/botanical bird pattern with sage green; I couldn't find a picture of that to show you, but it went better with the chair fabric and the swag valance. I got bored with it after a few years and changed it up for large scale red damask. If we had stayed in that home longer, I would have changed the window treatment to better complement the walls and carpet.

You'll notice that the furnishings are the same as what we have now, but the fabric on the chairs was originally a more casual, "durable" olive green and beige chevron -- that's the way they came from the factory. The dining room furniture was an early purchase, and neither of us loved it when we bought it. However, we couldn't afford anything that we did love at that time, and it was important to us to have furniture in the dining room for holiday meals and special occasions rather than let the years slip by without making those memories. Then over time, as our children and their messy dining habits came into play, we were glad we hadn't invested in dining room furniture that we would constantly be worrying about and afraid to use. My dining room table gets used for homework, jigsaw puzzles, giftwrapping, and as a conference table when my vendors come to show me new product introductions. So instead of replacing the furniture, I had the chairs reupholstered in silks and velvets to glam them up a bit when we moved to our new home.

Robert Allen silk/viscose Lattice Sheen in Aegean

Robert Allen viscose velvet Stylish Stitch in Peacock

I put a silk/viscose lattice fabric from Robert Allen on the seats and inside backs of the chairs. Although the swatch photo looks dark, in real life this fabric has a lively, shimmery irridescence that takes on different blue tones depending on how the light hits it. I selected a silky viscose cut velvet stripe for the outside backs of the chairs, incorporating different shades of blues and greens.

Reupholstering dining chairs is a really easy, budget friendly way to give your dining room a face lift, by the way. If your chairs only have upholstered slipseats, you can usually figure 3/4 yard of fabric for every two chairs -- that means six yards of fabric is enough for eight chair seats (depending on the pattern repeat of your fabric). Even if you splurge on wildly fabulous, expensive fabric, you won't even come close to what you'd spend on all new furniture, and it's amazing what a difference a few yards of beautiful textiles can make in a room. I would recommend that you order an extra yard of fabric to hold onto in case of a disaster. Yes, you can have your upholstery stain protected, but it's still a good idea to have a backup plan and stockpiling a little extra fabric ensures that you have the same fabric from the same dye lot in case you ever need to recover one of your chairs.

Here's what the dining room looked like when we bought the home, with the previous owner's furnishings:

I was NOT a fan of that dinky little brass chandelier, so I took the Currey & Co. Largo chandelier I'd purchased for my previous home with me when we moved. Here's the same dining room with our furniture, carpet, and Currey chandelier, taken shortly after we moved in:

Our larger furnishings and light fixture fit the space better, but the builder-beige flat wall paint and faux wood blinds were going to have to go. I regretted leaving all of my window treatments behind, but the buyer for our old house had specifically requested them and I knew I would want to do something different in my new home anyway. However, moving into a new home is fraught with unplanned expenses that pile up and hit you all at once, and I wasn't able to completely customize and decorate the new home immediately.

Fiorentino silk damask in Cypress from Vervain, discontinued

PLEASE! LEARN FROM ME AND NEVER, EVER DO THIS: I couldn't bear looking at that plain, ugly window in my dining room, and I came across this gorgeous silk damask fabric from Vervain that I fell in love with. I had no plan per se; and got this insane idea to just order 7 yards of fabric, enough for two single width drapery panels, thinking that I would order more fabric for some kind of valance and figure everything else out later. Just seeing the pretty fabric next to the windows would make me feel better in the meantime. Hah! I still can't believe I did that. Of course I had a terrific idea of what I wanted to do with the fabric by the time it arrived, except that now I would need a lot more than seven yards, and -- lo and behold! -- now the fabric was DISCONTINUED with no stock, and I had the last seven yards in existence.

Here's one option I considered with this fabric, if I had been able to get more of it:

Unfinished Rendering of the Draperies that Never Came to Be

I have since learned from my Vervain rep that the Fiorentino damask was printed on a Shalini silk dupioni fabric from Fabricut, and if I really wanted more badly enough they could do a custom order for me, but I'd need to order 50 yards of it. Hmm -- no thanks! At the time of the design crisis, however, I wasn't able to locate a coordinating fabric that was a close enough match either to the yellowy-gold or the irridescent sage green of my discontinued fabric. I could have (should have?) abandoned the discontinued fabric, but I had my heart set on it and I'm stubborn. So I decided to mix in some deep blue instead and started off on the long, difficult road of trying to make my oops look like "I meant to do that."

Robert Allen Soho Velvet in Indigo

The drapery fabric is a silk/viscose rayon velvet from Robert Allen with wonderful drape and vertical creases in the pile that catch the light and pick up lots of different shades of blue. The passementerie is from the Beacon Hill Lavish Silk trim collection, Prussian Blue colorway.

Here's what I came up with for the draperies:

Now, I have to tell you that I think the drapery panels are too skinny. It's a 48" wide fabric; I should have at least done a width and a half per panel, maybe even two widths per panel. I have some more of that velvet, and I might do something about that. Eventually. When I run out of other things to do. But what I really do love is the deep peacock blues and greens, a color scheme that evolved as the happy outcome to the Drama of the Discontinued Damask. I reupholstered the chairs soon after this photo was taken, because the casual, bland fabric wasn't holding its own with the Diva Draperies.

The next casualty of the room was the Karastan carpet that we'd had since our first home in New Jersey. It was just feeling too somber, too traditional in a safe, sensible way for me. I wanted more drama, less burgundy, and a rug with a bit of yellow to help my gold/green damask tie in better. I found the perfect carpet at a great price when a local furnishings retailer was going out of business and liquidating their inventory.
Meanwhile, I'd been looking for a pair of somethings to flank my china cabinet. I considered art, a display of decorative china, architectural elements, etc., and finally decided that I really wanted wall sconces. Although I loved the whimsical elegance of my Largo chandelier, I really hated the coordinating sconces and I couldn't find anything that went well with the chandelier. I eventually replaced the Largo chandelier with an oblong Dominion chandelier, also from Currey & Co., that had beautiful coordinating sconces.

Oblong Dominion chandelier from Currey & Co.

Now that the room was finally starting to come together for me, I hired my decorative painter to do a multi-layered metallic finish on my celing in deep blues and greens with a dark brown stain and a 4' x 5' design around the chandelier. I planned to scatter some Swarovski crystals randomly across the ceiling like stars, but once the finish was done I felt like the crystals didn't belong there, so we embellished the decorative motif around the chandelier with some bronze upholstery nails instead.

Kris Kuchavik of Casa Bella Faux Finishes

What's next for this space? Well, I'm loving the way the deep, lush blue flows from the ceiling, down the drapery panels, to the border on my rug. I know the room is a bit over-the-top and not for everyone, but to me it's dramatic, fun and very theatrical -- which is exactly what I wanted. I'm not so fond of the wall color (Sherwin Williams Camelback, nowhere near as yellow in person as it looks in these photos) and I think I'd like to do something special with the walls at some point. I found a grasscloth wallpaper in the right shade of green recently that I might put on the walls if Bernie ever gets around to trimming the arched entrance to the room. The way it is now, I wouldn't do a paper or any kind of textured paint finish because of how it would look on the outside corners transitioning into the foyer. I really love the rich, cozy texture of the grasscloth paper in my office, directly across from the dining room, so doing the same texture in a different shade would flow nicely at the front of the house. The white trim will probably stay, but I might tone it down by doing something interesting inside the rectangle "panels" below the chair rail. Maybe the same paper, but with a custom painted damask pattern to mimic that elusive discontinued Vervain fabric that started it all in the first place. For now, I'm just glad my dining room is put back together in time for Thanksgiving entertaining!

Are They Done Yet? The First Crackled Molasses Sugar Cookies of the Season!

2011-11-06T20:27:00.001-05:00

Rolling the cookies in granulated sugar

The leaves have turned colors and started to fall, the temperatures have been dropping, and we just turned the clocks back last night. When I did my grocery shopping yesterday, instead of picking up a container of gross pastel bakery cookies slathered with frosting for the lunch boxes, I loaded up my cart with dark brown sugar, molasses, vegetable shortening, and some eggs. Everything else we needed to make Crackled Molasses Sugar Cookies was already in our pantry.

Lars and Anders had a great day today, finishing up school work, piano, trombone and recorder practice, and choir rehearsal with plenty of time to spare. They deserved something special, so I wrapped them up in aprons and helped Anders with the chef's hat he got way back in preschool.

These cookies need to be formed into 1 1/2" balls and then rolled in granulated sugar before baking. I make the balls myself because if they are all different wonky sizes they won't all bake in the same amount of time, but rolling the cookie balls in the sugar is the boys' job.

They were too cute, camped out in front of the oven the whole time the cookies were baking, squealing "They're crackling! They're crackling!" This tells me that I do not do nearly enough baking.

Fresh From the Oven

So at least for this week, Lars and Anders will have homemade cookies in their lunch boxes and waiting for them after school. The big challenge will be overcoming the urge to snack on the cookies all day long while they're at school. I mean, there IS iron in the molasses, but these cookies aren't really appropriate as a meal replacement. Or so they tell me.

Trick-or-Treat!

2011-10-31T22:01:00.000-04:00

Lars as an Archer (from one of his books) and Anders as Darth Vader Sans Mask

Trick-or-treating has pretty much wrapped up for the night, and our little Halloween marauders have been tucked into bed despite the sugar high incurred by scarfing down as much candy as they could possibly manage before bed. Lars dressed up as a character from one of his favorite books, and Anders sensibly chose to leave his Darth Vader mask at home so he could see where he was going. For the first time this year, I left Bernie at home to hand out candy and I took the boys trick-or-treating myself. It was fun to be out in the neighborhood with all of the kids and other parents instead of left behind with a too-tempting bowl full of candy.

As promised, I got a picture of our pumpkins once they were lit:

I also took pictures of my favorite carved pumpkins on other people's front steps -- more ideas for next year!

Skull & Cross Bones Pumpkin

Ghostly Pumpkin

Another Cute Ghost Pumpkin

This little monster pumpkin was my favorite!

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Happy Halloween! The Jack-O-Lanterns of 2011

2011-10-30T20:25:00.000-04:00

Happy Halloween! Lars and Anders did some trick-or-treating to collect food for Loaves & Fishes today after church with their youth group, and then they rolled up their sleeves for some serious pumpkin carving with their daddy. We did some internet research yesterday and found some great jack-o-lantern ideas, which I posted on that Pinterest thing here. Because we were pressed for time, we shamelessly copied two of the pumpkins straight off the internet. Only Lars's pumpkin is a completely original concept.

Lars Carving his Pumpkin

We carve with drywall saws at our house. Oh, and I use that "we" very loosely -- I haven't personally carved a pumpkin in years. I like to draw the face on a pumpkin, and then hand it over to my handyman husband for the gut-scooping glory of the actual carving. It's a joint effort -- like parenting. Yeah. Also, someone needs to have clean hands so she can photograph the activity for posterity! You will be happy to know that, at the end of the carving party, everyone in my family still has all of their fingers firmly attached to their hands where they belong.

Anders Carving his Death Star Pumpkin

Once Anders saw the picture of a Star Wars Death Star pumpkin, his mind was made up. It took him longer than anyone else, but he stuck with it until he had a Death Star pumpkin of his very own.

I found a picture of a cannibal pumpkin "eating" another, smaller pumpkin. It was more interesting than an ordinary triangle-eyed, zigzag-mouthed Jack-O-Lantern, challenging, but achievable. I drew the face free-hand with a Sharpie marker and then handed the pumpkin off to Bernie for execution.

See how much he enjoys carving pumpkins? Who am I to deprive him of this joy?!

We had carefully selected a little baby orange pumpkin to be the "victim," and here he is, all carved and served up to the jaws of the big, mean pumpkin:

Unfortunately, this little baby pumpkin fell out of the other pumpkin's mouth and smashed on the driveway. I had to go to three different grocery stores before I found a little green squash of the right size to sacrifice to our cannibal pumpkin. Here's what we ended up with the second time around:

Here are the boys' finished pumpkins:

Anders' Death Star Pumpkin

Lars's Jack-O-Lantern

...And here they all are, hanging out together on the front steps, waiting for the trick-or-treaters to come tomorrow night! I'll try to remember to take another picture right after we light them tomorrow.

I think I will also rearrange the pumpkins when Bernie isn't looking. I'd rather group all of the pumpkins together on the right side of the steps. There aren't that many of them and they look weak spread out like that. Also, since we use candles, it's safer to keep all of the flaming pumpkins on one side so I can herd the little princesses and caped crusaders up and down the opposite side, away from the pumpkins.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Teacher Workday, Here We Come

2011-10-28T07:14:00.006-04:00

Today is a teacher workday. Two little rascals, home from school all day! You'd think I could sleep late this morning, but you'd be wrong. I set my alarm for 6 AM, thinking I could walk the dogs before the boys got out of bed, but when my alarm went off the boys were already awake, plotting against me in Anders' room. I heard them as I staggered down the hall: "Track 11! Play track 11! That one will really wake her up!" Then, a blast of Led Zeppelin at an ungodly volume nearly knocked me off my feet. Led Zeppelin? Really?! They are 8 and 10 years old! So much for a leisurely morning.

So here it is, ten before seven, the evil music player has been confiscated, puppy dogs have been fed their breakfast and are out in the back yard, and little boys have been slightly calmed by a brief separation in Time Out while I made my latte. It's still pitch black outside, but the blessing of caffeine is beginning to bring me to full consciousness so I can plan my day.

I'm going to need to walk my dogs, and I will need to bring Lars with me to prevent mischief and certain doom while I'm out of the house. This means I will need a bribe -- Ribbon candy? A chance for computer or video game time? Or maybe a trip to Starbucks later? Anders I would trust with my banking password and the car keys, but Lars? Not so much.

I have some pillows for a client that I need to pick up from my drapery workroom later today, so my little "assistants" will be coming along for the ride. We can go to Starbucks afterward, if they cooperate and behave well in the car.

Lars with his Vanilla Steamer, Anders with his Kid's Hot Chocolate

They really dig the cake pops at Starbucks, along with their beverages of choice: a Kid's Hot Chocolate for Anders and a Vanilla Steamer for Lars, who mysteriously has no enthusiasm for chocolate whatsoever. Obviously, little boys who wake up and terrorize me with classic rock before the sun comes up don't get anything with so much as a drop of caffeine.

What else is in store for us this day? Lars is going to his first sleepover birthday party tonight, which means that I need to take two little boys to Target to select a gift today. I think I'll delay Target as long as possible, because my Bernina dealer is in that shopping center and there's a good chance my sewing machine might be serviced and ready to pick up by late afternoon -- cross your fingers! I'll also need to get Lars's overnight things packed up. My decorative painter will be coming by to work on my dining room ceiling at around noon, so we will need to stick around the house for most of the afternoon (I'll try to post some pictures of that later). I have some business calls and paperwork to attend to at some point. Oh, and I need to get the Halloween costumes down and figure out what each trick-or-treater is going to wear (and referee any ensuing fights), because immediately after we pick Lars up from the party tomorrow morning we're taking our boys to the Phantom of the Lollipop concert at the symphony. Bernie should be back from his business trip by late this afternoon, thank the Lord.

Man, just thinking about this day is making me exhausted. Do I hear the water running upstairs?! I need to go... Happy Friday, everyone!

Temptation in Red: The Bernina 830LE Limited Edition

2011-10-26T15:15:00.000-04:00

As you all know, I sew over pins. On my drunkard's path blocks I'm sewing so slowly that the needle just deflects when it hits a pin, but just before starting this quilting project I whipped up a quick window treatment from leftover fabric for a window in our exercize room. When I'm sewing fast, I usually am careful to pull the pins out right before they get to my presser foot, but this time I charged over those pins, full speed ahead, and hit two of them. One got bent into the shape of a square root sign, and the other broke my needle and the pin.

So, as I was slowly sewing those first drunkard's path blocks, I started to hear a little metallic click with every stitch -- a sure sign that I had knocked my timing out of whack when I sewed those pins (alas; I have heard that clicking noise before!). My sewbaby hadn't been in for a tuneup in over a year anyway, so I brought her in to my local Bernina dealer for service on Monday afternoon.

You know how the car dealer desperately wants you to use their service department so that every time you get an oil change, you're wandering around lusting after all the gleaming newer models on the showroom floor? Well, that's what it's like at the Bernina dealership. Except that at the car dealership you have no real urgency. They have a newer, shinier version of my car with more bells and whistles? Well, they'll still have it next year or the year after, or whenever I need a new one. They are having a special discount promotion? Well, they always have special promotions going on; that's nothing new, either. But the mad marketing geniuses at Bernina have come up with a fancy, beautiful, shiny RED version of their top-of-the-line sewing and embroidery machine, and it is a limited edition -- only 4,000 of them were made. Here she is, Miss Sewbaby America, the Bernina 830LE:

Bernina 830LE Limited Edition

Bernina came out with the 830 machine a few years ago, just as the economy began to tank, by unfortunate coincidence. The computer in the 830LE is much faster than the one in my 200E/730E (my machine is the older 200 model, but upgraded to do everything that the 730 can do), and there are some other neat bells and whistles, but the main draw for the 830 is that it has a gigantic bobbin that holds 40% more thread (which means less running out of thread in the middle of machine quilting or in the middle of stitching out a large embroidery design) and that the machine itself is much larger, with 12" of space to the right of the needle instead of the 7 1/2" of space I have now. That's a big deal when you have rolled up a quilt and jammed it into the space to the right of the needle so you can get the middle part of the quilting done.

Still, the price tag on this sewbaby is such that it might as well be a car, and I know tons of people who do amazing quilting and embroidery work on machines just like the one I already own. Bigger bobbins are not thousands of dollars better than regular bobbins, and I feel the same way about that extra workspace -- nice, but not necessary, and not worth a five-figure price tag to me. But it was a lot easier to say no to the regular 830E machine, which is bulky, masculine, and boring:

Regular Bernina 830E

See what I mean? Exact same machine, does exactly the same things, even costs $500 less than the Limited Edition, but it's so ordinary.

Meanwhile, with my head out of the clouds and my feet back on the ground, I really love and prefer my 200E/730E and it does everything I could ever need or want it to do. No upgrading to the flashy red sewbaby any time soon. I'm just hoping that my dealer gets a chance to service my machine before the end of the day today so I can pick it up and sew some more Drunkard's Path blocks for Lars's quilt this evening.

And, by the way, I am still going to sew over the pins in my quilt blocks, but I'll think twice before sewing over another pin at high speed. It's hugely annoying to have to stop working in the middle of a project for an unplanned well-baby trip to the sewing machine doctor!