all buttoned up.

Winterizing

I did nearly no baking this year (a little for the neighbors, a little for guests) but I did stop and make these for a Mariko's Not Necessarily Cookie Specific Cookie Party. They are Lamington Cupcakes and come from The Craft of Baking, a book that usually gets a work out at my house this time of year.

That is glaze, not ganache and the cake part is more cake donut than cake. The crumb is very fine and bright white and as a not lover of cakes, I really love these. The recipe makes 12 largish ones and when I do it again, I may borrow smaller cupcake trays and try to make more small ones instead. They are rolled in toasted coconut and the few leftover were fine on the counter for a day or two.

We headed to my parent's house in B.C. to see the hundreds of cousins (not quite) and play in the snow that we woke up to the first morning after we arrived. We drove home just before Christmas to spend it here with our friends and various hi-jinks. The boys received more things that they needed than wanted (maybe) but it turned out just right in the end. The last couple of months I felt like I had acquired so many things (!!) for them but when they were all wrapped and under the tree I realized that I just have a lot of children and not really a lot of things for each.

I've finished a total of nine of Alicia's ornaments this year-- I sew them in bed at night getting the baby down. I have two more half finished that I packed away for next year. If you find yourself wanting to get into handwork and needing guidance and a beautiful finished project, I can't recommend her kits highly enough. I followed the directions and got exactly what was promised. They are sold out now, but I'm hopeful she'll release them again the the fall, so stick them on that list in the back of your head.

This was, by my counts, a banner year for making. I didn't think I would get very much done but I made a fairly ambitious list anyway, and then plowed right through it during nap times and a couple of weekend afternoons. I am always surprised at how much I can get through if I just put my head down and do it.

Comforter Style

For those of you who have purchased or sewn with Japanese double gauze, your eyes are probably popping and you're thinking "GIRL, YOU BOUGHT ALL THAT?!"

I'll stop you there and say, no, I didn't buy it, I STOLE IT. That makes it better, yes?

Mariko had a stack of half yards of Nani Iro Pocho and Fuwari Fuwari sitting on her shelf for years. I knew that she had planned to make a quilt out of them, but after watching the stack sit untouched on her shelves, taunting me, I finally took it down and told her I had a plan.

I had no such plan.

And so they sat on my shelf for a year and a half until one day I said, "enough!" and I cut into them with a half plan and a lot of good intention. The pattern is based on a throw project from Rashida Coleman's, "I Heart Patchwork". The squares are 9". I had wanted to tie it but I didn't want it to look fussy, so I opted for diagonal straight line quilting. The back is two lengths of double gauze sewn together, and I like it almost better than the front.

A few notes on working with double gauze:

• I didn't prewash because I wanted it to fluff up quite a bit in the dryer. Double gauze washes up almost like flannel and there's significant shrinkage due to a pretty loose weave.
• Because of that loose weave, piecing double gauze is best done on or against the grain. It frays and I had a monkey of a time trying to match those points due to stretching.
• It is so dang COZY, almost like a comforter. I stitched the binding on while putting T to sleep one night. I promptly fell asleep under it. I gave it to Mariko the next day because I knew I would want to keep it if I dragged it out. 

These projects bring me great joy. When I first started blogging (8 years ago?) I used to send surprise packages and swap beautiful things with people all over the world. It was fun and not always predicated on reciprocation. Making stuff and giving it away without occasion is so freeing and sweet. I need to fit more of that gift giving into my life again. Of course, if I can't find anything for Mariko for Christmas, I'm calling this her gift. So basically, I'm also covering my ass.

 

Where the Cat Hater Makes Tiny Cat Clothes and The World Did Not End

Manny poked at my belly this morning and asked me if we were going to get another baby soon.

How are YOU doing?

We are good. I'm sewing cats and kittens and tiny clothes for each. They are going under the tree for Truly.

I Blame Dorie.

There are probably more coming.

(The clothes all come off! The tiny dress is reversible! The baby is 2 1/2 inches tall!)

Beatrix for a Boy

My admiration for Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr is well documented, so when it came time to pair a charm pack of Lizzie House fabric and a baby-quilt-to-be-made, I turned to the first three issues of Modern Quilts Illustrated for a pattern. I don't use charm packs or layer cakes or what-have-you very often because I don't often own them, and I don't usually make quilts with a single line of fabric. That said, Lizzie does a fantastic job of mixing just the right number of quirky prints with her take on dots and stripes, that it's hard to go wrong when you're looking to make up something for a baby. This was a straight up stash project, and the only thing I changed was the size of the squares (which was dumb and took me much longer to do thanks to having to do MATH which I'm stereotypically awful) and an extra row of solid blocks on the long ends to make a small quilt a bit bigger.

 

Printz

Last month I started ordering prints of my photos to do a side-by-side comparison of some of the most popular online ordering sites. You all were so helpful with your recommendations and with card sending season upon us, I wanted to make sure I was making the best choice for us. I ordered from MPIX, Snapfish and my old favourite, AdoramaPix. Here was my criteria: I wanted the best possible looking print and the one that most closely resembled what came out of my camera. That means: no cropping, no colour correction/filters, and something like a matte finish. I wasn't worried about photo books or other products: just prints. I ordered the same prints on the same night from all three suppliers. It was actually four orders, because I requested both the budget and the e-surface prints from MPIX.

Here's the deal: MPIX and Snapfish both come out with near constant promotions making their prints the cheapest. I will tell you that I was pretty shocked that between these two, I preferred Snapfish for print quality. I will probably use them again if I'm ordering in large quantities for Christmas cards or whatever. In the end, AdoramaPix still has my heart. I could opt for no cropping, their uploader is much improved from the last time I used them, and their print price (without promotion) is slightly cheaper than full price prints elsewhere. I also chose their Lustre paper, which I'm pretty happy with. More importantly, when placed side by side, the colours and tones from Adorama were the most true to what I had taken. This is especially true when it came to Augie and Manny's skin tones. Mpix had them looking a little grey and snapfish upped the contrast in a significant way.

Here's the thing: I'm a average-to-fair picture taker, but if I'm going to go to the trouble of having the photos printed and hopefully put into books, I want them looking the way I took them (however flawed). It might be different if I only took photos of people's faces or groups of people in a commemorative way-- then I don't think it would be so important. But so many of my pictures are of the mundane and everyday variety, and I'd like to think that what makes them worth taking, is what also makes them worth printing. Or that's what I tell my hard drive, anyway.

So. Now to start getting these bad boys in albums that are neither non-corosive or toxic or made from animal parts (is that a thing?), and that will not require a home equity loan with which to purchase. Mo' photos, mo' problems, is what I always say.

I do, I really do.

*(For film photos I would still drive out to Blue Moon in St. John's, and I know lots of my people use Citizens in town for both film and digital.)

A Soft Ring (and a Ribbon Jar Gift Certificate!)

Like all good sewing momentum, you become transfixed with items Off The List and then head decidedly that direction (away from the list). I had help this time: Julie over at The Ribbon Jar, an online purveyor of beautiful ribbons, asked if I wanted to be a part of their Blog Hop, celebrating the revamping of their website. She sent me a packet of ribbon along with a bundle of my choosing (disclaimer: it was free to me). That said, it still took me far too long to make my decisions! They really have a lot of great stuff to choose from.

Picking a project to showcase some of what they sent didn't take me long (it's execution is another story). My plan was for a whole stack of taggy rings for Miss Grab-and-Chew, but I'm putting the other two or three on hold for Christmas. I used a free pattern for Baby Rings from Making it Fun (Kathy Miller's blog), scraps from my bin, and strips of Herringbone, Stitched French Cotton Ribbon, and both Red and Golden Wheat Grosgrain. The pattern is great. It's straight forward but does require some hand-stitching and attaching straight lines to curves. It's good practice if you've decided you're not good at either. To make stacking rings, I'm going to shrink the pattern slightly as I go.

Truly is happy to have something else to flick and tug at. She's at the age where it's helpful to have a small pile of toys next to the bed, in the car seat, in my bag, and in her basket in the living room. She has yet to force teeth out, but it's a near constant struggle and she will chew whatever she gets her hands on. I'm glad to be able to have another toy to be able to pop in the wash. The ribbon is beautiful, of course, and I couldn't help but colour coordinate when it came to picking out my own. I didn't own any velvet ribbon prior (the horror!) and I am a sucker for grosgrain, herringbone and twill of all kinds. It's almost time for gift bag season, after all.

The Ribbon Jar is offering one 25 dollar gift certificate to their online store to one commenter. Do you have a favourite type or colour ribbon at The Ribbon Jar? Let me know, and I'll randomly pick a name before Thanksgiving and you'll be on your way to owning it. You can see other participants and enter to win gift certificates here.

Hesitantly Holiday, The Folk Star Throw

Last year I ditched (gave away, mostly) a lot of winter/Christmas/holiday stuff that we didn't use or that I wasn't really feeling. It seemed strange and ruthless to get rid of things like these, but I really felt like I wanted to replace them with things we would all really look forward to see every year. I had it in my head that I wanted to make a holiday quilt, something that came out in November and could stick around through January. I had a small pile of dala horse/My Folklore Japanese fabric that I had been saving in a stack for a project like this, and then the clever bunch over at Purl Bee published instructions for a Striped Star Mini Quilt. Done.

I followed the instructions for the first star to the letter and was dismayed to realize how much pieced waste it created. For every arm of the star I was cutting away large triangles of strip piecing, and in the end I was left with a colourful pile of work going unused. And since last year this time I was in the beginnings of a wicked third trimester, and was running low on time/patience/ability to fit myself under my sewing machine, I put my piles away until I could figure out an easier way of putting them together.

A month ago I pulled them out, determined to get that Christmas Quilt done BEFORE Christmas, and decided that paper piecing was going to be much quicker and leave me with much less waste. I am a mess when it comes to math, but this one was pretty straight forward. I only used the paper for the striped arms of the stars, and then cut triangles out to piece the block together, following the original directions. I ran out of steam after four stars, and being determined to use only fabric I had on my shelves, I decided to put together some over-sized pinwheels to get it to throw-sized. In a perfect world, those blocks would have been some complicated variation on flying geese or something equally as folky, but time is not on my side this year either.

Again, in a perfect world full of money trees, I would have liked to find the some sort of neutral linen or soft wool to back it with. Instead, I pulled out yardage of yarn-dyed stripe left over from pj pants, and a warm grey, Japanese Snowmen print Mariko had de-stashed to me. The kids will like it better and I'm sure that in a few years I will look at its quirkiness with fondness. The quilting is mostly echo/straight-line, but I did use the free-motion foot to quilt all of our names into one of the stars. There are a few small open blocks that I think I might go back and embroider in: exponentially upping the quirk factor (if I'm going with it, I'm going to really go with it).

For now, though, it's done and ready for the couch (or who am I kidding? The floor.) and the next few months. It's also off the list and that is really the best gift. For the first time ever I'm only sharing my sewing space with my deep freeze and washer and dryer and it is AMAZING AND WONDERFUL, not to put too fine a point on it. I also have a space heater down there, so there is really no stopping that list from getting super long.

Stop Gap

 

(Manny took the top one, August took the bottom one)

Somehow, in the next few weeks, I will have both a new four year-old and a new five year-old. By "somehow", I mean that I will have no control over the sun and these two boys are going to grow, and Augie will lose a tooth this week, and Manny will learn all the letters in his name. While I say "don't get big! be little!" to them, I silently wish them to be bigger, smarter and wiser. I don't know. I'm having a hard time putting all this stuff down in a meaningful way. I feel it coming, though.

An Open Letter to Chicken: Puff Pastry

I know you are off doing your thing, with the jet setting and the home teaching and the potion mixing, and I realized I missed you and started to make a list of things we needed to address next time. But you know, I'll forget a lot of it and we won't have enough time anyway.

Last time we had dinner we got onto puff pastry and so I bought some at Fred Meyer and decided to try a Spanish custard thing for Paul's birthday. It worked, but there was something lacking on the pastry end and so I made more custard and tried making plain old danishes, just in case the dessert table fell short. They were much better and much faster. I cut the pastry into squares, cut a 1/2 inch line around the perimeter, topped them with a little custard, sliced peaches, and whipped egg white. I put them in the oven and watched them until they had puffed accordingly.

Caramel sauce makes it great. You were right. We ate some that night for dinner and then I put the rest in the fridge for the next day. They are definetely better at room temperature, FYI. The custard recipe is fantastic and I don't think we should skip that step. Steeped cinnamon stick! I ate that for the next two days. Next time I'm getting fancier puff pastry. I know that we should just make our own, yes? I have no time for that. Or maybe I just don't have the patience.

So what else is going on? I'm making tiny clothes which has calmed me down a great deal-- it's no meditation retreat, but it will do. Vintage Cakes? Why wasn't I at that book signing with you? Seriously, how does that woman speak our language so correctly? I just made a plum slump and realized that for me, summer is going to forever taste like that book.

Okay, we are due a dinner soon. Safe trip home--

xo, Frenchie.

Three Small Things

I have managed to sew three small things for Truly during the last week. If everything goes all right and the house is not too much of a disaster, Manny and I will sneak into the basement during T's morning nap and he will draw and glue and I will do something related to sewing or laundry (blech). We have been marginally successful. It helps that the seams are only ever as long as my arm. I traced patterns from a Japanese Craft Book (the NYC kids book everybody seems to have), Anna Maria's Quick Change Trousers, and Shelly's Ayashe blouse.

The little dress fits her now and I made it from a fine wale corduroy remnant and some beautiful cotton Sally let me pick out before she left (there's going to be a lot of clothes coming from Shim remnants). I thought it was the easiest thing I could think of to sew considering that I am quite out of practice. Of course, I picked something that involved some tricky inside-out turning and sewing, but it was fine. She's not much for wearing dresses. They get all twisted up when she's rolling around and refusing to sit or crawl. I don't know if it's because I've dressed three boys, but she wears far fewer traditionally pretty things than I thought she would. She looks right in soft, comfortable things... so what if they are mostly stripes?!

The trousers are too big, but won't be for much longer. The grey came from my Roobios dress and is the sort of fabric I could do with a bolt of. The gingham is from Sally and the reversible side is just an inverse of the two fabrics. I will be making more of these.

I love this blouse pattern and I'm planning several more in different sleeve lengths and sizes. And maybe lengthening it into a dress? That front yoke/neck opening and sleeve draping are exactly my thing in little girls clothes. In fact, when I'm browsing for small tunics or tops I always do a quick calculation in my head: is this more than a 1/2 yard of Liberty? Then I should make it. And also go buy some Liberty (see how that works?). This is double gauze that I've had for a long time-- maybe a remnant from Mariko? Actually-- I think she has a matching shirt? That would be fantastic. This is the 18 month size, which is too large to look right on her, but she wore it today anyway.

I bought some new fabric last month, but really, I should be able to sew for a good long time from my shelves. It's a shame that I'm so terribly wanty over several of the new prints from Liberty's new quilt weight line. That just means I should start cutting out quilts, yes? Manny doesn't have one yet, and Sam is in a new, bigger bed, which probably means a new, bigger quilt. See how easy it is to create unrealistic expectations for myself? DEAD EASY.