Sunday Afternoon Laurus nobilis

That’s bay laurel to you.

So my MIL has a bay tree. A big one. So it was that one day, she gave me a gallon and a half of dried bay laurel leaves (and three more gallons of other herbs from her garden!).

I thought to myself, “Self, what ARE you going to do with all those? You cook a lot, but not nearly THAT much.”

And so I made a wreath.

It was one of those lazy Sunday evenings. The day was nearly done but it was not yet time to make dinner. I had reserved an hour or so to plant myself on the couch with some tea and a movie.

Supplies were simple. A green foam florist’s wreath, a thin needle, green thread, and some very tiny needle-like tacks.  And patience.

For an hour, it was (1) thread five leaves (2) tack to foam (3) repeat.

At the end the whole from was covered in a continuous stack of leaves, and I just tacked a few extra on the inside and outside to finish covering the foam.  Add a simple gingham ribbon for hanging, and there you go. Bay Laurel wreath for about $4.

Doesn’t Pottery Barn sell fresh versions of these things at the holidays for some ridiculous amount of money?

Did you know? Bay laurel wreaths, in the medieval period, were used in people’s houses because they were supposed to ward off evil. Pretty fancy. Bay laurel is really just a small evergreen tree, usually used decoratively in the Mediterranean places from which it hails. It’s also one of my favorite herbs, has various well-known symbolism, a common usage in architecture and a notable place in Greek history.  I also just learned it’s the 2009 Herb of the Year of the International Herb Association. I’ve read it has applications in witchcraft as well as in herbal medicine, but I’ve never tried.

I mostly think having a dried version around smells nice and looks pretty.

Why it’s called “crafting”: Flower Afghan

Last night at about 1:30 am I finally finished my daisy flower afghan.  I’m quite pleased with the way that it turned out, which is really lovely, because putting that much time and effort into something you felt ambivalent about would be distressing.  I was so pleased I actually made a special effort with my photography for the finished project.

This blanket epitomizes for me the nature of crafting: a bit of this, a bit of that and a lot of effort.  The patterns are mine and not mine:  part flower pattern I found, edited appropriately, part pattern I made up, a multi-colored checkerboard pattern I came up with and some brown and red borders.  The end result is only a tiny bit talent - some hand-eye coordination and a bit of visualization.  Most of this blanket is just sheer time and effort.  I got a lot of practice crocheting.

So how long did it take?  Well, it took me about an hour to do each block plus a little, and there are 48 blocks, which means about 52 hours.  It took me another 24 hours to do the stitching and borders.  Plus a little time when things go wrong or I have to fix mistakes, another 3 hours.  I’d say that’s a good but conservative estimate of how long it took to make me, and that means I spent over 100 hours of my life spent making this.  I’m quite a bit better at crocheting now.

For the next month or so, you should expect to see a lot of flowers here, this is the beginning.  It’s springtime in the Hill Country, which means wildflowers, which is just about as pretty as it gets for me.  I’ve always preferred simple field flowers to cultivated ones in almost every case.

So there you go! Nice, eh?  I’m very happy it’s finished, and happy it turned out well!

Cute and warm

I am sitting here waiting for some medication to take effect.  I am sick again.  This hardly seems fair, and I am endeavoring to not be a grumpy Gus about it.  So I find myself with a half an hour until sleep, just enough time to post pictures of my dog. As promised, I have completed Audrey’s dog sweater.  See?

The sweater was originally a different project, a sweater for a cousin, begun way before this blog started.  It began to be a dog sweater when I messed up the stitch and ended up with a fairly wide bit of fabric I couldn’t use and wasn’t sure what else to do with it.  I discovered that the length of fabric fit around Audrey well.  She was then 11 pounds, which is a tad bit on the hefty side for a Yorkshire Terrier.  Now she’s about 9.2 pounds through cat-inspired exercise and illness, which means the sweater had to become a wrap sweater in order to fit.  I still need to shorten the wrap ties, but those ties make this one of the easiest-fitting sweaters I’ve ever wrestled onto a dog.

Honestly, dog clothing is on the silly side, and Audrey doesn’t like wearing it.  I mean, she’s a lapdog, but she’s still very much a dog‘s dog, if you know what I mean.  Nevertheless, I made this because Yorkies have fur issues - they don’t actually have fur, it’s hair, and they don’t have an undercoat. That’s good ’cause they don’t shed, but bad when it’s freezing out, because she takes a step out the door and starts shivering so much her paws skitter on the pavement.  So you can see that her getting deathly ill in January sorta made me think - hey, where’s that sweater!?

This one was designed to be loose in the right places, cover her tummy but leave her legs bare.  Audrey has this funny (really hysterical, actually) problem with her legs and feet - if they’re covered, she stops dead and refuses to move.  If you really want her to stay in place, put shoes on her.  She’ll stand there for hours on three legs.

As a last step, I am going to sew a harness right into the inside of this sweater, because separate harness + sweater = 15 minutes wrestling with dog.  That way I’ll just put this on and clip on her lead, and there will be less fuss for everyone, and a dog that doesn’t end up shivering pathetically!

Now I’m going to go collapse in bed.

P.S. So the Lion Wool (the royal blue in this sweater) … after about 5 minutes I had to get a hand covering.  It started to feel like I was rubbing my fingers with steel wool or an emergy board.  That can’t be good.  I guess this isn’t what it feels like to people who aren’t allergic?  What does it feel like?  I really don’t know.  Surely Lion Brand wouldn’t sell any if it felt like that to everyone.