Mittens, Holidays and Organization

Happy new year, y’all. How’s the year treating you so far?

{My brother, Jeremy, making honey walnut wheat bread.}

I’ve had any number of blog posts appear and disappear out of my head in the last few days. Mostly they disappear into the mashed potatoes that seem to be clogging up my head (hey Mom, you know that cold you had?). But basically, what I want to talk about boils down to three things: (1) mittens, (2) food prep and (3) family holidays. Not necessarily in that order.

{Lovely misty freezing weather in Iowa.}

Let’s start with the mittens though. I can’t seem to finish them. I’ll have you know I worked on an awesome traveling blog post about making mittens, only to find I wasn’t too pleased with what I was doing. Then I never seemed to have the time to sit down and work on them again, and finish. So here I am! Still mitten-less! This chaps my hide, if you’ll pardon the expression. I PROMISED MYSELF HANDMADE FUZZY MITTENS, and here I am still NOT with the mittens. Finishing them is my real goal for the week. Before it gets too warm to wear them.

{Jeremy’s bread, which I just finished off tonight along with my mom’s cranberry bread yesterday.}

Let’s move on to family holidays. I did what I’ve done many times in my life, and went to Iowa to my grandparents’ house. I love this ritual, and it’s something I remember doing for most of my life. It is a far drive, and I sacrifice other things to do it, but it is a dear and important tradition to me. This is usually the only time I see my maternal extended family during the year, so I make an effort to make the trip each year. I wish I could kick the a** of my paternal family to do the same periodic gathering sort of thing.

{It turns out my mom’s good at un-knotting tangled skeins of yarn. Thanks for those tangles, Wesley!}

On a side note, I got lots of great stuff. You? I gave almost 100% handmade things. It was definitely the season of felted pins. I did not make stuff, however. I will probably do something masochistic like that in the future (like some other crafty bloggers I know), but not this year. Once again, I failed to send holiday cards also. Meh. One day. Maybe I could send Memorial Day cards? Halloween?

{Denmark cemetery. You know, the old kind of town cemetery, dating to the 1800s, behind the church in the small town.}

This year I was in charge of the holiday food. Nine people from Tuesday to Saturday. Granted, I love to cook, and I don’t mind cooking a lot, but I’m used to cooking for two. This required meal planning. I love me some planning! I had charts, and I had lists, and I had recipes and I had … well, let me just show you:

See what I mean? I put notes and stuff on Flickr, too.

{I didn’t remember to get french fried onions for the green bean casserole, so I layered stuffing over the casserole instead, and it actually turned out pretty well.}

I was happy to have my grandmother (who is 83) sit while I did the work this year. She’s not good at just relaxing, but we tried. There isn’t a whole heck of a lot I can do for her being so far away, so it was good to do. Everyone else helped me out, and we all got fed on a regular basis. Usually my uncle Dan or my aunt Miriam do the cooking, but there’s no reason for me to sit around like a fence post. Uncle Dan helped with the meat a lot, which isn’t really my thing anymore.

{The day after Christmas it snowed. A lot. And Jeff drove on this to get us from Iowa to mid-Missouri. Good times! Actually, the glare from the windshield makes it look extra bad.}

The whole holiday was nice. Crazy family, crazy drive … oh hey. Did I mention there was a snowstorm on the way back to Texas? Jeff drove. I crocheted mittens. My mom got bored. It took two and a half days, but we made it in one piece. And THAT, my friends, is the mitten story. But it’s not today’s story.

California and other stories

So what I was doing three weeks ago before things in my life got sidelined, derailed and permanently altered was trying to relax. Ironically enough. I was on vacation in California, seeing what there was to be seen and visiting my brother. Although I’ve been to 42 out of the 50 US states now, I’d mostly missed CA except for one trip to San Diego, but I was too young to really remember it. It turns out that California has a fair amount of spectacular in it, kinda like this:

If that’s not your cup of tea, perhaps you’ll like the quiet coastal lighthouse wreathed in fog just down the road.

I mean really, who wouldn’t like this sort of coastline? Even though I grew up near Texas beaches, there’s no comparison with this. The truth is that many Texas beaches are rather smelly, sad and dirty affairs due to all the offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. They don’t look like this. Or smell like this. Have I mentioned the gigantic and pungent eucalyptus trees near the coast? And the pine trees? It seemed like no matter where we went, it smelled like awesome.

Anyway, we went all over the place from San Francisco to Felton to Santa Cruz to Monterey to Big Sur and back up to Nevada City and Truckee and Lake Tahoe. We encountered quite a bit of wildfire in our travels, first the Lockheed Fire and then the Yuba Fire. I spent half the week with ash falling on me and smoke in the air. This, for example, was what I saw north of Big Sur near Carmel-by-the-Sea (cough cough hack hack).

Big Sur is beautiful and dramatic and slightly nerve-wracking, but overall much of that stretch of Highway 1 is quite peaceful, and there’s more farmland along the coast than I expected. A lot of beautiful vegetables that really made me want to cook quite desperately. When we got to Jeremy’s cabin in the Sierra Nevada, I cooked quite a bit, just to relax, because by that time we knew Audrey was really sick and we were upset at being so far away. In the end, I left my brother food for a week I cooked so much. The news also made me quite weepy about all animals, like this snoring/barking sea lion. They are really more like watery dog-like beings.

So did I mention Lake Tahoe is spectacular? My brother sat out and contemplated it one afternoon.

We did also spend time in San Francisco proper wandering all over the place from the Mission District up through the Castro then up Market to downtown, and up to the wharf and stuff. We treated ourself to Greens restaurant one night for some fine vegetarian cooking, which was quite easily the best meal I’ve ever had in my entire life. When down in the Castro, after having some extraordinary coffee at Philz we sort of stumbled upon ImagiKnit, whereupon I purchased six skeins of Pima Fresca yarn (bulky pima cotton) from Queensland Collection in chambray. I wasn’t planning on that, but it was sooo pretty, and on sale … and as you can see, by that point I was weak. You see, ImagiKnit separates plant and animal fibers, and also labels stuff very clearly instead of just stuffing it all in. Usually I end up with itchy, red hands from picking things up to see what they are, and it was so enjoyable to go to a yarn shop without having an allergic reaction from handling wool.

It was great to see my brother, who I’m very close to, and neat to see his job. He does utility pole inspections in various guises, part of making sure the electric infrastructure in parts of California is operational, that they’ve cleared stuff out to avoid more fires, that nothing’s going to fall down and kill people or leave them without power. It’s neat. If sometimes dangerous for the enormous ants, unruly ranch animals, cantakerous rural folks, occasional cliff hiking and of course, the Very Large Splinters. Like this one.

I also got to see my nearly-three-year-old cousin, and her mom my first cousin, and her husband, and they are all very lovely and exuberant people who live in a lovely seaside community that most of us would give our left arms to live in. We just haven’t figured out places like this exist, and that you can really live there. They fed us, and sheltered us, and I’m afraid we were very upset and poor guests one night, so we’ll have to make up for that later.

So that, in a nutshell, was my vacation, which went awry halfway through, but was still quite memorable for both Jeff and I.  I’m sure it will pop up in future art/craft projects. And now I leave you with one last classically-Californian-sunset-but-seriously-it-can’t-really-be-that-pretty picture. Because really, it is that pretty.

Flowers for my Mom

This past weekend Jeff and I made a trip to Houston to visit our respective mothers. Since I work on Mother’s Day, we were a week late, but the love is still there, right?

So for this past Mother’s Day I decided to make my mother a gift of one of her favorite things, violets. I wouldn’t have thought of it except one of my favorite crochet designers – June Gilbank – provided a lovely pattern for a cute little pot of violets just in time to make them for the day.  It didn’t take too long to make it, it was fun, and it turned out so, so well!  June is one of my favorite designers because her patterns are deceptively simple, but just exactly right.

As you maybe can see from the picture, my mother loves violets, and as long as I can remember has grown lovely examples on her kitchen windowsill. So the idea was to make her a special, permanently flowering version of them.  I took June’s pattern and altered it just a wee bit, and it became not just a pot of violets, but a basket for jewelry.

I made sure to use fuzzy green yarn (Jiffy yarn in Avocado) for the leaves, because I always loved the soft velvet of violet leaves. Apart from that, the main difference from the pattern was that I split it in half to make a basket.  The original design is all one piece and stuffed with fiberfill.  In order to change it, I judiciously applied plastic cross stitch canvas, some matching stash fabric and a bit of fiberfill.

The first step was to cut out circles of plastic canvas to stiffen the flower top “lid” and the bottom of the pot.  Then I sewed a rectangle of the canvas into a circle shape to stiffen the pot sides.  I also sewed the circle for the pot bottom to the sides. I used plastic canvas because (1) I could sew it and (2) plastic doesn’t disintegrate over time like cardboard does and (3) it’s waterproof.

Next I got a large circle of coordinating fabric from my stash and stuffed it into the little basket made from plastic canvas.  I stitched the fabric to the canvas with yarn around the top, and then I tacked the fabric to the bottom of the pot with four tiny stitches, also using yarn.  That leaves you with a basket lined with fabric.  Then I trimmed some of the major excess off the outside, still leaving a considerable amount so it’s fabric-lined inside and out.  Here’s the lining basket after sewing (and a lovely picture of the Men’s Health magazine I was using as a table).

The final step was to stuff the fabric basket into the yarn basket and smooth the fabric down, and tack them together with matching yarn. Voila!  fabric lining inside and out. Creating a lovely, structured, lined basket capable of holding the most lovely of jewelry, if I do say so myself.

I did something similar to structure the “flower lid” by adding a circle of plastic canvas to the bottom of the lid. I also obviously added the brown lid bottom to suggest the dirt the flowers are growing in.  In the original there is no need for this bottom.  Apart from the canvas, the lid is mostly stuffed with fiberfill.  The crocheted bottom structured with plastic canvas is the lovely structural finishing touch that makes the lid match the bottom in shape and style. I don’t want to say more beyond that, because I don’t want to give away June’s clever pattern.

I also added a “lip” to the top and bottom of the crocheted pieces in white by adding two rows – I crocheted around twice in both the back loop and front loop of the last row of the top and bottom.  The point of the lip is to create a way to fit the basket together in a neat way. (sorry for the fuzzy picture below)  I did this before attaching the fabric.  You can see the bottom of the lid including the “dirt” bottom and lip in the picture of the two halves also.

So that was my Mother’s Day gift to my mom!  She loves jewelry and violets and purple, what better way to tell her her crafty daughter loves her than to make something out of the things she loves?