Once there was a big, cold lake

Dear Readers:

I am sorry to have been away from you since early July.
I confess I have not done a lot of crafting. Instead I went away to

Lake Tahoe, where I attended a family reunion.
It is true. I really am related to all of these people.
Which is awesome for me, because they’re all really nice people.

And I think that I was fortunate to be able to go away and stay a few days in a really gorgeous place,
Where the weather was cool and sunny,
And there were hundreds of my favorite aspen trees to enjoy,

Where I could eat many more homemade chocolate chip cookies and Doritos than was wise (but I tried to hike it off),

And have a great many really awesome conversations with awesome people.
I even played some pool. Badly.
And got several sunburns.

But in the meantime you’ll just have to do with these pictures.
Because I have really no idea what quilt to work on next.
All I have is ideas and scraps of fabric scattered all over my work table.
And no real plan in mind.

Hopefully I’ll have something crafty to post soon.
Sometime this year.

But not TOO soon. It’s still kinda vacation, after all.

The old fort town

If you can’t already tell, my blog is lagging behind my real life by a couple of weeks at this point – between spending a good bit of my free time sewing, several days of traveling and also having to take my computer in for repair, things are very two weeks ago. Which is not to say the last two weeks have been particularly exciting, but still … I’m behind.  But I didn’t feel like like moving on just yet.

[Old home in downtown Ft. Madison, Iowa]

The trip I took was to see my cousin graduate from high school – the whole family descended upon my aunt for a day or two, just long enough to make her small, fluffy white dog Bear go absolutely nuts with trepidation and excitement. I also realized while there that I’ve been to their home of Columbia, MO enough times to have a certain place I go for coffee in the morning. Columbia is quite a pretty place, home of the University of Missouri and also a lot of hills.

[Drawbridge across the Mississippi, Ft. Madison, Iowa]

My aunt Miriam and I share the cooking gene in our family, and also an interest in being healthy, so I tend to like her food a lot. A year and a half ago, after talking with her about it, I started paying attention to how much sodium is in the food I buy, which led to my horrified realization about just how salty canned and boxed food can be, and led to me cutting a lot of the salt out of my diet. My aunt is still one of the few people I know who pays attention to and cooks food like I do. We went to the Columbia farmer’s market when I was there, which was an interesting experience for me. When I go to markets I walk around planning meals in my head, and to be around food that I was not going to be able to cook was a little unnerving. I know, I’m weird.

[A now-unused shed on my grandparents' farm.]

My brother and I drove somewhere around 700 miles when we were visiting because we visited my grandparents in Iowa in addition to going to my aunt’s house, and our planes flew into St. Louis, which is only sorta near either one. I was kinda knackered when I got home after all that travel. But it was worth it, I think. I don’t often see my family in person, so I try to do what I can to make the most of the time I have with them, and when it’s possible I do plan much longer trips than five days!

[Downtown Ft. Madison]

When I was visiting my grandparents I got up really early one morning and took a nice three-mile walk around the downtown area. The pictures this post are from that walk. Ft. Madison is a Mississippi river town and a farming town, obviously one that has seen a considerable amount of river and train trade through it in the past couple hundred years. If you’ve ever heard of Sheaffer Pen, the company is from Ft. Madison though the factory is now closed. Ft. Madison is a piece of classic Americana, with a little main street and a park with a bandstand where people do really go hear summer concerts.

[Just down the road from my family's farm.]

My grandparents say that Ft. Madison has a lot of riffraff now because of the constant flow of people due to the river traffic, but if that’s riffraff, I’m a monkey’s uncle. I mean, it is and it isn’t. I’m used to places like Oakland and New York, people, so let’s be honest here: Ft. Madison’s riffraff feels pretty benign to me. Besides, in this town it’s hard to think about things like “riffraff” because the pace is so slow, the buildings are old and the traffic is light. Granted, the state’s only maximum security penitentiary is here and there’s a munitions plant down the road, but it certainly FEELS like it’s a place out of time. And really, I think it has many points that support that idea.

[There really are places with bandstands and summer concerts in the park.]

In any event, Iowa is not like where I live, or where I grew up, so it is always fun and interesting for me to visit, especially given that I have some very deep family roots there. Most people I’ve met in my life don’t know much about farming country and the Midwest and haven’t ever lived or visited there (Chicago does not count), so often when I talk about it people often react as if I am discussing a slightly foreign country. I feel as if the awesomeness of small towns in Iowa is one of my favorite open secrets. Actually, the awesomeness of Iowa in general is one of them, and it’s been my singular pleasure all my life to be able to return there every year and remember.

Hopefully this week I will finally complete the quilting of my project (it’s about 65% done) and get it bound, and whee! Who knows what I will do after that. Probably more sewing and quilting. I was considering making several small amigurumi, just for something different to do. I’m still totally feeling uninspired by crochet, so we will see. Probably I should clean off my crafting table though. Constant projects have left it looking a bit like a textile war zone.

Until next time.

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.