summer – Page 3

And now I’m 32.

July 3, 2016 Marie Leave a Comment

Today I turned 32. I feel older than that. I probably look older than that, to be honest. I have more gray hairs than I imagined I’d have at 32, and it gets worse by the week, and sometimes I worry I look like I’m mid 30s going on 60. Especially when I’m knitting in public. But eh, what are you going to do? The silver strands don’t take dye well at all, so even attempting to hide it just leaves me with some other color hair mixed with silver. So the only thing to do is just embrace it and hope that I can make natural grey look cute, I guess.

Anyway. 32. Most years I bake myself my own cake. This is a long-running tradition for me, and while it started out as a bit of a bitter project because no one got me cake… it has turned out to be a thing I very much enjoy doing. There’s something nice about making a special treat just for yourself, as a celebration of yourself and the one year older you became. This year, though, I took things a different direction. I had that new pie plate… and fresh raspberries in the yard… and we had nectarines in the fridge… Pie it is!
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The thing about pie, in this household, is that I’m the only one who eats it. (Well, the little Mr does, too, but he’s easy to hide it from). So literally there is no one else in this house that I have to share it with. My pie crust skills needs serious work, so it’s a bit messy, but OMG is it GOOD. Summer in a pie, right here. Maybe birthday pie is going to end up being the thing I do, instead of cake. After all, pie has fruit so it’s instantly healthy, right? No? Oh well. Worth a shot.

So after all the pie making, I spent today locked up in my craft room to sew. First up, I finished my sister’s wedding quilt (and I’m hoping my sister doesn’t know about this blog, or if she does she has sense enough to just avert her eyes and move on to another website so there aren’t spoilers… consider yourself warned, sis!)

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I’m so excited to have it finished! And… I kind of don’t want to give it away. It was a LOT of work. Do you see how small my sewing machine is? Do you know how hard it was to roll that quilt and get it shoved through that small hole so I could quilt it? SO. MUCH. WORK. But… I’m pretty sure I’m going to make another one so I can have one for myself. Different fabrics, of course, though I do love the black/white/gold combo so much. But, alas, without a gift quilt to gift I’d have to come up with something else and chances are slim to none that I’d get something made before Saturday. I decided to machine the binding, and I thought I might regret it but I don’t at all. It looks fine. It’s still handmade, regardless of how the binding is done. And it was way less stressful to machine it.

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After the quilt was done, I decided I needed a new shirt. The thing with having a uniform for work is that I don’t need near as many clothes as I have. So I need a new shirt like I need another hole in the head… but I can make myself a new shirt to replace one of my commercially bought ones that is nearly worn out, so it’s a compromise. I’ve had this Akita pattern in my library since it was released, but never got around to it. The fabric is some mystery fabric I found for $1 at the Goodwill (score!) that was more than enough to make this shirt. I’m nearly done with it – all I have left to do is hem the bottom and sew on the neck binding. If all goes well, I’ll get it finished tomorrow morning and be able to wear it. It’s purely coincidence that it’s red and tomorrow is the 4th of July. I’m not exactly the most patriotic of people. Mostly, I just like the BBQs and the pie. :) But more on the shirt tomorrow when it’s done – I added a special little detail that I want tho tell you about when I have more time (and when birthday pie isn’t still lingering, begging for me to eat it).

We have berries!

June 29, 2016 Marie Leave a Comment

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Just a small amount of raspberries, but the canes are full of more to come!

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.

September 11, 2015 Marie Leave a Comment

Let’s pretend I didn’t set the camera up on the self timer to take these, okay? Let’s just go with the idea that I have someone following me around in the craft room taking my picture and that I didn’t at all have to run over to where I wanted to stand and wait for the picture to take, then run back over to make sure it looked okay or if I needed to take another and repeat the process more times than I’d like. PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!

My Dorothy apron is done. This one fits differently than the one I made before and I’m not sure why… seam allowances, maybe? I’m almost certain I didn’t pay attention to seam allowances in the past so that might be why the other one felt like a better fit on me. I’ll have to go dig it out of the kitchen closet and compare and see, I suppose. Maybe my body has just changed more than I realized post pregnancy.

Anyway. That photo of the pup and I just kind of happened. I kept trying to get pictures of me in the apron and they weren’t working out very well. I either looked awful, or the apron fabric needed fixed, or some other random thing about it was off. We don’t let the dog upstairs very often because she’s 13 with back issues but when I’m home alone I let her up with me if I’m going to be hiding in the craft room for a while. She just kind of jumped up on me to get my attention… and the snap has turned into my new favorite photo of us.

So onto the next project… the Wiksten tank dress. Yes, yes, THAT pattern again. This is probably going to be the last one I make for a little while because I would like to try out another pattern or two that I’ve purchased. I’m still working on that Mesa dress but just have hemming to do and I have to wait for my Amazon order to arrive and bring me the twin needle I need. So for now I’m using up more of the fabric I’ve recently purchased to make a dress version. It’s definitely a slower process than the last version. That brighter blue is sheer so I have to line the dress with some sheath fabric. which meant cutting the pattern twice, then stitching the layers for the fronts and backs together before I could begin stitching up the shoulders and sides. I have all of that done now, however, and just need to hem it all and apply the facing. I can’t decide if I should leave the curved hem, though, or just take it to my cutting mat and make it a straight cut. I think it’s a bit long, given that I’m only 5’2″, but I might wait until the husband gets home so I can ask his opinion first before I do anything.

I’ve had a very glorious kid-free day today, with taking the toddler to Nana’s and then coming back home to have time to myself. It’s been lovely. I’m not totally ready for it to end, however – I had this laundry list of things I wanted to work on today with my free time because I’m a huge over achiever and I’ve only gotten a fraction of it done. There’s still a bit of time, and there’s always after bedtime. But I have this really nasty habit of thinking everything I want to get done will take half (or a quarter) of the time it actually takes.

Garden update: mostly weeds

September 10, 2015 Marie Leave a Comment

Allow me to present the most pathetic garden in the history of gardens. Ok, exaggeration – obviously. But it’s pretty sad. The tomatoes didn’t get staked. The peppers didn’t even remotely make it. The bean trellis (which is home to beans that were never planted) is full of morning glory vines aka the vine of death and doom that we nearly had beaten back.

Overall, I’ve basically just been the worst person ever about keeping up with it this year.

Oh well. There’s always next year. And, with any luck, next year might be at a new place. IF I can get a freaking realtor to ever return my calls/emails. There’s this perfect property for sale with a sweet little 2 bedroom house on it. It needs work, but it’s perfect for what I’ve wanted, both in the amount of land and the size of home (which would require much purging, but would be totally worth it). It’ll probably be snatched up before we can even get ready to place an offer but I’m trying to not let that deter me.

Regardless, I’ve gotten a bit of motivation again and have been trying to buckle down and tighten up our spending. We have a new roof coming this month, which is draining a lot of our savings (hooray home ownership), so we need to not only replenish that but also start saving back for a down payment. It’s incredibly hard to find the kind of property I want, in the area I want, without spending a small fortune more than I’d like to. My only hope is to put enough of a down payment on a place that I can keep the mortgage low enough that I could work part time and farm part time (my ideal situation, honestly – I don’t want to take care of a house and a kid on top of acres of land and chickens and such while trying to work as much as I am now. That’s pretty much a recipe for a giant meltdown.) So who knows – maybe in a year or two I’ll finally be able to stop dreaming of a farm.

One.

August 8, 2015 Marie 3 Comments

A year ago today this kid made his grand appearance. This last year has been rough with many highs and lows, but we survived. We’ve all survived. But I’m especially proud of myself and that survival thing.

This kid is officially one and we celebrated with Peter Rabbit and carrot cake. I’ve promised the husband that I won’t go so overboard on the future. I really couldn’t help it, though – Peter Rabbit is just about my favorite kids book ever and Declan really loves the bunnies in the books we have and the one I knit him. And, truthfully, I didn’t really go THAT overboard – I had probably 100 different ideas for food and whatnot and ended up keeping all of that simple. So, really, he should thank me for not doing all the things I wanted to do.

Peter Rabbit will be making an appearance from now on every Easter, especially since we don’t celebrate the religious aspect of the holiday, so I can’t wait to dig all these decorations back out next Spring (see, it can’t count as going overboard if you’re going to actually re-use the decorations every year for a holiday, right?). The bunny cake was… eh. I don’t understand how to bake with these fancy pans – the instructions say to make the sides of the cake higher than the middle… but, hello, gravity called: they’re breaking up with your silly directions. I don’t know, maybe I’m doing something wrong? The one half of the bunny had broken ears, and there was no way I was going to be able to shave the sides down to piece this thing together to make the 3D cake I imagined. But, you know? I don’t even care – it looks damn adorable sitting on a bed of kale on my cake plate regardless.