friday

nothing like a return to other people's schedule and expectations to make one welcome friday.

it's so arbitrary and it happens every week, yet i can't help but mildly celebrate its arrival/existence. a few minutes early to work this morning (quite a short drive), i got to enjoy a whole song of regina spektor's, a pretty melodic and echoing piece that suited this morning's bright sky quite well. things are greening. and i'd already had coffee, breakfast, made a listing on etsy. the eye one
which i adore, specifically due to the adaptation of the embroidery stitch to needlefelting. i love a lot of embroidery motifs, but at this point, i am not an embroiderer. there is a certain appreciation for color, texture, fiber qualities that exists within embroidery, and so i'm interested in taking these old techniques and needlefelting them. well that's an ambitious statement, as this pouch itself is one of the first in the projects that do this.
there's a camel-colored felted bag that's accented with a warm blue and nice dark red that's just gorgeous- it's upcoming. i'm having difficulty finding a suitable button- i'm looking for a nice plain wooden one, on a shank. tougher than it sounds. it's fabulous. should i end up ever with a nice camel colored coat, i'd like that motif to go somewhere upon it, in those colors too. but this pouch is a more tropical assortment of colors, and there's nothing wrong with that either.

an enjoyable evening planned, some baked polenta fries (gotten from 101 cookbooks, a food blog i've come to find really reliable and quality) and broccoli, perhaps a cartoon movie from studio ghibli- one of the few types of movies the three of us find agreeable. maybe some stove popped popcorn, maybe some roasted garbanzo beans. the fantastic feeling of leisure, which i'm sure i will muss up with finding something yarn-related to work on. oh well, if i can't pet a cat, i can at least mess with sheep hair. planning tomorrow's breakfast all the while.

midafternoon: beer and potatoes (with a sort-of recipe)

i'm not being needlessly decadent, both the beer and the potatoes were leftover. started the new job in earnest today, and while it's not my absolute favorite type of job in the world, there are perks; i'm not confined to a chair and a four foot by four foot space for eight hours a stretch, tethered to a telephone (eek! the horrors!) and my mind completely on loan to someone i don't even like very much. and, i got off today rather early. early enough to stop by a clothing resale (somewhere between a lowbrow vintage shop and higher end thrift shop) and try on a couple of things that didn't fit "just right" and then come home and shoot some pics for my etsy shop and enjoy some of last night's potatoes with the hub. and a 1554 "enlightened black ale" from new belgium. in reverse order, now.
the new belgium beer was one of a twelve pack, purchased the other night for our weekly family dinner/lan party. being done in by sinus illness, ill partner and week-long school break kid, i was not into cooking. i'd tried wooing both of my darling housemates with tasty treats throughout the week: valentine's day, we had heart shaped, faintly sweet scones sprinkled with big grains of colored sugar and sweet yogurt (brown sugar and almond extract in plain yogurt- a versatile dip/sauce) with some rhubarb and strawberry jelly from last summer; individual cherry pies, tortilla soup, eggs and fried potatoes & bacon amongst other delights. but exhaustion and jaded palates led us to a chinese buffet. i am so traumatized by the experience that i may never visit another again. i tried to convince everyone else that the best chinese food is not to be found beneath a sneeze guard and on a steam table. but none of us could pin down one item from a conventional restaurant that we could settle on so it seemed a good idea. i'll not fault that certain unnamed buffet for its lack of variety, but for the execution thereof. it was close enough to being pretty good that its failure to do so led it to be completely awful.
feeling sorry for ourselves, we agreed that our beer for the gaming festivities should be good, something that we enjoyed. we've picked up a folly pack on occasion and that evening it fit the bill. there are three of us, so the three bottles of four varieties is perfect, and towards the end of the evening we're usually amenable to trading. the ones we've gotten included fat tire, of course (the chocolate milk of beers), mothership wit (a belgian-style white/wheat beer, which i almost always love), 1554 (a tasty and dark brown ale) and the wildcard, which has been an interesting concoction new belgium calls giddy up.
giddy up is billed as beer, espresso and a hint of lemony citrus. rewind back to my college days; the first coffeeshop i really frequented (r.i.p. brickhaus) featured a proprietress versed in coffee and a menu item that included espresso and lemon. i never tried it, as i was in a mocha shake (the porsche cherry was the best, off-menu and named after our friend bobby's "porn name" - based on his childhood pet's name + the name of the street he grew up on) phase, if not availing myself of the 2.00 bottomless cup of coffee w/ lots of sugar. those were the days. anyway, i should have tried it, regretted not, and therefore was excited to taste that beer. i've drank a lot of beer, tried lots of kinds, but don't really claim to know much about it beyond what i like, what i dislike and what i've not tried yet. it's like most new belgium beers, quite refreshing. a good start to an evening of gaming and beer sipping, the espresso taste kind of gives a (psychosomatic) energy lift, and the rich dark beery flavor and lemon kind of spiral together. delicious, to me.
so the 1554 was left over from a couple nights ago and i enjoyed it. a moment of leisure and a pint is a lovely moment.
the potatoes, nommed in a hurry, are the only recipe i really remember gran cooking when i was young. she went all out and did eggnog french toast on xmas morning, and would do the occasional thing here and there, but really is not one for cooking. this, i remember eating along with something that required ketchup and mustard type condiments as i used the same to cover over the green onion flavor in the potatoes. but when i was making them up last night, they didn't smell right, then i rescued some old green onions and once they were added, it was all correct.
so. the sort of recipe. i'm not going to bother with strict measurements, just use what you have, use your nose and judge based on your crowd's hunger and needs. we ate this as a main course, but it could have been a side, too.
boil enough russet potatoes. i didn't use russets at all for a while there, and have recently gone back. they're delicious. buy them organic, scrub the skins and don't peel them. that's wasting food.
while potatoes boil, get out some yogurt (sourcream), cheddar cheese (sharp if you fancy it), green onions (if the outsides look wilty, pull them off. there might be some good onion shoot there in the middle), a little butter, salt and pepper and a couple slices of nice thick bacon- i buy some good ends and pieces at an independent grocery here in town, for flavoring use, so i cut a couple of slices off that. (bacon's tasty, but optional. i made this without when i was hard core vegetarian, and with margarine too, and it was a-ok.)
if bacon, put it in a cold pan and turn on the burner, removing when it is nice and browned and crispy. let it rest on a paper towel to drain a little grease and crisp up. save your pan of bacon fat for browning onions or something in, throwing it away is wasting food.
while bacon cooks and potatoes boil, cut off a tbs or two of butter and set aside. cut off a good knob of cheese, and slice.small cube, and save a nub for grating over the top of the potatoes. slice some green onions, and put butter and cheese back in the fridge. after the bacon's done and drained, dice it up into nice-sized pieces
one-a these days, your potatoes will be done- test them with a fork, when they're soft enough for pretty easy mashing, they're done. get out a baking dish (i used a glass bowlish shaped thing) and put the potatoes in. mash them up, add the butter so it melts. add enough yogurt/sour cream to make things pretty creamy. russets are mealy, so we want to bind that together. add in the cubed cheese and part of the bacon while stirring, then the green onions. add some salt and pepper, and stir. smell. you want to smell everything in a nice balance, but the parts that will stick out to your nose will be the bacon and green onions. use this smell to let you know if you need more green onions or not- they cut the richness of the dish, but we all have differing tolerances for them.
once that's all done, use a spoon and make the top nice and smooth. sprinkle on the bacon and cheese. it can sit for a little while at this point, or you can bake it immediately. stick it in the oven, covered, at 350 until the cheese starts to melt, then take the cover off so the cheese can brown a little. it takes 20-30 minutes all told.
ingredients: potatoes, butter, cheese, yogurt/sour cream, salt & pepper, bacon and green onions.
it's good stuff and a food/flavor memory for me.
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i have several projects going right now, in various stages of completion. they all reproach me when i walk past them; there are yarn balls giving me baleful looks, and purses that need buttons heaving meaningful sighs. beads twitter and giggle to one another under their breath, and patterns to find or devise playing ring around the rosy in the back of my mind. a folder of photos to edit and posts on etsy to space out and create. hopefully, it all leads to more.

love, late

our household for the past week and two days has been hit simultaneously by an adult incidence of illness, with requisite puny days and schoolfree week. bless those year round schools. a week's a nice long time, and we could have done so much more. in my ideal freelance future, i can visualize a three day field trip (and i mean really, like a field with a trail and some trees in it or a field with some sheep in it) but reality intruded, unpleasantly, but was treated to many cups of hot tea.

therefore with these protestations, i must submit my second shared love installment a little late but with no less love. i don't give myself a break on anything else- i was still working (on things that will be felted and thus washed in really hot water) and cooking, etc, so i cheesed out on uptalking another something cool. but here it is.

song for today: yael naim's "new soul" - really too cute.
which fits in nicely with this week's very cute new friend: gossamer, of portland
i cast the net wide on a day when i felt a little puny and the smallest person in the house needed some out time. we managed to catch a beautiful sunny day in the 50s. i made a list from google maps of several yarn/fiber places i'd yet to visit; needing fiber, a needlefelting pad and a good shove towards just getting started on that already.

gossamer was our first stop, and i'm so glad it was. the window beckoned with fairies and skeins of lamb's pride in shades of green (and i'm a sucker for lamb's pride/lanaloft. confronted with a rainbow of them, i'm apt to grab a skein or two of some unlikely shade partly because it's just so darn useful. even more so now, but i'm getting ahead of myself) and once inside we were greeted with natural/ambient light and the warm sweet scent of beeswax. jewelry afore us, lamb's pride to my left, felting supplies aplenty, not to mention work on the walls and lots of books. and a cheery, chatty, knowledgeable proprietress busy at some work on a central table. cozy, without feeling small and homey without being run-down. all questions were answered amiably as i fumbled through wool fibers of several colors and flipped through sheets of all-wool felt, in fabulous shades. (and made in europe to their stringent children's safety standards!!)
sweater scraps, organized by color, and the lamb's pride too. i adore places that organize by color, my thriftshop trained eye is pleased and enjoys browsing that way. the (local) beeswax was the source of the gorgeous scent and many bars stood proudly on the shelves.
i also got to touch a piece of nuno felt/scarf and touching it immediately made thirty or forty new ideas scan across my brain.
needless to say, this was an enjoyable shop that will no doubt become one of my favorites. i like the neighborhood (e burnside) but don't make it that way very often. as i'll be out and about more due to upcoming employment, i will certainly make a stop to visit. and i see on the gossamer website that there is an open crafting time, which if i ever have a tuesday evening to myself, i would like to visit.
gossamer
also has an etsy outpost, on which she sells her beautiful and colorful dutch merino felt. i love how she's got the color groups assembled, and i do believe that she's one of those darling shop owners that would put together a custom set for a buyer.
however, should one make it to portland, her shop is worth the visit- it's part craft/education supply shop, part boutique, part gallery. beautiful felted paintings line the walls- the shading is incredible.

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and of course my visit finally precipitated a felting flood, which is kind of closing in on the finish to my mad de-stash. i didn't realize de-stashing takes so long, but it's okay. the new stash does call, but this needlefelting thing is so awesome that it's a huge distraction. at this point, i'd rather felt, but there's no more felting to do. only buttons. which don't thrill me, but i have to be very serious about as it's such an important part of the piece. i have some new pouches and purses which will appear in my etsy shop as a trickle over the next several days (after buttons and photos, that is).

great expectations (while felting)

i'm listening to Cat Power- specifically "great expectations" while felting. it's appropriate, and an appropriate phrase to describe the apprehension, the excitement, while work is out of my hands and being agitated.
and by the way, if you've never listened to Cat Power, give her a listen. the playlist i've got going has all my favorites on it- my ears were craving to hear "king rides by" - i know ear cravings must be common, right? it's also got "fool", "rockets", "werewolf" and "free" on it- some of the ones i like to listen to the most by her. Cat Power is good working music to me, pretty and interesting and kind of introspective. i really love having music in the house, and it seems like we're listing to it more as of late. the shorter person of the house is certainly going to have unusual taste in music as her pater and i listen to some weird stuff at times- working music, stuff to pace our brainflows. i have a hard time ignoring sounds at times, particularly music, since a lot of the adults i was around when i was younger were kind of particular about their music. so things like dentist's office music drive me crazy, the sounds must have personality. and having spent no small amount of time around musicians, and my own decade with the trumpet are all compounding factors.
back to cat power though, it's some of that music that i was exposed to a couple of years before getting really into it. a lot of things are like that, so i tend to acquire music and then put it aside for a while. i also get great mileage out of my wardrobe by doing this; unless i donate it or give it to a friend first. the major exception there, is things that i make for myself. i tend to finish the ends and wrap it around my neck or plop it on my head or what have you. i hooked up a pair of those handwarmer things, kind of a test pair in this hemp/wool i bought last summer (and was kind of disappointed with it) last weekend and put the left one on and wore it while i made the right hand one. i also slept in them, and woke up with bluish palms. needless to say the quest for the right hemp yarn continues.

and i'm distracting myself from my original point; the tenterhooks of waiting. this is another step in the week of destash, and unlike a lot of previous projects, i know that it's not that close to the end for some of them. for example, the washers i use do not have adjustable cycles, so i know right off that most of them will have to go through again. i like sturdy felt; that takes agitation and time. all the things going (8 pieces!) will need buttons- and i'm going to head to a recommended button mecca hopefully tomorrow and will have details about that! i'm going through a button phase at the moment, loving the combination of aesthetics and functionality. and a couple of the bags in there are intentional test pieces, that will have embelleshment- pretty much my first foray into that. i think i wanted to have the structure down, and will still do unadorned bags, but i really want to explore some new techniques.
i'm happy with the shapes i did in this go 'round, some chubby little pouches and some cool bags. i really like the handle attachment i did on one of the bags, i think it's going to look snappy finished up. hopefully.

of course, not content to work on one set of projects at a time, i'll be finishing this awesome, cupcake sprinkle inspired set of bangles. and starting to brainstorm projects for the new stash. i think i'm not going to allow myself to work from the new stash until i've finished with these in progress and am starting to list them. that should keep me motivated and encourage me to be sure and give these pieces the best attention than i can. they deserve it.

re-stash

i have been destashing for a while now; i'd stockpiled yarn for a little while, squirreling it away and have gradually worked through it over the course of the last couple of weeks. well, we were interrupted by the noro niji for a minute or 20 but i have otherwise not gotten new yarn recently.
until today.
in a huge leap of getting out and actually driving, i visited yarn garden. (i was going to put a link in there but the blogger and i are not getting along at the moment. it wants to continue the link, indefinitely and i'm not fighting with it at the moment. www.yarngarden.net. there.)
and i was hemming and hawing on several things, trying to decide if i really want to work with little bitty thin yarn right now. i think soon, but not just yet. i blanked everything else out and just followed my color eyes and found an intense red pink purple. it's called orchid, but it makes me think of retina-searing azaleas down in texas. i have some gorgeous roving that i got in alaska over the holidays, in a teal (color i'm loving right now) and a nice orange/brown that has some little azalea pink flecks in it and the teal too. it may sound funky but when i just wrote that, i saw the idea i'm going for and it will not be easy for me to put that one up for sale, if indeed i do.


and then other errands intervened, and finding myself on the northeast (kind of) side of town, i went to (see it's doing it again and i am annoyed and unable to fix it) grr.
so i went to close knit. i haven't been there as many times as i've been to yarn garden, as yg is walking distance from where i live.
and lo and behold, they had their big worktable in the back, covered in yarn. all 40% off. their destash = my restash. it's a great shop, though a little more compact than yg and they have a lot of wool. i talked myself out of a couple of things, namely this hotpink wool silk blend with little light pink slubs(?) in it. it felt incredible and was nice, and on sale. but reason prevailed. i don't think it'd be useful until next winter and it was awful loud to keep around until then.
i touched some cashcotton that i liked a lot, but it seemed to have a lot of acrylic in it. that actually happened with several yarns- they looked great and felt wonderful, but were over 10% or so synthetic. and i've fixed this as kind of being a guidepost, for some reason. and there's so much lovely looking and fanciful yarn out there, but most of the animals that make the yarn i use, well, their poop is pretty good for the soil. not so much, chemical plants.
and i know cotton's pretty intensively fertilized and herbicided- i'm trying to get more and more organic as i go.

today was pretty much the first time that ever felt like a sacrifice, like i wasn't working with something that aesthetically, shallowly, i'd like to work with. some of the louisa hardings, oh my goodness, there was a two-dollar bin with this awesome sequined yarn, but it was polyester. but TWO DOLLARS?!? unheard of for this stuff. but i was unable to give in, and left with some cotton/silk, some wool/mohair, a stray almost lilac superwash fuzzy merino (for a baby something, i think) and some gorgeous golden buff color bamboo.
okay. nevermind, seeing it written like that, i realize, it was no sacrifice at all.

commentary on these yarns upcoming, to be sure.

*on an unrelated side note, a person for whom i write has requested a head-shot type picture of me. turns out, i don't have one of those. i use my camera a million kittens a week and have a billion pictures of myself, but they're all uninhibited or very posed myspace type pictures. there's probably a whole generation of us, with this easy advent of digital cameras. cameras have generally always encouraged the shy to retreat and the hams among us to be ridiculous (think bunny ears, tongue sticking out, wacky off center poses) but i would think that the digital photo era, combined with the internet has really layered the ridiculous onto the sublime.

sharing the love

so, it's valentine's weekend and all; and as over all the consumer holidays as i'd like to be, it's also headed full-tilt towards the end of winter and spring is afoot. we walked to the grocery store yesterday (fantastic exercise when you're walking back in a hurry to start dinner and your re-usable bags are strapped variously about your person) and i had to stop and pet the fuzzy little buds that my husband calls pussywillow. soft, and sweet, and it's enough to inspire a little lovey-ness even into me. (i'm usually so distracted at making that i'm not all fluff and ruffles with the loveyness. unless you're a kitty.)

so, having some good feelings, i'd like to share them around. today, we'll be sharing the love with someone i met at the craft/art show (still working on that "craft" word) last week:
jose klein.
jose (and his too-cute family) were representing at the show last weekend with some plates. i didn't think much of it at first, like, "oh, plates." plates for eating, decorated plates like you see on late-night infomercials capitalizing upon the success of our most recently elected president, decorated plates that you see in terrible parade magazine and coupon inserts in the newspaper, china you got from some second hand shop and forgot and put in the microwave even though there's gold decoration on?
however, when i took a second to stop by his table a couple hours later, i was quite pleasantly surprised. by this:

"RUTH!" i shouted, having some sort of 13 year old riot grrl, who hungrily read ms magazine, and our bodies, ourselves, and naomi wolf and gloria steinem and even dworkin and mackennon (the last two not with complete agreement, but with interest anyway).
(see jose's Ruth Bader Ginsburg page here. don't worry, his approach to the english language is a little more professional than mine.)
here, at this craftshow in our unexpected basement location, i'd found another nerd. not the kind of nerd who made me wish that i'd brought my 12-sided die, but more like the kind that made me wish i'd finished my polysci minor. (it's okay, as the learning continues, and i still got so much valuable class time with the esteemed dr. saliyeh)
immediately i asked, but alas, no sandy. if i had a pair of plates honoring ruth bader ginsburg and sandra day o'connor, i would need a boudoir. a room that had my own private mirror so when i fortified myself for the day, i could look in the mirror and see these women over my shoulders and have a greater handgrip on something like resolve. on something like inspiration.
i digress, and jose even said that the pair, while not complete at this moment, could be arranged.

on his etsy profile, jose refers to a childhood tradition of plates and markers and reclaiming this- i see it as revisiting that prior, more innocent(?) experience of creation with all this baggage of accumulated experience and knowledge. i am particularly interested in those of us who revisit things we did in our childhoods; it makes for a long evolution. my great grandmother taught me about poetry and crochet when i was little, she crocheted constantly and was the only one of my relations that kept any sort of notebook as far as a knew/know. when we repeat these things we learned at such young ages, they are markings of our passage, cave paintings on the walls of our lives, if one will.

i also see a connection between drawings, oftentimes colorful and interestingly rendered due to the background of in-court drawings. court illustration is so obscure that looking up the history of the practice is somewhat frustrating to do on an "on the fly, while writing" manner. i know i've seen many many of them and am tempted to chalk it up to the practice of drawing the proceedings in a pre-video media era for wider dissemination and posterity. perhaps with a hint of the human tendency towards political cartooning.

but more on topic, part of the goal jose states is the effort "to put faces on the names buried in law school textbooks" and for that matter, the names and dates that we all ran roughshod over in highschool and college assorted history, government, and politcal science classes. these things that affect our every day lives, whether we realize it or not, these things woven into the social fabric of the time and place we live are as mundane and un-thought of as the plates we eat our food from. yet, one could argue, we'd be a great deal less civilized than we are now without them- with salad in our laps and a great deal of disorder.

in addition to images featuring supreme court justices, jose also makes plates representing different facets of law, focusing on "a set of important Interstate Commerce Clause cases, a set about punitive damages, the First Amendment and a set about executive detentions." this may all sound like dry stuff, but as previously mentioned, these things shape our daily lives and often go unnoticed. some of jose's images on the first amendment and executive detentions are somewhat chilling and thought provoking, to which i say "good!"

these plates remind me greatly of a show i covered in brief while i was writing little blurbs for the houston press. julie green does plates that she exhibits as a collection that she calls "the last supper". painted upon these plates, sometimes in pictures, sometimes in words, she features the published requests of death row inmates' final meals.


which is also quite interesting, in and of itself. i'm interested in this idea of plates, and by extension food, being so easily taken for granted; a symptom of a largely comfortable culture, survival wise. even the most foodie types among us who will spend half an hour in rapture over a cayenne accented dark chocolate truffle (who? me!) take it relatively for granted that we will have food over which to obsess and triumph. we take it relatively for granted, upon assumption, that the meal we're currently eating will not be our last. we take it relatively for granted, upon assumption that the products we buy are safe, that we can say what we like without being spirited away to some place either overdark or overbright in my imagination, for punishment.

to learn more about jose's work, background on cases and all kinds of other interesting thing, visit his blog at http://www.learnedhandmadeplates.blogspot.com/ and his website at www.joseklein.com
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i think sundays are a good day for sharing the love. look for this to become a weekly feature, like our weekly family dinner. i'd love to invite you to the latter, but we've only got four mis-matched barstools and one very tiny kitchen.
on the menu tonight? a very lowbrow american feast in honor of presidents' day- buffalo chicken dip, salad, veggies, some of my artisan bread and for dessert? in honor of the washingtonian whopper about the cherry tree, individual cherry pies, in tiny pie pans i've never used. we'll see how that goes.

My first FRONT PAGE!

I earned one of these:


I almost gave the rest of the house a heart attack in my very noisy disbelief. I loved this photoshoot but was scared that the pictures were too dark. I guess that wasn't the case!
What was it you ask?
Only my gorgeous venus victrix beaded bangles. Up there, at the top.
I love these

I was working on more of them today and am happy to see that they are getting the recognition I'd like them to get. As well as Mr. Twentyfivecent moose. Elk. Whatever.

FRONT PAGE!
I have proof, too:
Okay, it's a little blurry. I'm so glad I decided to check my etsy when I did...And for me, at least, there's no question, views-wise, that my item got something special happened to it. It was at I think 75, but now is around 250.
Another etsy milestone. I'm very happy about it, and will be even happier when the perfect person gives these babies a home. I'm keeping the moose. Elk. Whatever.