7. My First Lone Star

It was in the middle of machine quilting this one that I burst into tears. Not out of frustration. It was something else, something I didn't understand.

Something about working on a project that is for a person, not just a project that might one day have a home (like infinite numbers of baby hats, for instance), really puts a lot of mental energy into thinking about that person while you do it.

It wasn't until I started quilting this one that I realized it. Sure, I'd been thinking about Colleen and Tim while I quilted theirs, and probably some about Bevin while I cut up all that double knit, but it didn't strike me until I was finishing this one. Why do I keep thinking about Ian and Ashley and their baby? I kept asking myself. At the time, they were expecting a baby with Down Syndrome and we were all adjusting to this fact and worried for them. The whole time I was fiddling with this dang star (turns out, they are hard to make...) I kept thinking and thinking and finally just started to cry. I had to walk away and work on one for Mike's brother and sister-in-law. Got to think about weddings and San Francisco and cute apartments and kittens for a minute instead of heavy things.

As you probably know from my other blog, they lost the baby in early February and are still going through the emotional and mental calculus required to try to come to terms with that, all that. I know when I make this year's quilt for them, it will be tinged with this new sorrow and new worry and new hope. And it won't be a Lone Star. I need something easier, but more than that, I need something with a closer name. Something about a hearth or family ties.

6. Valentine Bento

Coming off vacation, not too creative. But Sophia wanted hearts in her bento yesterday and I at least had some hard fruits and veggies to oblige her. I do bento lunches every day now, for two girls. Sometimes they are awesome. Other times they are serviceable. This was serviceable. But I still have yet to find another way to get Maeve to eat everything...

The first two are two separate boxes of Maeve's lunch. Sophia had the two-bowl bento box yesterday so hers are more condensed. Yes, that's a chocolate covered strawberry. No, they didn't deserve them.

5. Bevin's Quilt of Shame

I hate double knit polyester. I don't like the feel of it, I don't like to work with it. It is a fabric of shame, something out of the tacky led-astray 1970s and earlier, when we were all told we'd be living better through science. I remember wearing double knit things as a child. My uniform skirt in 7th grade was made from the stuff. It is probably still a skirt somewhere in a diminished but still intact form. The stuff doesn't die.

When I was in college, I visited my friend Marita at her dorm and on her bed was a nine-patch quilt made of double knit. Suddenly the scales fell from my eyes. This was kitschy and almost cute. The jewel tones and the black made it almost Amish in appearance. It still had an awful hand (feel) to it, but it was heavy and never looked unmade or in need of care.

So in the back of my mind I thought to myself, someday I'll make one. Just for the fun of it.

And it stayed on the back burner because there are too many pretty quilts to be made. Plus I found denim and corduroy to be far more visually appealing and soft to the touch if I wanted a big heavy utilitarian blanket. I made several denim blankets in college and a few since then--I have plenty of old jeans in the basement to make more. I have a brown corduroy Rail Fence quilt that I use as the "I am so cold and it's 3 in the morning pull this over me" blanket at the bottom of my bed. In order to make a double knit quilt I would have to, you know, procure double knit. Back burner.

Mike's grandmother died in 2004 and sometime that summer Mary Helen gave us something from her house--Mike didn't have any real requests and, having lived through hideous arguments, bloody knife fights, and molotov cocktail parties over who gets what out of which dead person's house, I wasn't going to say a word. But finally on the 10th time she asked, I said if there was a quilt that didn't have a home, even one in really bad shape, I'd take that.

She brought me a double knit quilt, a rectangle Around the World. Each rectangle was 1 inch by 2 inches and hand sewn in the diamond pattern. Hand quilted. Perfect in every way. Mary Helen's aunt had made it. It was lovely and garish and everything I remembered from Marita's example.

Bevin, of course, saw it at some point and died of jealousy. She's not a quilter because she's too much of a perfectionist. That makes for good knitting but not for good home quilting (sure, if you want to be in shows, perfection is key, but the sampler quilt on the kid's bed does not have to be perfect, it just has to be done).

So when I made my plan for quilts for Christmas, I admitted to Bevin I was going to make her a double-knit quilt, mostly because I knew she had access to double knit, working at a vintage clothing shop. She brought me bags full of the stuff, which I sorted by color family and mostly ignored all year. I planned out my pattern. I liked the Around the World but was afraid of so many pieces. I found a pattern for a Streak of Lightning setting of nine patch blocks in a 1930s reproduction quilt book, making them radiate from the center like Around the World but in a hexagon pattern of sorts. I didn't want all the seams of a 9 patch in that, but I love the sneaky triangle setting that creates Streak of Lightning. I counted the squares, found the clothing pieces with enough open fabric to cut however many 5 inch squares. I watched Hotel Babylon on Netflix and put her Quilt of Shame together.

And I must admit it is the most visually striking quilt I have ever made. Kind of a lumpy picture here, attempting to get as much of it as possible, hovering above the guest bed with my camera. But yeah. I kind of really dig it.

4. A Hankerin

hanker: possibly from Icelandic "hanga" meaning to cleave to.

I mentioned in Post #2 that we rarely bought meat that didn't come from the CSA in our regular share, unless we really had a hankerin' for something. We have fish and deer and whatever comes from the CSA. Really, that's enough.

But last week at the CSA, it was mostly non-perishables. It's the end of the season, truly, and we're about to take our month long break. Garlic, onions, potatoes, but not much else even remotely close to fresh. Frozen green beans and eggs and ground lamb. Took all that--but I traded the popcorn and apple butter and a few other things. I traded enough that I looked at the other options--sprouting onions, a butternut squash--and asked her about meat.

When we get red meat in our share, it is either ground into burger, made into sausage of various kinds, or rarely cut up into stew meat. We never get regular cuts because they're more expensive--but we can always trade up. Never have before, although I've ordered things special like a brisket for Leo's baptism. So I asked her about meat and she took me back to the cooler. There were fresh cuts back there, not yet frozen, delivered that day. I took a chuck roast and never looked back.

The next day I seared it on the stove and put it in the crockpot. Deglazed the pan with white wine and then sweat 8 cloves of garlic. Chopped up a few carrots, a parsnip, 6 little Japanese turnips, and 4 or 5 large potatoes. Three stalks of celery. All of it into the crockpot. I poured more wine on top and set it to low. Two hours later, I added more wine and a little water. About an hour before dinner, a bit of cornstarch and water.

It was a crowd-pleaser. I can tell my kids are getting older--we had enough leftovers for Mike's breakfast but nothing more. Ah well.

3. Put Up or Shut Up

That was the runner up title for this blog. Either do something or stop talking about it. But there's a pun there, because canning is sometimes referred to as "putting up for the winter." In the end, I quilt more than I put up jam and pickles, and so "ease in fullness" was the title. More on that another time.

But this is my "Put Up or Shut Up" Quilt. I made it for my sister Colleen this past Christmas. Only two photos here, neither of them really that good, alas (December was a busy time). A long time ago I purchased, on a whim, a kit to make a jar quilt. The shtick was using novelty printed fabric of foods, cutting them into a general jar-like shape, putting a little rectangle on top for the lid, and putting these blocks all in rows like they were on a shelf. I found the idea cutesy and endearing, but it aged in my unfinished objects pile (UFOs).

My sister Colleen, my youngest sibling, lives in Columbia, Missouri with her boyfriend Tim. They play bike polo and get tattoos. She works at a library and he works at a local TV station. They live in a little house I've actually never seen but heard described. I'm thinking probably a lot like me and Mike when we were starting out, when "shabby chic" would have been stretching the definition.

But unlike many of her generation (we are of different generations, seriously, I'm firmly in Gen X and she's whatever you want to call the people who come after that), she sews and cooks and cans. I taught her canning, both she and Tim, one summer afternoon with jalapeno jelly. She has the beginnings of a garden and it's all so quirky and anti-traditional and I love the idea.

So this quilt says "Put up or shut up" along one side; the jars of random food (whole watermelons, for instance, and in one case, a pair of garden gnomes) in the middle, and the other side has a few vignettes from housekeeping: a woman ironing, a woman cooking, a woman taking a bath. The border is clothesline fabric with a variety of unmentionables hanging on the line. The back? pictures of vintage patterns.I barely quilted it, since this year was about the snuggly quilt (except Bevin's, but more on that later). I wanted these quilts to get carried to the couch and napped under, not hung on a wall and never touched. Not prize winners. Just fun stuff. But each jar on the quilt says something, mostly writing out the word "Kerr" or "Ball." But some, like the watermelon jar, say other things, like "WTF?" or just a question mark. Because the kit really stretched the idea of what one might possibly can. Whole radishes. Onions. Grapes still in bunches. Hence, I added the gnomes. I would put gnomes in a jar. Especially those two sly ones.

2. Scratch Cooking and Scritch Cooking

I cook from scratch most of the time. I don't have a lot of processed foods--my pantry and freezer are mostly full of ingredients. I have things like canned green beans and frozen vegetables--but not a bunch of frozen microwave meals and stuff like that. Got frugal one year, oh, when Sophia was a baby, and never looked back.

We belong to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). Ours is a combined CSA--several local farms and bakers and so forth gather together, so we don't simply get beets all August long like the first CSA I belonged to. The Amish farmer makes the pickled beets and egg noodles and honey and peaches. My favorite pork farmer provides, well, pork. Little local farms have heirloom and hybrid tomatoes and cucumbers and all the produce that will grow in Missouri and Illinois. Dried beans and locally made tortillas and eggs and teensy little Japanese turnips and butternut squash and whole chickens and on and on. You can trade non-perishables (like the applesauce we never eat) for whatever they have on hand. You can buy extra. You learn how to cook just about anything.

That's what I mean by scritch cooking--cooking what you have even if you wouldn't have chosen it for yourself. Early spring brings greens. Lots of greens. And there are more, tougher, greens later in the summer into the fall. I NEVER ate greens before the CSA. Why would I? Bleah. But no. Olive oil and lemon juice. Or bacon and onion. Or baked in the oven with parmesan cheese. Mmm.

Beets no longer frighten me. Turnips, bok choy, pumpkin, ground lamb, salsa verde, whatever. I pack the fridge with our $50 share and it spreads through the week. No, that's not all I buy for my family to eat. I go to the local supermarket every other week or so--our weekly food bill is probably close to $120 for a family of 5 (well, Leo doesn't eat much...). Less in the summer, more in the winter. It helps, of course, that besides the bit of meat from the CSA, we have a deer in the freezer and some fish from my father-in-law and that's just about it meat-wise unless we get a hankering for something more interesting (rarely, to be honest).

Last night I made a pretty simple dinner of chicken in marsala based sauce with capellini (oh, there is the every-so-often trip to the Italian grocer, I AM SO SPOILED). For dessert, though, I made something that was definitely scritch: peach pumpkin cobbler.

I had a vacuum-sealed package of frozen peaches. I had a jar of peach butter that I was eying suspiciously. I'm not a peach fan. And I had way too much frozen pumpkin. So I dumped these three ingredients into a 9x13 pan and sprinkled it with lots of pumpkin pie spice and some turbinado sugar. Topped it with my mother-in-law's biscuit cobbler recipe and stuck it in the oven.

The girls wouldn't touch it. And I didn't care. I never make them eat dessert. Truly. And I sat down with a little mug of it, topped with just a few tablespoons of vanilla ice cream (because I was, frankly, apprehensive)....and ate the whole thing. It was like a pumpkin pie with a hint of summer and the salt in the biscuit top made it just lovely. Ah.

There was a time when I never would have done something so obnoxious as that. But I'm glad that time is over.

1. Hobbies & Chores

Some of what I do around the house is in the category of chore: mopping the kitchen, vacuuming, folding laundry, doing dishes. But some is in the category of hobby: sewing, quilting, cooking, knitting, photography. Some items fall into both groups, like organizing and rehabbing tasks (painting is more of a hobby, but being the second man on a job that Jake is in charge of is definitely a chore--and yes, I'm using the same pseudonyms on this blog that I have in the past).

Today is the first full day we are home after our vacation to Florida. It is a day of chore.

1. Mop the kitchen floor. My mop is defunct, so this task was completed on my hands and knees with rags and a sink full of hot soapy water. I love my kitchen floor and do not mind this task, but I would hardly call it a hobby. Mental note: buy a new mop.

2. Laundry. Laundry is always a chore at my house because the washing machine and dryer are in the basement; one line is in the basement and one (not this season of course) is in the yard. The ironing board and iron and all those supplies are on the second floor. Laundry gets folded in the library (second floor with the computer) or on one of the beds. And laundry gets put away on the first, second, and third floors. It is an exhausting neverending task. The only household chore I truly despise. Truly.

3. Figure out what to cook for dinner. While cooking is a hobby I enjoy, we currently have no food in the house, having emptied it out pre-vacation. So today's dinner will be pantry-based. That's fine, although my pantry isn't as stocked as it will be this time next year (it's one of this year's goals). I think I can create a spaghetti & red sauce with mushrooms. And a peach cobbler made of frozen peaches from the CSA. Maybe a carrot slaw? Hmm.

4. Tidy. Tidy tidy tidy. Wander through the house picking things up and putting them away.

5. Mail sorting. Ugh. The phone table in my front hall? Not my best attempt at feng shui, let me tell you. Right now it's a random pile of important tax papers, an overdue sewer bill (my sewer bill is always overdue), school things, netflix envelopes, and who know what else. That's my next task, actually. Heading down there now while Billy naps on my bed under a corduroy blanket I made several years ago (hobby). No time for that today. Perhaps tomorrow.