Baby presents to myself

Between shower gifts, hand-me-downs, and all the adoring (and shop-happy) women in our lives, I don’t foresee having much opportunity… need… reason… excuse to buy many clothes for my own little girl. But last Friday when we got home from the ultrasound, I thought it would be okay to treat myself just a little. Hey, I had a coupon and free shipping.

A ruffled corduroy jacket and little silver slippers… because I wish Old Navy made them in MY size.

Monkey references… because Sparks is always calling me his monkey. The “daddy’s little monkey” onesie just slays me. It’s the 0-3 month size and SO TINY.

A pretty foil-printed onesie and a teddy bear suit. This is the Old Navy fleece version, which isn’t as elaborate as the Gap version made of faux-fur and with toe pads embroidered onto the bottoms of the feet… but it was on sale and Sparks can’t stop laughing about it. Mission accomplished.

20 weeks

20 weeks!

Half way done!

Back pain–checkity.

Getting kicked in places I wish I’d never get kicked–checkity.

The MOST pregnant-looking of those willing to post belly pics in my due date club–checkity.

Totally in love–checkity.

Who will she look like?

The speculation is on. She has her dad’s long legs and, it seems, her mom’s nose and chin. But eye color? Sparks has pale green eyes and I have brown eyes, but two blue-eyed grandfathers, so that’s completely up in the air. Hair color? It’s destined to be medium to dark brown, but her dad was a blond kid.

And will she have hair, or be a bald baby? Welll…

Her mother

Her father

Pudding’s room

Confession: we don’t really have a guest bedroom.

It’s Pudding’s room. She makes way when we have guests, though.

Meow

Meow

Prrrrrr

Excuse me?

Christmas crafting plans

Oh, the plans I make.

Right now, my Christmas crafting task list is as follows:

1) Finish the church for my winter village, and make a hotel and two more houses

2) Make new stockings to match the new mod house

3) Finish quilting that Christmas table runner so it’s done and out of my craft room

4) Make Christmas crackers for us and maybe to send to relatives (depending on how much I find myself enjoying the task)

5) Make a tree skirt to match the new mod house and the white, mod tree

6) Make the usual round of Christmas cookies

If I do all this, I will feel awesome.

PS: squeeeee! Baby feet! Did you SEE those? Aren’t they ridiculous?

Our little GIRL!

Winter village

My sewing table has been taken over by paint, glue, x-acto knives, and all of the light cardboard boxes coming out of our kitchen. I’m making myself a winter village!

I gathered all of the materials for this project last winter, but set out to make them in a far-too-complicated way, and ultimately got frustrated and gave up. Not this year. This year I’m just doing it and so far, it’s coming along marvelously.

The houses have holes cut out in back for Christmas lights to be inserted into. I’ll put them on a shelf (maybe we’ll have a fireplace mantle???) with white batting for snow, and intersperse O-scale model railroad pine trees. It’ll be adorable.

Yes, I am totally going to glitter them. Soon.

Leaf walk: the neighborhood

How lucky that there is a nice overcast day to photograph leaves, before things get so wet and windy that the leaves all go away. Unfortunately, though the maples in the neighborhood are turning, they aren’t yet dropping lots of leaves… so no pictures of gorgeous mono-colored leaf drifts. Alas.

Leaf walk: the woods

It’s the time of year for my annual leaf-photographing walk. This fall, for the first time I am not living in a heavily developed suburban area, but rather in a suburb that is hiding in the middle of a forest. At first I thought that the woods were the natural place to go for fall color, but alas, I was wrong. The natural trees here are oak, ash, and sycamore, with no naturally occurring maples at all. And maples, you know, are where all the orange and red come from. It was a good learning experience.

My feet… they are disappearing beneath my belly.

Pokeberry–the berries long gone, leaving the hot pink stems.

Other berries and blooms

The road stretching out before me… the pavement gradually disintegrated into forest floor.
That little animal in the middle picture is a cat, I’m sure now, but at the time I wondered if it was a dark-colored fox. It stood watching me for as long as I stood still taking pictures.

A few good leaves. Next walk: the neighborhood. Where people plant maples because they’re so pretty in the fall.

Roasted corn, black bean, and mango salad

It isn’t all desserts around here, attractive as the idea is. One of the many ways in which being pregnant changes your relationship with your body is that eating junk food suddenly isn’t just about you and a few abstract principles of digestion and well-being. It’s about feeding a little tiny life that isn’t going to get something better somewhere else. And so, I’ve been trying to eat a lot of vegetables.

Like so many of us, I fall into the trap of thinking that since dark-colored vegetables have the most vitamins and minerals, therefore, only kale and beets are worth eating, otherwise you might as well have pepperoni pizza. That isn’t true, of course. The salad about provides a lot of valuable nutrition–beans especially provide folate and fiber, very important for the baby and for the mother, respectively.

I found this recipe on another website a couple of years ago, but I’ve been making it without reference to the original ever since, so I’m sure it’s changed. Here is how I make it now.

Heat a large skillet. Sautee one diced onion and two pressed cloves of garlic for a minute or so. Add one bag of frozen sweet corn. Mix it all together, then leave on high heat until the things on the bottom acquire a brown sear. Take the pan off the heat and leave it to cool while you get on with the rest.

Chop if necessary and then throw into a big bowl all of the following:
Two bell peppers, color of your choice
One mango
One handful of fresh cilantro
One can of black beans, drained and rinsed
One chilpotle chili in adobo sauce, plus an additional spoonful of the sauce
The juice of one lime
One hearty pinch of salt

Add the mostly-cool corn mixture and stir everything well. Further season to taste.

The chilpotle peppers come in a can that looks like this. If your grocery store carries it, it will be in the Mexican aisle. Unless you are familiar with them and use them all the time, get the smallest can you can find, because I have never, ever managed to use a whole can before it goes bad.

Doubles as a Mexican or a Caribbean side dish; great with jerk chicken or roast pork and tostones. Good!

Almond-apple crisp

Not to beat the almond and apple thing too hard, but, well, we do still have about 25 pounds of apples sitting in the garage, getting more fragrant every day. And I had a package of sliced almonds and not enough almond meal for another brandy cake. So…

Almond-apple crisp was the result. I have been making artisanal varietal applesauces, and it’s fun to see how each variety tastes and reacts to cooking differently. This crisp was made with Winesap because it’s the one we’re most desperate to use up (Arkansas Black appear to be all set to keep through the winter, whereas Rome is good for eating out of hand). Winesap makes a tart cooked apple, and holds its shape well.

Peel, core, and slice enough apples to half fill a large baking dish (I used the rectangular Pyrex kind–the kind you make casseroles in).

Slightly sweeten apples; I used 1/2 cup sugar for this lot. Had I been using a sweeter variety, I might not have sweetened them at all, especially considering the sweet topping that will go on later. Had I been using something sour like Granny Smiths, I would have used more.

Sprinkle on cinnamon; at least a teaspoon. Mix the apples up.

For the topping, combine:
1 stick mostly-melted butter
A cup of almond meal
1/2 cup sugar
One pinch salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup slivered almonds

Mix with your hands and do your best to evenly distribute it over the apples. Now evenly spread another cup of slivered almonds over the whole thing.

Bake at 350 for one hour. Eat as soon as possible.

Fiddling with photos on Friday

Over at P-dub’s headquarters she has people doing their own Photoshop jobs on an SOOC (straight out of camera) picture she posted. Earlier this week I snapped a saccharine picture of Pudding, so cute that I just have to share it again and again and again, and so I’ve done the same thing.

SOOC

It looks like she’s keeping my spot warm for me while I’m up, but in actual fact, she refused to move when I came back.

In all the following versions, I auto-corrected the levels then applied an action.

PW’s “Lovely and Ethereal”

PW’s “Fresh and Colorful”

My own “Fresh and Bright”

PW’s “Colorized”

Caramel corn!

Yesterday was a banner day for me in the kitchen. I made caramel and I didn’t ruin any pots and pans and I didn’t burn myself. I’m so pleased! It’s my first successful sugar-cooking experiment. Woop woop!

I started with one full-size bag of butter-flavored, low-fat microwave popcorn, a bag of raw peanuts left over from Sparks’ mole sauce experiment earlier this summer, and this caramel corn recipe. I followed the caramel instructions exactly, except that because I was already working with seasoned, butter-flavored popcorn, I omitted the salt.

Butter, sugar, Karo. Sparks likes Karo on his waffles and pancakes, so we always have it in the house. He’s just keeping it real, yo.

Once the sauce started forming bubbles, I turned the heat down to medium-low. Melted sugar holds so much residual heat that it takes almost nothing to keep it going. I stood by the stove and I watched it for the whole five minutes. Because bad things happen when I don’t watch the stove (right, sweetie?)

When the sauce was finished, I poured it over the popcorn, added peanuts, and baked for 20 minutes, stirring once in the middle and once at the end. And voila! Tasty, tasty caramel corn.

I am equal parts proud of myself… and ashamed of myself. Oh well. There was a time in my childhood when my dad would make this, so I can tell myself that it’s for old time’s sake.

Shiny Brite jackpot

If memory serves, I started my vintage Christmas ornament collection in July 2008, right around the time I met Sparks. It was obvious to me that, unless fate dropped a gorgeous pink aluminum Christmas tree in my lap, they needed to go on a white tree… in theory, a more obtainable item. Except I had specifics in mind. It needed to be pre-lit, slim-line, not flocked, not iridescent, and six feet tall. Sparks recently helped me remember a certain November Saturday when I arrived at his (this) house unannounced, completely distraught because I’d been to six stores and not found such an easily obtainable item. He sat me down, found one on Amazon, and had me order it. As he says, “sometimes you need me to be the man.”

I guess the world’s fervor for these ornaments has abated in the last two years, because I had zero competition when I won this lot on eBay a week ago. I paid a price that would have been cheap for new ornaments in-store. I couldn’t be more pleased… two years ago this collection would have gone for at least $75. What’s so great about it? Why let me tell you!

1. The ornaments are large–3″ diameter
2. They are predominantly pink, which is big with the Shabby Chic crowd
3. They are mostly reflectors, some double-reflectors. Very desirable.
4. They are Shiny Brite brand
5. Some have the original tops
6. They are clean
7. They are in a real Shiny Brite box, which is also in great condition.

Woohoo!

Shutting down the garden

Sparks tore down the vegetable garden, this weekend. The chard is still out there, because it likes the cold weather, and we haven’t pulled (most of) the parsnips because, though we haven’t gotten around to looking it up, I vaguely remember that they’re supposed to stay in the ground until it freezes. Everything else is gone, though.

He did pull a few parsnips out of curiosity, and here they are. Tee hee. They aren’t as beautiful as the ones you buy in the supermarket. This was due, no doubt, to the uneven first-year soil in the garden. Sparks tilled the whole garden several times, but there were so many grass roots from the broken sod (zoysia grass… tough stuff) that it never got mellow-smooth. Also, Mother Nature didn’t play nice with the distribution of moisture throughout the season, not that she ever does.

The peppers, both hot and sweet, were a pleasant surprise. They came on fabulously in September, and in the end, we have a pretty hearty crop of both. Above are the jalapenos,

And here is the last picking of sweet peppers. Sparks likes to eat them raw for a snack… I need to remember to cut some up and present them to him soon, to make sure they get eaten.

Endpaper progress

This weekend I finished the first Endpaper Mitt and started the second. I have a few observations about the pattern, and about how I’d change it if I knit another pair.

(Project in progress, with Shibui Sock “Peacock” and bamboo dpns from eknittingneedles.com, super cheap, super good)

1. When Eunny says to use smaller needles for the ribbing, she means it. One might even consider knitting the finger ribbing on a smaller number of stitches, to pull it tight.
2. I used my own favorite cast-on and cast-off, and I don’t regret it.
3. The purled false-seam stitches are frustrating and unnecessary. The effect is kind of cool, but I don’t think the coolness negates how fiddly they were to execute.
4. Two repeats of Chart A on the wrists would have been plenty
5. Zero repeats of Chart A on the finger portion would have been plenty.

Chrysants

I had three specimens of chrysanthemum Coral Cavalier at the other house, and they bloomed so profusely and gave me so much pleasure in their season that when I planned the gardens here, I bought a lot of mums. Right now I have three varieties of cushion mums and six football mums.

The football mums are starting to bloom, and I have already learned a lesson. Deer will nip at chrysanthemums but not destroy them. The ones that the deer nipped at are now upright and bushy and ready to bloom bushels and bushels of flowers. The ones the deer didn’t nip are leggy, sprawling onto the deck and the lawn, with comparatively sparse buds.

Reiterating earlier note to self: cut the chrysanthemums back mid-July.

Another interesting observation is that more than one variety, both cushion and football, will put out early blooms in white or yellow and later blooms in purple or pink. Who knew?

I think I need some more pink mums, though. Yes. I’m sure I do.

Fall jewelry: black flowers

This fall, all I can think about style-wise are charcoal grays, jewel purples, richly textured fabrics, and sparkly beads.

I’m so glad I decided to buy more ribbon than I need just for this season’s new necklaces. All of this ribbon above, every snippet of it, is miraculous. I bought it from M & J Trim. It is an assortment of velvet, silk satin, hand-painted silk, and silk grosgrain ribbons. They are every bit as exquisite as I’d hoped they would be. No, you can’t get stuff like this at JoAnn’s. The grosgrain makes me want to start sewing reproduction Victorian gowns, and the hand-painted silk just begs to be tied around a throat–no more necklace needed.

I’ve made some jewelry for the season. I’m using up all of my gunmetal findings and charms willy-nilly. It’s completely worth it.

Tis the season (almost)

The air is nippy, so I am clearly justified in getting excited about CHRISTMAS!!! Hooray!

C’mon. To plan is to be ready. We want to be ready, right?

This is to be our last childless Christmas, and I have to say, I am completely stoked about the prospect of having children to celebrate it with. It just isn’t the same with all adults, it really isn’t. And since future holiday preparations are all in my imagination at this point, they’re all glittering and perfect. Squee.

I’ve pulled out a little light reading to stay by my bedside table.

Pudding is a real Christmas Kitty, deny it as she might.

To Joni: your curtains. Soon.

Cozy weekend

It was cold this weekend, down into the thirties at night with daytime temps barely scraping sixty. We had to start the furnace. We turn it down at night, and all of us (me, Sparks, Pudding, Kidney Bean) cuddle in bed like a pile of puppies.

I spent some time cleaning up my sewing room, and then working on a patchwork quilt top (for myself) and curtains (for a friend). I also spent a lot of time knitting… I have a pair of Zauberball socks to finish for myself before beginning Sparks’ annual pair of socks, and I have also begun knitting the above Endpaper Mitts for myself. This isn’t a no-brainer project… but then, brain-involving projects usually have the most beautiful results.

Because I blow the pregnant lady’s caffeine allowance on my morning latte, I have to drink herbal tea the rest of the day. Oh, well. In such a chilly house, a big cup of hot something in the fastest antidote to cold hands. Brisk walks are good, too.

While I was sewing and knitting and tea-drinking, Sparks worked in his shop and listened to Tommy on continuous repeat. I peer over his shoulder at the circuit schematics, and am puzzled. He peers over my shoulder at knitting instructions, and feels the same way. We like it like that.