Motherhood and other creative adventures
This little guy is going to make me eat cherries like they’re vitamins. The only bad thing about cherries is dealing with the pits, and now I can get rid of those as fast as I can shove them in my mouth. I only went and bought this because I was going to be canning nearly 20 lbs of cherries, and that much food makes a specialty utensil like this suddenly very practical. But now that I have it? I think everybody needs one.
When I meet people in person who read the blog, I am surprised how often they bring up my canning adventures. Apparently, I am not the only one who looks at canning as some charming and old-fashioned pinnacle of domesticity that appears intimidatingly complicated. Canning may seem like one of those things that is better to think about having done than to actually do, but it’s really far easier than we have all imagined.
Here in Modesto the most gorgeous produce is hitting the farmer’s market, so this weekend Atti and I went out on a quest for cherries. I’ve still got quite a lot to learn about canning, so each season I want to try some new things, and this year my goals are cherries and so so so many tomatoes.
I found some exquisite cherries from a local, family owned, organic grower for a great price. This is what I love about canning, I just couldn’t feel better about the food that I bought, but since it’s in the peak season I can actually afford it and then eat these wonderful little jewels all year long.
If you’re tempted to try canning, cherries in a light syrup are a great place to start. Prep is manageable, processing is easy, and you’ll end up with something that you can’t get for love or money. They are like nothing you could find in a store. Bottled cherries are light and delicious and come January I can make cherry pie that doesn’t taste like canned pie filling.
This round of canning I ended up with 15 pints of cherries in light syrup, 8 half pints of cherry butter, and 4 half pints of cherry jam. I’m planning on cracking open one of those jars of cherry butter in the immediate future to put in between layers of a chocolate cake, if I can keep myself from eating it straight out of the jar with a spoon.
With Bear’s parents visiting us last month, I wanted the house to look as perfect as possible, which meant that I not only wanted to get my quilting mess out of the way, but I wanted to be able to show off the finished product. I’m totally in love with it.
As a reminder, here’s the piece I rendered in quilt. I saved that picture to my computer and made the pattern in photoshop by doing a whole bunch of math. I divided the whole quilt up into 12″ squares so that when they were all sewed back together they would create the original image. Then it was a matter of figuring out the math of how big each tiny piece had to be to create the 12″ piece, which in turn would create the actual image. With my love of puzzles, it was a ton of fun to work out.
I wanted to keep the quilting simple, partly because this is a 12′ x 12′ quilt I did on my home Singer, but also because I didn’t want it to distract from seeing the image as a whole. I decided to do this little spiral square pattern to really emphasize the squares of color, and distract from the patchworking it took to get there.
I love Mondrian’s work as an artist, but also because it just screams out QUILT! to me. I think this quilt may be the first in a series. Imagine how great this one would be. Or this one or this one. And of course, the most iconic of them all, this one.
When things need to be put away upstairs and I don’t feel like going there, I have a habit of just setting things on the stairs so I can take them up on my next trip.
I did that a little while ago with my quilting ruler, only to have Bear step on it and snap it right in half.
It was actually a hilarious moment because he called to me as he started coming down the stairs to tell me about something thoughtful he’d done, but instead what I saw was, “Tresa! I just want to call your attention to….” SNAP.
For a second it totally looked like he wanted me to watch him break my things!
I finally went out to pick up a new ruler, but buying a whole new kit with a self-healing mat and rotary cutter was only a little bit more, so I splurged. Plus, look! It’s green and teal! How could I resist?
Summertime is here in Modesto, and it’s in the best part. When things are getting warm, but before they get so hot you can’t bear to have skin.
We got together with our friends from church for a family activity, and somebody in the planning got really creative and fun and decided to have an ice blocking party.
One of our friends has the best dog ever named Lulu, and Atti is so totally in love with her. If she’s around, Atti doesn’t care about what else is happening. He wants to give her kisses and stuff his hands in her fur and say, “Aww…Doggie.”
There’s a park near here that seemed to be perfectly made for ice blocking adventures, so we all got together with our ice blocks and towels and took turns sledding down the hill. Here in California where we don’t get snow, we have to get a little creative with our outdoor sports.
Another of our friends got in touch with his inner engineer and made an official ice blocking sled, a long piece of wood with slots on the bottom to hold the ice in place, and a handle to steer with. It was brilliant, and Atti was the most excited by it because we could take him down with us.
Our little daredevil couldn’t get enough of it.
I’ve been on board with MaximumFun.org since the very beginning. And being around so long, spending so much time chatting on forums, listening to podcasts, supporting this new experimental media, makes me feel so connected to Jesse Thorn that he feels like a friend. Jesse and his wife Theresa are expecting their first child, so when we got together at MaxFunCon, a bunch of forum friends and I knew that it was only right we throw our friend a baby shower.
The whole weekend was scheduled so we decided to keep things modest. I sent out emails to everyone I could track down, inviting them to bring a card or something, a whole bunch of folks donated cash, and we all surprised them at lunch with our gifts. I had to make them a diaper cake, of course, but the real group gift is the quilt I whipped up.
Jesse frequently speaks of his love of antiques, so I went with reproduction 40’s fabrics with some cream kona cotton to break it up. They’re having a boy, but I don’t love aggressively gendered baby items, so I was pleased with the color palette here. Not pastel, not primary, but still somehow juvenile. It was hard to give up.
My favorite part was the appliqued section. I wanted to include a memento that would remind them where this blanket came from, but I also didn’t think they’d love decorating their baby in the business logo, so I recreated the iconic MaxFun rocket ship, but kept it off in a corner in an attempt at subtlety.
When I first had the idea I was worried that it might be a little weird. I’m not typically a fanatic type of fan, and I thought it might be a bit much. But as soon as I mentioned it to my MaxFun friends, everybody thought it was the right thing to do. That’s what keeps me coming back to the internet. Supportive, loving communities that spring up around something awesome.
Not one single thing this year has gone the way I planned it. Not one. And with the Africa trip falling through I was twice as bummed because of all the other plans I put off in favor of it. At the top of that list was MaxFunCon. Despite all the great fun I had last year, I didn’t buy tickets because I was going to put it all towards Africa. And then they sold out.
But for once I caught a break and at nearly the last possible second they found room for me and Bear. We just spent three days with all of my favorite internet friends, incredible comedians, some new internet friends like Eden and Maggie, and a superconcentrated dose of inspiration.
My local friends rarely get what I spend so much time doing, if they know about it at all. It is such balm for my soul to be surrounded by people who get my love of the internet and creativity, and will reflect their own passion back to me. If we could just all start a commune together, I think my productivity would quadruple.
For years, YEARS!, I’ve had this idea in mind for a project using a ring with a premade bezel. I searched and searched and came up empty. When I could find one in a jewelry finding catalog it was the wrong size and totally awful looking. Having one custom made was cost prohibitive. I even bought rings and tried to get the stone out, but I just ended up destroying the whole thing.
Then in my weekly perusal of the craft stores….BAM! The very perfect thing. When I found it on the shelf I wanted to run through the aisles of the craft store, hugging everyone I saw.
Now to get to work.
It’s time to accept that I’m not a kid anymore. Sigh.
It’s been nearly 12 years since I dyed my hair, but the day has finally come when my vanity has overcome my laziness. I was a little nervous, so I played it safe and went with a slightly bumped up red from my natural color.
When I was in college I used to dye my hair a different color every week. I tried going Gwen Stefani blond like every other brunette in the 90’s, but the closest I could get, after multiple disastrous versions of orange, was a warm strawberry blond. And by that point my hair was fried.
I gave up and went back to my usual assortment of kooky reds and blacks, my favorite being what my sister and I called “Wonder Woman Blue” which was black with a blue rinse. I had that color when I was engaged to Bear and my mother in law insisted that I absolutely could not have that hair color for my wedding, so she sent me to a stylist who tortured me while she held her phone to her ear with her shoulder and had a screaming match with the person on the other end. After that traumatic experience, I was happy to hang up the dye for a while.
I think I’ll go a little lighter when it’s time to dye again, right now my hair seems to weirdly match my eye color.
I bought a big spool of chain with a coupon at the craft store so I could make a simple necklace I could wear with anything. It’s just a whole mess of chains attached to one chain that goes around my neck, all thanks to jump rings.
Here you can see that it’s chains attached to little rings, onto a bigger ring. Doing it this way saves cash by putting all the chain just where you can see it, and also saves the skin on the back of your neck from being rubbed off by a huge rope of chains.
I just went nuts over this heavy chain I got at Michael’s, but I had no idea how to work with it. I also loved those gray brown faceted glass beads, so I just bought them because I loved them. That’s part of what’s so fun about jewelry to me, you buy stuff you love and then just mash it up together.
This chain is so thick that a circle big enough to get around it would be way huge. This was a perfect application for those triangle jump rings. I used these to attach the toggle closure to the chain, as well as the beads to the chain on the other end.
Jump rings are super simple to use, and incredibly versatile. All you have to do is twist the two ends open with a pair of pliers. Don’t pull them straight apart, you want to twist or you’ll never get it back in to proper position.
Then you just thread on your chain, your clasp, your charm, whatever you’re joining together and twist those two ends back until they’re touching.
This is part of what’s so addicting to me about jewelry making. It really couldn’t be much easier, but just knowing how to twist these rings closed opens up worlds of creativity. And betcha $10, if you’ve got a broken necklace you now know how to fix it.