wise craft

something to fiddle with in between those handmade christmas gift-making sessions

 

Or maybe when you're sitting there, trying to figure out what to make for someone. These little blocks are made by the fabulous Sarah Neuburger, The Small Object. As much as I love knicky-knack, sit-a-bout things, I especially love things that sit out and engage everyone. Not a person has sat at our sofa that hasn't played with these. They are for counting, for building, for stacking, for admiring, you name it.

And happy first day of advent! I dusted off our advent calendar and filled it with tiny toys (little whoopie cushions, colorful marbles, puzzles, maze books, and I couldn't resist filling a weekend day of these...), so I think I am ready. There are several things that will just not fit in those pockets (like for example the holiday pillowcases I'm making each kid for their bed pillow for one) and there are plenty of experience days vs. tiny toy days (like one day, it'll be a drive to look at Christmas lights with friends, another day is going out for ice cream after dinner one night, etc.) The kids already know what's in store on the 24th day of advent- new pjs.

I guess I should start thinking about making some gifts. Haven't started a thing. Started a lot in my mind...but nothing is magically materializing as I hoped it would.

P.S.- Rose, we had those turkey enchiladas and they are a new favorite! Thank you for commenting with that recipe!

uwajimaya

Testing out this new quick compose feature on typepad, trying to figure out how quick quick actually is...

We went to Uwajimaya yesterday. I love the hustle and bustle there. Korean barbecue, Beard Papa's creme puffs, a whole lot of Hello Kitty. Good times...

let the season begin!

The holiday decorating has officially started at the wise craft house. This little vignette is on a built-in shelf above the kid's computer in our family room (I struggle with what should go on this shelf all year, its just not functional and meant to be decorative...at least I think). These are the tomorrowland trees I made last year, instructions are here. If you have some craft felt, beautiful wool felt, or a sweater in a great color ready to felt...any of those would make a quick and lovely set of trees.

a couple things...

- Thank you to everyone who is supporting our chocolates! This is total grassroots and Peter and I are having a lot of fun with it. Shops have been enthusiastic about them and folks have been buying and enjoying them...and that makes us extremely happy. And, we have added a store locator page to the website, and it is updated frequently as our distribution grows, so keep checking in. 

- For you Seattle locals, Ms. Chicken Amy Karol is coming to The Quilting Loft on December 3rd at 7pm. She will be signing her book, Bending The Rules With Fabric and Bend The Rules Sewing, and show some tips. Believe me, you don't want to miss this very funny and sweet lady. 

- I'm currently attempting to control a potentially addictive eggnog latte habit. Love!

- Tell me this is not beautiful!!

- Hope your Thanksgiving was good. Ours was really nice, although at 18 1/2 lbs, Peter bought way more turkey than we needed, so please comment and let me know your favorite turkey leftover recipes. I need ideas!

Enjoy your weekend!

woodland centerpiece for thanksgiving

I won't be spending Thanksgiving with my friend C and her family this year, and I will miss her and well, truth be told, I'll also miss her flowers. I have shown you her amazing floral arrangements before. Always gorgeous and modern. So, as I'm prepping for Thanksgiving here at our house with friends this year, I'm remember a few little tricks that C has taught me (and that I've just kind of picked up along the way). I thought it would be fun to share.

I purchased a bouquet from our local marke, nothing extravagant...a few roses and some green berry, rosehip type sprigs. I used a short, wide-mouthed glass vase- pictured above. You can pick these up at thrift stores for next to nothing. (I used to be afraid of vases with large openings, thinking it would take a lot of flowers to fill them, but it really doesn't.) Fill it with cold water and dump at least a packet of the flower-fresh powder they give you with these bouquets, more if you have it (don't be stingy with it). De-leaf all the flower stems. Using a sharp kitchen steak knife, trim each stem down so that the flower will only come to the top of the vase (really tear off that stem with the knife, to expose plenty of the stem to water, no clean cuts necessary). Do this will all the flowers first, placing them to distribute their color nicely. Like this...

Now work on the green, leafy foliage, cutting down of the stem and dispersing its color. Keep the entire arrangement close and tight to the opening of the vase, with no space showing.

Looking good, no?-

You could leave it like this and it would look great. Or you could wrap any large leaves on the inside of the vase to disguise the stems, which is my C taught me to do. But my favorite part of this arrangement comes next.

 

I have a couple sheets of bark (I got these from C, but you can purchase them online. I did a search for "bark sheets" and found a place here that sells them). These sheets can be cut pretty easily with a good pair of scissors and I only needed to cut it to the height I wanted (and the best part is I have some leftover for another project!)

And there a woodland-y, non-Thanksgiving, and yet Thanksgiving, centerpiece.

Hope you all have a fantastic Thanksgiving day (or Thursday if Thanksgiving's not your thing). I will be preparing the whole soup-to-nuts feast and am looking forward to it (happy to say I haven't ruined a turkey yet, she says as she knocks on a sheet of bark). Be well! xo

 

scholastic circa 1973

Found my very faded, dog-eared copy of one of my all time favorite childhood books, The Cookie Book. It contains 12 recipes, a cookie for every month of the year. I ordered it from the Scholastic brochures that come home from school (and I smile at the idea of how little the whole Scholastic thing has changed over ht years). I loved the hand drawn illustrations. And I love that I marked my favorite cookies.

 

Ian has asked to make Mississippi Mud Pie from this book for Thanksgiving. It made me think of this little one, which is still in with my cookbooks.

just a few announcements

I finally made it to Sarah's new shop, Fabric Crush, over in the Magnolia neighborhood of Seattle. Such a charming place, very warm and full of all the pretty patterns and designer fabrics we're looking for. If you're local you must stop by, its really charming. (And gosh, I think these photos were probably the last time we saw the sun around town. Its been the rainiest I can remember!)

A few other random things:

*Kids Craft Weekly has two great ebooks for holiday crafting with kids that are full of good ideas, Christmas Cards and Christmas Crafts (newly updated with new stuff). So good. (Reminding me that I need to gear up for our crafting/gift making day soon).

*Kathreen posted an interview with me over on Whip Up. Thank you Kathreen! (Remember the Whip Up 2010 Calendars are available now right here.)

*I am getting a few holiday decorations out, starting with the less Christmasy. As I do every year, I will make some new ornaments for our tree, and I have my eye on a few from Crafty Tree Trimmings, another great ebook available now. (What do you guys think of ebooks. I really like the idea of them myself, but am curious what others are thinking.)

*Did you happen upon Martha's Origami wrap yet?

*I just ordered myself (for the 2nd year in a row, here's last year's) Patricia's customizable calendar. I have wall space in my studio where I hang a calendar and how fitting to have one with some of my favorite fabrics peeking out each month. Just print the pdf files onto cardstock, cut out the letter, glue the fabric of your choosing to the back of each page, and voila! Older kids can do this too, would make a great gift.

*Sew Mama Sew is doing their annual Handmade Holidays list, I've already marked several projects I want to do!

*I still have sponsor spots available on the blog during the holiday season. If you are an indie designer, etsy seller, or crafter that would like to promote yourself, email me for rates, I'd love to have you.

*I am going to be making some changes around here over the next couple of months. I need to shake things up a little in this space.The whole world of wise craft is evolving for me and I'm very excited about it. In the meantime, if you read this blog through google reader, bloglines, or some other service, click over and take a look at some of the links I'm adding to the "inspiring me" column. I will continue to update this section and others on a regular basis. There are some great holiday ideas out there.

Thank you all for really getting me thinking about photo file storage on that last post. I am glad to say that I went so far as to move all my photos from the computer to an external hard drive after I read your advice, but now I need to burn DVD's before I'm brave enough to hit delete on my computer (hoping to do that tomorrow). Anybody who is not sure how to store their digital photos, go read the comments from the last post, there's lots of ideas.

oh snap!

(Thanks for all the kind words about Ian's quilt!)

The birthday cake that was requested for Emma's party, Angel Food. My first one. Whenever I make a classic, something like this, for the very first time, I almost always go to The Best Recipe. That cookbook is one every budding cook should have in my opinion. Its not as sexy as most of the cookbooks coming out these days (although they recently reissued this cookbook with a bit more sex appeal, but mine is the original version, with no photographs, lots of pencil drawings, very much like its magazine origin, Cooks Illustrated). But this book will make a cook out of you. If you have a piece of meat, a squash, want to make the perfect chocolate chip cookie, anything, this cookbook will tell you the basic science behind what the ingredients do (for example, I never really knew why they used ingredients like lard in biscuits when I was growing up, I just figured it was what the cook had around, or maybe just tradition).

Anyway, a dozen egg whites and a lot of whipping later, the cake came out beautifully crusty on the outside (the recipe told me I was going for an almost macaroon-like texture on the surface and I watched it like a hawk during the last bit of baking time), and light as a feather on the inside. Whew! This photo was taken just before the strawberry halves were added.

Which brings me to my next question. Its time for me to take the bazillion hundred photos currently on my computer off before I tempt fate more than I feel I already have. How do you guys catalog your photos when you take them off the computer? In the past, I move them onto disks, and store them in a box, but this feel inefficient to me. I'm hoping there's a better way to preserve them. And quicker. Last time I did this little exercise it took me the better part of a day. So please, what's the secret? Is there a secret? Can we create a secret? Help!

the one for ian

To explain why, in spite of all the scurry that fills our days right now, I would stop to obsessively finish this quilt off is to just call me a little bit of crazy. The half excitement and half crazy parts of sewing can make me really productive, and I wanted to see this finished real bad. I brought it home from The Quilting Loft last week. The quilting Holly did for me, all-over loop-d-loops (which I also did on Emma's quilt), turned out, once again, just as I'd hoped. The loops add just enough and take away nothing. I'd given her a cotton, full sized bed sheet for the back, and she chose compatible batting based on the effect I wanted. (*For the record that there are times I get a lot of satisfaction out of quilting my own quilts, like the stash value quilt as an example. But when I want an all-over pattern like this, I just can't do it on my sewing machine, it definitely needs the expertise of a long arm quilter.)

 

Thing is I've had this quilt on my to do list for years. Years. The book came out in 2005 and that's when I fell in love with this Marquee pattern. If I really liked it that much for so long, sooner or later I feel that I have to just go for it. I'm really glad I did.

When I posted about the finished quilt top, a commenter made the analogy of the stacked patchwork blocks looking like Legos and I suddenly saw it too! Why hadn't I seen that before? The patterns I used (which may be seen better here) are a combination of muted colors, a lot of Denyse Schmidt Katie Jump Rope, and a random mix that provided color when the quilt needed it. Ian's room is orange, so I wanted some touches of orange sprinkled throughout. 

This quilt will alternate with Ian's Goodnight Moon quilt, which is still a favorite of mine. You may be asking why did I made yet another quilt for a bed around here (that's already got one)? I guess I'm just never content to keep things as they are for too long. For selfish reasons I like to look in Ian's room and see something like this, that I made for him.

Alright, off to curl up under my quilt with hulu. Night everyone!

in between

First of all, thank you all so much for the kind words on the last post, your enthusiasm makes me smile really big.

*******

When I began this blog, back in 2005, a lot of what I wrote about centered around daily life with my kids. We three spent a lot of our days together back then, and found creative ways to fill our time. I truly treasure the snippets of time that I documented on wise craft, writing about those days on this blog felt like it gave it all so much more life than just taking one photograph.

Even though they are still very much still my daily focus, I don't write about Emma and Ian so much anymore. This is in part a conscious decision and in part a natural evolution of our life together. As much as I've tried to slow it down, they are, in fact, getting older. More and more of their days are spent out and about in their own world, and I feel a strong need to let them keep their life and private. This is especially true with Emma. She is 11 years old today. That's just nuts! When I started this blog she was so little, just starting kindergarten. Feels like ages ago...

Lately, however, I feel the strong evidence of a "tweener" in our house. What does that mean? Well, there's the wiki definition, and there's our real life version, which doesn't feel so straightforward. Our real life tweener is a girl who is sweet and little and in her room playing with her tiny Calico Critter animals one minute, maybe wanting to hug and snuggle with me, then the next minute could be asking me about makeup, crying over too much homework, rolling her eyes because I won't let her stay up and read past her bedtime (ah! the eye rolling!), or have a friend over every afternoon, the one who needs a little space (or not, her call). Where did this girl come from? The other day she made her own little dressing table after reading one of those Daring Book for Girls (sorry, don't know which one) all afternoon. I just couldn't resist photographing it. She covered stacks of shoe boxes with 2 pieces of fabric, covered it with things she deems "important", and she just loves it. So cute. And so symbolic of where she's at in her life. The lipgloss and jewelry, nail polish, deodorant (suddenly a big necessity)...all mixed with bakugan cards, rubber band balls, and one of her homemade potions (weird combinations of shampoo, lotion, and whatever she can find) in a Pingu bottle.

Big Girl mixed with Little Girl.

The uncertainty of the middle.

So I enter the new challenge of parenting this new-ish Emma that's landed at our doorstep. I feel the need to give her a little space and a lot of guidance. Just do the best I can. I realize this is merely one of the thousand phases she will go through in her life. I am fascinated by all of them. The current phase, which I have dubbed the Loves Baby Soft phase, includes angel food birthday cake and jewel encrusted earbuds for her Ipod. I'm going with it...

Happy Birthday Emma, you are more awesome every year.

color your cloth

I have a confession...

I've never liked batiks. Of any kind. I couldn't really explain it except to say I saw no inspiration in them. I knew I gravitated toward clearer colors in general, so maybe that was the reason. 

But whatever the reason, I did not like them. Until I saw Malka's work that is. 

I started following her blog, A Stitch in Dye, earlier this year when I realized what beautiful, original things she was doing with color. She did batik in a way that felt totally new. She hand dyes and hand prints her fabrics using wax resist and other techniques, and each piece is a pure riot of color. Sunny, vibrant color. Batiks suddenly looked quite new and modern to me.

I played around with Malka's method of dividing fabrics for a project up by warm or cool for piecing the Tuesday morning patchwork pillow (in the Spring 09 issue of Stitch magazine). And now I'm happy to have my own copy of Malka's new book Color Your Cloth: A Quilter's Guide to Dyeing and Patterning Fabric. I often tell creative friends that I am looking for a sewing, crafting type book that will take it to the next level for me (whatever that actually is). This one definitely does. The first half of the book talks about how to add pattern and color to your fabric through a processes such as wax resist, stamping your fabric with found and homemade objects, how to use a tjanting tool (a tool used in traditional wax resist), brushes, etc. These are the types of surface effects many of us have been curious about but have never jumped in and tried. I've tried bleaching and loved the results, but knew there was a whole world of this type of thing to explore. This books breaks it down into understandable capsules of information. For beginner or more advanced.

I had ordered swatches of Malka's fabric a couple of months ago, wanted to do a project from the book with them. A manageable project for me right now is yet another pillow. The colors in the swatches I have reminded me a lot of the stack of Childcraft books we have in our family room (my kids still love these books and often read them over breakfast), so I'm now calling this the Childcraft pillow. I followed the basic layout of the Twinkle Applique Quilt pattern in the book, but changed the size of the squares slightly and created a 20" x 20" pillow. The squares and the circles all have raw edges exposed, and I really like the effect. The frayed edges add to it. I wanted the color of the batiks to stand out, so I sewed them all onto cream cotton twill and stitched everything with gray thread.

The fun, very doable projects in this book will really show off fabric you've manipulated using the processes she describes in the first part of the book. Or any fabric you choose really.

Available at amazon, and in Malka's store.

You can see pictures from the book here.