The Beautiful Life

This has been a tough week. I've spent most of it flat on my back with a cold. The kind where I can totter around for a little while, but only if I'm willing to lay down for an equal amount of time moving as little as possible.

But there have been a couple of bright spots. Being stuck in bed with a brain that's only half functional leaves a lot of time for reading. I've read about two thirds of Made From Scratch by Jenna Woginrich, a book about small-scale homesteading (the link is to Amazon, but I'm borrowing my copy from the library. I love libraries. They're free, and if you end up with dud, you bring it back, no harm done. And if you really like something and it will be used often, then you can buy it on Amazon knowing it will be a keeper). What appeals to me about this book on homesteading is that it's all about filling your life with beautiful things made by your own hands. That's what I want most in my life. I'm not ready for chickens or bees, yet, but I'm slowly growing my garden and someday, somehow, I think I might get a rabbit or two.

I've also started using Pandora, and finally after all this time, I've found somewhere with the music speaks to me. Contemporary Folk. That's me. Music that makes me forget everything except that the world is a beautiful miracle.

My weird, slightly wilted herb garden, sturdily defended from squirrels and cats.

Hippopotamus

Yay! for buying sprinkles for the first time.

Horray! for the cookie cutter my Dad got me.

IT'S A HIPPOPOTAMUS!!!

Sky on Fire

Finally a finished project!

My BF bought me this beautiful yarn for my birthday a year or two ago, and I finally found the perfect project. This is a pooling colors scarf that really shows off the hand-dyed yarn. It's also my first blocked lace project. I was surprised what a difference it made. It brought out the stitch pattern and transformed it from a lumpy scarf to a smooth, elegant stole.

If you're a knitter, you can find me on Ravelry: vanimaandune

Doings

Black Raspberry-Gooseberry Jelly

Traded two jars of finished jelly for the gooseberries. They're such a pretty shape. They remind me of slightly fantastical hot air balloons.

Berries ready for cooking. I picked the black raspberries myself.

Battle scars.

Frog at Battelle-Darby Creek Metro Park.

In April, I went to the annual Salvation Army fabric sale. I finally got all the cottons cleaned, pressed, and sorted (and put away!). A few of these fabrics were picked up elsewhere, but most of them came from the SA fabric sale and cost a total of $4. Yay, thrifty! Probably not fabrics to make art quilts out of, but definitely good enough for experimenting and learning to machine quilt.

Handspun Yarn

Here is my first yarn spun on a spinning wheel. It's a little odd and lumpy in places, but that's ok. Next time, I'm going to try to spin more intentionally and pay more attention to what I want the final product to look like. #1 on the list is spinning a bulkier yarn, since I would rather knit with something thicker. #2 is trying to get the twist more balanced.

Water Down the Drain

We lose a lot of water down the drain. When I go to take a shower, I usually let the water run until it gets hot. So I lose about a 1/2 gallon of water on every shower. Since there are two of us in the house, that amounts to about 365 gallons per year (assuming one shower each, every day). We aren't living under drought conditions, but that's no reason to waste all that water, and besides it costs money. We're charged about 50 cents per cubic foot of water (1 cubic foot = ~7.5 gallons), which works out to about $50/year. In the grand scheme of things, that's not a lot of money, but again, there's no reason to put that much money down the drain (hehe).

I was inspired by a post on Radiant Things about how she saves water. Now, when we run the water to get the shower to warm up, we catch the water in an old detergent bottle and use it to water our garden. Maybe it only saves us a little money, maybe it won't save the planet, but really, there's no reason not to.

Strawberry Season

I went strawberry picking yesterday with one of my friends and my boyfriend. We went in the afternoon, so it was hard work (a case of the early birds getting the worms), but we still had quite a good haul.

Yesterday, we canned strawberry jam (left) and strawberry-rhubarb butter (right). The strawberry-rhubarb butter recipe comes from Food in Jars, a nifty canning blog. I think I like it much better than regular strawberry jam: more flavor, less sweetness.



I'm also making strawberry-balsamic ice cream today. The balsamic vinegar is a souvenir from our trip to Italy in January. It's three-medal grade and amazingly good. Makes me wonder what five-medal balsamic is like.

Pesto!

The first basil harvest of the season.

This year I decided to have lots of a few things in my garden, and so far it's working. Last year, we had a small handful of tomatoes. This year we already have enough basil to make pesto. mmmm, tasty.

Jam Muffins

Things in my life that are true:

1. I'm not a milk and cereal person, but I like my breakfast.

2. Mostly my boyfriend eats breakfast only if I make it for him.

3. We canned way, way too much jam.

It just so happens that our plan to give away jam as gifts, did not actually result in net less jam, because people kept giving us their jam in return. Hence, an overabundance of jam.

So, every week, I try to come up with something that will address all three problems. Eventually, I settled on baking bread for toast. I found a wonderful recipe over at Orangette, but bread requires planning, and somehow, we've gotten all the way to Tuesday with no time for bread until next weekend.

But I'm hungry when I wake up in the morning.

I've taken to reading Joy of Cooking on the couch when I get home, and while I don't have the ingredients to make fancy muffins, I do have jam. I took the regular muffin recipe from Joy of Cooking and filled the muffin cups half full, spooned some jam in, and put more muffin batter on top. They baked up really pretty.