Oh, it's loud. And messy. It will be worth it, I know. But right now the house is a total mess. Because everything that was in the guest room is now in the other rooms. And the other rooms were full (at least, they were as full as I like them to be). Now they're fuller. One more week and it will be done. It's looking good. I know we'll be happy. But I won't deny that I will be THRILLED when it's finished, in part just because it's finished!
I baked muffins and then froze a bunch of them for my breakfasts. It's amazing that the thawed muffins taste pretty much every bit as good as they did the first day. These are blueberry streusel muffins. They are delicious. Yum. Saved me this week, seriously. They and my little milk frother thing, for tea lattes. I've been quite happily fed.
So many bunnerses! I love them. Possibly more than anything I've ever made. Yes, we will be doing kits! Almost everything is ordered and on its way. I'm hoping the kits will be finished a couple of weeks before Easter, but Easter falls on March 31 this year. That's early. So I can't promise, but we'll definitely try. The bunners above is not wearing Liberty, but the kits will have Liberty. We're thinking you'll have ten different dress fabrics to choose from! Because I couldn't possibly have picked just one. You know how bunnerses multiply. (And yes, there will be yarn included for the capelet, and the felt and pattern for boots, etc.) I'll keep you posted, and thank you so much for your enthusiasm! That made me very, very happy. Thank you.
I love all my little girls, furry and non-furry, so.
Cold! I like it! It feels like winter! There was black bean soup, lasagnas, hot tea and cinnamon rolls, Andy-made risotto, and cupcakes. There was a crackling fire in the fireplace most days, and glowing sunsets, and scarves and gloves, and I took one of my favorite pictures ever of Mt. Hood from the side of Mt. Tabor late Friday afternoon. Our amazing baby girl is three months old. She is such an incredible joy. Her personality is coming through more every day. She is very laid back (almost never cries), very cuddly, "talking" up a storm, smiling all the time, trying to figure out how to laugh (it comes out like a fake cough — so adorable), chewing on her hand, making us laugh with her funny faces and noises throughout the day, still sleeping throughout the night. Oh, girl. I love you so.
Bunnies, bunnies, bunnies. I have been sewing bunnies and bunny dresses and bunny boots. I have been tweaking my bunny pattern — changing things by millimeters, trying to get the bunny I want (you'd be surprised at how much very small changes in the pattern entirely change the personality of the bunny). I'm about to start Bunners #4 and I think I've almost got her to my liking. I have been having lots of conversations with Andy and Greta about making bunny kits (and a pattern). To that end, I've been sourcing materials and planning assembly and wondering how much time it will take us to wind a thousand tiny skeins of sport-weight wool yarn for bunny capelets. I've decided that the bunnies should be wearing Liberty peasant dresses. Obviously bunnies would wear Liberty peasant dresses! That only makes sense. More on the bunnies later. Slightly obsessed with the bunnies.
Tomorrow the construction starts on the upstairs cabinets. That will be loud and messy for a week. I'm excited about it but I can't wait until it's finished. I have looked at about five hundred rolls of vintage wallpaper (here and here and here) trying to pick out wallpaper for one wall of the bedroom. I like about a hundred of them. How do you choose, seriously. I don't know. They're quite amazing.
I like winter. I like wool socks and toasted oatmeal and the rocking chair in front of the fireplace and a warm little baby cheek on my chest. I like beeswax candles that smell like golden honey and glow through the evening. I like gray afternoon skies swollen with rain, and black birds that hop from fence to tree. I like nightlights that go on at dinnertime, and curry dinners that start early and end early, with Mexican hot chocolates at the end of them. I like travel shows about how Christmas is celebrated in other countries. I like piles of tiny wool undershirts and booties that don't fall off and baby blankets stacked in every room. I like tiny white lights that brighten every corner, and electric Swedish candles in every window. I like my pale gray flannel sheets. I like Medieval Christmas carols and a new stack of books about snow (I have this one and this one so far) on my night stand. I really like hours and hours of sitting with the baby in my arms, watching her tummy move up and down as she breathes, watching her rose-colored eyelids flutter as she dreams, feeling her fingers thread themselves through my fingers while she half-sleeps. I like tiny warm baby feet in my hand. I like little handmade stuffed-animals and dolls and little mice that wear sweaters and calico aprons. I like bunnies. I like plain white nightgowns with long sleeves. I like things with peppermint chips in them. I like Pillsbury sugar cookies decorated with buttercream frosting by kids. I like corgis that lean on you when they sleep, and stare longingly at you when they're awake. I like husbands that are great fathers. I like knitting with a baby asleep on my legs. And for the record, I like miracle snow, and if Brother North-wind wanted to send some this way this December, I'd do fifty pirouettes and faint with glee. Not that I want for anything at all, but . . . just saying.
Lots of cooking, lots of eating: Pumpkin pancakes, patitsio (we split it into two dishes and froze one), the apple pie (from the freezer, which I thawed for about 20 minutes and then baked as normal and it came out great), chicken with morels (for a Sunday night dinner-party; there wasn't any left to freeze), mashed potatoes from the potatoes from our garden, and roasted vegetables. Thank you so much for all of the freezer-food recommendations! I'm going to go through the list this week and make a few! I also made brownies yesterday. I'll show you those tomorrow.
The weather will be turning here in a few days. They say rain, rain, rain. We have half a cord of wood left from last year. It's stacked and ready to go. I'm going to try to knit exclusively from my stash for a while. The freezer is filling up. We have apples and carmel wraps. I say bring it on.
Before the rains come, there is warm, early-autumn light. It's the best light. Oh, I love love love it.
On Sunday afternoon we wandered around up near the park near the woods. When we were tired we climbed a long hill and put the quilt under that big green canopy of leaves you see up there and were drowsy. So nice. Warm. Dappled light. The sound of leaves rustling. No talking. Just resting. Quiet. Then some dude came along and started playing the BAGPIPES. For an hour. It had to have been an hour. And when I say playing I mean practicing. Not even complete songs. Just parts. It was seriously deafening and sort of hilarious. He cleared out the park. We were too lazy to move. Portland.
Crunch and crisp and the pink light of late September. A bit quiet-feeling lately. I am busy, and hopeful, and anxious to get out into the woods. Maybe this weekend. I'd like to lay on a blanket under a tree and read for hours, with my head on my love's stomach, and my little dog's chin on my ankle (that's where she likes to rest it). The days feel brief and brilliant.
I slowed to a wander on Sunday. It felt good to be so lazy and slow. The weather has been gorgeous. Bright and dry and just generally so pleasant. Our yard has been suffering the drought. It's been months since it's rained, I think. I was watering a bit through the summer and then I got busy and stopped. Andy spent the day moving the hose around from place to place. He did an imitation of a hydrangea before and after watering that was spot on — I wish I had a video. "Before" was this sad, parched, drooping, reaching thing; "after" he was bouncing in place and looked like he was on his way to a birthday party. :-) Pretty cute. I think the yard is a bit happier now, but honestly, I'd be relieved to stop worrying about it. A good rainy day would be most welcome, but all week we're supposed to be mid- to upper-eighties, and clear as a bell.
Before the slow, we packed and shipped orders, cleaned the fridge, got some groceries, did some laundry, watched television. Every night lately we've been falling asleep before 10 p.m. I made the blueberry cake again with marionberries, and a version of this pasta for dinner, but with sage instead of rosemary. I need to get it together, and get back into my cooking routine. I feel like this happens every year at this time! I need to sit down with my cookbooks and get inspired to cook for fall. Maybe actually plan [shivers involuntarily]. I suck at that. I don't mind the cooking; it's the thinking of what to cook every day that hinders. "What should we eat?" "I don't know. What do you want?" "I don't care. What do you want?" "I don't know. Pizza?" And pizza, because unless I'm actually looking at a cookbook or a recipie or a restaurant menu it's the only food I can seem to remember. I have the palate of an eighth-grade boy now. Hrrmmmm.
Making a new little preppy-hippie quilt. It's very yang. Thinking about maybe putting together a little quilt kit this winter. I think that would be really fun.
Puppers worries so when her Andy is down in the front yard without her. . . . What if he should fall down? Or need help with the sprinkler? Or someone should walk by? Or someone and A DOG should walk by? "Could you open this thing please?"
Last year (or maybe the year before?) the dahlias were $2.50/bu. Inflation. Still, a bargain.
Another day, another hippie dress. Not like I don't have fourteen other things I should be doing. There is so much hand sewing on these things. The bodice lining is stitched in by hand, along with the entire hem, and the sleeve hems. Two entire afternoons of hand sewing. Good thing I like — love — that sort of thing. Especially because we have a new sofa. With the chaise lounge thing. Best invention ever. Except you can't get out of it. Literally; it tilts backwards (need wedge). Finally, we have enough seating. Comfortable seating. It's not the nicest sofa in world — kind of scratchy (compared to our old microfiber one), and from Ikea (it's the Kivik). But it's kind of frumpy in a way that is really appealing to me right now. We are very hard on our furniture. We wear it out. It serves us well, but we live hard on it. Now I have three offices: the studio, the office, and the chaise lounge.
My first hippie dress was Bloomsbury. My second one (which I guess I never took a picture of), Hefeweizen. This one, guest lecturer in medieval studies at Reed College. Last night I was thinking the next/fourth one would be Sigur Ros groupie but then I changed my mind to Joanna Newsom groupie (because I was watching her on TV last night [it was TiVo-ed], and took a picture of the TV). I wore the second one to the mall the other day. I took my extraordinary, luminous niece/goddaughter shopping for some school clothes. I got some interesting looks while wearing the dress. I think some people thought I was on my way to my handmade-soap booth at the Oktoberfest. Cool!!! Or about to serve them a hot pretzel and a pitcher. I said to Andy that I thought it might be a bit too "bar maid." He said, "You say that like it's a bad thing!"
There was a barbecue with lovely new friends, there was more curried soup, there are now eggplants in the garden, there was brown sugar–banana ice cream good grief. There has been almost no reading. I thought this was going to be my summer of reading and it's been my summer of no reading. I don't know what the problem is. I picked everything up and put everything down. And then I fell asleep. Summer kind of wears me out, I think. It was good to have the long weekend of lazy. I think I needed that.
The best part of this summer were the afternoons we spent sitting in the river on our chairs together, watching the rapids and the hawks. I think of those afternoons every day. I hope there's a chance to go back one more time before it gets cool. I really, really, really, really enjoyed those afternoons.
Hello! How are you? We are sleeeeeeepy puppies around here. I can't seem to get up and do anything productive thank goodness. I am having a wonderful day.
One of my dreams came true on Sunday night when the boys played "Tales of Coming News" at Edgefield. I apologize to anyone standing near me because I sang every word as loud as I could (we were standing right next to the speakers). The show was just awesome. It was our fourth year and fifth time seeing the Avett Brothers. The Crystal Ballroom show a couple of years ago (or maybe it was last summer?) was so great, but I have to agree with the people on the fanboards that Sunday night's setlist at Edgefield was epic. I can't say enough about how much I (we) love this band. In thinking about it, this song is probably more of a fans' song than a song that will make you fall in love with the band if you've never heard of them before. (They're repertoire is enormous, so you will find something.) But if you click on the video (and thank you again for sending it to me, Kari, and thank you marysstikal for posting it originally), be warned there's a guy in crowd who in the first few seconds of the video drops the f-bomb about five times in a row at the top of his lungs when he hears the opening notes he is so excited. I completely understand this.
Anyway.
All of those fabrics were from JoAnn's! All on sale, too! Two more new dresses for me. I am desperate for some fall clothes. I almost never buy clothes for myself but lately I want to. I've got new tights but now I need some clothes to go with them.
I was thinking about fall colors. Stereotypical fall colors — that is, crispy golds and jewel-like reds and shocking oranges — are not really the fall colors I see out my windows. Here, our fall colors are dusky plums and russet reds and heathery grays and blue-ish greens. Not quite as brown and muted as winter's sunless, mossy, piney, muddy colors. But still somewhat dimmer, duller than classic, sassy red, or crackling-bright orange, or blazing yellow. Sunset-lit and smudged. We have these smoky-coated plums on the table. I picked some up off the street the other day while we were out walking in the neighborhood; a tree had dropped an entire branch in the road and there were piles of them all over the place, yellowy-blue, not quite ripe. I couldn't believe how beautiful they were. I put as many as I could fit into my coffee cup to take home. We have a plum tree (two actually) but the plums are nothing like these. (I wish they were like these.) I will take a macro picture of them so we can see them better.
I think I like fall. I think it's the shortest, and, in its own way, the most precious season in the Northwest. I hear a lot of people say that about summertime here, that it's the shortest and most precious season. But for me, the season I yearn for and try to hold on to is definitely fall. (Once the rains start, that's winter.) Andy is a summertime person. He really tries to stretch it out as long as possible. We have brilliant conversations about September:
Me: "That [whatever it is we happen to be talking about] will be in the fall, in September." Him: "That's not fall, that's still summer." Me: "September is fall." Him: "No, it's summer." Me: "No, it's fall." Him: "No, it's summer." Me: "No, it's fall."
Him: "No, it's summer."
I really can't tell you how many times we have had this conversation. We must like it.
He has a point. September sometimes feels as hot as July here. I sit in the hot wind and the fried up grass, holding my tights and my clogs, and hope the temperature will drop like a stone.
I finished my dress today and I just love it. The vast majority of things I try to make for myself look totally horrideous, which is why I hardly ever try to make anything for myself. But I love this (though I had to fuss with the pattern quite a bit). I used mostly cotton lawn, except for the bodice front/back which is regular quilting-cotton-weight. I apologize, but I don't really know what the fabrics are named or remember where I got them (but mostly all locally, and I have a decent size collection of Liberty Tana Lawn from local and various on-line sources). I just collect fabric whenever I see something I like, and am useless with the details. This dress is made mostly of rectangles or versions of rectangles. It's all very floaty and light, with lots of folds and drapes and gathers everywhere. Rather Vanessa Bell–ish, I thought.
The Sigur Ros show at Edgefield last night was exquisite. We have been big fans for many years but this was our first time seeing them live. Lovely, gentle, amazing people. The evening just couldn't have been more beautiful.
The garden is entering the late-summer phase. I think I'm supposed to be thinking about fall/winter planting. I replanted beets and kale already. Maybe I'll plant more beets where the potatoes were . . . ? Half of my butternut squash blossoms fell off, and a bunch of the leaves. A couple of the other little squashes just shrivelled up into little puckered things. Wah. :(
It's a quiet day here. Bright and breezy and we have no plans. Wonder of wonders. I shudder with pure delight.
