I’m sooooo far behind in blogging (well, in everything, actually). I think I will blame it on getting ready for the annual pilgrimage to Europe sur moto. This year it’s Germany (it always starts there, ’cause that’s where the bike lives), Belgium (the frites and the chocolats are calling me, yea verily), then to Luxembourg City, which is in Luxembourg the country, though as I understand it there’s not much difference between the two. We leave next Friday, the 24th — I can’t wait.
Or I could blame it on being too social. But that would pretty much be a lie, as there’s no such beast for me. Two weekends ago was the Tift Merritt show at the NC Art Museum that I alluded to in the title. We had 15(?) people, who were all friends of mine or friends-of-my-friend-Caroline (or, for that matter, friends of both of ours). We all brought pot-lucky foods, and I busted out the big guns on the cooking scene, making a Cook’s Country recipe for pasta with bacon and ricotta (and other bits) that Heather had recommended; coleslaw (hailed by two different people as the best coleslaw they’d ever put in their mouth! — the trick is using a little rice wine vinegar along with the regular vinegar…it adds a lovely ‘kick’); and two apple pies.(1).
The apple pies were not particularly portable (a fact I’d thought of when I was considering recipe choices, but conveniently forgot when I was making the actual dessert selection), and posed, therefore, posed an engineering challenge. We rose to the challenge by constructing a rather clever, if I do say so myself, Pie Box, consisting of a square cardboard box whose dimension along one side was a wee bit longer than the diameter of the pie, into which we placed four Pie Struts, made of cardboard folded into little prism shapes and taped. These fit quite tidily into the corners of the Pie Box, allowing us to support a “second floor” (made of several layers of cardboard, set cross-grain, cut to the appropriate size and taped together) to hold the other pie. Sadly, due to space constraints with unpacking the food, no one else got to see our clever Pie Box, so this memorial will have to suffice.
Last week I managed to have dinner with my friend Jacintha (followed by ice cream at Coldstone —mmmmm), (which was *really* cool, as we don’t manage to get together nearly enough and this “rescued” a spoiled plans night for each of us!), and my brother, Drew, who was in the state (and who I was seeing) for the first time in two and half years. That was great, and probably worth an entry unto itself (apparently his fiance, Jo, has somehow got me tagged as the “stylish jeans girl”?!), but that’s not going to happen if this is ever to get posted.
The real blame (for the lack of blogginess… you’d lost track, hadn’t you? That’s ok, I don’t blame you. I’d nearly lost track myself), though, I think, belongs to my most recent craft obsession: the sewing of a yukata. I’ve wanted to do this for years, but was finally spurred into action due to a constellation of factors including:
- finally getting the fabric (when I was in New York)
- discovering that I had a kimono pattern already (whilst looking through my pattern stack with Heather for an apron pattern), which is basically a more formal yukata
- just enough free time to think this was a good idea
Pictures (and a proper recounting of the battle, from which I emerged scarred, but victorious) to come (really), but on a day I’m not quite as frazzlepated as I am right now. Amongst the lessons I learned is the fact that fabric does, in fact, come in non-standard widths, and just because the back of the pattern envelope has directions for 45″ wide and 60″ wide fabric, and you know your fabric is wider than 45″, that *doesn’t* mean that it’s 60″. Nope. Not at all. I took the shortage of material as an opportunity to investigate contrast trim, which, in the end, looks quite nice, I think.
Also to come “Stupid Way to Injure Yourself, #113” …
(1) You get something from every experience, I believe. This *amazing* apple pie recipe is what I got from one of my significant ex-others.
ALSO: last chance to vote in the great spectacles debate! Voting closes 9:30am EST Wed.!
Then I got a little obsessive-compulsive (me? no way!) and decided that I needed to add beads to one chopstick from each pair (the Japanese aesthetic values asymmetry, right?). Here’s the result
Realm of the Lint Queen 