Hardworking, that Ryan

Thanks for being so patient. As I foreshadowed last week, I have some photos to show you of a fun project I did recently for one of our very best friends, Ryan. He asked me to make him a holster to wear at work back when he and Emily visited us in November. November was a while ago! I've been busy, as you well know.

Ryan is a server at the bustling South Philly Cantina and he wanted something to carry a check presenter, an iPhone, a pen and a pencil and his chapstick, with possibly a secret pocket thrown in for good measure and belt loops to attach to his belt. My schedule had a tiny window in it two weeks back and I headed to this year's legendary White Elephant Sale (a great source for fabric and raw material for crafting projects) on the hunt for interesting plaids and inspiration.

I decided to make him two. One for business and one for pleasure, you might say. One classic red and black plaid with brown leather accents and one crazier one, featuring vintage/awesome hand screened canvas in a neon green and yellow and purple pattern. That way, if Ryan is feeling fruitier one day and lumberjacked the next, he need not sacrifice self-expression while working.







In the end each included designated pockets for each of his aforementioned necessities, plus a few extra, with two reinforced belt loops of leather or seatbelt, two secret pockets for small things in back and a stitch-suggested pocket for chapstick.

It was so nice to be sewing again. So nice.

**John's modeling here, as Ryan lives in Philadelphia.

The Biggest Project

Making my portfolio turned out to be the most fun and also most challenging part of my applications. No matter how many proofs I looked at, of course, something could always be improved upon. And the version I shipped out is not pefect, but it's pretty good. The contents include sewing, drawing, prints, spanning late college through present day. I'm particularly proud of the final enclosure, which repeats a pattern used in one of the included pieces through machine embroidered silhouettes and sewn binding.



It's scary when your life seems to rest on something that is in some ways, so accidental. I've always felt stifled by the pressure inherent to making art--the feeling that each piece must fit into a decided repertoire and express you perfectly. When a given project can't or doesn't do that, I feel crushed by the waste of time and resources. And then I get monumentally discouraged.

But in making the portfolio, for the first time, I looked at it all together in a series. And to my surprise, they held each other up. Where one print fell short and seemed overly simple, another object chimed in with detail and nuance. It was reassuring and liberating to see that they were related, if only through their common creation by my hands, and I feel really proud of the work--all of it--for the first time.

I've embedded a link to the PDF pieces here, in case you'd like to see what I mean. Though it's rather late for critique, let me know what you think.

Dilly PIckles

If flowering dill weren't so dern tasty when it's floating in a spicy brine, I'd put the stuff in vases all over my house. That yellow of the flowers is nearly the color of paint covering the walls of our living room and man, I cannot get enough.


Where was I? Oh yes, PICKLES. Usually I'm more of a refrigerator dills sort of a girl, thanks to the expert tutelage of my friend Gerik, but we really wanted to complete this trifecta of canning projects with something more savory. Tomato sauce seemed a bit risky and we'd heard mixed reviews of canned salsa, so with little hesitation we picked up this hefty bottle of vinegar at the store and mixed it up with several shades of carrot and bean.





Keeping with our habit of beer pairings, we sipped a dark porter whose name I can hardly recall. I swear that at the time the beverages were clouding our minds just enough to numb the swell of our ankles and dull our sense of time's passing, not enough to get sloppy in our sterilizing and incubate the makings of botulism. Promise.


In the end, this was probably our least successful of the three recipes, mostly because we lacked the foresight to anticipate how beautiful purple carrots when bathed in hot brine would turn the whole mess violet! Also, we should have erred on the side of stubby vegetables instead of tall ones because while processing them in boiling water, we lost some brine out of the jars. Now the tips of some of our vegetables protrude above their liquid, which is no way to craft a crunchy pickle. Worst case scenario, they'll grow mold. We were really too tired to worry much about it at the end of the day. Total cost for 8 quarts of pickles? $9. If they're inedible, we'll live.

From this insane project I believe we gleaned a few lessons:

1. Jam is best made in small batches to ensure you can get a nice pectinated result.
2. A dishwasher is not for chumps. It is one of modernity's conveniences and comes in handy for washing jars.
3. Refrigerator pickles are probably easier and just as tasty as canned ones. While living in California with year round produce, canning pickles may be actually unnecessary.
4. Three canning projects in one day is a bit of a stretch, but doable.
5. Holiday weekends are perfect settings for crazy projects.

{High Five!}

Strawberry Fig Jam, with break for Hot Dog

Phase two of what I have coined Canaganza ushered in the red period of our day: Strawberry Fig Jam cooked while sipping a Rogue dry hopped red ale.



We subbed figs for rhubarb in this stage when we failed to locate the rhubarb patch at Berkeley Bowl West, and the combination certainly made for some nice photo ops. Ruby red against plumesque purple was just a photo waiting to be taken. Then I had a little affair with the part of the recipe that instructed us to combine 10 cups of sugar with all that fruit to let it mellow for an hour. Sugar is rather photogenic, in my defense.



Cara's help was instrumental for this part because she not only chopped strawberries, but also juiced all the lemons. You may or may not know that the hero that juices the lemons is contributing the most important part to any jam making project. In the end, we maybe could have used a few more lemons for our monster batch of jam because it's a little on the saucey side. Then again, I don't really mind the saucey side.


After that we had to let it cook for what seemed an eternity, so we broke for a hot dog snack and a root beer float out back. It was exactly what the Preservation Doctor ordered, a Top Dog with everything.



And before we knew it, we were ladeling the hot jam into sterilized jars like professional jammers. Next up: Dilly Pickles.

Peach Butter with Cinnamon and Vanilla Bean

I mentioned I was out collecting mason jars, but did I mention why? I don't think I did. This labor day weekend, Miriam and I opted to labor over some of late summer's bounty and put it up over 12 odd hours in her cozy kitchen. It was the perfect thing for a three day weekend. One day to gear up, one day to do it, and one day to recover from all the hard work. Maybe we're insane, but we undertook three separate projects to do in one day. Which means that by the end, we'd made more than fifty jars of preserved food to gaze upon with self satisfaction. If that constitutes insanity, then you'd better lock me up. I'd do it again in a heartbeat...but give me some time to get through the stuff. There is a lot of food in my cupboard now waiting to be slurped, spread and crunched upon.

We bought a box of peaches from the Temescal Farmers Market, 50 cents a pound for the bruised ones. Even these were of such high quality that we squirreled away some of them fresh while we were busy cooking down the rest.


Here are some photos of the festivities. I'm going to post them in stages, so that no one has occassion to be overwhelmed. To keep things light, we paired a nice beer with each phase of the process. For the huge batch of peach butter, we selected Anderson Valley's Summer Solstice Cerveza Crema. The beer was light but flavorful, a good combination to savor over the three hours that pot of butter sat on the stove. Waiting for spoon-coating consistency can seem an eternity and so it was important to keep our hands full of cold beverages.



Next up: Strawberry Fig Jams

Listless

I know, I know, I pretty much owe you one. Honestly, August has hit me a bit across the face over here. For one, my tomatoes are still green. Do you know how wrong that is? That's entirely-opposite-on-the-color-wheel wrong. And have we talked about August? How August marks one year since we moved here? One year not quite as I'd planned and one year worth of California sinking into my skin.

One whole year! Especially this year, I really can hardly say how I managed to fill up 365 days, it feels like we only just parked the car in front of Miriam's house and said to each other, Well, Here We Are. But then there are little things that mark time's passing: growth in the garden, most prominently but also, the way the Berkeley Bowl feels old hat and the fact that I no longer include We Just Moved Here in my personal introduction. I suppose it was all the tiniest of things packed together, end to end, that propelled me through this year. It makes it hard to explain what I've been doing when anyone asks, but I know I must have been doing something.

So this California Anniversary it makes me want to write lists of things, just to keep in a little stack, to reference from time to time as way of collecting all the small things and maybe making them feel bigger. I haven't been on any fancy trips this year, I haven't bought a house, I'm certainly not getting married and professionally speaking, well, I haven't done much in that department either. But I did bake at least 5 pies. Made 10 or so jars of pickles. I made Marianne a dress. And took several picnics. And biked to Sonoma. And made some friends. I would really like to have a list of my friends to put on the wall, old fashioned style. Just so that I can remember, if ever that knowledge seems distant. Maybe this, a shorter version can suffice for now:



The goal is every day. A list every day. And the only rule? No TO DO lists allowed.

xo

All I Can Think About

Is the dinner parties to come! John put the finishing touches on our measure it, 96 inch! picnic table yesterday. That's seating for 10 at least, 12 if we're cozy. Since moving into our miniature apartment last fall, I've been dreaming of hosting outdoor style dining events but haven't had the furniture to turn that dream into a reality.



But Saturday we joined the tool library, and checked out a jigsaw (they were out of circular saws), which made the sawing a whole lot easier. And Sunday we bought materials and started cutting all the wood to size, and then a little every day after work we kept working on it, through several snags in our directions, until yesterday when John championed it and finished it without me in the middle of the day.



That's all salvaged wood, which came in way under the budget I'd made for Fresh From Home Depot lumber and I love the variations in the top. We may seal it up one of these days but since it so seldom rains out here, we're not in any rush.



ps. Ryan requested a "full body shot" so I'm adding it here. I'm a sucker for close ups, and so sometimes forget the bigger picture. My bad.

Sporadically

I've something to confess, friends. Though it's not set in stone, I've begun working at a JOB recently.

Which leaves far too little time for the number of projects I'd been undertaking at an increasingly ambitious pace this spring. Including my commitments around here. Caramels have been keeping me rather busy, besides the actual 9 to 5, in addition to learning how to compost using red worms, joining a soccer team and oh did I mention, sampling the homebrew?


That last task has taken up the better part of my evening two nights running and I dare say I'll probably have another one tonight as I wrap the last of the caramels for the highly anticipated wedding of Colin and Sarah, which we plan to attend this Sunday. And depending on how it goes, I may even whip up a dress for the occassion.

Now we just have to wait.

So John finished with school this week, an event we celebrated on Monday evening with Jelly Beans and Beer at the park. One whole year of graduate school closer to being Doctor Geography is nothing to sneeze at.


So that also means that now I have an extra set of hands around here for things that are really more of a two person job. The first on the list was getting that aforementioned hefeweizen into bottles so they can start carbonating and aging so that we can drink it. You may however remember that the most dreaded, most labor intensive part of the whole process is when you have to put that stuff into bottles, a process that goes something like this: power wash, suds it up, rinse it WELL, sanitize, and then repeat.

It takes a while just to get everything prepared and then you have to also siphon the tasty beer from the primary into the bottling bucket (I've reverted to single stage fermenting since moving here, as it is a bit simpler in our tiny quarters), managing to leave the trub behind, mixing in the sugar, keeping everything Clean. And then actually dispensing it into those shiny vessels and capping them all off. I'm getting tired just thinking about it.

But we did it. John cleaned the kitchen and kept things orderly while I cleaned out the bottles and then we did that brilliant waltz described up there of doing the damned thing and afterwards, John scrubbed the floor. Truly.


Afterwards, the payoff is all those shiny bottles lined up on the countertop ready to do their part and turn that delicious hoppy liquid into something refreshing. Now we just have to wait.



I couldn't have done this one alone. Thanks to Andrew and Miriam for being such trooper beer drinkers and giving us a bundle of bottles. And thanks to Gerik back in January for so considerately saving those big old 33 oz. re-sealable bottles he drank out here, which were Great for this.

Terrace, In Progress

We've been undertaking a huge project around here lately: turning our inhospitable dirt yard & non-functioning driveway into a backyard space that will not only grow tasty food, but also be home to many fabulous garden parties and ultimate relaxation. Up there, through the window, that's the Before.

While the former goal, as you know, is well on its way, we have yet to hang out back there. I've only just begun to find some things that will spruce up the place and turn it from dingy driveway into a place for sitting. And already, I sense a bold color palette emerging.





We're still configuring all the disparate elements and in the end we hope to have an outdoor dining setup. But I dare say, the thing is well on its way. Assembling patio-type furnishings that are neither plastic nor expensive is tricky business it turns out, but our luck is finally changing. We're now the proud owners of 2 loungers, 2 benches, 2 chairs (plastic, but forgivably) and a ceramic Swan, all of whom are becoming acquainted. With a little finesse and some rigged lighting, I think they'll get along swimmingly.

I can almost taste the mojitos we'll be sipping out on the Terrace.

Fag-lover

As in, bundle of sticks! Isn't this one model-esque? We were making plant markers from old things in Miriam's old garage. They're tied together with one of those cords that keeps your glasses hanging safely around your neck, which we found on the ground in that old garage. Inexplicably, it made a very picturesque bundler. And this is me transporting them home atop my newly fashioned front rack (thanks to kurt!) which makes me unstoppable when it comes to hauling.


**those are shasta daisies on the back end that someone at the Temescal Community Garden was getting rid of. Quite the load.

Seedlings

This week Miriam (with a tiny amount of help from me) started our collective seeds. We ordered a bundle from Baker Creek Heirloom seeds and they arrived last Friday in adorable little illustrated envelopes. They're incubating right now in little containers of soil as I type this. Among them, carrots, chard, beets, purple cayenne peppers, black heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, peas, herbs and several types of lettuce.


Pretty terrible pictures though! Sorry!

As I tend to go on and on about the garden once things are growing, this is fair warning that you'll probably get lots and lots of updates as things begin to sprout. We're trying all manners of vegetable this year, so I'm pretty optimistic something will really flourish. We've already dug up half our backyard in preparation, and I'd say spring is well underway at our house for sure.