dontcallmebecky

Happy Thanksgiving!

We're leaving soon to head to my grandparents' house for Thanksgiving dinner. The butternut squash and sourdough stuffing are baking away as I type.

I love Thanksgiving dinner and I love stuffing...I would eat it every day if I could. Here's my all time favorite stuffing recipe:

Sourdough Stuffing

Ingredients

1-pound loaf sourdough bread

8 tablespoons non-dairy butter (I use Earth Balance)

10 ounces cremini mushrooms, sliced 1/2-inch thick in both directions

Salt and freshly ground pepper

4 stalks celery, halved lengthwise and sliced

1 medium onion, chopped

10 sprigs fresh thyme, leaves stripped from the stems

12 fresh sage leaves, chopped

3 1/2 cups vegetable broth

3 tablespoons chopped Italian parsley leaves  

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 2-quart baking dish and set aside. Cut or tear the bread into 1-inch cubes and spread it evenly on 2 baking sheets. Toast the bread in the oven until completely dry and beginning to crisp and brown, about 20 minutes. Transfer to a large mixing bowl.  

Melt 2 tablespoons of the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add the mushrooms and a few pinches of salt and saute, stirring occasionally, until golden brown, about 6 to 8 minutes. Add celery, onion, 2 tablespoons butter, and thyme. Once the butter has melted, cook, stirring frequently, until the vegetables have softened, about 5 minutes. Add sage and remaining 4 tablespoons butter. Add vegetable broth to skillet and stir to combine. Season with salt and pepper, to taste.  

Transfer toasted bread cubes to a large bowl. Pour the vegetable broth mixture over the bread cubes and toss to combine until the bread cubes absorb the liquid. Pour the mixture into the greased baking dish, and sprinkle with parsley. Bake in the center of the oven until heated through and the top is golden brown, about 40 minutes. Remove the stuffing from the oven and allow to cool about 15 minutes before serving.

Blurb book

I put together a blurb photo book of our Europe trip and finally received the finished product.

I ordered the book from blurb and used their design it yourself templates for Adobe InDesign. This is the program that I use at work all the time, so I am comfortable with the software and the templates were very easy to use. The album I made is a 12"x12" hardcover book. I set up each page with a 3x3 grid of 4-inch blocks and then added and resized my pictures to fill the blocks. Some photos fill one block and others fill up to 6 blocks of the page. It was a little overwhelming to fit all of the pictures in the book, so coming up with a simple grid to use made the book easy and quick to put together.

I stuck with one color bar for each city that we visited and added some of the text from my blog entries and some of my own additional commentary. Friends and family are having fun playing "spot the typo." Luckily only two have been found so far!

Blurb was great to work with. I used Blurb for my parents' anniversary album earlier this summer. For the Europe book, I used the cover wrap option which turned out nicely. For my parents' album, I used the dust jacket option, which turned out nice too. Here's two tips that I discovered myself through purchasing two books and through reading Blurb forums.

1. Don't pay to upgrade from Standard to Premium paper - it's not much of a quality jump to justify the cost.

2. Don't pay $15 extra to remove the blurb logo from the last page (custom logo option). I was able to tear out the final logo page myself for free (blank white page with a tiny logo at the bottom center).

For past trips, I have just put photos into 2-up or 3-up albums and written captions and information. The scrapbooks and photo albums are starting to take over our house, so getting a photo book like this printed is a great space saver for the amount of pictures that it can include. It fits easily on our bookshelf and is only about 1/2" wide.

A coworker of mine has had great success using Walgreens for photo books, too. She came up with the best idea for creating a yearly album. She started a new book on January 1 and adds pictures to her online album layout throughout the year when she has a chance (once or twice a month). At the end of December, she'll have a complete album with all of the pictures she's taken this year included in it and won't have to scramble around to remember what she did or where she misplaced photos of a certain event. I think I'm going to try this method out for 2010.

on (and off) my needles

I've been doing lots of knitting lately. It's a great break from studying and is a lot less of a mess than sewing or quilting, so I don't have to worry about cleaning up after myself when I pull out the needles.

As with all of my sweater projects, I tend to get sick of them about halfway through and want to cast on anything but another sweater, so my Amelia is waiting in the wings right now until inspiration strikes again. I still hope to finish it by the end of the year, but I have to get a couple small projects finished up before I start on it again.

My first break from Amelia was for this Red Scarf Project Scarf. I've been in a bit of a purple rut lately, so it was so refreshing to use yarn that is not purple for a bit. The yarn I used for this project is called Shepherd's Wool and it's from Stonehedge Fiber Mill near Traverse City, Michigan. This yarn is Michigan's best kept secret. It's similar to Cascade 220 because it is a solid worsted weight yarn that comes in lots of colors. But, it's 250 yards/skein, is a lot softer than Cascade 220 and is thicker and woollier than Cascade. It's great for felting and it's super soft to wear on your skin.

I pulled out my old bamboo needles for this project. They are my first pair of needles and the pair that I learned to knit with and it was fun to use them again. I mainly use my interchangeable circulars for all projects now, but wanted to use these for nostalgia's sake.

Here's the finished scarf:

Pattern: ScaWiNoNa or Scarf with No Name

Size: 6"x72"

Needle Size: 9

The Red Scarf Projects is taking donations until December 15. Check out their website for details. Thanks, Melissa for spreading the word about this great cause.

Also on the needles are this Big Montana Tunic from the Fall Interweave:

I was sort of in denial for a while about how this sweater would look on me and then I saw something online about how women with larger chests should not wear sleeveless turtlenecks and it kind of sealed the deal for me. I'll be ripping this one out and starting on a different project. I've got six skeins of this yarn to work with, so I think I'll use most of it to make Wrenna from French Girl Knits. It's a short sleeved cardigan and I think it will work much better with my body type.

My weekend project has been working on the End of May Hat, this beautiful colorwork pattern from Zig Zag Stitch. I am slowly getting the hang of knitting in both hands and it's been fun to see the pattern progress as I go. I think the yarn that I chose for the project is a bit too close in value, so the colors won't pop individually, but I'll save my final judgment for when the hat is finished.

• • •

Finally, Jon, my sister and I went to the Detroit Urban Craft Fair yesterday. My sister got a stained glass Michigan necklace, Jon and I got a couple of screenprinted designs stretched on canvas from All Things Grow for our offices, and I bought my first skein of hand spun yarn from hands + notions.

In the words of my sister, "I really like how it smells. It's sort of gross, like sawdust or something, but it smells good to me." I agree. Ahh...the smell of wool! I'm going to pair this yarn with a cream yarn and make a striped scarf similar to the Noro striped scarf. I'm so excited to work with handspun for the first time!

Marie Claire Idées & a craft challenge

I picked up the September 2009 issue of Marie Claire Idées at a newsstand in Paris (still can't believe that I can say that!). I have loved looking through this issue. The styling is beautiful and there are some really cute projects to try out.

• • •

I don't know if you're like me, but I have a great library of craft idea books that don't get used very often. Is anyone up for a "make-a-project-out-of-an-ignored-but-beautiful-idea-book" challenge? Off the top of my head, I've got a few great books in my stash with projects I'd like to make but have never gotten around to it. The project can be big or small, from a book or magazine, and made for you or as a gift. If you'd like to join, post in the comments and maybe we can report back in a bit with our progress.

edited: Let's plan on making this a challenge to start in January.

Last Minute Patchwork & Quilted Gifts

Weekend Sewing

Material Obsession

Stitched in Time

knitting projects

Here's two knitting projects I finished recently. I've had a busy semester so far and it's been hard to get any crafting done other than knitting lately. These two garter stitch projects were the perfect projects to give my mind a break.

First up is the Quincy Hat from Made in Brooklyn:

Pattern: Quincy

Yarn: Filatura Di Crosa Zara Solid

Color: 1706 Eggplant

Yardage: 2.5 balls, yarn held doubled

Needles: 10.5

Notes: This was such a fun pattern to knit. The construction of the hat is genius! I hope to make many more projects from the book soon. It's a soft, thick, and warm hat and a great variation on the typical knit hat.

Ravelry link: craftr's Quincy

Next is the Baktus scarf:

Pattern: Baktus

Yarn: The Plucky Knitter Merino Cashmere Nylon Fingering

Color: Bosherton

Yardage: 1 ball, 385 yards

Needles: 10.5

Notes: This project would have been so much more successful if I had a micro scale and weighed the yarn before I started! The basic pattern of the scarf is to cast on 4 stitches increase every four rows until you've used up half your yarn and then decrease every four rows until 4 stitches remain. I knit more than half of the yarn before I started to decrease, so I ended up with less yarn at the end. 

When it started to look like I was going to run out of yarn, I started decreasing one stitch every row until the end. I think that I was able to decrease to about 15 stitches remaining. Then, I ripped (cut) out the cast on row and ripped the beginning of the scarf back until I reached 15 stitches and bound off the original cast on side. The ends of the scarf are no longer pointy, but they are the same width.  They kind of curl up in a point when I wear it, so I'm going with it.

The scarf is nice and warm and perfect for the cooler weather and I absolutely love the color of the yarn, so this project is still a great scarf for me to use. Next time, I'll make sure to weigh the yarn first!

Ravelry link: craftr's Baktus

LivyLou Designs

Chris, one of my former coworkers, just started a new blog and online store. I miss hearing about all of her painting, home decorating projects, baking and crafting adventures every day. Work just hasn't been the same without her!

Rumor has it that she's quite talented in the Christmas tree decorating department, so I'm looking forward to her posts in December (hint, hint, Chris!).

Be sure to check out her blog, Livy Lou Designs and store, LivyLou Designs

 
 

green projects

It seems like my big craftwind last week has died down. I managed to tweak out these two projects before life got the better of me.

First up is a few cat pillows for around the house. I found this microfleece blanket for $5 and was able to make 3 pillows out of it (with lots of leftover fabric) for the cats so I was glad to find such an inexpensive piece of fabric to use. The pillows are your basic rectangle stuffed loosely with fiberfill. The cats like to sleep on the floor in front of our heating vents, so I made two for in front of the vents and one for the couch. (Mental note: buying a dark couch is not such a good idea when you have light colored cats...we are constantly vacuuming fur off the grey surface). As soon as I finished the first pillow and set it on the floor, NukuNuku jumped off my lap and splayed herself across the pillow. It's always nice when someone appreciates my work! Even though we have three pillows, they always seem to be fighting over the use of whichever pillow the other cat is using.

Nuku Nuku thinks I iron everything too well...she always likes to make sure everything is sufficiently scrunched up.

I also finished my green quilt top. This was modeled after my other baby quilts (here and here) and the blocks in this quilt are 5" square instead of 2.5" square. I used 10 fat quarters from the Timeless Treasures Apple Collection and 3.5 yards of fabric for the top. I was able to cut 12 five inch squares out of each fat quarter, for a total of 120 squares that were then cut in half. I cut the green fabric into 5" wide strips and cut out 120 squares from each strip and used the remaining fabric for a border.

The quilt is 14 blocks wide and 16 blocks tall with a 5" border of sashing around the edge. From my estimates, the quilt is approximately 72x81. I'm not sure how I'm going to quilt this yet. I was thinking about doing some straight line stitching a quarter inch in from each seam to make concentric squares, but I might just stick with basic stippling. Any ideas?

I was planning on giving this away as a gift (I don't think the person reads my blog), but after I told Jon my intentions, he became very protective of it. Hopefully he'll let me part with it!

Common threads

It's been a while since I've posted all of the blocks I've been making for the Common Threads virtual quilting bee that I'm a part of. Here's what I've made this year:

January: Oiyi

February: Jenny

March: Lynn

April: Jacquie

May: Wendy

June: Lisa

 

Round 2

August: Amber

September: Amy

October: Rossie

I've got November and I mailed out my fabrics on Monday. I can't wait to see what these ladies come up with for my block theme!

getting crafty again

Thank goodness for Daylight Savings Time and remnants of jet lag. I was up at 7:30 on Sunday, and if you know me, I'm lucky if I get up before 11AM voluntarily (a morning person I am not)! I spent most of the day sewing blocks and quilt tops and it was so nice to work on projects that were moved to the back burner before our trip.

I finished the quilt top for Amanda's Nine Patch a Day Along. These blocks have been sitting in my craft closet since early in the summer and I was so relieved to finish up the top. I'm hoping to get to IKEA sometime this week to stock up on some twin flat sheets for quilt backings so that I can work on finishing the quilt this weekend.

Last night I cut out lots of triangles for a new quilt project. I think I'm going to make a large version of my trusty nested diamond baby quilt (here and here).

 

Because I have so many unfinished projects sitting in my crafting stash, I decided to join in on Jacquie's aptly timed "Joy in the New Year Challenge" to help spur me on to finishing up some things around here. I've got 14 projects to finish up this year and I think I can manage it all before the end of the year. Wish me luck!

German Christmas Ornaments

Here are the two ornaments we bought in Bamberg.

They are so darling it hurts! I wish that we had enough money to bring all of the adorable ornaments in the store home with us.

I hope Jon and I look like this when we're 80! He can keep me warm with toasty fires and I can keep him warm with knitted goods. :)