sweater slippers

 

Well, first day in of my week of home projects and my daughter reminded me that she's been asking for slippers.  The painting of the walls waited while I whipped these up using a couple of sweater sleeves.

 I say "whipped up" because they really only took me about 30 minutes.  The perfect project to fit in between a trip to town and dinner-making.  I cut the sleeves off of a lightly fulled (shrunk on purpose) cashmere and lambswool sweater that I had been saving and sewed up the toe with wool yarn.  I put them on her feet to figure out where the bend in the ankle needed to be, and sewed that too, cutting off the excess on the inside.

 

I stitched a faux cuff and tacked them in place with little roses made out of some wool rope my friend Odile sent me a while back and called it good.

She's slipping and sliding around the floor at this very moment, quite happily.  For that, the walls can wait.

making do - a painted shoe (boot, really)

 

Last week I had a holiday party to attend that required a slightly less woodsy attire than I normally wear.  We don't get out much so my selection of dress clothes is pretty slim.  I put out my clothes and looked for my black dress boots and came up with only one boot out of the pair.  After much fruitless searching and grumbling about my kids getting into everything I decided to wear my black heels instead.  I found...one.  What could they have possibly done with the others?  Who knows.  I'll probably find them in the bottom of the duck pond or something.  I had neither the time, inclination, nor the budget to drive 25 miles to the store to get new boots.  You know what I did have?  Paint.

  

During my search I had found a pair of tan leather boots in the back of the closet that I never wear.  I've painted shoes before so I thought, what the heck I'll give it a shot.  I wiped the boots down with rubbing alcohol and let them dry then applied thin layers of black acrylic paint to them (tho' they look blue in the photos, they're really black).

I had intended to leave the soles tan as they are plastic and wouldn't hold the acrylic well, but my daughter decided to help me paint (while I was outside) and I needed to fix those up too.  I had a tiny jar of army green enamel in my paintbox, so that's what they got.

The acrylic finish looked kind of unconvincing as it was, and I was concerned about it scraping off so I applied a beeswax sealer and that made a huge difference. (I used Sno-Seal)  Looking at them in my hand, I couldn't tell that they weren't black to begin with.  I probably could have used an acrylic sealer too, but the wax was faster.

After a full night of walking around and eating appetizers, they still look pretty good.  If you look closely you can see some paint loss where my foot bends but overall, they served my needs just fine.

Sometimes you have to make do.

I know we've all been there... safety pins holding shirts closed, staples on the pant cuffs... what are your "make do" stories?

an abundance of green tomatoes

 

With the early frosts we've had, my tomato plants got hit hard, leaving me with an abundance of unripened tomatoes.  As in, a full garden wagon and two 5-gallon buckets full of unripened tomatoes.   

 

While I would have loved for all of these heirloom beauties to have ripened and blessed me with tomato sauce, juice, and salsa, I wasn't about to let the green ones go to waste.

 

After much chopping and mixing and cooking and canning, I managed to put several quarts of green-tomato goodies in the pantry this weekend.

 

I pickled the cherry tomatoes, made pie filling from the mortgage lifters, relish from the genovese, and jam from whatever was left over.  I still have a good 20 pounds to use up, as well as a shelf-full of some that look like they might turn red for me.

 

Though I hated to spend such a gorgeous weekend inside chopping tomatoes, I am happy to have this bounty tucked away for colder days.

How was your weekend?  Hope your week gets off to a good start.

what to do with unripe watermelon

 

I jumped the gun.

The watermelons out in the garden sure looked ripe.  They were the right size, had a yellow spot on the bottom from where they had been laying on the ground, and were pretty close to their projected ripening date.  I really really wanted watermelon.  So much so that I overlooked some of the other indicators of a ripe watermelon - the tendril closest to the stem hadn't yet turned brown and when thumped it sounded more hollow than dull.  (did I mention that I really really wanted watermelon?)

 

I picked it anyway and when I cut it open found myself with a totally unripe watermelon.  Bummer.

 

I certainly wasn't going to let it go to waste so I figured I would make some watermelon rind sweet pickles.  I cut the skin off and cut the flesh into similarly sized pieces, leaving out the seeds.  My watermelon was small variety and I got about 3 cups of flesh from it.

 

You can find a lot of different recipes for pickled watermelon rind online, but basically you're cooking the rind in a simple syrup of vinegar and sugar, with some spices added.  When it's done, you have pickled rind.  It's pretty good, but I will say that the flesh parts were still very "fleshy" and the consistency wasn't as good as the rind area.  Since it was just OK, I decided to take it a step further.

 

I put the pickled rind in my dehydrator and let them get to the "good and chewy" stage.  These we liked.  They are sweet but not cloying and now my daughter doesn't need to drink the sugar water out of the hummingbird feeder to get her sugar fix (which I caught her doing twice this week).

Even so, I'll be a bit more careful when I pick the next one.

Have a great weekend, everyone.

 

mushrooms and flower brooches from felted stones

Since I shared my tutorial for making felted wool stones the other day, I thought I'd also share some ideas for using those stones that don't turn out exactly as you like.  Maybe the color isn't what you like or it it didn't turn out quite as smooth as you'd hoped, there's still lots of opportunity in that wool.

For this first one I've liberated the stone by making a cross cut through the bottom of the wool.

I needled the flaps down until I have a little cap.

I had a piece of felted "rope" on hand already so I cut off a piece, tucked it into the cap, and grabbed some roving.

I used the handle of my felting needle to tuck in a good layer between the stem and the cap, then needled it in place, being careful not to poke all the way to the outside of the cap.  That would make the white wool show on the outside of the cap and it wouldn't look very nice.

I needled on a few white spots and just like that I have a cute toadstool.

Another idea is to use the wool in a flower brooch.  You can see I've cut open the bottoms of the smaller stones but cut the wool off the long rock into two somewhat equal pieces.

I flattened the green piece and sewn through it to act as a leaf.  I've left the open end alone for now but once it's sewn to the other pieces, the open end will be sewn shut on the underside of the flower.

I took the two blue pieces, cut a few slits for the petals of the flowers, and turned the pieces inside out which causes it to flare out a bit.  I rounded the petals a little then sewed over them with a blanket stitch.

I cut the smallest piece with a fringe.

After stacking all of the flower pieces onto the leaf, I tucked a wool bead in the middle and sewed them all together down through the center of the flower.  I took a few extra stitches through the open end of the leaf and attached it securely to the underside of the flower. 

Stitch on a pinback and you have yourself a brooch, or sew it to a headband, or you could tie it to a present...

The best part is that you still have those rocks to work with again.

I keep a set of stones on hand just for this purpose.  You can make cute little pouches this way, or finger puppets, or the projects I've just covered...so much possibility!  So the next time your rocks don't turn out as you wanted, don't think of them as mistakes.  Rock your mistakes instead!  (I know, I'm such a nerd)

Have fun, everyone!

grinding garlic

When it comes to food I'm a hands-on kind of girl.  I bake my own bread, dry my own tomatoes, and make my own cheese from time to time.   We brew our own beer and ferment our own sauerkraut so I find it odd then that I never once thought about making kitchen staples like garlic powder. 

I was running low on garlic powder and as I was writing it on my grocery list I suddenly wondered if I could make my own.  The answer was yes, and the process was really simple, to boot.

I picked up a few heads of good garlic at the store, peeled and sliced them, and put them in the deydrator on low until they were dried to a crisp.  (a full day and a half)

I ground them up with my mortar and pestle until I had powder and that was it.  Now, it did take some time to process all of that garlic, and 5 heads only gave me about 2/3 cup so the question for me naturally, is "is it worth the effort?"  I stuck my finger in a bit of the store bought garlic powder and tasted it.  It was vaguely garlicky.  I stuck my finger in the homemade and tasted it.  Whooo!  It definitely had some kick.

A little will go a long way with this, and it comes with no extra packaging, which I appreciate.  The overall cost was about the same as store bought too.  I can couple it with some finely ground salt when a recipe calls for garlic salt.  I'm glad I tried it.

Do you have any pantry staples that you make?  Have any good tips for me?

the girl's new goldfinch

Early this week I took a little time to finish one of the unfinished pre-holiday projects on my workbench.  I had this pretty but shrunken wool sweater on hand and have been meaning to make it into something wearable for my daughter.

It was nearly the right size for her already so using a shirt that currently fits her as a guide, I just trimmed a bit off of both sides of the body and the arms and sewed it up.  I also cut some length from the sleeves, leaving them long enough to cuff.

Using the cut-off cuff from one arm, I made a pocket for the front.  I also decided that the pre-finished neck looked a little too "finished" so I cut it off and made a more organic neckline.  I also did an exaggerated running stitch around it and the pocket for the same reason.  I wanted this to look handmade and the previous machine stitches weren't cutting it.

The color of the sweater reminded me of the thistles that grow in front of our house, and reminded me of the joy we get from watching the goldfinches hanging from them, eating seeds in the fall.  I decided that would be my theme.

Using scraps of felted wool I stitched on some thistles and a goldfinch.  The girl got a big kick out of having a bird on her belly.

She got an even bigger kick out of momma filling her new pocket with birdseed so she could feed the birds.

Naturally, the chickens love this new pocket too.

Have a good day, everyone.  Extra points if you fill your pocket with birdseed and feed the birds today.

Wordless Wednesday

Again with the not really wordless bit...

What to do when your oven breaks?  Bake bread in the grill of course. (it worked!)