Making Progress...

So, I had maybe left the scrapbooking world behind, now that I live on an island, have no (or, as my three year old will tell you, ZERO) friends who put pictures in albums, much less scrapbook, and live at least 75 minutes from the nearest scrapbooking store. But no. We have settled into this new home, on this remote place. I am pregnant again, with all the nesting that implicates (in my case, a great amount. More importantly, we've unpacked the last 7 years of photo albums. And the kids like to look through them. And suddenly, watching a computer slideshow of the last year doesn't seem like such a tactile or engaging process.

Yesterday I pulled out all my scrapbooking gear. Holy cow, I've got a lot of paper. And photos which sit ready to go, starting with January 2004. Chris, though largely uninterested in this process or its result, gave me the green light to let the house go to hell while I take over the dining room table and see what I can do in one week. Unfortunately, I only had 8 blank album pages left. But I managed to get January to June 2004 onto the pages, photos, paper, stickers and all. And even though scrapbooking with four small hands reaching up to touch and try everything isn't nearly the social experience that a "crop til midnight" was, I'm hooked again.

Just have to get more pages...

Scrapbook Obsessed.

It began innocently enough. Take pictures. Develop pictures. Put pictures into an album. Maybe write a few words about who is in the picture, where it was taken, why. And then suddenly, inspiration hits, and a funny sentence is added. A story is told. Colored markers make an appearance. Oh, this scrap of paper looks nice against the background.
I know many women who lived quite happily with shoeboxes of photos until they were ambushed by Creative Memories (and I really do mean ambushed in the nicest way). I wasn't one of them. I was cutting up paper and adding captions long before I knew about archival markers or special glue, much less 12 x 12 sheets of patterned paper. I was delighted to find out that my secret passion was a certified, money making product line, even if, I confess, I never enjoyed spending all that money to make sure that everything was archival.
Then I had kids. The picture taking escalated. Then we got a digital camera. The picture taking rocketed past the moon. Only now there was choice, there was the ability to take two dozen photos to capture the moment in just the right way. Yikes. I was scrapbooking regularly, with the "right" pages and the right products. My best friend had a baby three weeks before me, and we would take our sleeping infants through the craft store and drool and ooh and buy, buy, buy.
The first year of Sterling's life takes up not less than two of the 12 x 12 straphinge albums that now dominate our botton book shelf. At least three inches thick each. Thankfully, I got pregnant that first year, and despite the addition of a second set of smiles, the albums got a bit more spare, say, a book and a half. Then the kids got older, we remodeled and put everything in storage, and moved. Digital photography makes it far easier to just leave everything on the computer and not worry so much about it - after all, its not like you've got a shoe box of photos to stare you in the face whenever you open the closet door.
This is going somewhere. Really. But more on that tomorrow.

Cookie Cutter Madness

I was cruising through some of my new favorite sites (wish I could add a link list of the blogs I read, but that is still beyond me), Craftapalooza and found a Flickr photo group of cookie cutters. As craftapalooza has said - I've shown you mine, now you show yours! You can see a bunch of neat cutters on the Flickr Group Site. Despite the rather large bunch of cutters that I have, I just don't make many cookies anymore. Since the kids can be sensitive to sugar, I've veered away from making roll cookies and more into muffins and such. Any ideas for a low sugar, sugar cookie? Oxymoron, I know.
Anyway, here's a photo from the cookie cutters I have... my favorite cutter, a moose from our honeymoon in Jackson Hole, Wyoming (back in the day, to be sure).

Like Mother, Like Daughter?

It shouldn't be such a big surprise, but I AM constantly amazed at how much my daughter can be like me. And how much she is definitely her own person (and a much bigger personality than I). But she loves so many of the things that I love to do. I've probably used up a skein of yarn, allowing her (age 3) to use a pair of dpn and poke away, "knitting" at her scraps of yarn.

But here she is, creative like me, but so different - she loves to paint. She will watercolor for hours, using copious amounts of paint and even more water. Color means everything to her - so usually every inch of the paper is vibrant with color. Here she is in one of my lesser creations - a denim apron made from some scrap denim I've been holding onto for a few years. Unlike me, she loves to pose!

A knitting frenzy

I've been suffering from a bit of a knitting frenzy. It began innocently enough a few weeks ago when I was searching, not for knitting inspiration, but for a pattern to make a Waldorf style Doll. That brought me a blogger site called SouleMama. I'd known about blogs (Chris has a great one for his experiment at the Story Collective), but hadn't thought about it being for THIS! What a revelation.

Needless to say, I didn't immediately find a link for the doll, but instead found inspiration for a whole slew of new projects, and even better, links to a ton of other crafty/knitty blogs. I have found a few on eblogger that have lots more options for display than this one seems to have, so I hope to figure it all out and get some links up myself someday.

Anyway, I've got a backlog of crafts to share. Right now I am working on a second little knitted hat - This is from Joelle Hoverson's Last-Minute Knitted Gifts. It took three weeks on the library waiting list to get ahold of a copy, but it was worth the wait. This hat took less than the four hours it might have, and looks so darling. Since I have six new babies to knit for this spring, I can't wait to get off island in two weeks and pick up some new cotton yarn!

Random dinner with us

Us being my family - husband, wife (properly known as partners here in Canada), two kids and counting (only three months left til number three arrives). We all love food - the women could eat round the clock, the men are a bit more particular. Sugar tends to be out, whole grains tend to be in, and everyday feels like a race to the finish. Hopefully this will entertain and give some recipe ideas, at the very least occasionally make you hungry.

A few nights ago we had a perfect "extending the table" moment. Since the whole idea is making every bit count and being hospitable not only when it is convenient, but when the guest just shows up, it was fitting that as I was thinking of creating this blog, some friends just showed up. We live on a rather small island off the city of Vancouver, and it takes about two months to go through the entire video collection at the library. So Chris (my husband) bought a huge lot of DVD's - say, 500 movies. Now we are a regular blockbuster video store - and people are often showing up to borrow a movie. So these friends show up just as we are mid-way through dinner - and we coerced them to stay for supper. We love people just showing up! It was a fine night - a very simple meal of brown rice and the simplest recipe for black bean chilaquiles that I've ever made. I had planned on freezing the leftovers for when baby comes, but how much more fun to have company!

Bon Appetit!

About Me...

A bit about me. I'm a thirty-something mom who loves to cook and bake. BC (before children) I was an avid baker and extravagant cook, but things have toned down now with two preschoolers (one whose palate still leaves something to be desired). I am also an aspiring novelist - with one semi-completed (read: I've finished a draft, and boy, does it need some reworking!) novel about baking on the shelf. This blog in part satisfies my need to keep writing, and to focus on food for a bit. Since reality is ever present, I thought it would be a challenging exercise to simply write about our daily food - in a household of recovering vegetarians, a five year old who would eat a bagel every meal if allowed, a three year old who will eat just about everything set before her (and ask for a snack twenty minutes later), a sugar-holic, peanut-allergy, carb loving people, that ought to be entertaining. Perhaps even humbling, as there will surely need to be admissions of nights where cereal was the only option. But then, the motivation! To try new recipes, to branch out, again, into the land of multi-course meals... I am excited to see how this might all turn out! Bon Appetit.

Extending the Table

I've been gorging myself on crafty blogs this month - so much for the new years' resolution to stay focused. Actually, I've been very focused, just not on what I had expected to be. In the process, I've been crafting a bunch. And cooking a lot. And decided to make a blog that combines the two. A week ago I set up a site just for dinner, but after making two hats last week and really wanting to post the pictures, I realized that I could do both at once...

Many years a good friend of mine shared the Mennonite book, Extending the Table, which is not simply a great basic cookbook, but a call to true hospitality and sharing of all that we have. So, in the spirit of bringing varied lives together, as my husband and I are want to do, I offer up this blog.

The food part will be obvious - you make the dinner, and an unexpected guest shows up, and you extend your table (and the goodies on it) to include everyone. As for the crafts, my husband will attest that all too often a portion of out huge table is covered in bits and parts of my crafty world. And since moving to Bowen Island, BC from Southern California, there has been many a pot of tea shared with new friends while learning how to knit/crochet/etc. at the table.

Welcome!