When J is gone on an extended work trip (for who knows how long), I find I play too much WoW* (once the kids are in bed), I have a fixation with keeping the kitchen spotless (Just In Case -of what, I have no idea) and I try to find creative ways to keep us occupied in between.

Sometimes that entails preparing an aesthetic, yummy dinner for one:

Part leftovers, part treat, part necessity.

And I take photos of it, as though it were a work of art:

I forgot to get a photo of the Inukshuk one.

I spend time with Theya on projects that we dream up together, including finishing her dress to match Rose’s:

I know. Totally freakin’ cute, eh?

We go to beaches (man-made in this case) and get all freaky on blue ice-cream:

ZOMG BLUE ICE-CREAM

And I sit in our cozy, perfect reading corner (so cozy it should be illegal) and go through books like they’re stacks of pretty foods on a cracker.

As Leelu watches on, wondering what the heck I’m doing.

*Kul Tiras server, Elunelaurel is my main. Gimme a hollar if you’re in the neighbourhood.

Along with 1. Installing clothesline in the yard and 2. Buying a new high-efficiency washer & dryer set, it seems our duty to get good compost bins going in the homes we buy.

The first summer after we’d moved to Red Deer I was pregnant with Lochren but determined I’d get compost bins built. Yeah, it didn’t happen. I’ve had the same notion each growing season but time, babies, exhaustion, anemia, and whatever else, seemed to get in the way.

NOT THIS YEAR DAMMIT!

J managed to nab some wonky pallets from behind his work and I finally had my inspiration! One pallet was in nice shape and had low sort-of-walls built on two sides so we plunked it at the alley and now share it with our next-door neighbours as a garbage bin holder thingy (why can’t I think of the word?) Horray! No more bins blowing all over the alley!

Another pallet was really long and made me think it’d be awesome for the back of some compost bins. I’d drawn up some designs in the spring and came up with one I’d liked but it would have required buying some lumber -which is fine, we just hadn’t got around to it yet. Having the pallet meant I could use more of the cedar lengths I’d piled up from taking apart the benches John had made us. I’d used the long pieces on the raised garden beds and was left with a bunch of short ones, so I improvised. It took me a few evenings and a little help from a Carpentry Fairy, but I built them!

Carpenter Fairy, working her little butt off!!

J helped me move them into position yesterday evening. This morning, while the kids frolicked (and fought) about the yard, enjoying the sunshine, I pitchforked out the two piles I’d sort of haphazardly created into the wheelbarrow and filled up the bins!

Horray! Proper compost bins!

Each one was topped with a bag full of half-rotten leaves (Horray for J, in the spring he spotted 8 or so bags down the alley for garbage pick up and went back for them!) and will settle quite a bit.

I finally got it done! There’s such satisfaction in completing a project that’s been bugging me for so long. There’s satisfaction in knowing it’s not just a huge, messy pile where the mice obviously hang out (not hard to tell -the cats all sit there and stare). There’s satisfaction in seeing how well it’s all be chugging along, decomposing and turning into nutrient-rich heaps of awesomeness despite my lack of attention. There will be great satisfaction when I see it piled on the gardens and turning back into happy plants!

I posted photos of my preparation of this very aesthetic recipe months ago and had requests for the recipe. I’m finally making good on my promise to post it (with photos)!

If a recipe has several steps that require the addition of a few ingredients at once, I like to copy it down with the recipes all grouped together so I can have them all in the same bowl at pre-preparation, hence the A, B, etc, below. The pre-prep for this recipe is more time consuming than the actual cooking (so many ingredients! so much chopping!) but it’s very, very yummy and worth it. Don’t be afraid to substitute dried herbs for fresh if you haven’t got it (I didn’t when I took these photos) or you just don’t want to pay $5 for one bunch of mint at the grocery store in the middle of winter.

I admit it! I get a lot of enjoyment just out of gathering the ingredients!

INGREDIENTS
A:
1 medium, finely chopped onion
3 tbsp butter

B:
3 cloves garlic, chopped fine
2 tsp whole cumin seed
1½ tsp mustard seed
4 cloves
C:
3 tbsp curry powder
1½ tsp chili powder (or to taste, I leave it out -too spicy for the kids)

D:
1 cup split red lentils
1¾ c water
1¾ cup (or 1 can) coconut milk
4 thick slices fresh ginger root
4 medium tomatoes, chopped
300g spinach (frozen or fresh)
ground black pepper to taste

E:
2 tbsp butter
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
F:
juice of 1 large lime
1 tbsp chopped fresh coriander
2 tbsp chopped fresh mint
1 tsp salt

DIRECTIONS: (as they were given to me)
1. Fry A on medium heat until golden
2. Add B and cook for 5 mins
3. Add C, stir
4. Add D all at once and simmer, stirring occasionally, for 30-40 mins or until lentils are soft and mushy
5. Cook E in another pan and add to lentil mix
6. Add F and stir
7. Let it all sit for 10 minutes, covered
8. Fish out and discard the cloves (if you can find them!) and the slices of ginger

Serve with Naan bread! (Yes, I have a recipe for Naan, but I’ll post that another time -I promise!!)

My naan-kneading assistant.

NOTES

• If using fresh spinach (as I do) it will make a HUGE dome over the pan and getting the lid on will be tricky:
  
  But it will wilt down a lot so no worries.
• I prefer to keep the tomatoes and spinach out of step 4. because I prefer chunkier, fresher veggies, so I add them at step 6. instead.
  
  Nice and bright! Perfect!
• Unfortunately, when I made it (and took these photos), I didn’t time the Naan properly and was frying the bread as the Dahl sat, so it wound up more faded than I like
  
  Still very yummy, though! (Don’t forget to fish out the cloves and ginger!)

Sometimes the kids like it, sometimes they don’t. J and I love, though, and it makes quite a bit -it’d be great when having friends over or if you like a lot of leftovers (it’s excellent re-heated, make sure you warm up the leftover naan, too).

As I mentioned yesterday (wow, two posts in as many days!) I’ve been poring over Amy Karol’s blog feeling inspired and excited about so many forms of creativity but this one in particular, Summer Sweater That’s Really A T-Shirt, has been easy, yet excellent (and potentially dangerous), inspiration.

Immediately after reading that post I uttered a quiet, “Duh! Of course!” grabbed the scissors from the drawer and headed for my t-shirt bins. I pulled out several that I wanted to attack but managed to keep myself in check and only modified two (so far).

This works so well for me because my most comfortable outfit is a light tank top and a cardigan. Sometimes the cardigans I have are a little too heavy. Sometimes the weather is so crazy here (OK, always?) so it’s nice to have layers to pull on and off while I’m outside as the sun plays hide-and-seek in the clouds. I have been a clothes collector for so long and while I’ve been doing great at getting rid of extra things, it’s been hard to part with clothes because I can’t help feel that Someday It Will Come In Handy.

Here’s one of the tops I cut:

With ratty jeans and the ubiquitous ribbed tank.

This long-sleeved T-shirt was from some thrift store or other and I liked the little flowers embroidered at the bottom but still was a bit too girly for me -yet I couldn’t part with it, even though I never wore it. (Crew necks also bug me.) For whatever reason, it’s totally OK as a cardigan and I’ve been wearing it constantly since yesterday afternoon. Woohoo!

After finishing last night’s post, I was raring to get back to the sewing downstairs (nothing like a little spewing of inspiration to make me itch to keep up on it) and I managed to finish Rose’s dress!

It looks so darn cute and I swear the pockets fitting her hands perfectly
was serendipity -it certainly wasn’t deliberate!

I was so excited to show Theya but there’s no accounting for a 5 year-old’s appreciation: she held Rose, looked it over, then looked up and asked me, “But where’s mine? And where are the matching bloomers and slippers you said you’d make?”

*sigh*

Wow, where the hell have I been and why the hell am I paying for this blog and hosting if I’m not going to use it?! I really need to get on that. No. REALLY.

It’s been nutso over here for the past oh, season? The last weekend in June had us going to Baptiste Lake to hang out with J’s side of the family for a mini reunion, then back for Theya’s last day of school and a birthday party, catching up on laundry and getting the house presentable so we could head out the door for another long weekend, this time in Cold Lake to hang out with my side of the family and a massive reunion. Then scooting back in time for Theya to hang out at a Gymnastics Camp each afternoon for a week.

It’s been a hell of a whirlwind of a summer and I’m just now starting to feel like I’m settled. There’s tons of yard work to be done -isn’t there always? I know, but this yard still has a looooonnnng way to go and a LOT of work to do to make up for some shitty landscaping (on the part of the previous owners) and some cheap, eco-determined processes (on our part). I’ve managed to do a lot this year (horray for feeling NORMAL and having this amazing power called ENERGY). Still, I really must get those compost bins done and that gravel dug and soil carted and grass & clover seeded and and and and…. *breathe*

Yeah. It gets so overwhelming at times. Did I mention that I am planning to have a garage sale the first weekend of August? AHAHAHHAHAAAA. I am clearly insane. I’m still carting boxfuls of stuff up and out of the basement and into the garage destined for the sale (or donation for whatever doesn’t go).

Did I mention that, because our house is very close to the Westerner Days parade route, I told Theya she could invite 5 friends to come over early on the 21st for a Pancakes & Parade Party? Yeah. I’m nuts. I figure I’ll focus my, er, focus on getting the yard looking ‘reasonable’ (COMPOST BINS instead of horrible, messy PILES would help, there, Chair..) for the P&PP then I have a week and a half to sort through boxes, arrange and price stuff for the Garage Sale.

Did I mention that my big sister (and a huge long-time supporter of our artistic efforts) has commissioned me to make her a quilt? She sent me paint chips of her bedroom colours and told me that she’d love a tree, so I picked up a few beautiful fabrics and came up with this design:

Watercolour concept illustration.

Once that’s done, THEN I’ll be able to relax.

HAHAHA. Relax. How can I relax when I’ve been spending literally hours (not all at once, I assure you) poring through this blog: Angry Chicken; and feeling so inspired to bake, sew, craft, paint, sew, sew, sew?! I had to force myself to close her Flickr stream and stop bookmarking pages. It’s getting overwhelming again.

And yet, yes, I am happy. Things are good. J hasn’t had to work out of town much so far this summer (yes, it might come back to bite us in our butts) so he’s been around to cart the monkeys off in the bike trailer most evenings to goof around in a playground so I can at least keep the house in decent shape and have a good hour to crank my music and get stuff done.

It’s also been a real treat having Theya home in the afternoons. She helped design a matching dress set for herself and her doll (Rose) and picked out the fabrics. While I work on measuring, cutting and sewing, she’s been embroidering the front of a plain white t-shirt with flowers and hearts. I can’t tell you how much I cherish those moments crafting and creating with her. It reminds me of watching my mom sew and her lessons on how to make things -continuing the tradition with my own little girl is magical.

I really, really want to try making something like this dress, but as a jacket, and matching ones for me & Theya. Maybe in time for the fall? HAHA.

It’s great to be finding so much inspiration, though, I hope (please?) to remain motivated enough to make it back into a habit to make things and post about it here. I miss blogging.

I hope everyone is well. I am happy.

Now, if only I could get my yard organized! The gardens are all in and happily green-bursting. I picked about 4 cups of strawberries today from our patch.

J brought home an extra-wide pallet for me to use as the back panel of my compost bins, which I was determined to build this week but have been having way too much fun playing outside with the kids in the gorgeous weather we’ve had. It might rain tomorrow, so maybe that’ll be my chance.

Once the compost bins are built, I can finally get around to clearing out some of the back/gravel section of our yard. It’s horribly grown in with weeds and we vehemently oppose the use of herbicides so I will be doubling (or tripling, not sure) our huge-ass tarp over nearly all of it in an attempt to smother the weed forest. We’re slowly digging out the gravel, filling in with soil and seeding grass & clover, but with the small chunks of time we manage to find, it’s a long, slow process. But! We’re certain we’ll win!

So many things are going right around here, the thing that are trivial (weeds and what our neighbours think of them) are easy to dismiss as such. Things that are important (having a good visit with Mom while she was here for a few days and spending fun time with the kids) are easy to get lost in.

Busy building raised garden beds: taking apart raw cedar benches that my late step-father built for Jason & I when we got married. They were beautiful but softwoods do, over time, get rickety from bearing the weight of people. Left unfinished, they also started getting crazy-sliver-heavy: I couldn’t let the kids sit on the benches without a blanket thrown over first or they’d be rashy and red the next day.

With my drill set on Reverse, tossing the screws into a bucket, I knew John wouldn’t mind. In fact, he’d probably think it was a great idea. Raw cedar is excellent for raised beds: naturally rot and pest-resistant and smell SOOO lovely. John was the one who taught me how to use a mitre saw and let me have free-reign on his huge pile of cedar lumber in the garage when I lived at The Acreage. (I still have the small tables I’d built.)

He would get a kick out of me holding the drill like a girl, running back and forth between the garden bed and the garage (where my borrowed mitre saw sits) with a measuring tape in my hand, eye-protection glasses on the top of my head and my gardening knee-pads strapped around my jeans. He would do his little chuckle & shrug as he’d tell me to save all of that fragrant sawdust on the garage floor in case I get another hamster.

I miss John.

The wedding we went to on the weekend was SOOO many kinds of awesome. The bride, my cousin and a long-time friend, was breathtaking and every little detail (and trust me, she is all about details) was beautiful. I really wish I had a much better camera. Then again, I would have felt compelled to take many more photos if I had, and therefore been less able to enjoy the ceremony and reception.

I could go on and on about how wonderful it was to see so many friends and family that I haven’t seen in such a long time (a benefit of being related to the bride: I saw many cousins that I spent a lot of time with as a child, seeing everyone and their children was such a treat) but I am really, really tired from sawing, digging, pulling, building, folding all day in an attempt to get caught up on house and yard work that was left to slide while I furiously tried to finish the wedding gift in time.

THE GIFT:

A 6′x6′ patchwork quilt in colours I know T adores.
The top foot or so is hung over the balcony, so it’s hard to get the full effect -I think, anyway.

Here you can see some of the scrolly detail of the tree branches.

For the sake of making it more durable and use-able, I first used iron-on adhesive to place the tree sections, then zig-zagged each entire outline. That’s a lotta zig-zagging, lemme tell ya.

It was a lot of work and while I never doubted I would be done on time, I certainly would have fared better if I’d started earlier (story of my life) and kept at it more regularly. Overall, though, for my first large quilt project (I’ve only done a couple of small ones for friends’ children), I’m very happy with how it turned out!! I stayed very close to my original design, though I changed construction plans a few times throughout the process -for the sake of saving time, money and aesthetics.

I learned tons, which is more important to me than anything else, I feel like I can go from here to create some really fantastic usable art. And, really, that has me thinking about my career and whether or not I need to reconsider my options. I love painting, SO much, but there’s satisfaction in completing a fabric item like this that isn’t there in an illustration. Yes, art on the wall or in a book is enjoyed, very much and, when published, by many people.

But a quilt like this; that can be used to warm cozy, sleeping bodies; that can be wrapped around you to read a book or watch the rain through a window; that can be spread on the grass for a picnic; that could, too, be hung on a wall as art; makes me feel like I’m creating something even more special.

There’s an extra degree of emotional satisfaction -on my part- in imagining the physical enjoyment that can come from a quilt, in addition to the aesthetic pleasure of the art. You can’t hug an illustration or wrap it around you and feel your warmth returned.

Thanks again to Ada, who is often a source of excellent links, articles and this time: animated films. This looks SOOOOOOOO good, I cannot wait to get my hands on a copy of the DVD (because I’m already 100% certain that this is one we’ll all want to watch many, many times).

The animation looks wonderful and oh my, the story!! Handmade books with medieval illuminations! Irish medieval history! A transforming forest nymph! Did I mention the animation?!