penny carnival

Christmas craft tutorial No. 1 of 12, and surviving the grocery store

My house looks like a Christmas explosion right now. There are baking ingredients dusted all over the kitchen floor, "cherry wink" cookies covering every inch of countertop, glitter-covered crafts on one end of the dining room table and handmade greeting cards on the other. Oh, and millions of little bitty pieces of red yarn under the table because when a 2 year old decides she can entertain herself for 30 minutes by cutting cheap yarn, you don't complain.

Thank you, thank you for all the great feedback on the Santa dilemma. After giving it a lot of thought and talking with Bo's teacher, we decided we're just not going to emphasize the big guy this year. We're not going to sit her down and tell her the truth; we're just going to focus on other holiday traditions more, like the Nutcracker and singing Christmas carols and building gingerbread houses and making cookies and crafts (hence, the mess). I'll put more of my thoughts on that issue in the comments section of my previous post when I get a minute.

Speaking of the Nutcracker, Seattle magazine had a darling idea in its December issue: Throw a Nutcracker-themed party for kids before or after attending the show. Pink tulle tablecloth. Cupcakes that look like toy soldiers. Invitations that look like theater tickets. Squeal! More details on my Kids' Parties site.

And if you're heading over to the Kids' Parties site anyway, here are a few other things I've been working on over there:

-Food to serve at a kids' Christmas party (that one is a work in progress--I plan to add many more pictures and recipes in the coming weeks)

-Theme ideas for a kids' Christmas party

-And this one wasn't my idea, but I love it so: an Advent calendar of books. Every day, a new Christmas themed book to open and read together. Brilliant idea courtesy of Babyccino.

On my other blog (seriously. how did I end up with so many blogs? my computer is like a rabbit), today marks the start of my 12 Days of Crafting. Between now and Dec. 17, you'll see a new tutorial every day for something holiday related. I started with these twig stars today--easy, cheap, earthy:

You can use them as tree ornaments or string them together like garland or make a super big one to hang on your door.

Much more on the 12-Days-of-Crafting front coming soon.

Let's see ... what else? Our first three holiday cards have arrived from the Kids' Craft Weekly card swap. Bo looooves opening these.

Yesterday, we had breakfast at Chaps, one of our favorite Spokane breakfast joints. Hee haw! The Christmas decorations were darling:



(Yes, I took a picture of the bathroom.)
 



Best children's play area ever. Vintage toy kitchen appliances. Pink cowboy hats. Tin tea set. Love it. Love it. Love it. Thanks, Celeste (owner). You're brilliant.

Lastly, a quick tip courtesy of a friend of mine from high school (thank you, Facebook). After swearing that I would never again take my wild-animal children to the grocery store, Rachel suggested I have the kids make their own grocery lists before we go and use them once we get there. The girls cut pictures from the Wednesday newspaper ads (all based on what I actually needed), and glued them to paper. I made dotted letters spelling out the products for Bo to trace.

And, yes, that's turkey food. We didn't host Thanksgiving this year and we're missing the leftovers.

We headed to the grocery store this morning and the lists worked like a charm, as long as you don't mind your kids lying on the floor in the middle of the aisles so they can cross off what they've just put in the cart. 

 Sorry for the crappy cell phone photo blur. 

Thank you, Rachel!  

I better clean up this mess before this guy comes home. Hope all is well, bloggy friends.

Pumpkin cookies, just because

We had cookies for dinner tonight.

Sometimes the girls and I bake cookies just to have something to do. I wasn't even craving cookies (unusual for me) when we came across my friend Sarah's pumpkin cookie recipe today. Serendipitously, there was half a can of pumpkin puree in the fridge threatening to get moldy. And two sticks of butter, which is what this recipe calls for.  

The recipe did not disappoint, and despite the fact that I wasn't craving cookies before we made them, I've now eaten about five of them. Awesome. Glad I ran for all of 25 minutes this morning. That should have taken care of one of the five.

I can't tell you how many photos I have that are similar to this one:

It's a scene that will never bore me.

I promise that if you are my friend and I bake cookies for some event at your house or function at the girls' school, I do oversee the hygiene issues. But when I know we're just going to consume them here at home, I let a lot of this slide:

Magpie is wearing the apron I sewed for Bo when she was about this age. 

She doesn't know there'll be an apron sewn and wrapped up for her for her 2nd birthday in a few weeks.

Delicious. Thanks, Sarah. I didn't make the frosting, like you did. Figured I'd done enough damage already. 

By the way, that Italian Deruta-style saucer has traveled with me from Portland, Ore., to Boston to Spokane over the last 10 years. I rescued it from a dumpster in the late '90s when I lived in an apartment across the street from a Torrefazione coffee shop that used them. Torrefaz was my living room back then, and a box of chipped saucers and cups caught my eye as I walked past the dumpster one day. One of my better junk finds.

On to the garden ... Almost a year ago to the day, I posted a shot of one of our last trips through the garden and what it yielded. I took a similar picture the other day after the girls and I gathered up the last big basket of veggies. 

Some scenes from the garden as it gets put to bed:

 

 

Some things just didn't have enough time to mature in our short season:

Including these cute little cantaloupes:

We thought we'd find out how a mini cantaloupe tastes. Magpie's reaction here should give you an answer:

Could also be because she's eating the seeds, though.

Until next year, little garden. Have a restful winter.

An autumn dinner

The summer weather is gone here. Time for fall. Dig in. 

Here figgy, figgy:

An onion and leek tart

Fig, Thyme and Blue Cheese Tartines, from the Leftoverist

So good, they deserve two shots:

Butternut squash with farfalle:

Our Swedes and our ABCs

We just wrapped up a week with guests from Sweden in our house. I wanted to put the word "wonderful" in there before "week," but in classic Megan style I ended up catching some sort of cold/stomach bug by Day 3 and was out of commission for most of the visit. 

Ugh. It all had started so strong. We set off on a 2-hour drive to pick them up at a lake cabin in a remote part of northeast Washington Monday night. 

"It's time to go get our Swedes," I announced to the girls cheerfully. 

"Are we going to put them in the ground and watch them grow?" Bo asked.

"Swedes, honey. Not seeds."

When Bruno and Iris greeted us with warm hugs, I knew in an instant it would be a good week.

On Tuesday morning, I made quiche and pumpkin muffins and set out an array of teas and coffee for breakfast. That night, J and I cooked up a feast for 10 that included this butternut squash pasta, this bleu cheese dip and this apple cake for dessert, as well as some rosemary chicken, fennel sausage and other yum. We have failed miserably at dinner parties before, but we seriously hit it out of the park with that one.

The food was meant to be Northwest and autumnish, but the company was truly international: 2 Swedes, 1 Dutch woman, 1 Canadian and 5 gringos. It was a mix of neighbors and friends, and they hit it off beautifully.

But by Wednesday afternoon, my head was in the toilet. And, no, it wasn't food poisoning (thank goodness).

Our kind guests were completely understanding and they thankfully felt comfortable enough to help themselves to what they needed. But I couldn't help but think that they must have worried that they'd walked into Swine Flu Central. (Despite the fact that eastern Washington is ground zero for swine flu right now, I don't have it. Again, thank goodness.)

But during the times I was coherent this week, I witnessed moments of intercultural, intergenerational beauty.

We'd never met Bruno and Iris before. They were part of a "Friendship Exchange" through one of the local Rotary Clubs, which J volunteers for. They probably assumed they'd be staying with a retired couple like themselves, perhaps not with two 35 year olds and their young, er, energetic daughters. 

But it didn't take long to see that Bruno and Iris love children--they have six grandchildren of their own--and my heart swelled when Iris put Bo on the kitchen counter on night 2 and sang a Swedish nursery rhyme to her. (Something about a mouse looking for a house. The mouse creeps up the child's leg and finally finds its house in her tummy. Giggles galore.)

We talked with them about history and war and the environment and immigration and health care and taxes and about the unbelievable polarization that's happening in this country right now. (Seriously. A day doesn't go by when my jaw doesn't drop open as I read the paper. And I'm a journalist, for Pete's sake! Nothing should surprise me by now, right?)

So, yeah, it was a bummer that I got sick. But besides going to a foreign country and staying with a family there, I don't think there's a better way to expose ourselves to another culture than inviting people into our home. It's important to me that the girls grow up knowing that their way of life isn't the only way of life.

We jokingly referred to Bruno and Iris as "our" Swedes all week. But, at the risk of sounding ridiculous, in some ways that's true. We now have a small connection to a country we've never visited, except vicariously while wandering the aisles of Ikea.

I've been thinking of making a table runner I would applique over the years with small symbols of our voyages and of folks who visit us (like a Swedish flag and a reindeer for Bruno and Iris). I mentioned this to my friend Klay and she suggested starting a signature tablecloth, like this one. I plan to get some hybrid of those ideas going soon.

We're back to normal life now, and here's a little activity I did with Bo this afternoon to 

help her recognize words and,

more importantly, to remind her where to put her clothes away. 

I cut out letters as she ran back and forth to her room to come up with things we needed to label, like her sock drawer, her pajama drawer, her zebra and her duck. Of course.

Then she glued them to the background paper.

As you can see I probably should have coached her a bit more on the order of the letters, but she'll figure it out one day.

And finally, a visual report from our garden. This was tonight's bounty. The white tomato is courtesy of our youngest and most eager gardener, Magpie.

Stick-bound book tutorial

I've got food on the brain (when do I not?).

Our garden is on the verge of exploding. So far, we've been able to eat what it grows but I think within the next week it'll start outpacing us and J's co-workers will mysteriously find zucchini and patty-pan squash sitting on their desks in the morning.

Enter this recipe for ratatouille from The Leftoverist (A.K.A. Sarah, a friend of mine from high school who I've mentioned here before). I've got it roasting in the oven right now. The smell of the basil is killing me (in a good way)--not to mention the smell of tomatoes that's lingering on my fingers. 

I plan to eat it this way tomorrow.

I'm convinced that Sarah needs to write a cookbook. Her photos alone are stunning, not to mention the artwork her sister Naomi has done for the blog.

Now, if I were to write a cookbook, it would be this big:

In other words, itty bitty. 

This little booklet is one of the make-and-take crafts I'll be teaching at the county fair I mentioned last week. I'm running a booth as part of my gig for the local newspaper as a blogger for its "Down to Earth" Web site.

Everything will be made from secondhand materials, so I've been hitting every thrift store and garage sale in town over the last few weeks collecting supplies. Even the hole puncher we'll be using to make these books was a 99-cent find from The Classy Rack (don't you love it when thrift shops get clever with their names?). 

I figure this little booklet, which is bound with a twig and some twine (or yarn or strong string--whatever you have handy), could be used for grocery-shopping or to-do lists. If I were really great at entertaining house guests, I would print out the recipes of the food I made for them while they were staying with me, bind the recipes together this way and then give the book to my friends as a departure gift. As it is, my last house guests were lucky to get clean sheets and take-out pizza.

If you can find a use for this little booklet, please enjoy this tutorial:

1. Choose a front and back cover for your booklet. The paper should be cardstock-like, so consider using cereal boxes, softback book covers, old calendar pages, etc. In the pictures here, I used the front and back cover of a small coloring book from 1967.

2. Choose some filler paper. I like to mix blank pages with pages from old books, dictionaries or graphing paper.

3. Find a twig, pencil, chopstick or other short stick and a piece of strong string or twine that's about 15 inches long. (The length of your string will depend on how tall the book is that you're making.) 

4. You will also need a hole puncher, scissors and either a clothespin or paper clip.

5. Arrange the papers in your hand like a book, sandwiching the lightweight paper inside the heavier cardstock. Tap the stack on the table so that the edges of the left side are even and hold everything together with your paper clip or clothespin. 

6. If the papers aren't already all the same size and shape, trim around everything so all the pages (including the front and back cover) are the same size.

7. Punch two holes on the left side of the stack, a few inches apart.

8. Lay the stick on the right side of the holes. 

9. Poke one end of the string through the top hole of the book, pulling it through so that about half the length of the string is sticking out the front of the book. Wrap the string around the stick once or twice, then poke the string back through the hole toward the back of the book. Pull so the loop around the stick is snug.

10. Repeat that step with the bottom hole.

11. Pull tightly and tie the ends of the string together in a double knot on the back side of the book. 

12. Trim the ends of the string. Or don't. Whatever.

You're done!

The stick binding isn't practical for, say, a journal or anything else you'd be opening often and writing in at length. But it's kind of a cute, earthy way to present something special, like maybe a wedding program (grrr ... there I go again re-doing my wedding seven years later). 

While I have your attention, I just have to put a plug in for some amazing Spokane talent. Last night, J and I attended a fundraiser for a food co-op that's opening soon here. For an extremely reasonable price, we were treated to some top-notch entertainment, including book readings by 2006 National Book Award finalist Jess Walter and columnist Cheryl-Anne Millsap, both of whom are fantastic people as well as talented writers.

And then pianists Brad Greene and Kaylee Cole took our breath away. You can hear some of Brad's music on his site and Kaylee's here. I know we're all busy people, but if you get a sec give them a listen. 

Hope all is well, my bloggy friends.

 

Ice cream social

Farm girl MaryJaneButters had a blog post the other day about how to organize an old-fashioned ice cream social. You guys know I'm a sucker for anything that builds community, so you know that kind of thing is right up my alley. But what kept lingering in my head after reading the post? Duh. A craving for ice cream.

The girls and I solved that tonight with a trip to The Scoop, a local shop that makes its own cold stuff. We always have to opt for "the kind that doesn't hurt our tummies," as Bo always tells the workers, so our order was 3 grape sorbets on sugar cones. Delish.

Fingers work just as well, apparently:

I knew we needed to linger a while because J was home sleeping (we're working our way through a case of the icks), so I brought along our felt pencil rolls and some paper.

We parked ourselves at a kid-sized wooden picnic table (easier for some of us to maneuver than others) and colored away.

Bo wanted to hang the signs on the shop's bike rack just to remind folks that they sell ice cream inside, but alas we had no tape ...

... She thought maybe curling the paper onto the bike rack would work. When it didn't, she moved on to twirling around in her rainbow dress on the lawn.

By the way, that beauty is NOT my bike. Too bad, huh?

We were there for so long that Bo built up the courage to ask two other sisters if they wanted to play with her. She's not shy, but she gets nervous about that sort of thing. The girls were thrilled and they played for all of 30 seconds until their mom announced it was time to go. I could just tell she wasn't one of those moms who likes to socialize, and that's fine, but I felt bad for Bo. 

The pencil rolls got me thinking about Amanda Soule and how her new book is coming out tomorrow. I should have pre-ordered--I would have had it by now--but the anticipation of going into a bookstore and flipping through the pages for the first time is fun, too.

Not that I have any time to follow her projects quite yet. I'm still swamped with writing deadlines and other responsibilities, including filling a few orders for book slings in my Etsy shop. By the way, I officially have a cottage license to make and sell Emmeline aprons now! I'm going to stock the shop with some once I get a chance, but for now I have a listing there for custom ones.

Are you ever so tired your stomach hurts? Ugh. Can't blame it on the sorbet, so it must be time to sleep.

Back to reality

Good golly. I can't believe more than two weeks have passed since I last posted something here. I think that's a record. Not a Michael Phelps sort of record (as in, yea! good for him!). A Takeru Kobayashi sort of record (as in, UGH!).

We got back to town last night after two weeks of laughing and eating waaaaay too much food with the Italian side of the family across the state. It was a great trip, but we all were happy to sleep in our own beds last night. 

Before I had kids, I had a healthy case of wanderlust. I wasn't a frequent flier by any means, but I've been to Costa Rica and Italy and I tended to move every couple of years. If I wasn't hopping cities (Portland, Ore., Boston, Mass., Spokane), I was moving to a different apartment across town. I loved change.

I still do, but ever since the babies came along I've had little desire to travel far and wide. Now I crave routine and simplicity and it might be to a fault.

The kids do great when we travel. Even on the six-hour drive home yesterday, they were fantastic, with Bo making up stories about princesses and her dead dog Cronkite (r.i.p., sweet doggie) in my car and Magpie reciting every word she knows in J's car (J had to work so he couldn't stay as long as we did).

The first couple of nights in a new bed are always a bit rocky, but any battles at bedtime are usually more my fault than theirs (i.e., trying to get them down at our regular times rather than easing up a bit). 

Going away is always worth it, but our itinerary here at home today reinforced my love of our quiet little lifestyle in Spokane.

On our agenda today:

-Run through the sprinkler (I felt a bit guilty after just visiting a town with watering restrictions, but it's super hot here right now so it was either crank up the A/C and stay inside or hose off the kids on the lawn).

-Hang wet clothes on the clothesline. The girls can't get enough of this.

-Do "magic" tricks, i.e., put a wine cork under a cup, shuffle the cup around with two other cups, make the kids guess which cup holds the cork. More endless fun.

-Make edible play dough (1 part honey, two parts peanut butter, 3 parts powdered sugar), cut out cookie shapes, bake it at 200 for a long time. This last one is doing nothing for my attempts at weight loss (I'm eyeing the leftover "cookies" across the kitchen right now), but as you can see the girls were captivated:

I didn't get a good shot of this, but is there anything better than seeing your child wearing your Nana's old aprons?

The day wasn't perfect. At one point, I had to put Bo's toys in time out. ALL of her toys. Seriously. But setting boundaries is just part of our routine, too. Besides, it took her all of 30 seconds to turn a washcloth, a baby blanket and her little sister into toys that weren't off limits. I don't know what that says about my attempt at discipline, but by that point I sort of forgot why she was in trouble.

Lots of crafting is on the horizon. I've sold a couple more book slings, so I'll be putting those together this week. And more inquiries are coming in!

Meg McElwee over at Sew Liberated has approved me to make and sell her Emmeline aprons, so I'm going to fill my Etsy shop with those as soon as I get through some other deadlines. Thanks again for everyone's encouragement on that!

And later in August I'm running a "make-and-take" craft booth at a local county fair (it's part of my role with the newspaper's Down to Earth blog). I'll be sure to share the four projects I'm doing with folks here.

Busy, but fun. Simple, but fulfilling.

Hope you all are well, too.

Vintage toys, a country wedding and more farm charm

Is this the summer of the hoedown or what? I hope you guys aren't getting sick of my photos of country chic, but I can't seem to help myself. I keep going to these vintage barn bazaars and find myself leaving totally inspired.

This weekend was the Vintage Barn antique show in Rathdrum, Idaho. 51 vendors, home-baked goodness by women from a nearby Mennonite community, and live bluegrass music. This was the scene:

I thought this would make a great lemonade stand for the girls, but for $300+ I decided we'd stick with the card table for now:

Can you imagine the hours that went into this?

More tartan! This time plates:

Bo contemplates the "naughty chair." I'm not sure today's child psychologists would recommend this.

Wee! No buckles! No straps! A handle that can become dislodged and used as a weapon. 

Pretty paper flowers made from pages of vintage books, I assume:

I loved the sea of blues and greens in this booth by Wild Whimsy (photo above, too):

Given that my blog is named Penny Carnival, I couldn't resist bringing home this toy for $5:

Can you see the grumpy look on the Ferris Wheel operator's face? I love it. It's like me at the sewing machine when I need to use the seam ripper. Grrrr ... 

The girls each chose a vintage toy, too--a dog on wheels for Bo and a helicopter on a string for Magpie. Bo named her dog "Flower" and insisted we build her a dog house this morning.

There's something about painting 3-dimensional surfaces that thrills my children to no end:

That's why I rarely recycle cardboard boxes and I keep the hot-glue gun handy at all times.

Does anyone else buy their kids secondhand toys? The girls chose these vintage ones on their own, but on birthdays and at Christmastime, I always throw some garage sale finds into the mix. Just today, I heard a funny story about an old friend whose dad always bought his kids stuff from garage sales for gifts. So they'd be putting together a puzzle and get to the end only to discover that four pieces were missing. And one Christmas two of the brothers got bicycles--one bicycle worked and one didn't. That cracked me up, but it caused one of the brothers to vow to always buy new toys for his kids. You can probably guess which brother.

In other news from the weekend, we attended our nephew's absolutely gorgeous wedding in the, you guessed it, country.

I don't know if Bo was more thrilled by the bride and groom's kiss at the altar or the horse-and-carriage rides:

This draping was inside the barn where dinner was served:

Outside the barn looking in:

Inside the barn looking out:

At the risk of sounding completely unappreciative for the lovely wedding J and I had 7 years ago ... um, can I have a do over, please?

I did do some sewing this weekend, but it just involved adding straps to an otherwise revealing strapless dress. I'd show you the before and after, but the before shots would make this an x-rated blog. Not that I actually took before shots like that.

We did manage to hang my hammock in the backyard after it spent, oh, 15 years in storage. Literally. I bought this hammock while studying abroad in Costa Rica in 1994, lugged it all the way home on the plane, and then never hung it. Leave it to my task-master husband to get it swinging. That guy can plow through a to-do list like nobody I know.

It's dreamy to relax in there under the cherry trees, callused feet and all (don't zoom in. you'll regret it. I've been running a lot).

Speaking of cherries, I'm overdosing. I need an intervention. I just filled a small baby bottle with pits while writing this post. 

They're. Just. So. Frickin'. Good. And. Sweet. 

I mostly just eat them as nature intended, but we had J's cousin over for dinner last night so I made this dessert:

Bo took her job of making it snow on the clafouti very seriously.

OK, so she went a little overboard. What can I say? The kid is used to living under 4 feet of the white stuff every winter.

Burger tasting

My mom hit the nail on the head the other day when she said, "the only things I crave during the summer are hamburgers, hotdogs and fruit."

Amen, Mama.

J and I are currently obsessed with Bobby Flay's recipe for Cuban burgers. We'd seen him make them on the Food Network time and again, and finally tried it ourselves last week when friends from Seattle visited. To say the least, they were a hit.

A key step in making the Cuban burger involves wrapping it in tin foil and smooshing it with a brick. The marriage between weight and heat result in one juicy, melty, messy little baby.

So J and I got to wondering about what other ingredients we could smoosh together with beef between two buns. 

Feta, mint and roasted red bell pepper? Check! 

Salami, mozarella, pesto and garlic mayonaisse? Check!

Chipotle mustard, pepper jack cheese and carmelized onions? Check!

There were a few other combinations, but those were the best. We dined under the cherry tree this afternoon while the girls napped. Corn on the cob was our palate cleanser, not to mention beer and mojitos. 

Our view:

Now if we could just get our own nap in before the girls wake up.

Neighborly love

I don't care if you live next to Fred Friggin' Rogers, nobody has better neighbors than us. 

We were a little gun shy on the neighbor thing when we first moved to this house two years ago. Without going into detail--because who knows who's reading this blog--we didn't have much luck picking good neighbors in the past. (Picture a cuckoo clock. See the crazy little bird that jumps out every hour on the hour? Now imagine living in the clock next door.)

So when S & G, the retired couple who lives across the street from us now, rolled out the welcome wagon two years ago, we hesitated to get to know them too well. 

Bo, however, did not. Thanks to her effervescent (read: pushy) personality, we had no choice but to become friends with S & G. At age 2, she would stand in our front window and scream S's name when she saw her, waving madly until S came over to say hi. 

And we now thank Bo every day for building that relationship.

S & G have helped us countless times, from snow blowing our driveway to lending us a car when ours didn't work to jump starting our car on more than one occasion to looking after our pooch (rest in peace, sweet Cronkite) while we were away. They call to let us know when we've left our garage door open at night. They bring the girls gifts from the far away places they visit.

One time we pulled up to our house and this sheep, plus two similar friends, were sticking out of the grass greeting us:

S used to own a bed and breakfast, and these were left over from the little shop she ran out of the house.

More than anything, though, they're just fantastic people. We tried once to thank one of their kind gestures with a gift certificate to a nearby restaurant. Instead of using it on themselves, they took us out to brunch with it and insisted on no thank-you gifts from then on.

Except cookies. G isn't afraid to hint that he has a sweet tooth, so if I'm making a batch, I double it whenever possible. 

Today, it was oatmeal M&M cookies. Peanut M&Ms, mind you. Try it. They're way better than when you use plain.

We had a few minutes, so I sewed an elasticized dish cover to go over the cookies. It's one of my favorite projects from the Farm Chicks' cooking and craft book. 

We've been spending more time in our front yard than our backyard lately. Not just because of S & G, although they're part of it. A family with two young boys just moved in next door, adding a lot of life to our street. It's sweet to see the four kids run back and forth between our two yards or cruise on their bikes and trikes around our circular driveway. The boys' mom keeps apologizing for her sons coming over so much, but I am honestly thrilled. The laughter. The shrieks. The conversations that start across the street or across a lawn until one neighbor or the other decides it'll be easier to talk in one driveway instead of from two.

It's how a neighborhood should sound.