Holiday Week? Day One

I'm off work this week on holidays but not actually going away, so clearly the only thing I can do is sew all week long. I haven't done a huge amount of sewing this year, but as always have a huge amount of things I want to get finished and/or started, so... now's my time, I suppose.

The week is off to a slow start though, since I spent the majority of my day away from home. I did go out, though, with intentions of buying fabric. My list:

- Christmas stuff
- yellow/blue
- repro fat quarter

I didn't manage the yellow and blue fabric, which I wanted for a couple Swap Angel blocks I'm doing for a livejournal swap called Birthday Blocks. It's a swap that I've participated in before - you can see some of the blocks I've received and/or sent here - though this year I'm only acting as a Swap Angel to make up for some drop-outs.

In any case, I didn't actually NEED the yellow or blue fabric, since I've got plenty here. I pulled a few things out of my stash this evening to use instead of anything new, so sometime this week there should be some yellow and blue blocks created for that.


The Christmas stuff I want so that I can make fabric postcards for a postcard/recipe exchange I'm participating in this fall. I'm not certain that this idea will work out, since it'll require making ten cards in fairly short order, but I have high hopes that it'll come together this week.

For the Christmas fabric, I wanted something that suggested Christmas but wasn't explicitly Christmas. So I picked up two bundles of fat eighths in (mostly) greens and reds. There are only two actual Christmas prints in the 16 fabrics - a green one with mistletoe and Eiffel Towers and the phrase 'Joyeux Noel' and a red one with white trees. I also picked up one fat quarter - the green at top right with the red and white stars - just because I loved it so much. I hope I can find some way to show it off a bit in my cards because it's fantastic.

I haven't got any definite plans for the cards, but I had originally thought of doing something like a log cabin type block, maybe with a dark red in the centre and then lighter colours around it. I'm not sure though. Maybe they'll all end up completely different.


When I was looking through the Christmas display, I found a kit for a pillow (top left of the photo), which I picked up to make for my Grandmother, who is coming out to spend Christmas here this year. She's quite hard to buy for, since she's got a house full of stuff she doesn't need and she doesn't want to add anything else to the pile. But homemade gifts I think are always appreciated. And she's given me some wonderful quilts, so I'd like to return the favour, even on such a small scale.


So that only leaves the one reproduction fabric, the green with the playing kids on it. Quite a long while ago I had this idea for a baby/children's quilt that would be done with these style fabrics using a pattern from a book I've got that uses 12 fat quarters to create a variety of quilts. I'd ordered repro fabrics online, but only 10 of the 12 were in stock, and I set it all aside for months. So many months, in fact, that I was convinced I had 11 fabrics, when in fact I've got 10, so I only bought one today and am still short now by one fabric. Worse yet, I can't remember now what pattern from that book I'd intended to make. Ah well, whenever I finally get that 12th fat quarter, I'll figure something out.


The other thing I did today? Washed and ironed fabric. Some of it was fabric you see here, but most of it is stuff from my stash that I was washing for other projects I hope to accomplish this week. But more on that another day. I'm for bed.


Injury of the Day: One burned finger, courtesy of the ironing.

Pignoli-Coconut Crusted Salmon with Steamed Boy Choy

It's been ages again since I cooked fish, so I thought it was probably time I sucked it up and cooked it again. I really don't understand why I have such difficulty with fish because it always tastes good and it's easy to cook. And yet I hum and haw about cooking it and sometimes can't talk myself into buying it. It's completely ridiculous.

Never mind that, though. This was really quite good. I singed it a little bit and so I was worried it would taste like burned nuts, since it's crusted with ground pine nuts and coconut, but it was really just wonderful. The fish was really moist and cooked perfectly. The sweetness of the salsa was a nice compliment to the salmon.

I didn't wind up eating much of the bok choy because it got cold very quickly while I was taking my pictures. I thought about reheating them, but didn't bother because I didn't think they'd taste very good reheated. Shame about the missed opportunity, though, as I love bok choy.

Udon Miso Soup with Chicken and Mushrooms

I do love chicken noodle soup.

I got a little scared of this one when I sat down to eat it and was staring at those big fat white noodles and thinking about them tasting like paste, but it was all lovely and delicious. I liked the thick noodles, but I think I'd like this as much with cellophane noodles in place of the udon and a mound of bean sprouts on top. (Though that'd probably be mixing my food culture references, unless miso is used also in Vietnamese cooking.)

I think I probably killed my miso by cooking it at too high a heat, but the flavour of the broth was quite delicate and nice. Not too salty, as I was afraid it would be, but just nice. I did get a lighter miso, a white one rather than something dark, so it probably was easier for an unaccustomed palate to eat than if I'd used a brown or golden miso instead.

Now the challenge is to find more recipes for miso, because I've got a whole tub of the stuff to use.

Sweet and Sour Chicken

This is the last of my backlog of photos to post, except for one that I'm skipping over (a soup and pizza combo, because you can't get a good enough look at the soup, which is the only interesting thing, and that not very. This I made... on Sunday and because it's a sloppy mess, it would be a good guess that it's a Sandi Richard recipe, from Dinner Survival.

Like many of her sloppy mess dinners, it tastes pretty good, but it also pretty sweet. I think I need to learn just to cut back on the sweet parts of her recipes and add more sweetness later, if it seems to need it. It did taste better on the second day, when the sauce had a chance to turn saucy, and somehow the sweetness seemed less overwhelming. (There still wasn't enough sour to balance it, but it wasn't so sickly sweet.)

I had used chicken thighs in this recipe and ugh... was that a gross experience. I had forgotten how much fattier than chicken breast they are, and how much more work you need to do to make them edible. (Or how much work I need to do, anyway, since I have a thing about always cutting off the fat and making sure there aren't veins and things.) It's just that they're cheaper and in some dishes much tastier (because they are so fatty, I suppose) and if they came without so much excess fat on them I'd probably cook them more often.

Italian-spiced Pork with Spicy Broccoli and Salad

This feels like an ages-old picture - I'd forgotten the meal until I uploaded pictures from my camera to my computer and discovered it again. Really, it was probably made on Friday or Saturday last week but I don't remember exactly.

In any case, the pork was a pre-prepared thing that I bought at Safeway. It was already marinated in whatever sauce/spices were on it and I just had to cook it. It made me feel a little lazy not to sprinkle an Italian herb mix (or whatever) on a piece of pork myself, but it wasn't very expensive and I remember feeling terribly lazy. All I had to do was fry it in a little oil and time things so that it'd be ready at about the same time as the broccoli. I don't know that I'd buy it again unless I were feeling particularly lazy again, but it did taste quite good. (I wouldn't probably buy it again only because I could make myself something pretty similar pretty easily.)

The broccoli was pretty standard for me - lightly steamed and then sautéed with some garlic and red pepper flakes. Tasty. And so was the salad, which was nothing extra special, except that I added toasted almond and some carrot to the lettuce mix.

All in all, a good meal.

Chive and Goat Cheese Frittata

This picture is getting to be several days old now, almost a week even. I've been wibbling about whether or not to post it because I think I've done a similar frittata before, maybe just without the cheese and chives. I can't remember though.

And then too it's not a very interesting picture. I always make and eat frittatas on their own, but they aren't that easy to photograph on their own. I always feel like I should have put a pile of mixed baby greens on the plate, even if I don't intend to eat them, just for appearance's sake. But I don't particularly like dressing a plate. I don't often garnish things, and if I do it's because I intend to eat the garnish. (My next photo in the backlog has a sprig of cilantro on the plate, which I ripped up and mixed into the soup before I ate it.)

Anyway, I've been looking for ways to use up that goat feta that I've got and I've been kind of miserable about food lately, not wanting to cook and just not wanting anything, so I thought what I really needed was to make something yellow. (My love of yellow food should be well documented by now. If I don't have a tag for yellow food, I should.) The yellow peppers didn't look that nice at the store the other day, but the orange peppers were pretty good, so I picked one of those up instead (and orange is practically yellow anyway, right?) And finally, eggs? Easiest thing in the world to cook when you don't really feel like cooking anything.

And so, yes. Eggs with potatoes, orange peppers, chives and goat's feta, cooked to deliciousness. (Which was also a great lunch for work. I should make these things more often to take to work.)

Assorted gift postcards

I made this postcard for a friend's daughter, who recently turned three years old. She wanted to have a monster themed birthday, so I thought it would be fun to send her a monster postcard.

I designed three potential monsters while riding the train home from work one afternoon, and the next day decided on and made this one because I liked the googly eyes and the giant mouth. Maybe one day I'll make the other two, but we'll see.

It sort of reminds me of a lion cub that's not grown up enough to let out a really big roar but keeps trying anyway.

In any case, here is another postcard I made for a different friend, though I made this a handful of years ago, back when I first started trying out fabric postcards. I only just recently finished it when I found it again shoved into a stash of fabric.

The friend I made this card for used to have an icon on her livejournal of a lemon-pig and this was my attempt to recreate it.

I didn't finish it then because I made a rookie mistake with the fusible web - I fused it on the right rather than the wrong side of the fabric. It's not especially noticeable with the yellow because it was a batik, but the orange feet and the green ears are much more pale than they would be if I'd done it properly.

I decided that it's cute enough, even with its errors, that it needed to be finished, so I added a back and sewed it all up. I think it's maybe one of my favourite postcards ever.

Cinnamon-Salsa Chicken with Rice and Cauliflower

Another of Sandi Richard's sloppy mess dinners that taste very good. I don't really have anything else to say about it, except that it was good. There was nothing special about it, and I'd probably not serve it to guests, but it was good.

I used leftover rice that got really sticky when I thawed it, so I mashed it into the bottom of a bowl until it stuck in the shape of the bowl and turned it out onto the plate. It sort of looks silly like that, really. Still tasted okay, though.

Goaty McGoaterson Goat Cheese-Stuffed Pasta

All I can really say about this is that it's a good thing I made a salad because I didn't really eat so much of the pasta. I tried. But that was the goatiest goat cheese I've ever tasted.

This, actually, is a five-cheese stuffed pasta shell: Feta, Parmesan, Mozzarella, Ricotta, and Cottage cheese. Talk about a heart attack in a cute little pasta shell. Well, really, I made a four-cheese stuffed pasta shell. I didn't want to buy ricotta, so I used low-fat cottage cheese in it's place, and I had low-fat everything, really. Extra spinach, less cheese, lower fat cheese. But the feta that I had, I didn't notice when I bought it, but it was actually a goat feta. Feta style chèvre.

I'm pretty hit and miss with goat cheeses. Sometimes I like it. It's particularly nice (I find) if you bake it until it's all melty and then serve it on a salad. But I really, really prefer it in small doses and if it's quite mild.

This was not mild. This was full-on goat. All I could taste was goat. You wouldn't think the one thing that I used the least of would be so very over-powering. But.

I need to go scrub my tongue with a wire brush and some bleach because the taste still hasn't gone away.


ETA: I saved four of these and took them to work for lunch - I work in a grocery store so if I still couldn't stomach them, I'd have options. They were much less goaty the second day, somehow. I ate them mostly cold (just barely warmed in the microwave) and they weren't so bad. In the future, I shall try this with regular feta and see what happens.

California BLTC

Way back when I used to go to school in Nova Scotia, there were these ridiculously delicious little wraps they'd make in the Cafeteria quite often. They called them California BLTs, which I think had to do with them containing salsa rather than just tomato. Or maybe it had to do with the wrap part. I don't know. In any case, this is probably the only thing I really remember from that cafeteria and probably the only thing worth remembering.

Okay. It's not the only thing I remember, but the other things I remember are everyone stealing milk and the line-ups when they served deep-fried clams. I'm rather scared of seafood, but I let myself get talked into eating a piece of deep-fried clam once and I felt like I had little squirmy clams squirming around in my stomach the rest of the day. Yuck.

Anyway, I'm not terribly sold on bacon. I know some people sort of thing bacon is the one thing you can add to anything and it'll always taste better, but I'm not really a fan of it. It's okay. Maybe twice a year. I'm not sure what my issue with it is because it does taste okay, but I really hate the smell and it's so greasy and... meh.

It's really nice with these, though. Here's a quick recipe:

1 wrap, any flavour
2 or 3 slices of bacon, cooked
1-2 tbsp salsa and/or chopped tomato with hot sauce
1-2 tbsp shredded cheese
1 leaf of lettuce, torn

I usually use both salsa and tomato, though I'm not really sure why. I just like it that way, I guess. So I layered this with lettuce first, then cheese, then salsa, then grape tomatoes, then bacon. I used about half to one teaspoon of Caesar salad dressing smeared along the top edge to help hold it together for the photo, but it's not necessary (and didn't really add much taste). Actually, this would probably be nice with ranch or Caesar dressing inside. Hmm.

Anyway, a tasty, easy supper, which is probably more suited to summer than fall and to lunch rather than dinner.

Cherry Tomato Lasagna with Ground Bison

Is there anything to be said about a good lasagna? Yum.

I think lasagna recipes are a dime a dozen; everyone's got one and none of them are quite the same. I don't think I've ever made a lasagna the same way twice. (And usually I don't use a recipe, I just do them the way my mom did - meat sauce, cottage cheese, lasagna noodles, and grated cheese layered, then baked, the end.) I've made white lasagnas, I've made lasagnas with spinach, broccoli, ricotta, turkey, chicken, vegetables only. I've made individual rolled up lasagnas. I've made them in bulk and froze them. I haven't made one in ages, though. I can't even remember the last time I had lasagna that didn't come out of a box in the freezer aisle of the grocery store. (And they're never that good.)

This recipe was a little different because it uses fresh cherry tomatoes as a layer, and lamb for the meat sauce. The photo was gorgeous. It intrigued me.

I used bison because it is much easier (and cheaper) to get fresh ground bison here than it is to get fresh ground lamb. In fact, the only place I know of that sells fresh lamb is the market, and I'm not sure that the lamb people man their booth during the week. Fresh bison, on the other hand, can be bought at plenty of large grocery store chains nearby.

In this dish, the bison didn't stand out at all. I found the flavour much more of a background thing, rather hidden by all the cheese and the gorgeous tomato. It's not such a meaty lasagna as some that I've had, but it doesn't taste or have the mouthfeel of a vegetarian lasagna either. It was a much more creamy lasagna than I've probably had before, soft and smooth. And delicious, really.

As I said, I don't typically use a recipe for lasagna, but I might revisit this one anyway.

Roasted Pork Loin Chop with Salsa-topped Baked Potato, Buttery Carrots and Salad

I've had nearly a week of nothing for dinner but nothing, fast food, beans on toast, or pizza from a box. So I went a little bit all out tonight with lots of sides and delicious things.

Some sad carrots in the bottom of the vegetable drawer, cooked, with a bit of a butter and parsley. Tomatoes and cucumbers with the most delicious lemony, garlicky dressing ever. A small baked potato with slightly spicy salsa. In other words: Vegetables! Just what I've been missing this past week.

I mean... my last photo was on the 14th, when I did have vegetables. But then after that was at least a day or two of nothing at all, one McDonald's chicken nuggets and fries dinner, a meal at Nicastros (potato skins - hold the vegetables! no onions or peppers - and chicken fingers), canned beans on toast (the kind with tomato sauce, but no meat products), and pizza, which did have spinach and mushrooms on it.

It's good that I was eating fruit and salad at work for lunch, but still. That's just kind of ridiculous. It's no wonder I've been feeling so rundown. It's no wonder I kept piling more of the salsa on my potato.

Anyway, the pork part of tonight's dinner was ever-so-slightly overcooked, but was based off a recipe in Sandi Richard's newest book, which might maybe be called Dinner Survival. It's actually a recipe for an all-day pork roast, but I don't need a roast that serves 8-9 people, and I don't think a single pork loin chop would do terribly well in the oven all-day, even at low low temperatures. So I gave this a quick browning on the stove top and then finished it in the oven. I left it a bit too long as I based the cooking time on a recipe I made half an age ago that had a much thicker chop. It was pretty tasty, even over-cooked, and of course the vegetables were divine, so I'm happy anyway.

Ghosties and Bats and Pumpkins

My most recent crafting has been dealing with felt, rather than my usual quilting cotton. I don't particularly like felt, but it's good for projects like this one. Projects, that is, that look like they were designed and executed by 8 year olds! Yay!

I don't usually decorate for Halloween, but somehow I got the urge this year and I thought... garlands. A garland would be nice. Then I whittled down potential images to these three - bats, ghosts, and pumpkins.

Altogether there are three full strands of them - ghost, bat, pumpkin, ghost - plus a fourth smaller one. (I messed up one of the pumpkins and threw it away, so the fourth string only has a bat and two ghosts - I had a lot more white felt than black or orange.) The third strand isn't visible in the picture, and the fourth isn't hanging up right now. I want to put it in the skinny window beside the front door, but I haven't figured out how to attach it yet.

I sort of think they look like drawings a kid in elementary school would come up with, but that's okay. It's Halloween! And also, less morbid than the decorations in front of this one house on the way home from work: they've got toddler sized chalk outlines of bodies on their sidewalk.

I think the bats are my favourite. I stitched their eyes on with orange embroidery thread, which I borrowed from my sister's collection of scraps leftover from cross-stitch projects.

More stitching with embroidery thread. I don't like that you can see my strings inside the ghost, but what can you do? (Other than use more layers..)

Sperm ghosties?

Please do not look at my crappy machine stitching :D These were meant to have leaves beside the stem, but I got lazy. (They were going to have proper stems, too, but I got lazy and decided the tab to hang them would be stem enough. It's not, but until I figure out a way to attach leaves, it'll have to do.)

Ginger Lime Chicken with Sauteed Zucchini and Mushrooms

It's too bad really that this isn't a more impressive looking dinner, because it did taste very good. The lime is a nice bright taste with a spark of chili (sweet chili sauce and I also added some red pepper flakes) and of course the ginger.

I was going to make a pea pilaf, with cumin and onion, but I forgot the cumin and it turned out I had no peas. Huh. I could have sworn... Anyway, it was fine with just the onion in the rice, even if it was more boring that way. Peas probably wouldn't have suited the ginger-lime anyway.

This is another recipe from that new cookbook I've got by Sandi Richard. It's still in the kitchen (and I'm still not) and I still can't remember what it's called. But one of these days I'll remember to make a note of it so I can mention it here.

I'm sort of slowly working my way through the first week of recipes, this and the potato soup and a chili sauce to serve on pasta, which I ate on a baked potato and didn't photograph because... it's chili. Tomorrow will be pork, though I'm going to do a pork loin chop rather than a proper pork roast, and then after that another of her ugly (but usually tasty) chicken dishes of indeterminate origin containing dried fruit and condiments like salsa. With any luck, it'll be interesting, anyway.

Baked Potato-Cheddar Cheese Soup

This is a sort of... slightly lighter version of baked potato-cheddar cheese soup, with more broth than cream, skim milk, and low-fat cheddar cheese. It tasted nice, if a bit too cheesy, but even without all the extra cream and full-fat cheese, I found it too rich. It didn't take long for it to upset my stomach. (I'm usually okay with dairy, but I eat so little of it that it doesn't generally have a chance to bother me. When I eat too much or eat it in combination, then I tend to react to it. )

I think I would have preferred a soup that was more potato based, a bit more like a chowder, maybe, with just a touch of cheese instead of a cheese soup with baked potato in it, if that makes sense? I suppose I just need to keep looking for different recipes.

Tonight my brother-in-law is making Sour Cream Chicken, which is this slightly nasty looking dish made of chicken legs (skin on, bone in) and cut up potatoes cooked in a whole lot of sour cream and hot sauce/soy sauce/Worcestershire sauce. It tastes ridiculously good and I half wish I'd skipped my soup and stole some of his and my sister's dinner instead.

Varga Girl Postcards, Pt. 2

These are the last six Varga Girl cards that I created for my Art2Mail exchange. These cards taught me a lot, by the end, about what sorts of shapes and movements work well in silhouette and what doesn't. I think I didn't really think about how shapes translate without the shading that you get in a normal photograph and the loss of detail.

This card is a pretty good example of that, I think. In the original artwork, what you see is a woman with her arm bent back, as if she's scratching her shoulder, but here it looks almost as if she's got an arm amputated at the elbow. She's also wearing a skirt, but her legs look awkward because you don't see anything to define that big blob below her waist. I maybe should have treated her as if she were nude or in a bathing suit and cut in a gap to show the shape of her folded in leg. This one was also a good object lesson in colour - I should have given her a hat that would stand out more against the background, rather than making the flower stand out against the hat. It would have had more impact if she'd worn, for instance, a white hat with a purple flower. Still, I like it. The more I look at some of these cards I'm not totally sold on, the more I like them and am less bothered by these flaws that I can mention.

The thing that I was most scared of with these cards was that they'd come out looking tacky. Like the silhouettes you sometimes see on mudflaps for trucks, all massive chests and tiny waists and not much artistry. This card most reminds me of the mudflap girls because of her position, but I love this card too much to see too strong of a comparison.

This girl is the most plain Jane of my Vargas girls, which a little bit funny because I remember the original being quite saucy. I fought with this fabric for a long while, getting the girl's body to follow the line of flowers. She originally had a white flower in her hair, but it blended too much with the background, so I pulled it off. She needs some sort of spark to make her more visually interesting, so it's a shame about the flower.

Another girl who lost her floral embellishments. I should have put a ribbon in her hair or a flower. Ah well, she's lovely anyway.

Another of the awkwardly shaped girls who taught me about silhouettes. She also taught me that in some respects, Varga didn't have a terribly clear idea about how bodies bend, because I've never managed to recreate that particular arm movement. Her bent back arm looks almost like a large brimmed hat, rather than an arm, and I think I like that explanation. I so love thte fabric in the background of this. Gorgeous.

Here is another of my very subdued, quiet seeming cards. Like in the other card with a floral background, I had to fight to get my girl to stand/sit in just the right position. I didn't want either girl to look as if she were farting flowers. For all its quietness, I've loved this card since i first got a good look at it.

It was a little bit sad to leave my Varga girls behind when I moved on to my final collection of cards. I think they turned out amazingly well. I've had more requests for the woman in the polka dot sweater than I quite know what to do. If only they didn't take so long to sew.

Meat Feast (BBQ Pork Ribs)

We had a meat feast at my house today.

I had never made ribs before, but a good friend of mine has this recipe for ribs that she (and her mom) swears by, and so I got it off her this summer to try out when, someday, I finally got around to buying ribs.

I think I must have got scared about the end of barbecue season because I finally bought a package of ribs a couple weeks back when my work had them on sale, even though it was raining and it clearly wasn't going to happen just then. Fortunately, we've had some ridiculously good fall weather and I did manage to get them in.

Anyway, here is the recipe. Honestly, I can't explain just how good these were - the rub kind of tastes a lot like salt and pepper wings from the pub and the barbecue sauce, which tastes far too sweet before you cook it, complements it perfectly. So. Good.



Faye's Mom's Ribs Recipe

2 racks back ribs (~2-2 1/2 lbs or 1kg)
2 oz. rib spice (~60g) (About half of the following recipe, but I used about 3/4)
2 cups water (500ml)

Spice ribs liberally on both sides with the rib spice. Place ribs in shallow pan, bone side down. Add water to the pan, cover with foil tightly, and place in a preheated (300F/150C/Gas Mark 2) oven and bake 2 hours.

Let ribs cool for 10-15 min and sauce both sides. Wrap tightly with wrap or store in a container and place in the fridge until you're ready to grill them or barbecue on medium heat until re-heated through, adding more of the barbecue sauce as you go.

Rib Spice:
2 tbsp salt (30ml)
1 tsp cumin (5ml)
2 tbsp packed brown sugar (30ml)
1 tsp onion powder (5ml)
2 tbsp sugar (30ml)
1 tsp garlic powder (5ml)
2 tsp paprika (10ml)
1/2 tsp cayenne (2ml)
2 tsp black pepper (10ml)

Stir ingredients together until well blended.

BBQ Sauce:
3/4 cup ketchup (175ml)
1/2 cup maple syrup (125ml)
1/4 cup oil (50ml)
3 tsp bourbon (15ml)
2 tbsp cider vinegar (30ml)
3 tbsp dijon mustard (45ml)
2 cloves minced garlic
1 tsp pepper (5ml)

Whisk together ingredients until well blended.


So my changes. I notice as I'm typing this up that I forgot to include the paprika. I didn't notice anything off about the taste, so I guess if you haven't got any, I wouldn't rush out to get it. It certainly did well without it. I skipped the bourbon because we had none and I didn't want to drive over to the liquor store to see if they had any tiny bottles of it, just for this. Again, I wouldn't rush out to get it. It probably adds a nice flavour, but I don't think it's hurting anything without it. And we didn't have any cider vinegar, so I used rice wine vinegar instead. I don't know why I used that, rather than any of the other vinegars we've got (two different balsamics, white wine, rice wine, sherry wine), but it did work well.

Delicious.

String Theory postcards

So this is my last series of postcards for my Art2Mail fabric postcard exchange. I had planned to do another series of silhouettes over solid backgrounds, but none of my ideas were working out as I'd hoped and I was getting frustrated so I decided instead just to go in completely the opposite direction.

This last grouping is called 'String Theory' for two reasons. First, this is string quilting - strips (or strings) of fabric sewn one onto the next. Quite typically, they're made of squares where the strings are on the diagonal, and then you sew them into boxes. (Like in this example.) The second reason they're called String Theory is that I was watching Season One of Criminal Minds as I worked on these cards and I happened to be watching... Derailed, which is an episode with a schizophrenic unsub, and Reid starts talking to him about String Theory. So there the name was.

In any case, one of my favourite string quilts that I've ever seen online, well, I can't find now, but it was done in long strips with horizontal strings, so this first postcard is kind of an homage to the gorgeous quilt. Someday I'll do a full-size quilt the same way, but probably far off in the future.

As I was making this card out of primaries, I got stuck on the idea of grouping my colours together, so I had one stack of red scraps, one of blues, one of yellows, greens, purples, browns, black/whites, oranges. Which is more or less what you'll see in the following cards.

This card makes me think of spring with so much green. Everyone who has seen this card remarked on how it looks like a row of fields or maybe lawns.

I really love this card. I know so many quilters who don't like to use browns but I'm such a fan of them. Of course, I nearly never use them either - who knew I had so many brown scraps? Some of these though I'd bought for particular projects - one I think was part of a lion's body in a Griffindor pillow I'd made, and the one with the slightly reddish/coppery spirals was definitely used as the lion's mane.

This is probably least like a string quilt, since it really wound up a bit more like a free-form log cabin. Anyway, I think it's quite pretty.

And then finally this, my least favourite of the series. I'd had an idea about working in a rainbow, but I'm not at all happy with the execution. I'd sort of planned to alternate with all blacks on one side and all whites on the other, but then I didn't have enough black scraps and I wound up combining them, but meh. Should have stuck with a single colour. I guess.

Varga Girl Postcards

My second series of postcards for my Art2Mail exchange was of 1940s pin-ups, in particular Alberto Vargas pin-ups. I think his pin-ups are such iconic images. For many people, I think he's what people think of when they think of old pin-ups. Beautiful, coy women who are sexy but not in an especially overt way. Of course Vargas did do nudes as well and there is definitely a range from baring very little to baring everything. I didn't use any of his nudes, but even if I had, I don't think you'd be able to tell, with these silhouettes.

I found this particular image of a woman sunbathing surprisingly difficult to execute. Somehow I made my template too large, so I had to resize her feet. I completely flubbed her fingers. And then, too, my attempt to stitch on the bathing suit (if you click through the photo, you can see a larger version of the image which shows more detail) was only somewhat successful. I thought this very basic shape would be so easy, but... not so much. I love, still, the blue background because it looks almost like water, like she could be lying at the beach or beside a pool and thinking about something cold and sweet to drink.

This is another card where my attempts to stitch a bit more form into her body came out only so so. It's not bad at all, I don't think, but a bit awkward around her bum and the size/shape of her left leg. Anyway, I liked the fabric I found in my stash for her hair. I'm not sure anyone else I showed this too was very fond of the brown, but I thought the kind of variance in colour was nice for giving her hair more depth.

Oh, this one is so lovely, I think. I just love how sort of delicate everything is - the fine stripes on the background, the bouquet of flowers, even her pose.

One of my favourites. I love the bright background colour on this one and her pose. In the original, she's holding a very large feathered pen, but I didn't want to try to recreate the shape or texture so I just left it out. Her fingers are a bit awkward with nothing to hold, but I think it works anyway.

This is my favourite of the bunch; I think she's gorgeous. The white pops so beautifully off the red, and I think there's something old-school and perfect about her wearing (taking off? or putting on?) a polka-dot sweater; it seems for me to reflect the time-period these images came from, even if polka dots weren't really in fashion then.

For this card, I wanted something in sort of light and breezy colours, like a windy spring day. I liked the yellow and green together up until I actually fused the hat on and I find it a little bit... meh. The hat, unfortunately, didn't take shape terribly well. (It really needed the depth of shadows.) It doesn't have quite the same pop that the pink and red cards have, but I love her shape and the implied movement of the wind.

Mac and Cheese with Turkey Sausage

I've been a really lazy cook lately. I have a drawer in the fridge full to the brim with vegetables, but I just don't feel like eating any of them. Normally I eat a lot of vegetables and fruits, but it doesn't seem like so much lately. I've been cooking lazy and I've been cooking comfort.

I've talked before about how my mom didn't really like to cook, and so I don't remember a lot of what she made when I was a kid. I remember tuna casserole and breaded chicken cutlets and sometimes fish and chips from a box and I remember roasts, sometimes, and stew and chili. I also remember macaroni and cheese with fried sliced hotdogs or fried bologna.

I think a little bit that my mom's aversion to cooking, and getting so much of the same thing so often, is part of what really drives me to keep trying new things. I hate the thought of just rotating the same 10 or 12 meals. I'd rather have 10 failures in a row than the same 5 things twice over.

But comfort food seems often to mean things from childhood. Roasts and stews and chili are comforting, but so is that sort of generic fake cheese taste of macaroni and cheese from a box. I so rarely eat the stuff because I really do think it's quite disgusting, but a couple times a year I'll think, yeah, mac and cheese sounds good.

I think the only way to eat a hotdog is either to singe it over a fire or to fry up slices of it. I don't eat hotdogs anymore, at least not the ones made of the crap scrapped up off the killing room floor, so I had to make a bit of an adjustment to the standard "recipe." Instead, I fished a spinach and feta turkey sausage out of the freezer and fried that up instead.

It wasn't at all delicious, but it sort of tasted good anyway. Not that I'm likely to eat it again for, oh, ages, but...