recipe corner.

in an attempt to enlighten you to the finer points of nutritional survival while travelling by car in america, the sweetie pie press bring you a sure-fire recipe for mobile food satisfaction:

1. after craft fair, exhausted, order chinese food from a flyer in the motel.
2. order too much, confused by low american prices.
3. car + hot day.
4. go to the thrift shop!
5. your friends will never know it wasn't made from scratch.
6. (optional) pray that the 24 hour lack of refrigeration has no harmful side-effects.

voila!

songs of the darned.

oh, this is a bit of a gross post in that it begins with a shot of my cat hair-laden dirty slippers (this is what they look like after a wash), but i am proud of the work i did darning these guys late into last night. also, i think this is just what hardwood floors do to pale-soled footwear.

the slippers were a little cursed to begin with. they were made at the workroom's slipper making class, with instruction and design by the beautiful and brilliant reva quam. but i used a fulled blanket that didn't quite felt properly (chosen, clearly, for aesthetic reasons) and they started unravelling immediately. i've always meant to blanket stitch their edges, but never get around to it.

the blanket was also a little thinner than it should be for walking on. remember, i mostly work from home so these are part of my daily uniform.

i snagged one rather quickly on a nail poking out of the floor boards (another drawback of my beloved hardwood) and it frayed wildly. but i like these guys and i am trying to stretch my possessions to the limits of their usefulness, so i decided to pull out the old darning supplies and practice the ancient art of woolly preservation that my grandma johnson once taught me.

i admit, this is a much more "folksy" rendition of darning. it had been a while and my skillz have vastly diminished. i was also using thrifted lengths of wool tapestry yarn that had come to me precut and preseparated so there were lots of ends to deal with. but the work does its job pretty well. besides, i wanted to dive back into darning as fall looms and i am faced with the task of squeezing another season out of all my wool knee highs.

ideally, i would like to progress to a more finished and clean technique (it is my way) but i was happy to practice on these old reliables. darning can even expand into seamless mending of knits and purely decorative practice. for now, i am happy my slippers will last a bit longer. maybe the pattern of my feet will eventually be replicated thereon in woven yarns.

craft my ride.

thrift store afghan + shredded bench seat = crafty answer to style and function.

apologies to xzibit and crew, but we haven't filled the trunk with plasma tv's and woofers yet. we need that space for crafts. besides, it's a station wagon.

i love how this aesthetic mess looks against the backdrop of our equally daring kansas city motel. i should have taken more pictures of the filled-in pool. next time.

hey, happy canda day. let's go to saint louis!

potential in the form of seeding pots.

this is me trying to be useful in that craft blog kind of way. see? i am sprouting things (hopefully) and had to come up with some brilliant way to line all these seeding pots up on our narrow kitchen window sill. after some chin scratching and eyes darting around the apartment, i came upon an answer - the glass tops from old mason jars. i have a pretty big collection of these canadian classics and have even amassed a bunch of jarless tops just in case i happen upon topless jars (and also because we are a bit clumsy around here).

don't worry, this temporary usage won't ruin them. they are glass, after all.

and there you have it. domestic craft lady blog tip.

experiments in terraria.

the moss plate was threatening to dry out. i knew this would happen. so yesterday, aitor and i had a brief outing on the hunt for the last couple of materials we needed to make a terrarium or two (namely charcoal and sphagnum moss).

i have been dreaming up terraria for while - actually, ever since aitor went on a plant splitting spree and gave me a small butterwort. he still has two thriving in his big wardian case while mine was pluckily struggling on our bathroom windowsill. so i started looking around for appropriate containers. that's when i found the one above, which was a serious thrift score. of course, you can't just plop a lone carnivorous plant into a big jar like that all alone. so a hatched a plan to collect some mosses out west (which also acted as a bid to bring a small part of the farm home with me). well, that plan snowballed, as plans are often wont to do, and i ended up with quite a bit of mossy materials.





in the end, the butterwort didn't end up figuring into the big glass jar at all. it's very easy to overcrowd these things and my maximalism really comes out in these situations. this little guy might be a lot to take in for the tastes of others, but i just see a million things to stare at. those stringy red things dance around when misted, which i can never get over.

with the remaining smaller bits and the butterwort, i put together these three smaller containers.



i imagine they are intended for some kind of wild alcoholic beverage (if you know, please fill me in) but they make perfect tiny terraria. i had orginally intended to give these ones to friends, but i think i need to hang onto them for at least a little while. after all, this is all experimental for me so i would it would serve me to observe the trials and successes of these little ecosystems.

after just one night, i can already see condensation on the glasses, the moss has perked up and the lichen have reverted to the softer forms that they had when i met them in british columbia; they had taken on a much more rigid demeanour when just lying around in the open of our dry apartment. the butterwort even ate some bugs that crawled out of the moss! let's hope it starts to look more like its happier brethren soon.



also, if anyone in the city has another large glass-topped jar or container that they feel like getting rid of, i would give it a good home. i have one big chunk of moss left with a couple of ferns growing in it and am trying desperately to keep it happy and healthy. my recent thrift store outings have yielded nothing of use. such is the plight of the impoverished artist who takes on opulent victorian hobbies.

although there is more extensive information on building your own terrarium elsewhere on the web, i will quickly run down what i did to make these:

a) washed and sterilized the glass containers.

b) filled the bottom with loose river rocks.

c) mixed in charcoal (i found it keeps the dust down if you rinse it first and lay it into the glass wet).

d) soaked the dried sphagnum moss and applied a healthy layer over the rocks.

e) placed moss samples in with gentle downward squeezes.

f) laid lichen-encrusted twigs and little pine/alder/cedar cones on top.

g) watered.

h) replaced lid.

i) marveled.

putting 289 buttons on 289 nails (or how to drive yourself crazy in four easy hours).

today i installed my piece (affectionately titled 'the security envelope project') at the ontario crafts council for the diwhy? exhibition that opens tomorrow. as a result, i will show you how i did it in case you ever get the urge to display 289 1" buttons on a wall somewhere. oh yes, i should apologize for the photos in advance. the lighting was not great and my photography skills have some holes in them so they are petty grainy.

step #1 - do math
i did this in my head and thus couldn't take pictures. in this case, the buttons'centres will be spaced 1.5 inches apart (leaving .5 inches between each button) and will be arranged in a grid of 17 squared (the highest square number i could muster out of my current collection).

step #2 - make a centre dot on the wall.

step #3 - apply a horizontal piece of masking tape over this dot, extending the width of your intended display. this part can be eyeballed. the level will come in later.

step #4 - measure out a leveled series of dots (at your predetermined intervals and quantity).

step #5 - place a new piece of masking tape vertically using the centre dot as a guide.

sep #6 - repeat step #4 on the vertical axis.

step #7 - start applying lines of tape (eyeballing their levelness), using this centre axis as a guide. part way through, your grid should look like the one above. when you are finished this step, it should look like this:



step #8 - draw levelled lines through your central axis of dots. this should be done with some amount of care.





...see how my eyeball lines and leveled lines vary considerably? i even had to add tape in a few places so as not to draw on the wall (which i was trying to avoid).

step # 9 - nails!



i used 2 inch common nails with a nice flat head. although i started by placing two in the middle, i quickly realized that right-handed people should start in the upper right corner. i would imagine that the reverse is true for lefties but have yet to test this theory.

step #10 - keep it up! don't loose focus and just go for a coffee/tea.



step # 11 - finish nailing and feel a warm sense of accomplishment. after all, this is the most stressful part of the process. if you mess up, you risk making the holes loose and having your nails fall out. i am very proud to report that i hammered in 289 nails without bending one, loosening a hole (well, that's debatable), or hitting a finger. my dad would have been so proud.



step #12 - remove tape. i find that this process is greatly aided by having shannon gerard idling in the vicinity. if you are lucky enough to find yourself in this situation, you will see how much faster she is than you at picking masking tape off a wall.



this is also a good time to start marvelling at the shadows that a big grid of nails casts.

step #13 - apply a single magnet to the end of each nail. i chose the rare earth magnets at a diameter of 1/16 of an inch. these magically fit the nail heads perfectly with no math or effort on my part. when applying magnets to the nail heads, you will also notice that shannon is faster than you.



step #14 - apply your 1" buttons to the magnets. i found that you have a better chance of getting them close to centered if you open the pinbacks. i did not take any pictures of this step because i could not bear the resulting images given the low light. but fear not, i will be back tomorrow and will take some pictures when the sun is shining.

step #15 - be proud of your accomplishment. you actually did something today!

reflections:
- gallery walls are full of patched holes. you should have spackle and paint on hand to deal with the chips and cracks your nails will create.
- tape is hard to peel off walls. i actually may have to think of a better system for future installations, but this was a first stab and worked out exceptionally well.
- accept the irregularities of doing it by hand. it is nearly impossible (for me) to make this grid all sit on the exact same plane. also, there are so many layers of variable (measuring, nailing precision, magnetism, button/pinback cooperation...) that inconsistencies are bound to present themselves. i have decided that these elements make the piece more organic. besides, a show about the diy movement can't possibly want to install the craziness like an automaton, right? like what is this...readymade?

thanks for reading (if you did). is anyone else actually going to try to do this somewhere? let me know, if you are. i am thinking of selling do-it-yourself kits in my etsy shop (of various grid dimensions) but i am holding off until i have perfected the instructions. please let me know what you think of that idea, too.

and go to the show! it opens tomorrow with a reception on february 5th.

how to sell crafts in the rain (or renegade craft fair, day one).

being from vancouver, one would think i might know how to operate in the rain. and while i used to be fine with living life in a constant state of dampness, my advanced age and curmudgeonliness have made me a very cranky customer when it comes to selling crafts in the rain. well, this time i swore would be different. we knew the weather reports well in advance (it was even pouring as we drove into town last night) so i had time to psychologically prepare myself. i resolved to stay positive and figure out solutions to our situation that would keep us happy, safe and dry.

first of, we do now have a new better tent that we got on sale at home depot. it's not perfectly rain-proof but pretty rad.



the one big flaw we discovered is that since the seams are stitched, the rain-proofing along them is all full of tiny holes and tends to leak quickly. and since the seams run above the uppermost poles of the tent, this sends a little series of drips down the four ceiling poles. as a fix for this problem, i had the major brainwave to simply tie yarn along the poles from the point of the highest drip. this doesn't patch the holes, or stop the leaks from happening but it does divert the drips down the yarn in a path-of-least-resistance approach to keeping the rain away from our stuff. it worked like a charm!





i know this is a pretty niche problem for my first how-to but i was just so shamelessly proud of myself for figuring out such an easy do-it-yourself fix to a problem at least a few of you may face in the future. and it all kept working through a whole day of torrential rains!

we also pulled the mats off the floor boards of the car to keep our under-table stuff from getting wet on the bottom. this also worked like magic.



after hours of fussing and mussing and adjusting and trying to stay dry and positive, i looked out of the tent and saw this on the curb:



i guess choosing to find things fun makes them fun. also, kids are more waterproof than balloons. who knew?