holiday – Page 8 – The Witty Child

Happy Mother’s Day!

May 13, 2012June 23, 2018 wittychild

This year has been a far cry from last year’s adding French knots and framing on Sunday morning. For once, I actually came prepared for Mother’s Day.

Besides the towel that I posted last weekend, I stitched up a little card for Mumsie:

It was a free kit that came with a recent issue of Cross Stitcher magazine. The kit included googly eyes that looked freaky-deaky (the mama koala looked merely surprised; the baby looked like a strung-out Keane kid), so I added French knots to give a somewhat more natural look.

And you can’t have Mother’s Day without dessert, can you?

This is a variation on the raw strawberry cheesecake from The Post Punk Kitchen. I made the filling as per the recipe, but used the vanilla cookie crumb crust from Vegan Pie in the Sky instead. I’m not normally a cheesecake fan, but this wasn’t bad – light and mousse-ish, with a nice strawberry flavour.

The cake, incidentally, made a lovely finish to our breakfast of cocoa-Kahlua pancakes from Hearty Vegan Meals for Monster Appetites. Dense and chewy, they were like eating brownies for breakfast. Yum!

Happy Mother’s Day, everyone!

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

I shake de tree.

May 5, 2012June 7, 2018 wittychild

Sshhhh! This is a top-secret sneak preview of a little something I whipped up for Mother’s Day, so think of this as an advance screening.

You may recall that a couple of years ago I embroidered a Swedish Chef towel for my mother’s birthday. He still gets a lot of use, but it’s seemed to me that he could use a companion towel – most of our other tea towels come in pairs, except for the poor, lonely Chef. So, bork-bork-bork, I decided to embroider the squirrel design from Sublime Stitching’s Forest Friends pack.

At this point, you’re probably questioning the connection. Why not another Muppet, or something more kitchen-y? Well, it all started like this: the very first episode of The Muppet Show that I remember seeing was the one guest-starring John Denver, with a camping theme. In this one, the Swedish Chef has traded his kitchen for a little set-up in the woods, and has decided to make squirrel stew. I can’t do it justice; just watch the video.

Now that it all makes a little more sense, on with the towel:

Here it is, posing on the oven door.

A better view of the stitching. It’s done mostly in stem stitch with the little tufty fur bits in backstitch, and a hint of satin stitch to keep it interesting.

I also got some baking done! (Although this is not for Mother’s Day.) Behold, the Applesauce-Oat Bran Muffins from Veganomicon:

Truly, I have no future with the Muppets, as I didn’t haphazardly fling a single ingredient while making these. 🙂

baking, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

So Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny walk into a bar…

April 9, 2012June 7, 2018 wittychild

Wait. What?

Okay, so I’m not insanely early with this, I swear. Just kinda, sorta four months late. I think my inner monologue started something like this (perhaps abridged for the sake of time and space): “Oh, boy, I love doing Mill Hill beaded kits. They’re so quick and cute, and if I start stitching now I’ll have this finished in plenty of time for Christmas…All right, now that I’ve got the stitching finished, all that’s left is to add the beads. Ooh, they’ll twinkle nicely when this is hanging on the Christmas tree….Oh, well [bad word]! There’s a bead stuck on my needle! Hmm, maybe if I try pushing it back off the way it came…nope…”

One of the red beads got stuck (as in, super-stuck) on my beading needle. Right over the eye. I could neither slide it over the eye and down to its rightful place on the ornament nor slide it back off. Considering that at this point I had already completed most of the beading and had, oh, three red beads to go, I was considerably unimpressed by this development. So I calmly and rationally did what any psychologically normal person would do: stuffed the entire works into a drawer to be ignored until some to-be-determined point in the future when I felt like dealing with it.

A few weeks ago, I happened to bitterly mumble something about “that [bad word] bead”, to which my mom replied, “Why don’t you just take a pair of pliers and crush it? You do have extras, right?” Genius! So, yesterday I took a pair of pliers and crushed the sodding little thing to bits, whereupon I cheerfully resumed my otherwise pleasant little project. Here it is, with one of my mom’s potted plant-like things standing in for a Christmas tree. Hey, foliage is foliage:

It’s called “Kitty’s Gift”, and I can see now that I need to trim the backing paper on it…but I’ve still got eight months or so. She looks rather like my youngest cat, too.

Gratuitous cat shot:

(Yes, the cat, I got dressed up in time for Christmas. The tree, not so much.)

Also on my list of Easter weekend homemakery, I made a pie from scratch for the first time. Well, the crust is from scratch, at least. I didn’t want to go to all the trouble of doing a scratch filling only to find out that the crust was going to be inedible, but…next time! I used the Buttery Double Crust recipe from Vegan Pie in the Sky by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero, and dumped a can of peach-passionfruit filling in between. The edge of the crust turned out a little lumpy and imperfect, but I’m still satisfied for a first attempt:

My Pennsylvania RR Peach Passionfruit Pie. One of the pies in the book shows a crust with little stars cut out; I happened to have a small locomotive cookie cutter handy so used that instead.

I could use more four-day weekends. I get so much more done around the house than I do at work. 🙂

baking

Why don’t you make like a banana and split…

February 12, 2012June 7, 2018 wittychild

…into a dozen delicious cupcakes! Muahahaha!

*ahem*

I had had a hankering for these for a while, and had slowly been acquiring the ingredients necessary to churn out a batch. When soy yogurt – *bing* – magically found its way into my fridge on Friday, I knew I was in the clear.

These are Banana Split Cupcakes from Kris Holechek’s The 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes, and oh, lordy, they can make believers out of omnivores!

The picture doesn’t do them justice. A moist vanilla cake studded with chopped maraschino cherries and bananas, mini chocolate chips, and crushed pineapple…heaven! I actually wound up with 16 cupcakes instead of the alleged 12, but this is my own fault for not measuring my mix-ins as precisely as I could have. (“Eh…that looks like 1/4 cup.”) I topped them off with a basic vanilla buttercream piped into approximations of swirls, and sprinkled a few chopped peanuts on top for good measure. They make a nice contrast to the sweet of the cupcake and icing.

The best part? My cherries were not quite as thoroughly drained as they ought to have been, and imparted a lovely pale pink colour to the batter. It wasn’t my intention to make Valentine’s cupcakes – I used the heart-print liners because they’re seasonal, but it wasn’t a deliberate attempt or anything – but I wound up with them anyway.

craftmas, Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Nice? No, naughty!

December 23, 2011May 27, 2018 wittychild

I’m alive! Frustrated with mankind, mind you, but alive nonetheless. So what have I been up to in my [checks calendar] nearly two-month hiatus? Well…November was mostly occupied acquiring this:

Go me! Novel #8! However – November was not a great month for crafting, and then boom, December rears its Christmas-baking-social-function-shop-and-wrap-and-sign-cards head. Sorry; I’m attempting to rationalize here. And I actually was able to craft one Christmas gift, although I wrapped it before I took a picture. That will be forthcoming. In the meantime, I have this:

It’s one of those lovely Mill Hill beaded kits, but my goodness, was there ever a lot of white stitching! I have the accompanying “Nice” kit in my stash, too, but may tackle that next year. (Being naughty is more fun than being nice anyway, right? Right!) I backed the design with silver paper after I cut away the excess perforated paper, and presto! Instant ornament!

For those who are curious, my new favourite holiday memory was formed just today: crowded in the workplace lunchroom with roughly 2/3 of the office, listening to one of our inspectors play his guitar and sing, and having an office sing-along to “Last Kiss”. I wish I were making this up.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Cross-stitch and Embroidery

Bewitched Kitty

October 9, 2010May 27, 2018 wittychild

I bought this Mill Hill beaded kit last year just after Halloween – thereby eliminating the pressure to have it finished before. Oh, yes. I’m clever, I am. After finishing one of my UFOs (pictures still forthcoming), I thought it was time for a quick-stitch project that would provide almost instant gratification. And right I was!

It’s actually pretty tiny, maybe 2 1/2 inches tall. The kit came with a pin back, but honestly, I’d be paranoid about something happening to it (flimsy perforated paper, delicate beads, potentially de-secured thread tails – ack!), so I used one of Kreinik’s new holographic threads to make a hanger and turn it into an ornament instead.

My own bewitched kitties seem quite enthralled with it, as the living-room sun glints off the beads, so it’s now hung safely out of harm’s way.

General Sewing

Halloween ahoy!

October 30, 2009May 23, 2018 wittychild

I do love Halloween – I think it may very well be my favourite holiday. The stores stay open, no dopey special dinners required…and you get to wear a costume and consume unholy amounts of sugar! More holidays should be like that.

Anyway, I’m showing up at work tomorrow as a somewhat contemporary (assuming this is somewhere in the late 1940s) Little Red Riding Hood. I’ve had the pattern for the cape for a while, but only just got around to making it. See, I found this sweet gingham square-dance dress (according to the tag) at a vintage store, and immediately fell in love with it as it reminded me of something that Vladimir Nabokov’s Dolores Haze might wear. However, I had the sneaking suspicion that if I showed up wearing the dress and had to answer the inevitable “What are you?” with “Lolita”, I’d be subjecting myself to a barrage of “But what’s your costume?” and so on. Just a hunch. *sigh* The cape was a very necessary addition, using a Simplicity pattern whose number escapes me at the moment, and made from (believe it or not) an old satin sheet.

So I decided to reinterpret Red Riding Hood as a slightly more modern girl. She’s going to be a bobby-soxer, with saddle shoes and cuffed white socks, a nifty wicker lunchbox-cum-purse instead of that boring old basket, and hopefully a knowing gleam in her eye as she fends off the office wolves. *snerk*

Modeling the requisite red satin cape, made with my own two hands, over the nymphettish dress, is my dress form Dolores (herself named after little Miss Haze). Please ignore the blurry background, as I chose to smudge the clutter out rather than actually, you know, tidy up.

...you sure are looking good...