It's December!

First things first: we've got some pretty interesting stuff going on politically in Canada right now, that could see a change from our current newly re-elected government, to a coalition government.

My friend J over at My Artsy Pet Pursuits explains it far better than I could, so go take a look.

Moving right along!

It's December. Twenty-three sleeps until Christmas morning. This means that I put up our decorations on Sunday. Usually, I wait (at my husband's request) until after December actually starts, but this year I jumped the gun by a day.

We now have Santas (the one on the left was made by my aunt):

Stockings with elf clothes hung up over top of them:

And a tree with colour changing lights on it:

We do have a much larger tree usually, but it takes up most of the living room and, more importantly, blocks the back door, which would mean that Roo couldn't get out into the back yard. Last year I was cranky and didn't decorate for Christmas, so it wasn't an issue, but this year I needed a fix, so we hit a local big box store and picked up this little guy for $20. I can only fit half of my decorations on it, so I chose the most important ones and made sure that they reflected both of us and our history together, as well as before we met.

Every year I give Fred an ornament. This is one I made for him our first year together:

Our second year together (yes, that is a black christmas ball):

Around the back of the tree, there is also a Millenium Falcon, and an X-wing Fighter:

I have enough angel ornaments of different kinds (cloth, wood, glass, ceramic, hand made, plastic, you name it!) to do a whole tree in just angels:

Finally, I have started my Christmas knitting:

Taste of Love

Fred's birthday was on Monday, and he requested a chocolate cake. I didn't get around to making it until yesterday, but I did get it done.

Happy belated birthday, baby!

Pretties!

Last night I spent a few hours making a bracelet for my friend for her birthday tomorrow:

I really enjoy doing this and would like to try selling some of my work on etsy, but I'm having a hard time figuring how to do the pricing. I know that it should be materials + labour, and take into consideration what the market will bear, but I just can't seem to get that down to an actual number. Anyone out there who runs a business (Laurie, Meg, Annika, you all spring to mind) have any pointers on how to figure this out?

The Pratchgan is Done!

In this post from February I talked about The Pratchgan, and showed you my humble square.

If you click on the title of this post, you can get to Ramblings of a Yarn Junkie, the blog of the wonderful woman who was the heart and soul of this operation.

Here's her photo of the Pratchgan, in all it's glory:

Hopefully, she will be able to hand it to the man himself later this month.

There's been talk of doing a Pratchgan knit along (where as a group, we would knit squares designed by each other, so that we all wind up with our own afghans at the end of it). Given my group of friends' love for Pratchett, I may wind up knitting squares for years!

From left to right, that's Tiffany Aching, Magrat, Granny Weatherwax, and Nanny Ogg. Other attendees at that particular party included Lord Vetinari, The Cheerfulness Fairy, Death (with his guest, the Death of Rats) and the Luggage. Yes, we have a lot of fun. *grin*

Bitter Music

I am making a mixed cd for a recently single friend. She's into hard rock, skulls and leather, and is waffling out of the "righteous anger" phase into the "I sent him an email" phase and we're hoping to get past this part and into the "what did I see in him anyways?" phase sooner rather than later.

While noodling around on the intertoobs for song ideas, I came across this: Cold and Bitter, which ends with this paragraph:

"Full of Grace - Sarah McLachlan (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
No matter how badly your relationship turned out, it's unlikely that your lover lost his soul, became a vicious killer, tried to send the world spinning into hell, then regained his soul moments before you had to impale him on a sword to save the universe. Lost and broken, Buffy wanders away from her hometown of Sunnydale at the end of Season Two, taking a bus to Los Angeles as this tearjerking song plays - "I know I can love you much better than this..." Yeah, I think you probably could. Just don't stab him this time."

Made me giggle.

So, here's the tentative song list:
Bloodletting - Concrete Blonde
Who Knew - Pink
Not a Pretty Girl - Ani DiFranco
Thorn in my Side - Eurythmics
I Don't Care - Apocalyptica feat. Adam Gontier
Pain - Four Star Mary
Laid - James
Ballad for Dead Friends - Dashboard Prophets
Hate Me - Blue October
Juke-Joint Jezebel - KMFDM
Wearing Me Down - Dashboard Prophets
Bullet with Butterfly Wings - Smashing Pumpkins
Machinehead - Bush
Everybody Knows - Concrete Blonde
What I Did For Love - Me First and the Gimme Gimme's
Time of Your Life - Green Day

I deliberately left out stuff like "You Oughta Know" because she's already got that one and similar songs on a different "Bitter" compilation I made for another friend a couple of years back, and I'm aiming for this to be on the harder side of things, Eurythmics and Ani DiFranco notwithstanding.

So, any suggestions?

Weekend Update

My weekend started (sort-of) 12:15 am Friday morning, when the husband and I went to see The Dark Knight. Woo! Definitely worth the lack of sleep! I napped before and after the movie, and then went into work on Friday, where I mainlined coffee all day. The movie was dark and wonderful and creepy and exciting, and I'm so glad I went.

Saturday we went into the Big City to visit friends and eat sushi (yum!) then we got together back at home with friends to watch UFC. How I went from someone who hated sushi and wresting, to someone who will drive 1.5 hours to eat sushi and will spend 4 hours watching men pummel each other until they bleed/pass out is beyond me.

The very most exciting part of the weekend was yesterday when I spent the afternoon making cheese with my friend semicrunchymom.

We started with milk (and a couple of other things from the cheesemaking kit she bought):



And ended up with mozzarella:



Then we started out with milk again (see previous picture; it looked exactly the same), and ended up with ricotta:



It was very exciting to see the change from milk to curds and whey. It was one of those things that happens in moment, much like the moment when whipping cream turns into butter and butter milk. It was a lovely afternoon, and a fantastic reminder that cooking is really just math and chemistry.

Father's Day Lunch

For a number of different reasons, I have been spending more time experimenting with food the past few months. Yesterday, I decided to take ideas from Angry Chicken, my Weight Watchers meeting and Noirbettie and throw them together in one meal. I was so excited by it that it wasn't until half way through lunch that I remembered to take a picture for the Today's Homemaker Flickr pool!

I roasted beets and russet potatoes in some olive oil with some garlic (this is the part from Angry Chicken). While that was going, I bbq'd some bacon wrapped steaks, and made a viniagrette out of 1/8 of a cup each of maple syrup (the real stuff), apple cider vinegar and olive oil, about 5 strawberries and a couple of slices of red onion (blended using a hand blender so that it was all frothy and pink). I tossed the viniagrette and roasted potatos and beets with more sliced strawberries, spinach and boston lettuce, then sliced the steaks and put them on top of the salad, and sprinked the whole thing with some sunflower seeds.

The bun on the side of my bowl came from the same local farm the lettuce, spinach and straberries came from, and the butter is the stuff I made using Noirbettie's post about making butter.

Yum!

I made this!

This is what I did with my night last night instead of painting my sewing room or cleaning the house. It's a gift for a friend's birthday.




I think I need to get one of those jewelery store busts for showing off this kind of stuff.

Circlet!

The last piece of jewelery is made!

Circlet front

Side

Back

Other side

Tonight I'll start sewing the dress together.

Two weeks! Woohoo!