librarysarie

So many books...

For much of the last few months, I've been in a reading slump. I wish I could say why, but there's really no good reason - do slumps ever really have a true cause? Anyway, I'm slowly digging my way out of it, and just in time, as another Book Expo America is now, uh, on the books.  

Book Expo always makes me feel so optimistic...I've gotten all these books, I think to myself, and I'm actually going to READ them all! That rarely happens -- my intentions are good, but my follow-through is lacking -- but I still wouldn't miss it. Even if I don't ever make my BEA-related reading goals, it's incredibly valuable to me, both personally and professionally, to see what people are excited about reading and just to be in the company of so many people who love books and, like me, spend their lives with them and around them.

Most years, there's at least one title that I'm desperate to get my hands on, or an author I'm anxious to meet, but this year there wasn't anything that jumped off the page at me, so to speak. Which was kind of nice, actually -- it made me feel like I could take things at a more leisurely pace and not rush around to get into certain lines at certain times. Still, though, I did have my galley list (thanks, as always, to Library Journal for the galley guide!) and managed to get my hands on most of the things that interested me. And there were, of course, plenty of things that weren't on my list but caught my eye.  Here's my pile (or most of it, anyway) from my two days. Some things for me, some for others, some for the library. I was pretty selective in what I picked up and I think I did a decent job of not overdoing it. (In addition to the books, of course, there are all the bookmarks, oh so many tote bags, nailpolish (advertising a book about manicures), a sippy cup (advertising a board book about adult beverages), and the requisite naughty things from the erotica publishers.)

 I also, like many others, have a conference tradition of pictures with whatever wacky things are wandering the conference floor -- Elvis, Oscar the Grouch, the dummy from the "For Dummies" books...This year, there was Bad Kitty (though that picture seems to reside on my BEA-pal Heather's phone) and, more importantly, everyone's favorite intergalactic bounty hunter.

Saturday was Reed Expo's first ever "BookCon" and...well, it was something. I won't go on at length about it but I will say that it was way too crowded (this picture hints at the crowds but doesn't really do them justice) and I was VERY glad that I had a "professional" badge and could go anywhere on the show floor rather than being confined to the BookCon section. I don't mind crowds as a general rule, but BookCon was making me feel seriously claustrophobic and anxious.

Don't get me wrong -- it was WONDERFUL to see so many people, especially tweens and teens, so excited about books and reading and authors, but the crowd seemed far FAR too large for the space allocated to it and that section of the show floor basically became completely unnavigable as well as basically useless for any kind of professional browsing or conversation. My perennial BEA companions Heather and Jennifer and I stuck to the non-BookCon part of the show floor (which was practicaly devoid of people) and had a calm, relaxed experience. I even got to go home with an armload of dictionaries, thanks to being at the Merriam-Webster booth at the right time. (Maybe this wouldn't be exciting to anyone else, but it made this word nerd VERY happy. Merriam-Webster's Visual Dictionary may well be the book I have always longed for without knowing it.)

 

All in all, it was a fun and productive two days -- and who knows? Maybe I'll actually make a decent dent in that big to-be-read pile: less than two weeks out, and I've already finished three books, which, considering that aforementioned reading slump, is AMAZING. Yay books!

There are some things you just can't say no to.

It's a long time since I've shared any finished knitting...amazingly enough, I kind of have a backlog now!

Back in the fall when we went to Ugly Duckling Yarn, almost as soon as we walked into the store Ian beelined over to the display of Ella Rae Seasons and grabbed a ball in a blue-and-gray colorway. "Mommy, I want a sweater of THIS yarn."

There are a few rules in life, and one of them is this: When the preschooler asks you to knit him a sweater, you knit that kid a sweater.

Pattern: Set-in-sleeve sweater - Child, from Ann Budd's The Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns
Yarn: Ella Rae Seasons, colorway 17
Needles: US9/5.5mm
Time: October 30 - November 23, 2013
Ravelry project page

I don't really like seaming (and did a terrible job attaching the sleeves here), but I opted to knit this sweater in pieces because I knew that the striping pattern would annoy me otherwise -- somehow, stripes not lining up doesn't bother me, visually, like stripes of unequal width would -- and I chose a "figure out your gauge and plug the numbers into a template" sort of pattern. I had a really hard time figuring out what size to make -- I wanted the sweater to not be ridiculously huge on Ian now, but I didn't want him to outgrow it immediately either -- so I went for something that seemed a size or so too big, and lengthened it somewhat since he usually outgrows things in height well before he outgrows them in width. In the end, the sweater is NOT as big as I was expecting, so it looks very tunic-like on him. Then again, I've not yet wet-blocked it, so chances are I will be able to ease it into a wider shape.

The best part of knitting this sweater was just how excited Ian was by the process. I was afraid that, despite having watched me knit for his entire life, he'd think it was a lot more instant-gratification than it really is, but that wasn't a problem at all. He'd watch me knit -- encourage me to do so, really -- and the best was one day when my mother-in-law came over and Ian excitedly showed her the back and one sleeve I'd finished. "I LOVE how this is coming out, House!" he gushed. And when I did finish it, after about a month (which must have seemed an eternity to him), he was so excited he could not stop giggling. Just couldn't contain his glee.

Seriously, how could you NOT knit for this kid?

In other news, my son may have a future as a model. He posed himself for these shots. What a ham.

Thumbprints

I like to think that I'm raising a little crafter.  One of Ian's very favorite things to do is sit down with a pile of paper, scissors, glue, and crayons and just mess around, and he and I have great fun making projects together, too.  In this post you can see one of the little foam turkeys that we made for Thanksgiving this year, for example, and he loves to help out with my own projects.  (And yarn winding. He loves yarn winding.)  

For Christmas this year, he and I made ornaments for his grandmas and aunts and uncles.  

 Aren't they cute?  

 These were very simple to make.  The ornaments are clear, hollow plastic...discs, I guess? (they're flattened, rather than being spherical).  Using a white Stazon inkpad (a solvent ink that adheres to non-porous surfaces like glass and plastic), Ian stamped his thumbprint  three times to make the snowman.  After the ink dried, we used acrylic paint to add the snowman's face, hat, buttons, and arms -- I painted, Ian supervised.  When THAT was dry, Ian partially filled the ornaments with coarse glitter (added bonus: thanks to the magic of static electricity, some of the glitter stuck to the inside of the ornament, making the whole thing sparkly!).  Then we put the tops back on the ornaments and put on the strings.  Ian had the idea to add a jingle bell or two, so he strung those on as well.  

They're somewhat similar to our ornaments from, I think, two years ago:

 

Ian helped a lot less with these -- he was much smaller!  ;-)  These are small glass balls with, again, Ian's thumbprint (this time with dark brown Stazon).  I glued on a little red rhinestone and drew eyes with a black Sharpie and antlers with a brown Sharpie.  Voila: reindeer!

I'm a total sucker for kids' crafts incorporating thumbprints and handprints -- by the time Ian ages out of wanting to make silly little Christmas ornaments with me, we might have quite the collection of them!

Bigger on the inside

I haven't had a whole lot of opportunity yet to play with it, but I think that shrink plastic is my new favorite thing.  I always loved Shrinky Dinks when I was a kid, and revisiting the stuff as an adult -- and with the knowledge that I can make MY OWN DESIGNS -- has been a ton of fun so far.  

Some time ago, I started noodling around an idea for a Doctor Who-themed jewelry project, and finally got the chance to try it out back before Christmas. 

I started by finding a simplified line drawing of the TARDIS and tracing it onto translucent white shrink plastic sheets.  I used regular old Crayola colored pencils for both the outlining and the coloring.  The shrink plastic has a smooth surface, so I had to rough it up with some fine-grit sandpaper in order for the pencil to "stick."

I had printed the source image in several different sizes, since I wasn't exactly sure how much the plastic would shrink, but as it turned out the first one I tried ended up being about the size I'd hoped the finished product to be.  

 

After cutting them out, next up came the shrinking, which I did in the toaster oven on a baking sheet lined with brown paper.  Have you ever made a Shrinky Dink?  It's such fun to watch -- the plastic jumps around and curls up as it contorts into its final size and shape.  Mine were pretty flat when they finished, but sometimes they are left with a slight curl and you have to quickly flatten them with something when they are still hot and pliable.

Look how much they shrink!  The color also intensifies as the plastic shrinks, so you have to be careful not to saturate your colors too much lest they become too dark in the finished product.  

 

 

I had to do several batches, experimenting with the placement of the hole (I was planning to turn these into pendants and earrings, so I needed a hole to attach a jump ring, and it's much easier to punch the hole before shrinking).  I also discovered that the plastic doesn't shrink equally in both dimensions -- I traced several TARDISes with the plastic in portrait orientation and several in landscape, and the ones that were done in landscape ended up being shorter and squatter.  You can kind of see the difference in the picture below, although it's easier to see in person -- in the grouping of three, see how the middle one with the earring finding is a little taller and thinner than the other two?  Interestingly, the portrait-oriented ones also cooled flatter -- the landscape ones were a little more wavy.

I finished these into simple pendants and earrings -- in the bead aisle at Michaels I found some little faceted crystals that were pre-hung on a wire loop, and attached those to the top with a jump ring to look kind of like the light atop the TARDIS.  For the earrings, I then attached the whole thing to an ear wire.

All in all, I'm very happy that these came out basically exactly how I was hoping -- I love when a plan works!  I gave a pair of earrings to my sister-in-law, and sent a pendant to my friend's daughter in California, and they've been very well-received.  (I saw my sister-in-law three or four more times over her Christmas visit, and she was wearing them each time. Yay!)

Given the shrink plastic medium, I think it's fair to say that these are bigger on the inside, no?

 

Ian Takes Flight

Like a lot of little kids, Ian is a huge fan of airplanes.  He's loved our visits to the Air & Space Museum and the New England Air Museum, is always flying his toys around and/or pretending to be an airplane himself, and can spot a plane in the sky no matter how high up and tiny it is.  I remember the look of disappointment on his face when we first went to the Air & Space Museum and he got to climb into the cockpit of a Cessna -- I thought he'd love it, but instead he looked crestfallen.  "I thought we were REALLY going to fly!"  

A couple of weeks ago, he finally got his wish.  Jim had gone to DC for work for a week, and Ian and I flew down to meet him there.  

Bradley Airport is pretty quiet at midmorning, and we were able to walk right up to the security checkpoint with no line whatsoever.  (Interestingly, Ian was selected for TSA Pre-Check, according to his boarding pass.  I was not.)  He was a little nervous about all the police officers and big machines, but the TSA agent who checked us in was super-friendly and great with him, and I think that put him at ease, although he was a little scared of walking through the metal detector by himself.  (We saw the same agent later, on the other side of security, and she waved to him.  "IAN! My buddy! Are you having fun??")

We had gotten to the airport with plenty of time to spare, so we had a couple of hours to wait.  We wandered around the terminal a bit, watched a couple of planes take off and land, and then went and sat at our gate.  There weren't any chairs right by the window, so we just made ourselves comfortable on the floor.

While we were waiting and watching all of the ground crew activity, some of the ground crew guys waved at Ian, which he thought was exciting. "Are they waving at ME?!"

Not long after our plane landed and the people from the first leg got off, our flight crew arrived and Ian got to talk to the pilot.  And before we knew it, it was time to board.  I didn't think it was possible for Ian to be any more excited than he already was...but he was literally bouncing up and down and almost sprinted down the jetway.  

While we waited to taxi to the runway (naturally, they discovered a mechanical problem AFTER we boarded), Ian familiarized himself with the aircraft's safety features and skimmed the in-flight magazine.

When we finally got to the runway and they fired up the engines for takeoff, Ian just started giggling.  And giggling.  And giggling some more.  Even the people around us were laughing at him.  :-)

Ian is low and the windows were too high for him to see out, as evidenced by this Ian's-eye photo...

...but that's just as well, since it was a cloudy day and there was nothing to see anyway.  He did enjoy flying THROUGH the clouds, though, and getting to see sunshine and blue sky on the other side.

I'd brought along some M&Ms -- his favorite -- as a surprise snack, and our flight attendant slipped him some salty snacks (you know, the ones the rest of us pay $5 for) to go along with his apple juice. Boy, it pays to be 3 and cute.

When we were coming in to land, I told him that there would be a little bit of a bump when we hit the ground.  When we landed and then slammed on the brakes, he started giggling uncontrollably again just as he did when we took off.  

As we were getting off the plane, the pilot invited Ian to see the cockpit and have his picture taken, but he suddenly became Mr. Shy and didn't want to.  And after all the time he spent in the cockpit at the Air Museum!  Oh well, maybe next time.

All in all, I'd have to imagine that this ranks right up there with Ian's Top Three Days of All Time.  He had SO much fun...and I did, too.  The first time I was on a plane I was sixteen years old, so it was a ton of fun to see the whole thing through his eyes.  And it doesn't hurt, of course, that he's a great traveler and we got lots of compliments.  Mommies like that stuff.  ;-)

Where to next???

Recipe: Corn Chowder

Today was Jim's big extended family Christmas party.  I always have such a hard time deciding what to bring to potlucks but for whatever reason this year I felt inspired: soup.  I got a new crockpot with a latching lid for Christmas so it seemed like a good excuse to try it out (sadly, as it turned out it was defective and one of the latches broke off -- which we didn't discover until after it was too late to come up with a Plan B!).  Several people asked for the recipe, and this seemed like an easy way to share it.

If I'd realized I was going to blog this, I might have taken something other than a single instagrammed picture of the soup! (That said, I'm not much of a food photographer. I don't have the patience for it, and I could NEVER do one of those blogs with step-by-step photos of recipe preparation.)

I'm very much a "handful of this, pinch of that" sort of cook -- especially when it comes to things like soup.  Once I find a base recipe that I like, I'll tweak it based on my mood, the season, the ingredients I have on hand...whatever.  "My" corn chowder started out life as "Corn Chowder with New Potatoes, Golden Peppers, and Basil" from Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone but over the years I've done a bunch of different things with it. 

1 large onion, diced small
1 carton (about 4 cups) of vegetable broth/stock
about 1.5 pounds of potatoes, diced into bite-sized pieces
1 bag of frozen corn
2 cups of milk
A couple handfuls (1-2 peppers) red, yellow, or orange bell pepper, diced
Bay leaf
Salt and pepper
Butter
Dried herbs: thyme and basil (I don't know how much...a few shakes of each!)
Fresh chives (optional, but yummy)

• Melt about 1/4 stick of butter (more if you're feeling crazy) in a soup/stock pot.  Add the chopped onions, thyme, and bay leaf and saute until the onions are soft and translucent (but before they start to brown).
• Add the potatoes, broth, and a couple of big pinches of salt.  Bring to a boil and then simmer until the potatoes are cooked through.  Meanwhile, in a separate pan, melt another 1/4 stick of butter, and add the bell pepper.  Cook on medium-to-low heat, stirring often, until the pepper is softened.
• Optional step: Once the potatoes are cooked through, use an immersion blender to partially puree the soup.  
• Add the milk, corn, basil, and sauteed peppers, and heat through.  Add finely chopped/snipped chives at the very end of cooking, if desired (or use them as garnish).  Salt and pepper to taste.

A few notes on substitutions -- the recipe is pretty forgiving!

• I've used leeks and scallions in place of some of the onion a bunch of times (in fact, the original recipe calls for leeks).  I also really like onion, so I often put in more than a single one.
• Everything's better with bacon: Today's version of the soup was vegetarian, since some of our family members don't eat meat, but I make this with bacon quite often.  Chop 1/3-1/2 pound of bacon, fry till crispy, remove the bacon from the pan, and then use the bacon drippings instead of butter to saute the onions.  Then add the crumbled bacon back into the soup at the end, just before serving.
• Potatoes: Whatever kind you've got! I've used regular old generic white potatoes, gold potatoes, fingerling potatoes, red potatoes (leave the skin on!), a combination of several kinds...it's all been tasty. Red potatoes add a nice bit of color.
• Corn: I almost always use frozen corn just because it's easiest, but needless to say it is REALLY tasty with fresh corn from the cob.  
• Milk: I usually cook with skim or 1% milk because that's what we have around the house most frequently, but any kind of milk works.  I often make this recipe when I have some half-and-half or cream left over that I don't want to waste (though I think it would be too heavy/rich with all cream -- today, for example, I used 3 parts 1% milk and 1 part heavy cream).
• I really like this soup with the peppers, but it's just as good if you leave them out.
• This makes a "soupy" sort of chowder. Partially pureeing it will thicken it somewhat, but you can thicken it further with a flour roux or with arrowroot starch. 

This is total comfort food for me -- one of my very favorite things to make, especially on cold weekends. Throw in some garlic bread on the side (because what doesn't go with garlic bread?), and I am one happy camper.  

On a completely unrelated note, except for where it's also food-related: apparently Ian has been trying his hand at food photography.  I just found these photos on my phone.  

Thankful

 

I think that Thanksgiving weekend is my favorite time of the year.  It's always just so...cozy.  My favorite people, my favorite foods, a nice long weekend, a few days of fun and relaxation...what's not to love?

This year, for the first time in recent memory, we didn't have Thanksgiving dinner at our house.  Jim's grandmother has a hard time getting up stairs these days, which makes our house a difficult place to visit -- the four steps to get in the front door is a lot for her.  So instead, we cooked all of the advance-prep stuff at home and then hauled it all over to my mother-in-law's house, where we cooked and served everything else.  It worked out really well (there's more counter space there than there is here, AND a dishwasher!) and it made for a really lovely day.  I was afraid that I might find it stressful to cook in someone else's kitchen, but we prepared well and so it wasn't a problem at all.  (The closest thing to a "problem" that we had was that it didn't occur to us to take any pictures at all on the day.  Oh well!)

I try very hard to be mindful of all my blessings year-round, not just at Thanksgiving, but it's nice to have a couple of days that are dedicated to thankfulness.  And I have so much to be thankful for: I am lucky enough to be surrounded every day by love and laughter and joy and warmth and plenty.  I couldn't ask for anything else.

A new LYS for us to love!

I don't go yarn shopping very often anymore -- even if I quit my job and spent all my time knitting, my stash would last me for at least several years, and daycare costs eat up an awful lot of our disposable income these days -- and so when I do get to yarn shop, it's a special treat. 

The next time you find yourself in southern Vermont, I recommend you give yourself your own special treat and stop at Ugly Duckling Yarns.  My dear friend Cynthia (who I met at a library conference when we were the two knitters in the back row of a boring presentation) moved to Vermont a couple of years ago, and this fall she was able to realize her dream of opening a yarn shop. She had a sneak-peak open house back in October, and to my great delight, the stars aligned nicely and we were able to go.

 

Cynthia hadn't yet gotten in all of her stock at the time of the open house, but she had some great basics in, including a TON of needles (yay! It's always so nice to go to a shop with a good needle selection).  Having heard more about what she's gotten in since then and some of the things she has planned...well, it's going to be an excellent inventory! 

 

The shop is right down the road (literally) from Mount Snow, and there is a cozy, comfortable sitting area -- it's perfect for people like me who don't ski as much as our spouses and would really like to go sit somewhere warm and knit and drink tea. ;-)  Cynthia is planning to carry locally-made products and support other small businesses, such as Stitched by JessaLu.  Ian was quite enamored of JessaLu's bags -- someday when he's a knitter himself, he's going to need some.  (Maybe he needs some in the meantime to store legos in, or something.)

 

He didn't get a bag that day, but he DID beeline right over to some blue self-striping Ella Rae Seasons and grabbed a ball.  "Mommy, I want a sweater of THIS yarn."  Needless to say, Mommy obliged.  How can you say no to a request like that?

 

Ugly Duckling is located at 114 Route 100 in West Dover, VT.  Stop by when you're in the area, check out this great article, and follow the shop on Facebook.  

Congratulations, Cynthia, and SO much luck with your new endeavor!!!

Like riding a bicycle

It seems silly, these days, to think of myself as a spinner.  Once upon a time, Stella the spinning wheel lived in a corner of our living room, and so I thought nothing of spending a few minutes with her each day.  Now, though, with a preschooler in the house, things are different.  Stella got demoted to the spare room as soon as Ian became mobile, because, as good a kid as he is, he can't help but want to play with the wheel.  (And who can blame him?  My great-aunt had a spinning wheel in her living room -- hers was just a pretty antique, rather than something that was actually functional -- and that thing was like a MAGNET. Even though I knew I wasn't supposed to touch it, I could never resist spinning the wheel as fast as it would go. What kid could?)  I'm not really too worried about him breaking or damaging the wheel itself, but if I have a work-in-progress on it, I don't want him to mess it up.  The problem is, though, I am very much an out-of-sight, out-of-mind kind of person, and Stella being stored away means that Stella is ignored.  

This summer, the Historical Society asked me if I'd do the spinning demo at our country fair again -- I've been doing it each year for about five years now -- and of course I agreed.  All throughout July and August, not a day went by that I didn't think "I should really get out the wheel and practice..." but days turned into weeks, and then suddenly it was the weekend after Labor Day and the fair was imminent and I hadn't done a thing.

I went into the spare room to dust Stella off -- literally and figuratively -- and realized that the bobbin of yarn on the wheel was the very same bobbin I spun LAST YEAR at the fair -- I hadn't touched the wheel at all, not even for one little project, for an entire calendar year.  How embarrassing!  That's when I started to worry that maybe the whole demo thing was a bad idea -- that I'd get there and just discover that I'd completely forgotten everything I once knew.

I sent off a worried text to Tamara, who pep-talked me.  "It's like riding a bicycle!", she assured me.  So on Sunday I packed up all of my stuff and hauled it off to the Historical Society.  I got there a little early so I'd have plenty of time to set up my little room, and then I loaded a fresh bobbin on the wheel, drafted some fiber, took a deep breath, and started to treadle. 

And Tamara was right.  It IS like riding a bicycle.

First Day

Despite the fact that my life hasn't revolved around a school schedule in years, the turn of the calendar from August into September still feels like a new year to me in a way that the actual new year in January doesn't. Summer just always feels...different, somehow, and I've always welcomed the return to the normal routine of the fall and winter.

As much as I look forward to autumn, this year I am really having a hard time wrapping my head around SEPTEMBER. This has been something of an odd summer -- we didn't really take a vacation, both of us traveled for work a fair bit, and Jim just started a new job, which meant that the last month or so has been hectic while he overlapped jobs for a couple of weeks, tying up loose ends at the old job while trying to hit the ground running at the new. We had a relatively small list of things we wanted to do this summer -- both fun stuff and around-the-house stuff -- and barely made a dent in either. It kind of feels like the last three months just...didn't happen, somehow, because they flew by so quickly. It's odd how we can be so busy and yet feel like we are doing absolutely nothing.

I love Facebook at this time of year -- seeing everyone's back-to-school pictures just makes me smile. Ian doesn't really get a "first day of school" per se, since he goes to daycare/preschool year round, but Tuesday was the first day of public school in the town where we live, so for photographic purposes I declared it his first day. His very first day of daycare, back when he was in infant, was at the very beginning of September, so if nothing else we can think of it as an anniversary shot. ;-)

He is SO excited about the prospect of taking a bus to school and will tell anyone who will listen that he gets to go on the bus when he is FIVE. To him that must seem like an eternity, but I know that for Jim and me, those two years before kindergarten are going to go by in the blink of an eye, just like this summer did.