Sunberry Frozen Yogurt

Here is a rather terrible photo of a delicious dessert I had this weekend.

Sunberry frozen yogurt garnished with ground cherries (all berries home grown)and black sesame seeds.  Without the benefit of an ice-cream maker, this was made using the tried-and-true method of a baggie full of yogurt inside a big bag of ice and salt. We loved this all-natural purple color… but the flash turned the ground cherries yellow gold, and they were really the best shade of chartreuse!!

A friend made this for me on Saturday night after a delicious meal of homemade Som Tam with roasted peanuts (my friends used green tomatoes instead of papaya, since we’re in a temperate zone!), peanut-oil-fried tofu with sea salt, and coconut rice.

Stirrings-Mantel Display

I have really enjoyed my Stirrings Collaboration with new friend Jen from Painted Fish Studio, in which we’ve been looking for signs of spring. We’ve both known all along that spring comes sooner to Salt Lake City than to the midwest. So just as I’m thinking of wrapping up my contributions to the project, I’m looking forward to seeing more photos from her warming  climate.

In a time of year when I might have been discouraged or gloomy about the grayness of late winter, or the dampness of very early spring, instead I was encouraged to notice, to observe a quickening, to hope for small signs, and to share the sweet burgeoning of spring.  To me it has felt like a long, delicious season, when some around me are still complaining about the crispness at mid-morning.

Salt Lake’s spring is in full force, now. In bloom, in leaf, in music. From here, summer is so close at hand, a rapid ascent into often triple-digit clay oven conditions. Life is rampant and the birdsong is worth waking up for.

I want to thank Jen for co-publishing with me, and I hope to show you more of her thoughts and photos as winter withdraws from her neighborhood. I hope she feels spring as luxuriously as I have this year!

P.S. The flowers above sit on our new mantel, now installed in the great room, atop oiled floors and freshly painted buttery yellow walls.

We turned on the gas flame to test it and immediately turned it off: the season for that has passed. Something to look forward to in 6 months!

Florida Sunshine Quilt

Several weeks ago my nephew Josh and I helped my mom lay out a quilt on the floor of the clubhouse at her apartment complex. This is an “Orange Peel” quilt, and my mom spent many years of her childhood in Florida, so she named it “Florida Sunshine”.

On Easter we took photos of the finished (GORGEOUS!) product. She wanted me to show it off here. I dare you to find a brighter quilt.

Front:

Back:

Detail:

Here we are, Team Florida Sunshine:

Stairs–Before and After

There’s a light at the end of this home-remodeling tunnel! My photo quality isn’t great, but I’m hoping you’ll still appreciate the before and after-difference…I do!

View Down the Stairs Before:

View Down the Stairs After:

View looking at old wall before the new window and chandelier:

View looking at clean new wall, window, and chandelier:

This photo is the entryway, before renovation, and is shown just so you can picture what the upper part of this area looked like for about 9 months. You’ll need your imagination to picture the pink insulation fluff that was hung in some places.  You’ll really have to stretch to imagine the plaster and 100-year-old coal dust that fell on our heads any time the Boogedy slammed a door upstairs.

Art Swap

A student at my school made a really cool scratchboard in art class.

It’s approximately 8 by 10 inches. Here’s a close-up of the peacock’s face:

I loved it immediately and offered a barter! I knit her this scarf in order to trade. Here is Madison modeling. Her hair is orange now, but I swear it has been every color in that scarf this school year!

The chunky yarn is Ironstone Fun, and the skinny stuff is Shibui Silk Cloud that I got at a new local shop Blazing Needles.

Look at the little snowflake!!

Hooray for barter! I’m thrilled to hang this fancy peacock on my wall!

Hyperbolic sunset pants!

What an embarassing dust cloud lurking beneath my sofa. Don’t look.

How cool are these pants?! My sister-in-law Natalie gave me the pattern last year for the Boogedy’s first b-day. She originally saw the pants in Craft: Magazine, but my boy was already too big for the published pattern, so she bought me the book. She gave me money to buy yarn, which I purchased in cream and dyed using kool-aid (see previous post).

The pattern was really easy. I had one tiny question and emailed the author, who assured me that I was doing it right. Before I seamed them, I handed them to all sorts of people to puzzle over, including these two teachers at my school, who wondered on what planet this “thing” would be a pair of pants (and possibly why I thought “sunset” was an appropriate “boy” color scheme).

The Boogedy was impatient with photography while I was snapping these photos, and got grouchy, but you need to see the difference between the front and back of these pants. Plus, you get to see Nat, the gifter of said pants.

Malabrigo Cat Hat

Ooh, this yarn is luscious. I think it’s from Malabrigo’s Aquarella line, but honestly, I was so giddy as I put this baby on the ball-winder, that I cast away the ball band in haste without even looking! I went into Soul Spun looking for the perfect kidsilk haze or something like it to go with something else, and was helpless in the face of this beauty.

I took a huge series of photos trying to capture the hat’s texture and style just right, and trying not to capture any sheetrock, or pink insulation fluff, or water spots on the mirror. In looking at all these photos just now, I began to wonder when I started looking so…Mature…even in a cat hat.

Delaney’s Delight

My friend Jenn approached me last July about knitting a blanket for her little cousin’s birthday in September. A knitted blanket turned out to be prohibitively expensive (and time-intensive), so we agreed on the size/price/general color scheme (bright!) for a pieced quilt instead. Jenn’s taste seemed to lean toward geometrics and liberal use of stripes. She insisted that the quilt be feminine, but not little-girly, so that as Delaney grew, she wouldn’t think of it as her baby quilt.

I enlisted the help of my mom and sister to help with piecing and binding this twin-size beauty, and had it professionally quilted by Sue’s Machine Quilting in Roy, UT. I was so pleased with this quilter’s work and speed!! I highly recommend her if you’re looking to have something quilted. I embroidered the label and appliqued it to the soft flannel back.

By the time we had everything figured out, we had to push our date to xmas, instead, and Jenn says that Delaney sat in the box on xmas morning and really was delighted by the present. I was so pleased, because I know that sometimes little kids can be so non-chalant about blankets, socks, clothes, etc.

Here’s me laying it out at my mom’s apartment:

Handspun Mittens

I knitted these little boy mittens over the Thanksgiving break. We drove to Boise late Wednesday night (arriving at 3am!) and I spent most of Thursday Cooking and Cooking at my in-laws’ home. Zach took the Boogedy and the Chibberty out for a walk along the lake that is behind the house, just to get them out of my hair. Dinner was wonderful and I ended up taking the Boogedy in for a nap while people were still eating, because he was just so tired. I conked right out too and ended up being completely unhelpful in the cleanup portion of the dinner. I felt only slightly guilty.

I made these little mittens for the Boogedy on Friday during my down time, while he played with his cousins. I used a small fraction of the handspun yarn Kristin gave me for my birthday. The yarn turned turquoise all of a sudden at the top of the second mitten, and I decided to leave it that way, because the color is so gorgeous.

Bohemian Baby

Thanks to Michelle at Green Kitchen for a fabulous tutorial on these sweater pants! I shopped at the local thrift store last weekend, and found the perfect sweater, but it was a women’s medium, MUCH smaller than her tutorial suggested. So, I couldn’t use the sleeves, but I was able to cut a pattern from the front and back of the sweater. I’ve never sewn pants before, so my mom had to help, because my brain wasn’t grasping it (again, that’s because I didn’t actually follow Michelle’s explicit and clear instructions).

Oh yeah, and the sleeves from this thrifted sweater are going to be a pair of trendy legwarmers for me. They are sure to be way cooler than the plum slouchy pair I had when it was actually the 80s.

Now my guy is a colorfully clad dreamboat. This bohemian outfit is finally something stylish enough to rival Sonia’s quirky kids. Yes, I did knit that hat. And that sweater (successfully put in a zipper, by the way!!). But those maroon curtains are original to our 90s luxury van. I wish you could see the big tv in there …(it’s true, I’m not the mom I thought I’d be…he watches Winnie the Pooh when he’s cranky).