Spring Cleaning

Ben and I spent today going through all the various drawers and closets in the house and getting rid of stuff we don't need any more. We found some pretty ancient treasures:

The best thing we found was a letter from Ben's grandparents accompanying a gift card they sent him in college:

Dear Ben,

You can use this card at any Harvard/MIT Coop store. The magnetic strip "knows" that it is for $25, but also keeps track of what you spend until $25 is reached. So if you spend $3 you won't get any change, but the card will now be for $22. I thought it would come with your name on it but since it doesn't, anyone could use it if lost of stolen. So you'd better spend it fast either for food for your brain or food for your body or anything else that hits your fancy.

Love,
Grand Mom and Grand Dad

My favorite part of this letter is imagining the phone call(s?) between Ben's grandparents and some hapless Coop employee to get all of those details sorted out. I'm sure one day we'll send our grandchild an equally adorable letter explaining in painstaking detail how to use the neurotransplant credits or whatever we just sent them!

Sugar cookies

My parents were in town last weekend, and my mom brought up her baking supplies so we could making sugar cookies with my little sister. It was a huge success!

She had never made sugar cookies before and loved the whole process - rolling out the dough, punching out the shapes, decorating them with frosting and sprinkles. But her absolute favorite was adding the food coloring to the frosting; she had never played with food coloring before and thought it was the coolest thing ever. After the cookies were all done, we just filled a bunch of cups with water so she could further experiment with different food coloring combinations - she was very scientific about it, and tried every possible combination of the four colors we had.

Also - we had this funny exchange when I picked her up:

LS: My sisters and I stayed up until midnight last night listening to music!
Me: Wow! Aren't you tired?
LS: No, I never get tired!
Me: Really? You never ever get tired?
LS: Never! Except for at night, when I get tired.

Kids are the best.

Soups on!

Ben got me a cooking class for the holidays, and unlike last year's experience-based holiday gift that took him nine months to deliver, this time he came through by February! The class was "hearty Italian soups" and we made three soups over the course of the evening:

Creamy potato, cauliflower, and leek soup

Italian wedding soup

Some sort of delicious amalgamation of vegetables, chicken, and pasta

All three were delicious, but only the first one seemed like a likely candidate for home preparation - the other two were good but way too time-intensive to make in real life. While potatoes, cauliflowers, and leeks sound pretty bland, that soup was surprisingly tasty - and it used my favorite kitchen tool of all time, the immersion blender!

It's alive!!

I love orchids, but I've never been able to get one to re-bloom after the initial flowers fall off. I usually keep watering them for a few months until I give up and buy a replacement. But yesterday, for the first time ever, I went to water my latest all-leaves-no-flowers orchid and saw that it has sprouted a new shoot with buds on it!

Look at all those buds!

I'm still sort of expecting that the buds will die and fall off without blooming, but at least I've gotten farther than I ever have before!

Black Socks

When I'm doing the laundry and come across an unpaired sock, I put it on the little shelf above the dryer until its match turns up later. Over the four years we've lived here, though, a few unmatched socks have accumulated up there with their mates apparently permanently lost. There are nine of them, and they are all black.

The only possible explanation I can think of is that we have some sort of dryer gremlin with a black sock fetish. How else could we end up with nine distinct unmatched black socks, and no unmatched socks of any other color?

Home improvements

We try to do at least one home improvement project each summer, and this year we decided to tackle our balcony. We have enough room out there for a table and chairs, and there's a nice view of the city, but it's a little... bland.

Table & chairs removed to show you the plain concrete floor.

We bought deck tiles at Ikea, and it took a grand total of five minutes to install them. They just snap together!

Ben is so handy.

After I stained and sealed them.

The following weekend we went to a nursery and picked up some window boxes and flowers. After getting them all set up, and bringing the patio furniture back out, now it looks like this:

(We still have to get real pots for the basil on the table)

 To recap, with a few hours work and a couple hundred dollars (almost all for the decking), we did this:

Before

After

Take that, Tim Allen!

Compost Cross Stitch

Ben and I started composting a few months ago - we don't have a yard, but we signed up for a service that picks up a compost bucket from our building once a week. They have a list of things that can and can't go in the bucket, which we printed out and taped to the wall above it:

But that was ugly, and I was bored, so I cross stitched the list instead.

This is actually the first of my creations to hang in our house - I usually have a rule that I can only make things to give to other people, so as to avoid filling the whole house with needlepoint. Thankfully, we have 6 weddings on the calendar in the upcoming year, and 2 more engaged sets of friends who haven't picked a date yet, so that should keep me busy enough to avoid the temptation of making more for myself for a while!

Happy Valentime's

I went to a crafting class with some friends this week, and we made Valentine's!

It was very girly, and they even had tiny pink heart-shaped cookies. But it was fun to spend an evening playing with shiny things and eating tiny cookies!

I'm still finding glitter in my belongings because of this one.

It's hard to see here, but this one is embossed - the pink parts are all raised.

String and lace - oooh!

This is the most boring one.

More glitter!

I like them apples

Yesterday Ben and I went apple picking!

The trees were shorter than I expected. I thought we'd have to climb ladders or something..

There were a lot of different kind of apples:

Red AND green, woah!

Ben was very proud of himself:

We also got to go on a hayride, drink apple cider, and eat apple cider donuts. It was an excellent day.

Today I am going to attempt to make an apple pie, so in case Frankenstorm knocks out our power for the week we can survive off cinnamon-y apple goodness. We don't have any bottled water, but we have 9 bottles of wine left over from the wedding, so I think we are all set for potable liquids.

Let there be (less dated) light!

While we painted over our condo's brown-and-silver walls and ripped up the super-gross carpeting pretty much as soon as we moved in, there are still a few lingering remnants of it's 70s-tastic origin. Until this weekend, two of those remnants were these ribbed, fishbowl-y lights in the hallways:

Blurgh.

But thanks to our genius ability to follow directions, we now have new, less hideous lights, and no one was electrocuted!

Ben installed this one. Look how simple it is.

I installed this one. It is more complicated, because I am better.

We are now one step closer to being HGTV ready.

Full on cross stitch all the way across the sampler

I just finished my second steotch cross stitch sampler!

I thought it would be much quicker than the last one, but the design's simplicity is deceptive - it took a really long time to do the border, with each word being a different color.

Here's the back, which is a lot less messy than my last one:

You can see how many times I had to change color from all the little tufts of thread, each of which is the start of a new piece.

Now I need a new project! I'm thinking about something along these lines...

My New Hobby

For awhile now I've been obsessed with Steotch, who makes the world's coolest cross stitch samplers. For example:

They are all too expensive for me to be able to afford, so until now I've been content to admire them from a distance. But recently she started selling some of her patterns, and after much finger-stabbing and thread-untangling I am very proud to have produced my very own Steotch sampler:

If you look carefully, there are two small errors. Don't tell me if you find them, though, because I am trying to convince myself that they aren't noticeable.

That's right, I made that! I am so proud of myself! Also, now I finally understand why her finished samplers cost so much - they take a really, really long time to make.

As pretty as the front is, I also like to flip it over and look at the back. I think it's neat to see all the raw threads, although I have a feeling that a more experienced cross-stitcher would have produced a less-messy back.

Front

Back

I really enjoyed making it; it required just the right level of mindlessness to be relaxing, and it was very satisfying to see it take shape over time. I bought another pattern to start working on already, I can't wait!

I am the Valedictorian of Sewing Class!

Several of my work friends know how to sew, and I do not. They invited me to take a sewing class with them at this really neat Philly fabric store, and since I didn't want my domestic incompetence to interfere with my friendships I said yes. But first, since the class we are taking together involves making actual clothes, I figured I should take the Beginner's Sewing class to prevent embarrassing myself.

I was nervous going into it, since the last time I used a sewing machine was in my sixth grade "Life Skills" class (I made a misshapen lunch sack!). But it turns out the fact that I can follow directions and am not afraid of touching electronics was enough to put me at the front of the class, and today I triumphantly walked home with my very own handmade tote bag!

Things I am proud of about my creation:

1. It looks like a bag.
2. When I put something in it for the first time, it did not fall apart.
3. Even up close, it looks pretty decent.

4. It is lined, and reversible!

I am going to take it grocery shopping next weekend, so that will be the true test of its durability!