The Little Red Hen

The Year of the Placemat

My friend, Sara, declared this the "year of the placemat."  Placemats are like doll quilts in that they are small, quick to make, and a great canvas for trying out new techniques, or branching out to using different fabrics styles or colors. They are also practical for those people who don't have dolls to snuggle in quilts.  Placemats might also be easier to wash than table cloths. If there is only one messy person at the table then only their mat could be washed instead of the whole table cover!
Sara started a placemat swap group which was the motivation I needed to make my first placemat.  I think I'll be making more of these. They make great gifts that could be personalized or coordinated for a whole family.

This placemat is headed off to Tami. She says she likes bright colors.

How to Make Gardening Fun - lessons learned from a four year old

Sometimes I feel like our garden gets overwhelming. The weeds get out of control, some of the plants don't "keep" in the garden and you have to keep up with picking every day. It is great to have fresh food from the garden every day for supper but the extra time for harvest and processing to keep for the winter can get to be drudgery.

Just look at all those weeds! The about to give up pea plants are in the back of the photo below. In the foreground there are parsnips, carrots, and beets. There are a few more rows to my right. This is one of five garden spaces that we have this year.

Here are  Little Miss P's tips to make gardening fun:

1. Wear tights to the garden so the bugs don't bite your legs.
2. Plant picking flowers so that you don't get in trouble for picking flowers in the yard.
3. Take good care of your flowers. You have to dust them with garden dirt and then fluff them with a bit of grass.

4. Use the proper kitchen utensils. This makes the pea shelling REALLY fun. Make sure you have a spoon that is just the right size for ONE pea so that snacking while you work is enjoyable.

5. Plant pink food. It is always fun to have pink food on your plate. Beets are fun because they also turn rice and noodles pink when they are on your plate together.
(I think I weeded most of that light pink variety out thinking they were the radishes that we planted with the beets to mark the row. I pulled a "radish" the other day that I thought I had missed. I bit into it and--- it was a beet. Too bad.)

Spider Webs - A Cautionary Tale

I have this spider web quilt pinned and waiting to be quilted. It catches my eye often as it sits right next to the sewing table.

I thought it would be fun to try a small project with just one spider web. Sometimes, well almost all the time, I am so excited about starting a new project that just start right in without the full picture of the finished project in my mind. I took some quick measurements off the quilt and counted that I would need eight base triangles. I also wanted to use a print fabric for the background. The creative juices were flowing. The method for making the quilt was fresh in my mind so off I went. For one web I only need the strips sewn to one side of the triangle. Cut. cut. sew. sew. I could see this would be a quick project.

I was eager to see how it looked with the polka dot background. It took me a while to get it arranged so that the pieces fit together.

Um. Yeah. Half of the blocks should have the scraps sewn to the OTHER side of the base triangle.

Matching Socks on a Beautiful Blue Sky Day

For our latest pair of socks in the two make a pair project we used some yarn I spun in the early spring. We whipped up a pair of crew socks to show off the color in the yarn. There was enough of the yarn left that I knit a pair for P too! Now we have matching socks. The roving I used is an interlacements superwash merino.
 
The sky was such a pretty blue we felt we had to capture that in our photos too! But we got a little itchy, and the sun was in our eyes so we had to be quick.

More Recipies! - I promise this is not turning into a food blog. More craftiness coming soon.

This weekend we enjoyed our first raspberry  harvest- more than a quart!

We rushed in to make our favorite raspberry dish, raspberry ribbon pie.  The original recipe calls for a regular prebaked pie crust. Several years ago I tried it with a graham cracker crust and we like it that way too. D suggested that we make our graham cracker crust with the recipe we used for our crackers but just roll the dough and bake it in the pie pan. That sounded like a good idea to me. D mixed up the dough and let it chill in the fridge. After rolling it and putting it in the pan I realized that we didn't have any dry beans to weigh it down while baking. Our black beans are here:

I looked around for something to put in the crust and settled on some baby/child silverwear and put the crust in the oven.

That worked out pretty well. The giant graham cracker crust was a hit.

The crust recipe is here. (this makes enough for two pie crusts and a bunch of crackers)

Raspberry Ribbon Pie
1 quart red raspberries
1 small box raspberry jello
1 tablespoon lemon juice
4 oz cottage cheese
1/3 cup confectioners sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup whipping cream

Dissolve raspberry jello in 1 cup boiling water, add lemon juice. When jello starts to set gently stir into raspberries.http://smittenkitchen.com/2006/11/cubes-of-colossal-cheer/
Whip the cream. Beat 4oz cottage cheese with the confectioners sugar and vanilla. Fold into the whipped cream.
Layer into a baked shell. Refrigerate.

I also had to try yet anothe recipe from the smitten kitchen. This is the cinnamon chocolate chip cake. It was delicious!

And just so you don't think we only eat sweets.... this is the purslane I picked and added to our salad yesterday.

Yes, to most it is a weed. Well, to us too. But it is edible and adds a lemony flavor to the salad. P was also eating some lambsquarters while we were weeding.

Thoughtful Sunday

"Just living is not enough...One must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower."

Hans Christian Anderson

Pineapple Upside-down Cake

It seems that the last few weeks have been full of celebrations for us!

B's birthday was while he was in Maine so we waited to celebrate until he was home. He has always liked pineapple upside-down cake so, I splurged and got a fresh pineapple for his cake.  I haven't bought a fresh pineapple for a very long time as any pineapples that we get have been brought to the states on a plane, a very fuel intensive mode of transportation.  I still have a little guilt about that but the cake was very good. I used the recipe from my new favorite food blog, the Smitten Kitchen.

I hope your weekend is full of celebrating fun.

Garlic Scape Pesto - a cautionary tale

We have been trying to do better about using all that our garden produces and not let things go to waste. So, after clipping the off garlic scapes I thought we needed to use them instead of tossing  them in the compost as we have done in the past. After a little research on the web I found a collection of garlic scape pesto recipes.
I chopped and processed and ended up with some pesto for dinner.

It was good but pretty strong. So strong, in fact, that I had to get up twice in the night to drink water! The rest of the family did not think it was too strong. Next time I make this I'll add a bunch of garden greens before processing to cut the intensity a bit.

It is fun to try new things like this. What new things have you tried lately?

More Swap Blocks

Yesterday the mosquitoes were so thick I didn't want to spend much time outside. Instead I did a little work in my sewing room. I finished off the next pair of blocks for the 8two8 swap. These are for Beth.  She wanted the blocks to each be a color. I chose purple for one and blue for the other.  I had lots of small scraps of purple and wanted to use those. I also found some pale purple fabric that I hand dyed a few years ago. I used that for the base squares of this block.

The photos make it look a bit more blue than it really is.

I had so much fun doing the swirly bias design on this block that I had to try it again.

Again, I am eager to see what the blocks from everyone look like when they are put together.

I am next on the swap list. I have requested basket blocks in fall colors.

Back Yard Smores

Yesterday was another beautiful day. We weeded in the overgrown vegetable garden and harvested LOTS of peas and a few beets.
For dinner we fixed a pasta dish that included peas and beet greens and served it with cooked beets. Delicious.
After dinner we baked graham crackers from the dough D made earlier in the day. The crackers turned out great.

We had a happy end to a busy day. B came home from Maine in time for dinner and we all enjoyed smores from our homemade graham crackers and the marshmallows we made earlier in the week.