Friday, April 08, 2011

Food for thought

Last night I made Nigella Lawson's Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic. OK, so it's the recipe in one of her books, not a recipe she invented or anything, but it was awesome. Tonight will be her Tarragon Chicken. Yum. I love tarragon. Even though they're hard to find around here, I plan to get more tarragon seeds/plants for the garden this year.

Current activities include:

- stocking up for inflation (I started to do this just over a year ago, but with my short attention span, I didn't follow through.)

- planning a bigger garden

- making more soap to sell

- knitting an entrelac scarf

I'm tutoring a boy in math right now, and making a little money for things like soapmaking and school stuff, so that's great! It's been a challenge finding methods that will work for him, but in the last week or 2, his progress has been really encouraging. I think we're on to something. :)

I still make soap, but I need to make more as stocks are low right now. I recently got some new fragrances and EOs to try, but my new big WANT is to try some of the awesome M&P projects in the Soapy Love book I got on sale at a closing Borders. I used to be something of a M&P snob, but no longer!! Fortunately, there's a place not far away that sells M&P base for a good price, and I can pick it up so there's no shipping.

The kids are going to a friend's birthday party tomorrow and she's asked for no gifts, just canned food because she's doing a food drive. She really likes upcycled/recycled goodies, so the "wrapping paper" will be this bag that I made today from one of our old rice bags. I didn't take the time for optimal photogenicicity (new word!) but you can get the general idea.



Fishy thought it needed "bunny ears."




The zipper part is now a functional pocket. :)


And here it is with some towels stuffed in to show expandability.



And, finally, my entrelac scarf. I'm not working on it very often right now, but it's still growing. The good news is that I can tell now that the right side will be straight after blocking. :)



Wednesday, April 06, 2011

1,000 Things Challenge

Inspired by someone else, I am now working on getting rid of 1,000 things. So far, I have 5 down. ^_^

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Alive.

Believe it or not, I'm still rewriting my novel. Now that's just embarrassing. Sometimes as I work on it, I'm very encouraged, and other times not so much. For the most part, though, I'm happy. I'm making little connections (a bit like a developing brain sending connections back and forth between the hemispheres), ironing out inconsistencies, and trashing useless scenes. I suppose if I devoted a little more time to it, things would go faster. And I think I'm at the point where I need to do that now, because having it unpolished is bottling up other stories that want to come out.

In the meantime, look for upcoming pics of knitting and soaping projects - my excellent timewasters! (Or not wasters, since it's stuff I enjoy doing.) I made a batch of salt soap today, and it's AWESOME! I think it's going to be an excellent shaving bar.