I promised to tell you whether the flag shorts came out cute or dorky.  I vote cute.  More from our early Fourth of July celebrating here.

In keeping with the “things I saw two years ago when I was a newbie sewist and wanted to try but didn’t” theme, I turned to Nancy of Belle Epoque and her Tie Tank Top Tute to make a top to match my new pajama bottoms.  Again, I found it quite simple to make, now that I have some basic sewing experience.

It’s constructed in a similar fashion to a child’s pillowcase dress, but it’s more flexible in that you cut the cloth to fit your measurements.  That said, I knew there would be a problem when the instructions included a step that essentially amounted to adding 16 inches to my hip measurement.   Perhaps a super skinny girl could look good in a shirt with that much extra fabric floating around, but I just couldn’t pull it off.  I tried.  I made it as instructed, but then narrowed the whole thing by about 4 inches around.  It’s still pretty big, but being that I intend to wear it as a pajama top, big is ok.  Comfy, even.

The ribbon I used for the ties was too wide, I know, but even so, I am not a big fan of ties on my shoulder, and am thinking that I will just sew the ribbons together where they’re supposed to tie, and do away with the bows.

I think I would like to try and make this shirt for normal everyday wear – I imagine it would be really cool on those hot days – but first I have to figure out if there’s some way to cut it so that I don’t end up looking like I’m about 300 pounds in it…  Any suggestions?

We’re heading out to see fireworks tonight, and my plan is to spend some time today making Blueberry-Raspberry Pound Cake to bring, and new bandana pants for the boys – I found bandanas that look like American flags.  Those boys are either going to look really cool or really dorky.  I’ll report back, when I can, to let you know which it was.  Hee hee.

I’m eager to get into a new daily photography project, and here it is:  A Month of Hands.  Won’t you join me?

Our hands are always busy, always making art, preparing meals, helping children, keeping journals, driving vehicles, holding doors open, tying shoelaces, applying nail polish, picking berries… all of those things and many, many more.

I hope you’ll join the flickr group, and spend the next 31 days with me, documenting the work of your hands.  And please spread the word if you like – how wonderful it will be to see how women everywhere use their hands in nurturing, creative, and utilitarian ways!

Add the button to your website, if you like:

More on similar topics:

• Hands and nightstands – June 25, 2009
• 730 Feet: a retrospective – January 6, 2009
• Flickr – April 23, 2007

From the moment I saw the lounge pants in Amy Butler’s In Stitches, I was smitten.  This was two years ago, and I had barely a month of sewing under my belt.  Every delicious project in that book looked impossibly complicated to me, so after a month of drooling over the pants, the apron, and who knows what else, I gave up and put the book away on the shelf.

Since that time, I’ve taken on one little sewing challenge at a time, slowly building my skill set.  And wouldn’t you know it? I took that book down off the shelf recently, and actually understood most of the directions.  Not only that, but I found I didn’t need to read the directions as much as skim them.  Hard to believe I could have learned so much in two years without even realizing it.

These lounge pants are made from an extremely lightweight thrifted bedsheet, and will fill a void in my nightwear collection – I love all of my handmade pajama pants, but anything constructed from a quilting cotton is way too warm for a Summer night.  The weightlessness and flowiness of these should make them perfect for sweaty weather.

I veered from the instructions in a few places.  Most notably, I replaced the drawstring with elastic. I dislike drawstrings.  They add extra bulk in the tummy area, and I have enough unwanted extra bulk in the tummy area as it is, thankyouverymuch.  I also didn’t put any ribbon trim at the ankles, because I thought it might interfere with the flowy weightless factor, and make them too stiff.  I may still change my mind on that one, though.

I’m considering using the half of the sheet that I have left to make a Built by Wendy Simplicity 3835 shirt that I can use as a pajama top.  I don’t often wear pajama sets anymore, but something tells me it might just work for me in this case.  Either that, or maybe I can adapt a pillowcase tank tutorial.  I’ll keep you posted, if I do.

By the way, thank you all for the suggestions as to where to get cake flour yesterday.  I have always figured I could get pretty much anything I wanted in the stores around here, being so close to a major metropolitan area, but would you believe neither my regular supermarket nor the local Walmart carries cake flour?  Crazy.  I may try one more place around here, but if that fails, I’ll just go online or make my own.  Preferably before the blueberries go bad.More on similar topics:

• My first quilt! – October 11, 2008
• Anticipating a crafty weekend – October 16, 2008
• Napkin Land – December 28, 2008

Yes, they do.  Spring changes to summer, and strawberry season changes to blueberry season.  While Friday night we were enjoying a delicious Strawberry Lemonade Smoothie, with what may prove to be the last batch of farmers’ market strawberries we see this year, Sunday afternoon saw us ushering in the blueberry.

With rides – those of the wagon variety

and those of the pony variety.

With beanbag throwing, and the making of new little friends.

With music.  And shopping.

Well, we all know what happens when you go shopping at a blueberry festival, don’t we?  Oh, yes, you come home with a tasty snack.

And the raw materials for a small batch of the purpliest jam a bread machine ever churned up.

Tonight there will be blueberry pancakes, and perhaps tomorrow, blueberry muffins?  I have my eye on the blueberry raspberry pound cake from A Homemade Life, too (anyone know where to buy cake flour?).  Plus, it’s been suggested that maybe our smoothie recipe might be tweaked to involve blueberries instead of strawberries, so that, too, is on the list.

I think I may need more blueberries.More on similar topics:

• Berry Puree Muffins – July 8, 2008
• Wineberry Crisp – July 20, 2008
• Summer Berry Muffins – August 20, 2008

Silly boy.

So, I finally managed to clean up my creative space today <I need a happy dance icon to put right here – woo hoo!> and can you guess what the first thing I made was?

“Cute pajamas” for the boy.

I gently cautioned him that a floral motif such as this might be considered a bit “girly,” but he was fine with that.  I’m glad he’s not hung-up on gender stereotypes yet, because really, he’s got enough boy-ness in him to counteract any feminine vibes that retro floral print might want to give off.  He’s all boy, even when his bottom is bedecked with flowers.

It’s so nice to be able to make your kids happy with a small piece of leftover fabric and less than an hour of your time, don’t you think?

If you would like to attempt your own easy pj bottoms for a small person in your life, all you need is about a half yard of appropriate fabric, a bit of elastic, and a tutorial for making bandana pants (I have used Stefani’s in the past, but at this point I have it commited to memory).  Just remember that, unlike bandana pants, the edges of shorts made with cuts of fabric will be raw, and as such the pant legs will need to be hemmed.

I’m thinking that this same method would work for adult-sized pj shorts, if you start with larger squares of material, but I haven’t tried it myself.  Be sure to let me know if you do!More on similar topics:

• Pillowcase party – April 26, 2009
• Splash of color – September 7, 2008
• Snow Day – December 13, 2007

Becky from Whosies commented on a recent post and let me know about her Nightstand Play Along.  I snapped a picture of mine this morning.  To be honest, the nightstand is probably the neatest spot in my bedroom (notice how I rarely photograph any other section of the room?  Life as seen through the lens is just so much more tidy…). I cleaned the nightstand up not too long ago, and so there are very few things that don’t belong:

• the Luna bar and coffee I am having for breakfast
• a hair clip that I removed from my hair before bed two nights ago
• a clay-covered barrette that I removed from my hair before bed last night
• a scrap of cardboard that I used last week to deflect my camera flash when I took a picture of something in low light
• a post-it note with a list of things to do, most of which were done last week sometime.
• half a bag of mint M&Ms from Christmas (what? we stock up in November. doesn’t everybody?)
• the protective case for my Palm
• the phone cord, which should be hidden around the back of the night stand

Looks like a long list, but really, it’s not that bad.  What to play along?  Check out Becky’s blog.

Now, do you remember back in January when I mentioned that it would be fun to do a flickr project about hands?  Well, I know it’s been several months, but I’m ready to start.  I’ll post more about this next week, but essentially, I’d like to spend the month of July photographing my hands – one photo every day – going about their business.  That means there will be hands holding coffee cups, smooshing clay, and folding laundry, among other things.  I’ll create a flickr group so that you may join along with me if you like.  More details to come!

Now my hands and I need to go smoosh some clay and then type up some words about smooshing clay, for a little secret project that we really shouldn’t have waited this long to begin.  That’s what we do, my hands and I.  We procrastinate.  Happy Thursday!More on similar topics:

• A Month of Hands – July 1, 2009

Until that happens, I guess you’re stuck with this kind of post.  This “let me tell you what a nerd I’ve been for the last few days” kind of post.

I’ll avoid too many details, because I know this kind of thing can only hold so much interest.  Just let me point out the highlights:

• There are some purely aesthetic layout changes, essentially taking the three separate white blocks (two sidebars and content) and making them into one large white block.   I also removed all of the images from the green portion at the bottom of the page and just put a simple copyright text.  Essentially, I was trying to simplify the look a bit.  I was feeling it was too busy.
• I moved my list of favorite blogs off of the sidebars and onto their own page.  As much as I liked having them right out in the open, they dramatically cut into page load time.
• Comments.  I spent a few days on this one.  What you’ll notice, maybe, is that the formatting is a little different.  I did that to make them blend in better with the aesthetics of rest of the site.  That was relatively easy in comparison to what I did behind the scenes.  Essentially, the old comments included a collection of hacks I had put in so that I could have threaded comments, gravatars, and email notifications.  With the most recent few versions, Wordpress has added support for threading and gravatars, so I ripped out my old comment mess and replaced it with a much simpler version that takes advantage of the native Wordpress functionality, and added a simple plugin to handle the email notifications. Let’s hope it all works.

Hey, if you’re still reading (and I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you dozed off back there) and you still don’t have a little picture of your own next to your comments, I encourage you to get yourself a gravatar.  It’s very cool, in that it works on this site, on any wordpress.com blog, on any self-hosted Wordpress blog that has enabled them, and a variety of other sites around the web.  It’s free, and pretty easy.  Feel free to comment here and test it out, once you get one.

Now, no more nerdiness for me!  The kids and I have a little adventure planned for today, and I’m turning off the computer for a while.  Have a great day!More on similar topics:

• Seeing spots – December 12, 2007

It really is a fabulous book, short on wordy descriptions and heavy on the  illustrative photographs.  I’m thinking I may need a copy for my personal collection, as it looks to be a fantastic reference.  I flipped through the first few sections, on a quest to learn how to take beautiful, realistic shots, and I picked up all kinds of helpful information.

So tell me, then, how is it that most of the images I took that afternoon looked like this??

Let’s just say that in the course of reading about candid portraits, I found something I needed to look up in my camera’s manual.  I’ve had my camera for a year, but have never actually looked in the manual for anything aside from, embarassingly enough, how to turn the darn thing on.   So, I started reading about some of the advanced features of the camera and discovered “color swap mode.”

This could be the least realistic thing in the world, and completely counter to what I was trying to accomplish with my photography skills when I first sat down with the book, but honestly, realism just isn’t this fun!

For most of these pictures, I focused on our skin, and chose that as the color to be replaced.  And then, I looked around the room and found any number of brightly-colored objects to focus on as the replacement color – a pale aqua pillow, Aidan’s neon green shirt, a hot pink ball, a red pillowcase – you get the idea.

We took so many pictures this way, I drained my batteries and filled up my memory card.  I still have not learned the best way to take a candid portrait, but I can turn my children into aliens like nobody’s business.  Now you tell me, which is the more important skill?

I brought a tossed salad to a Father’s Day BBQ today.  I gathered most of the ingredients from the Morristown Farmers’ Market this morning, and had intended to make my own salad dressing and croutons, too.  I vaguely remember having done both before, but not being pleased enough with the results to repeat the process.

I made the simple mustard vinaigrette from A Homemade Life last night and sampled it on my supper salad.  It was ok, but I didn’t love it enough to inflict it on Neil’s whole family, so today’s dressing is store-bought. No big deal.

The croutons, on the other hand, came out exactly as I’d hoped – crunchy and herby (is that even a word?) so they came with us to the BBQ.  They were pretty easy to make.  Here’s how:

First, make a loaf of bread.

I made this herb bread in my bread machine:

Ingredients

• 1 1/8 cups water
• 1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
• 3 cups bread flour
• 1 tablespoon  sugar (I used demerara)
• 1 tablespoon gluten
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 3 teaspoons dried bouquet garni
• 2 1/2 teaspoons bread machine yeast

Directions

• Place all ingredients in the bread machine pan in the order recommended by the manufacturer.
• Set crust on “light” and program for the “basic” cycle
• Remove bread from the machine when finished, and allow to cool on a wire rack.

Next, cut up the loaf

Slice off the entire rounded top of the bread and stand there at the counter, tearing it apart with your fingers and eating it like a barbarian.  You won’t need it for the croutons, and it’s entirely too soft and delicious to eat in a refined, ladylike manner.

You might also want to set aside a few slices for sandwiches.  You really only need half a loaf for the croutons.

Cut 3/4-inch slices, and further cut each slice into 3/4-inch cubes.

Lastly, make the croutons

Ingredients

• Enough bread cubes to fill up a cookie sheet
• 4 tablespoons melted butter

Directions

• Preheat the oven to 375.
• Spread the bread cubes out on an ungreased cookie sheet.
• Drizzle the butter over the bread cubes.
• Bake for 5 minutes, remove the cubes from the oven and stir them up a bit.
• Return to the oven, bake for another 5 minutes, stir again.
• Return to the oven for 5 more minutes, or until the bread cubes are crunchy all the way through
• Cool completely and store in an airtight container

I got a lot of guidance on this process from The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook.  Both recipes were adapted from it.More on similar topics:

• Grilled Pepper Jack Cheese on Zucchini Bread – September 5, 2007
• Homemade Microwave Popcorn – March 26, 2009
• Attack of the drooling zombies – May 29, 2009