Petit Lapin au Chocolat

The aftercraft

My version of soft trees from the Little Birds pattern. I used a vintage Pendleton wool plaid shirt (and its buttons) from my friend Violette Crumble and an old red sweater I felted this weekend. The bows are made from strips of the plaid shirt. I sewed the trees by hand, because Lily was sleeping, and I was not to be stopped.

Thanksgiving was lovely and exhausting. I cooked for eight hours on Thanksgiving Day, which was luxurious because I never get to cook with abandon anymore. On the menu: broccoli casserole, roasted pumpkin, mashed rosemary potatoes, lima beans, poached pears, and pumpkin chiffon pie (an old recipe of my partner's mother, who was down from Vermont). Everything was divine, and there were barely any leftovers to gnaw the next day. I spent the rest of the weekend baking banana bread and waxing catatonic in my chair.

Tonight I am home alone with Lily, and I plan to make another little tree, this one out of strips of fabric, and affixed to a base. It's an experiment, inspired by a Christmas ornament my sister gave me last year.

Random day of the year resolution: Learn to take better pictures.

Thinking about starting a business, as I wrote about below, is daunting. I seem to be frozen in a state of indecision / fear / self-deprecation / apathy / inability to perform simple mathematical equations. Everything has derailed from my own indolence. And when I see people who aren't any smarter or more talented than I am running successful businesses, it aggravates my (inflated) sense of entitlement. Why shouldn't I have my own business? If it's because I know how to use apostrophes and quotation marks, I can fake it! Why shouldn't I be running a craft group for "mom's" and "baby's"? Or more to the point, a language immersion playschool for small children?

Clearly, I must stop making these soft trees and get back to my business plan. But not until I've finished that stocking...

Worst Thrift Store Ever (WTSE)

The promised pictures of my new fabrics, soon to be works in progress...

On one of the coldest days of the fall so far, feeling lame for having kept Lily inside for most of the day, I trekked over to the thrift store closest to my house (WTSE). The impromptu trip was made possible by time I had left over from our visit to my friend J's and her baby boy H, onto whom Lily unleashed some serious attitude... after which we were asked to leave. So we nursed our wounds out in the blustery cold (thanks a lot, J) and over to Atlantic Avenue to hunt for wool.

I freely admit to jumping on the felting bandwagon, and was hunting for sweaters to felt for the adorable hat pattern in November's MSL. Despite Lily's piercing rendition of Go Down, Moses, from her prison on my hip, I managed to stay long enough to score three of the only, say, six? wool sweaters in the entire joint. But they are nice, all-purpose, muted colors, one of which is a lovely powder blue cashmere I will make into the hat for Lily and some booties for gifts.

I lived for a few years in Cleveland, where the thrifting was the stuff of madrigals and fairy dust, until New York got wind of it and started renting minivans for weekend raids. My favorite was Unique Thrift just down from my old neighborhood, which by the way is so fashionable now that just last week I saw some hip Brooklyn whippersnapper wearing a Tremont T-shirt for the love of Pete! Back in my day [creak of the bones, pinch of snuff], Tremont was full of dilapidated houses and boasted one indifferent little coffee shop. I had an 18th-century two-story house of some Civil War fame on a high bluff overlooking the hideous Cuyahoga River and the skyline of Cleveland – with a full attic, a back shop room, a laundry room (how I pine for one of those again), a charming little backyard with a patio, fish pond, and mature fruit trees (including two sour cherries!) – for 600 bucks a month. I was one of the hated gentrifiers. But I was one of the first with my then-boyfriend, now friend, Kyle. My boyfriend Kyle became my ex-boyfriend Kyle because the thrifting was so damned good (that's my story). I brought home countless projects-in-the-making, and never did anything but work in my vegetable garden.

The upside to this is that we stole two beautiful cats who loved gardens. One of them is the larger of my two babies (yes, still larger than Lily), The Black & White Kitty (Kitty for short – and Lily's first word). I lost Betty in the split-up, and she is now retired in South Beach.

I digress. I was spoiled by Unique thrifting. I bought tables for a dollar that I have sold for hundreds to New Yorkers (of course, I moved them across the country and stored them for years while I lived in Paris, so I made money on them not so much?) – my current sewing table is one I bought for three dollars (pictures to come). I found amazing vintage coats and all manner of pristine vintage housewares for pennies. So New York thrifting by comparison, to say the least, is dismal. Hell, it's dismal even not by comparison.

Is there any thrifting stone left unturned? I know you wouldn't tell me if there were (and you shouldn't).

I did manage to get a photo of the zucchini-oat-currant bread before it was duly et. This one's for you, E. I call it Still Life with Mini-loaf.

One-armed baking

Here are some photos of Lily at her recent birthday party, having her cake and eating it, too.

Today was my partner's day to get some work done in the basement workshop, so after Lily's nap I decided to do some baking a deux. I hoisted her to my hip and commenced to churning up some zucchini-oat-currant bread, Fugitive-style. Lily gave running commentary and kept pointing to the egg entrails I'd dumped on the workspace while trying to act all one-armed cheflike. When I put her down to do the last bit of mixing, she threw her arms around my legs and wailed into my knees, so I slung her up and finished the job. End result is a little dry but still yums.

So I installed Tiger today (which took forever because my poor machine has about 3 KB left on the hard drive), and when I launched Safari there was no Internet access. I called tech support for my wireless card – cheapling as I was not to buy the Apple interior card – only to find out that they "do not do troubleshooting on that product." What? "We do not support that product, ma'am." But it says right here on this very product: D-Link. "Sorry, ma'am. We are not allowed to support that product. Here is what I want you to do. Go to our Web site and..." I can't go to your Web site because your product doesn't work! Here's something: YOU manufactured this shite product and YOU don't know how to fix it. How am I supposed to fix it?

Luckily we are Geek Family Robinson and have dueling PowerBooks, so I can still gambol about on the Internet. But I have no photos for you of my beautiful one-armed zucchini bread, or the new Denyse Schmidt fabric that is making my fingers (all five of 'em) itch. I doubt there will be much left to show of the bread on the morrow, but I'll try not to eat the fabric.

But I did manage to buy a few holiday magazines...

On my way home from Lowe’s (the first time today), I was listening to Lily make truck noises over the drone of NPR, and something about the release of the newest Play Station caught my ear. Apparently, I stepped off the planet somewhere around 1989, because I have just learned that kids are spending four-plus hours a day playing electronic games (a-HA! I almost said video games), and that part of the fun is tooling around on the Internet – and here's the kicker – just watching other people play the games!

And I thought to myself, My god. We are going to evolve into a species that does not speak. My offspring, onto whom I am zealously and self-righteously projecting my love of language and languages, is/are going to beget offspring who are going to beget offspring who are going to beget (you get the picture)... people who DO NOT SPEAK. And then I thought to myself (linguistically), Mother scratcher, I forgot the mounting hardware for my blackout shades.

So it was a fleeting moment of indignation, replaced by dread: turning the car around; navigating the one-way streets, the potholes, the traffic, the obnoxious woman in the blinds aisle; taking Lily out of her car seat again, stuffing her into the sling again, and bribing her waning patience with a pass through the ceiling fan section, where she pointed at the immobile fanscape and made circles with her finger in the air.

Ah, that made it all worthwhile. The touches of recognition, the signs that she’s absorbing everything: Fans are supposed to go around and around. But these fans are not. So I will make circles in the air to publicize this egregious physical violation, and make it known that the betrayal has not passed unnoticed. Then I will have another Goldfish, please.

Toe in the water

So this is it. This is having a blog. My own blog. I'm always a little late to the party, but here I am, and I'm wearing my party panties.

Today I spent a lot of time hashing through some of my creative ideas. Last night I had a discussion with my partner about a cool little neighborhood business idea I have, and frankly, I'm dismayed at the result - I have to scale back my initial proposal and start smaller than I'd hoped. But you know, this is a good exercise for me, because I am always trying to skip to the finish, too lazy to do everything it takes to get what I want, and damn it, I'm gettin' on up (geriatric James Brown style) toward 40 and it's time to pull up the bootstraps (or more to the point, the party panty straps). What?! I actually have to do something to make this happen?

My amazing baby girl just turned one and she's accomplished more in the last year than I have in the last ten. She's learned to coo, eat, babble, hold up her head, crawl, walk, faire ca-ca in the pot, and now she is communicating in four* languages. FOUR LANGUAGES! It's humbling, really. It makes me proud and it pisses me off. My biggest accomplishment of the year? (Besides having a baby, which is not so much an accomplishment as getting knocked up and waiting for nature to take its course.) I managed to get to the halfway mark of a manuscript that was promised to a publisher two years ago. They've grown so desperate that they offered me a 10 percent COMPLETION BONUS. Just. Please. Finish.

To further behumble myself, here's a quote a friend sent me when I told her about my business idea. It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck:

Until one is committed, there is the chance to draw back; always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not otherwise have occured. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have dreamed would come his way. ... "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it! Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it."

That bit of inspiration has been chronically misattributed to Goethe, but is actually W.H. Murray from The Scottish Himalayan Expedition. [Psst! Who?]

And this (verbal) quote from the legendary Joseph Campbell:

When you follow your bliss – and by "bliss" I mean the deep sense of being in it and doing what the push is out of your own existence; you follow that and doors will open where you would not have thought there were going to be doors and where there wouldn't be doors for anybody else. There's something about the integrity of a life and the world moves in and helps.

The integrity of a life. That blows me away.

Anyway, welcome to my blog. My blog. Hilarious! This from someone who bought her first computer in 2001 (yeah, a real techie) – the amazing and talented Sugar Baby, who was of course worth the wait, but who is about to become my daughter's computer when mama buys herself a shiny new one. Huh, how many times did I switch person in that sentence?

Mmm... when the grammar talk starts, it's time to close. Night-night.

*French, Mandarin, ASL, and uh... English