We had snow today. The weather gurus were even predicting isolated areas of 5″ which is practically unheard of in this part of Texas. Our neighborhood didn’t get anything but a light frosting, but fun was contrived anyway.

Yes, I know he’s outside without a hat, he kept taking it off and throwing it on the ground. Just don’t tell my mother in law.

My morning was spent in the acquisition of a warm coat for GeekBaby. Terrible mother that I am, I did not have a warm winter coat for him. My reasoning was why waste the money until we needed it, and I ended up getting it heavily discounted, so it worked out. I did balk at spending as much on mittens and hat as I did on the coat. So I spent the rest of the day knitting mittens. I finished one (after misplacing the thumb hole and completely frogging it) and am through with the ribbing of the second. So he’ll have mittens as soon as it’s warm outside again.

(This was supposed to go up on Monday, but I have a 25 lb. sporadic computer problem in that my baby hates it when I sit down and start typing. Sigh.)

My latest completed (!) project was our advent wreath. I made candle markers this year for ordinary pillar candles instead of buying my favorite fancy candles. The greenery I pillaged from scraps trimmed off my parent’s Christmas tree and wound into a sloppy sort of wreath with 22 gauge floral wire. It turned out quite pretty!

Long ago and far away when we were not quite so poor, I used to buy advent candles from Marklin Candle. This is where I got the candle holder, although they don’t appear to sell it anymore. I dislike advent wreaths with tapers – we completely burned through a taper during the first week of Advent once – so when I looked for pillar candles I fell in love with this set. They are gorgeous. I could generally get two years out of a set of candles, but eventually the paraffin would get yellow and I’d get new ones.

These days we’re too poor to spend so much on candles. And you just can’t find unscented pink and purple pillars to save your life. So I got some unscented white pillars at Target and made ribbon markers for them. The general method is as follows:

Ribbon Advent Candle Markers for 3″ Pillar Candles

• 12″ of 1.5″ wide ribbon (per candle, in desired color)
• a spool of narrow (1/8″) gold wired ribbon for the borders
• embroidery floss to match the gold ribbon and the wide ribbon
• a very fine, sharp needle
• paperclips or binder clips

Wrap your wired ribbon around a candle to get exactly the circumference needed. Make sure this bit of ribbon can slide easily up and down the candle, then trim it. Use this length as a measure to trim 7 more pieces of the same ribbon.

Position a piece of the wired ribbon 1″ – 1 1/2″ from the end of a piece of the wide ribbon. Position the wired ribbon along the edge of the wide ribbon, and backstitch it into place with the yellow embroidery floss.

Position another piece of wired ribbon along the other edge of the wide ribbon. Make sure the end is level with the first piece of ribbon. Backstitch this piece in place as before.

Now you will have a piece of colored ribbon, the middle segment of which will have gold borders. With the right sides together, match the ends of the gold ribbons so they make a circle end to end. Use the binder clips to secure everything in place. With embroidery floss matching the wide ribbon, run a seam down just past the ends of the wired ribbon. Trim this to about 1/2″.

Flip the circle inside out, and slide it over your pillar candle. Tada!

By the time I finished the 4th marker, they were just about perfect, snug enough to be positioned anywhere along the candle, loose enough to move up and down without too much effort. The wired ribbon really helps this. I will probably redo the seam on the pink marker so it’s as snug.

One more picture!

…he really does. And he’s so proud of himself I don’t have the heart to scold.

I like to talk about my projects here, past and present. And today I’m going to talk about the baptismal gown I worked so hard on and didn’t finish “to spec” in time for the baptism.

I’m afraid I never got a good picture of GeekBaby in the gown, things were so chaotic around the time of the baptism. (We had to have the baptism on a Saturday so my in-laws could come, but our parish only held them on Sundays at 2pm, and had no private Saturday slots open for something like a year! We ended up having it at the church we were married in, a one and a half hour drive away.) Anyway, here’s a picture of the “finished” product.

The original design was spawned when I decided to make a heirloom gown. I didn’t know whether my baby would be a girl or a boy, but I passionately hate those silly little white pants suits, a hatred only surpassed by that of the frilly, poofy, besequined girl’s outfits. I wanted something different, even if it did mean someone mistook my boy for a girl just because he work a gown instead of a stupid pants suit.

At first I was going to cut up my wedding gown like a friend did. But her dress was beautifully embroidered, and she showed the embroidery off in the gown. My dress was plain, its beauty was all in the lines of the gown itself, and there wasn’t much point in cutting it up. So instead I started thinking about what symbols I would like to incorporate into the gown.

Eventually, I ended up with this:

I tried several silhouettes before deciding on this one. The pleats at the shoulders added fullness to the bottom and I felt gave it a resemblance to an alb. It’s made from linen twill, for a good stout embroidery background. And because Texas can be so terribly hot, I made it sleeveless.

The offset deer and running water were inspired by this gown. I hated that awful silk screened green grass and tree, but liked the idea of of some color. I also love the psalm from Easter Vigil with the response “as the deer longs for the flowing stream, so my soul longs for you, oh Lord.” So the border was born. The border was actually born first, and helped dictate the shape of the gown.

I still felt the rest of the gown was too… plain, somehow. Some whitework embroidery would be nice and subtle, but decorative. After playing with the idea of some psalm verses around the collar, I decided instead to do a stanza of the Lorica of St. Patrick (appropriately) on the breast of the gown. I love the Lorica, it has always made me think of baptism. And I learned that the Gaelic title of the Lorica, “Fáed Fíada”, meant “The Cry of the Deer”, which tied in thematically with the border.

So… I’m making a gown for a baby who’s size I don’t know, with a homemade pattern, and then I’m going to compliment it with a brand new embroidery technique – crewel embroidery. I had my work cut out for me.

First I made the pattern. I bought a pattern purely for the size information, cut it to a six month size, then started folding and adding bits of paper to places and changing the hem and necklines until it was something like what I wanted. Then I cut a muslin model and tacked it up, using a teddy bear as a model. Finally, I made a real paper pattern, which I still have floating around.

I got the linen and crewel wools from a needlework supply store online, Needle In A Haystack. They were just great. When there was a flaw in the first bit of linen, they sent me more fabric so I could get everything I needed. The fabric wasn’t quite what I was expecting, it was very thick, and not as drape-y as I hoped, but it took the crewel embroidery beautifully, so I can’t complain.

With my pattern and my fabric, I traced the outline of the front onto one piece of fabric with a water-erasable marker. Then I taped it up on my window centered over a copy of the text and traced the text. And spent the next few months painstakingly split stitching the letters in white wool on white linen. I was very happy to finish!

When this was done, I cut my pattern pieces from the linen and assembled the gown. I lined it with some fine cotton, because I was worried the linen would be too itchy for a little baby. I hadn’t figure out how to close the back yet, so I let it be.

And now I was stuck. I had a model for the deer. But I just wasn’t happy with the water. I tried many different attempts, before I settled on the S-shaped waves that I ended up with. In the meantime, I started embroidering the deer.

I started the water Thanksgiving week. The water band was supposed to go all the way around the gown, and I ran out of time to finish it. It was also supposed to have a third, middle shade, of blue in between each wave. But I finished what I could, and it at least looked respectable. I’m not entirely happy with how unlevel it is, but those are the breaks when you’re embroidering at 2am the day before the baptism.

I have a bad habit of putting things off that I don’t want to mess up, and then rushing them because I’ve put them off too long, and this embroidery is a perfect example of that. It was my first crewel project too, so it was never going to be perfect. I am absurdly proud of that deer, though. You can tell it’s a deer and everything!

So, the baptism happened (this was the important part, after all). And I have my heirloom gown for future babies. But there were several things that didn’t work out as planned, or as advertised, and I’m not sure how to change them.

1. The lining stretched way out when I washed the gown. Even though I cut it shorter than the linen, it stretched out to longer than the linen and I had to pin it up to keep it from hanging out from under the gown. I still need to go in with my shears and cut off the hem and rehem it up shorter.
2. The method of closing up the gown didn’t work, and it kept getting unhooked in the back. I looked for snaps, and could not find any! I am going to install a zipper and snaps combo, because it was really ridiculous trying to hold a wiggly baby in a gown that kept coming undone.
3. I can’t decide whether to extend the embroidery all around the border. I also can’t decide whether to add the third shade of blue to the water. Opinions on doing either or both are welcomed.
4. Linen wrinkles terribly, but I still love that it’s linen and not cotton or polyester.

The end… until the next baby comes along anyway!

I can hardly believe it, but today it’s been one year (liturgical) since GeekBaby’s baptism. (Tomorrow will be one year annual.) It was so hectic that I’m sad to say I forgot to blog about this at the time. In addition to the stress of moving, finishing the baptismal gown embroidery, and having the pastor dump two extra babies on the deacon doing the baptism without much more than 30 minutes warning, it was just too much to blog about.

All I remember is that I refused to give him a bath until I couldn’t smell the chrism in his hair anymore.

And Deacon warned me this would happen, but I’m not convinced the exorcism took, if you know what I mean.

I have abandoned cookbooks.

They often don’t have enough pages within certain categories, they rarely have the right categories, and they never have the right kind of recipe format.

For years my recipes have existed on any scrap of paper big enough to write said recipe on, piled in an old paper HEB bag. Very organized, I know, but I didn’t know what else to do. Recipe database software had different, but similarly themed issues, and was really unusable.

When we moved, a friend very sweetly sent me a beautiful cookbook stand for my new kitchen. And I knew what I wanted. I wanted a beautiful cookbook. Something that would stand in my kitchen and hold all my miscellany and disorganization and be beautiful.

What i ended up with was this:

Another picture, so you can see the pretty cookbook stand:

That book is just a blank book from Barnes & Nobles. It has a little under 200 pages, plenty of space, and I’m handwriting the recipes in. My handwriting needs the practice anyway.
Nothing is in any particular order, just whatever I wrote them down in. This is my heirloom cookbook, with recipes from family and friends, all good enough to be worth writing down by hand, and with all the errors that implies.
I could not find the perfect cookbook. So I’ve decided to have the most imperfect cookbook I could come up with.

via xkcd

In the next panel of the academia timestream, the professor lady says “I’ll make sure to put you in the acknowledgements!”

Knitting flat objects is unnatural.

Knitting’s final cause is to conserve warmth, a goal best achieved via knitting garments. Well, the human body is, in physical shape, a variety of tubes. Why should you knit flat things and seam them when you can inherently knit tubes?

This abasement of logic is brought to you by the letter constant c and my desperate need for another cup of coffee.

…but our society intently wants them to go off early.

I didn’t get the first round of treatment today, because the opthamologist decided I needed to wean GeekBaby first. I argued that I was not dumb enough to nurse after he gave me a drug that would hurt my baby, and that he could start treatment now, but he refused. Probably sensible in most cases, and he hasn’t had the opportunity to know me very well, but still. I’d like to start treating this, and it certainly doesn’t make weaning easier to know I could give in to the screaming and the crying and the gnashing of teeth.

I’m not kidding about the gnashing of teeth. He gnashes.

No one outside of Mike seems to understand why this is a big deal. It seems that once your kid is one, he’s no longer a baby anymore. The opthamologist came right out and said that’s why you had people nursing five year olds.

Well, that’s a stupid thing to say. It’s also ignorant, but I am used to doctors’ ignorance.

My baby, at not 16 months, is too old to nurse? Why? He can’t use the potty by himself (although use it he does). He can’t communicate in words. He can’t handle Daddy leaving in the morning without crying.

Is it terribly surprising that he also doesn’t understand why Mommy can’t nurse him anymore?

He has always been an avid nurser. Am I supposed to feel good about depriving him of his biggest source of comfort? I feel like the most terrible mother in recorded history.

GeekBaby was Link (Ocarina of Time young version) for Halloween.

I had a lot of fun planning and making this costume, although it was a last minute job.  Originally I wanted to dress him as the Companion Cube and I would dress as Chell from the Orange Box.  Mike would have gotten a crowbar and gone as Gordon Freeman.  But my costume ended up being too much work, so I changed my mind at the last minute and had to think of something else.

I made this costume in the week leading up to Halloween, and reused as much material as I could find.  Excepting the paint, his wee sword and shield are all scavenged from things around the house.  I made the tunic and hat the afternoon of Halloween.  The tunic was almost too small, but worked much better than I anticipated.  I didn’t hem anything, so it’s just the 4 seams and a slit cut in the front for the collar.  I’m especially proud of the hat.  Total cost was about $20, for fabric, thread, cotton belting, buckle, and painting supplies, but it’s much more awesome than what you’d get for that price in a store!

He loves charging with his toy Master Sword.  I took this picture, and he charged me.  We took him to his grandparent’s house, and he charged Big Daddy down like a pro!

Close up of the Shield of Hyrule. It’s made of black foam core, spray painted silver, and the colors are done with model enamels.  I free handed all the drawing, and it turned out really well!  I attached it to the tunic with a big safety pin stuck to the back of the shield with some packing tape.

Close up of the Master Sword. It’s cut out of black foam core and painted. The hilt was wrapped with some shelf liner scraps and then wrapped in blue duct tape.

Oooh, he found a rupee cookie!