Currently watching: Pushing Daisies, which is remarkably sweet and charming for a show with murders and corpses in every episode.
For a change of craft pace, I borrowed a sewing machine.
I have dozens of ancient T-shirts of a size I will never get into again. They’re in unsuitable condition for hand-me-downs, but cut under the pits, they yield either a tube or two good-size squares of fabric.
First project was a T-shirt blanket. I like the fan on my face and feet at night but don’t want to feel movement against any other body parts. It will soon be too hot for even a sheet to be a tolerable fan blocker, but threadbare T-shirts are the perfect weight.
I thought 3×3 squares would be sufficient but ended up adding an extra row due to slippage the first night.
Hemmed the 2 cheap curtains I cut in half to make 4 curtains. They no longer shed threads from the raw edge with every touch.
Also hemmed some $12 linen-blend trousers, which shockingly did not come with the ideal inseam length.
Equally shocking, the initial wash of three $12 trousers (pre-hem to reveal their true length—I’m not new here) deposited an alarming amount of lint in the dryer trap.
A clear warning to wash these only if they’re smelly or stained to slow their inevitable transformation to fishnet.
*shakes fist at sky* Back in my day, $12 linen-blend trousers barely showed their age after a decade!
And lots of first-time bakes:
Bakewell tart with frangipane.
I’ve never consumed frangipane before and therefore have no custom against which to measure. However, nothing should have 2 teaspoons of almond extract in it unless you yearn for your house to smell like cherry popsicles for a week.
Hamantaschen with apple-cinnamon filling.
Delicious, palm-size tarts. My spoons, however, are in short supply, so in the absence of personal religious significance, I’ll use the dough for less shape-intensive applications in the future.
Mexican wedding cookies.
These were absolutely amazing. The reason the word “amazeballs” exists. Tiny pecan shortbread balls double rolled in powdered sugar. (The first roll, while warm, the sugar melts into a sticky coating. The second roll, after cooling, the sugar sticks and doesn’t melt. Genius.) (ETA: I have since discovered that they can be rolled the first time before baking, which ends up with less of a sticky mess.)
I would love to link to the recipe and share these joy balls with everyone, but I apparently didn’t bookmark it, can’t find it in browser history, and the right one wasn’t on the first two pages of search results. I know it claimed to yield 60 cookies and people in the comments were complaining they got only 30 (perhaps a clue they were twice as big as they were supposed to be, but what do I and my exactly 60 cookies know) and their balls flattened out in the oven (because they were the size of grapefruits, perhaps), so if you come across such a recipe, that’s the one.
Threats of summer heat notwithstanding, we’ve still got at least one freeze left in the forecast. This optimistic strawberry blossom is undaunted!
Pursuit of windblown garbage brought me to the forest’s edge, where this funky thing filled me with visceral unease.
It looks like it belongs in a jungle. The color palette is so Not Right, I instinctively jumped back before my brain processed “plant.” Nothing here is that malachite green. Nothing here is that blood-clot red.
It looks like it will grow into something that eats people.
State wildflower search suggests it’s a completely harmless trillium cuneatum. The linked site claims it smells like bananas, but this face isn’t leaning into the botanical version of the poison-spitting, frill-necked dinosaur from Jurassic Park to check.
