Bouncing, Baby Boy

The biggest accomplishment of the last year was the healthy birth and development of our baby boy, Rourke.

While I can't take full credit for this one, I am more proud of having this fabulous little boy than all of the other stuff I did.  He was born May 30, 2012, thirteen days after his due date.  He waited until just six hours before the scheduled induction to trigger labor and get the party started.  Born at 5:29pm, he weighed in at 8 pounds, 1.2 ounces, and was 20.5 inches long.

At about eight and a half months now, he continues to be awesome.  With eight VERY sharp teeth, he's eating solids; he's cruising around between pieces of furniture and daring himself to take steps; he's demonstrating his frightening ability to climb more than one stair at a time; he says "Mama" discriminately; and, he has learned exactly what cry will ensure that he gets picked up every single time he makes it because it is so heartrending.  Smart guy.

While having a kid isn't exactly a "Big Idea," it sure is one hell of a big project.  And it's a project that never ends.  As long as you live.  My favorite!

Big Ideas, Many Hiccups

Soooooo, it has been more than a year since a post.

The hiccup came from the goal setting.  I determined that I would service my sewing machine and move along quickly with my sewing projects, giving myself a target date of maybe two weeks following that post.  Apparently, with fewer people sewing, fewer businesses are around to service the machines, so the ONE place in Rhode Island I found for servicing my machine told me it would be at least three weeks before I could pick it up.  Oh, and it cost over $80 for the servicing.  It put me so far off of my timeline that I got discouraged, then was too embarrassed to post again.

In the mean time, though, I did keep busy with a number of projects.  There was additional soap-making, many goat and pseudo-goat cheeses, my first Parmesan cheese, a failed farmhouse cheddar that became a tangy, crumbly cheese we called "Farmhouse Feta" because it more closely resembled the Greek block then the English wheel, a few quilts, a Han Solo costume for Maddie, herbal oils, mock-raised beds for the garden, renovations to the kids' rooms, mats for some large photographs printed off Shutterfly and then the frames to go with them (that I cut on a crappy mitre box and ended up with frames too big for the mats and specially ordered glass!), oh, and I had a BABY somewhere in there.  I also set a goal for beating the Oral Assessment for the Foreign Service in the midst of all this which, alas, I failed at too after passing the Written Exam (and more than 20 points above the minimum requirement), clearing the essays, and getting invited to the Orals.  Oh, well!

In the future, I am going to decline setting time-based goals, because I find my interests are too fickle--one day I may be gung-ho to make cheese, the next I am pouring ten pounds of salt over a "pork picnic" to make prosciutto (oh, yeah, I made a 12 pound prosciutto during this time).

I am going to do some back-posting--essentially, breaking down the things I have already done that I can remember, and that I have some photographic evidence of (which means I'll have another goal here--figure out how to include pictures in these posts!).

I am also excited for the year to come--I'm planning some major gardening projects, figuring out how to cold frame so I can harvest veggies into the late fall and winter, maybe building a picket fence, building a compost bin, finishing some more quilts, and canning my own vegetables (eeek, so exciting!) thanks to the awesome stovetop canner my younger brother sent me for my birthday.  I am also planning to copy my dad's great pancetta (he got into charcuterie this past year, too).  I still have big dreams of renovating the basement into a curing room, cheese room, seedling-grow-zone, and MAYBE a partial chicken coop (with a run to the world outside) but those seem further off and far more unlikely.

Well, enjoy the pictures.  I enjoyed the process.

Big Idea #1: Soap Making

I am happy to report that this was accomplished according to the timeline, and with better success than originally anticipated!

The Big Idea was that I would finish a block of soap, formed in a homemade mold, by Sunday night.  I was actually able to make and mold the soap on Friday morning and pop it out, cut it up, and leave it to cure by Friday afternoon.

The item I thought would be the biggest problem, the soap mold, actually turned out even easier than originally planned for, since I had the project on my mind so much.  I had initially thought about cutting up cardboard, hot gluing it together, then lining it with wax paper to prevent the soap from sticking when it was first poured in.  Over a few days, this was whittled to the idea of using an empty rectangular half gallon milk container, made of stiff waxed cardboard.  This would still require some cutting and gluing, or at least compressing and gluing, since the top side of the milk container is actually triangular and would need to be formed into an equally flat surface to match the other side.  While inspecting a milk container from the recycling bin, I happened upon a plastic (awful, I know!) egg carton, the top of which was actually a PERFECTLY formed rectangle, and the thin plastic had the extra advantage of being flexible, so I figured I could just pop the hardened soap out of it and use it again, thus continuing the recycling (and the whittling) process.

With the mold situation under control, I tackled the next problem--that of using an extremely corrosive and easily spilled substance in the same house as a small toddler--with the easiest solution I could manage.  My daughter is not terribly reliable when it comes to taking naps, and some days goes all the daylight hours without conking out.  We don't really push a nap schedule in our home, as we figure that she'll sleep when she's tired, which she demonstrates on a regular basis, as we routinely find her passed out on the carpet in the living room.  Instead of waiting around for Maddie to be tired enough to nap, I just circumvented the system by getting up early enough in the morning that I could make the lye water and mix the soap before she would wake up.  Simple enough.

Now, in making lye water, there are some precautions to consider.  Anyone who has seen "Fight Club" is familiar with the concept that moisture + lye + flesh = chemical burn.  I am not keen on the idea of "hitting bottom" by creating intolerable pain in the pursuit of understanding that "someday [I] will die;"  I just want to make soap, and so I take at least moderate measures to prevent the aforementioned agony.  I wear long sleeves and latex gloves to cover the skin of my hands, wrists, and arms, and, since I do not own safety goggles, I wear sunglasses to prevent any stray lye specks from flying into my eyes.  Powdered or flaked lye, known more accurately in this case as sodium hydroxide, is combined with water to create lye water, which is then added to melted fats to create soap through the process of saponification.  When lye is added to water, it creates toxic and corrosive fumes, and also very quickly heats up the water it has been added to.  Adequate ventilation is a must to avoid injury.  Since I do not have a fume hood in my house, I actually complete the process of adding lye to water outside on my driveway.

So, at 7am on a cloudy Friday morning, I am outside squatting in my driveway, wearing sunglasses and blue latex gloves, and gingerly pouring a white substance into a small jar of water at an arm's distance from my body.  I am sure I look crazy to any passersby, which I can confirm from the one passerby walking his dog, who eyed my stance and my get-up, and probably wondered if I was a meth head out cooking up a morning batch (incidentally, I had to jump through a couple of hoops to procure the lye online, as it seems to be an ingredient in the production of actual meth).  I stir the solution with a stick dropped from our tree, since I don't want to put any of my metal or wooden spoons in the mixture and risk their becoming pitted and nasty, then leave it on my porch to cool down.  Success!

From there, the process was a snap.  The only snag I hit was when I tried to pop the soap out of the mold.  It was pretty well stuck to the plastic, so I ended up having to make cuts in the carton to free the soap block in once piece, a bummer because I wanted to use it again.  On the bright side, between the time that I poured the soap into the mold and then tried to pop it out and failed, I remembered that I have a silicone (read: flexible) loaf pan, and that I could use that item in the future to easily mold soap.

Cutting the soap block went easily, as well.  (Instructions online will lead one to believe that you run the risk of crushing, smooshing, or otherwise damaging one's soap if the proper tools are not used at the proper time--I just used a sharp, straight-edged carving knife, and all went well).  The soap is now curing as I write!

Given that this is now Tuesday, and I completed the actual soap making (if not blogging) well before the Sunday deadline, this Big Idea is a success!  I actually did another soap block this evening after coming home from work, as one of my Long Term Ideas (another category entirely from the Big Idea) is to make enough soap that it can function as Christmas gifts to family and friends this year (spoiler alert!).  The soap is setting in the loaf pan, so the hope is that this will go as happily according to plan as I hope it will.

During these past few days, I have been pursuing a few Big Ideas in the learning and planning stages only, such as researching how to acquire and house chickens on my small property, and building raised beds for vegetable growing on my concrete parking pad next to the house (as there is no available land for gardening).  I am not ready to commit to either of these as my next, true, Big Idea.  Instead I'll go with:

The Big Idea: getting my sewing machine serviced so I can get back on those scores of unfinished quilts.

The Small Steps: finding a place in RI that services machines, loading up the sewing machine and transporting it out, negotiating a price for said service that we can afford (hey, times are tough), then actually going back and picking the thing up

The Possible Pitfalls: not finding a place that services my particular machine, finding a place but having it's location be "off the island" and thus a perceived grueling expedition to get there, not having enough money in the bank to service the machine, putting off going back to pick it up because it's a pain to drive and I already drive too much in my job, etc.

The Deadline: I will give myself one week (so, until next Tuesday evening) to complete this task, including getting the machine back into the house.

Onward!

The Whittling Process

In my head, every project I seek to undertake has a fabulous, perfect outcome.  The watercolor quilt I begin to piece will be a work of sheer genius, the individual color blocks syncing up their color schemes into a symphony of fervent expression; the stitches I have already set in my mind are neat, straight, the threads blend perfectly where wanted, and pop with unexpected presence on command.  Everything about this quilt is planned and perfect, an award-winning work of art that I will casually show off to family and friends, noting that oh, I just figured it out myself and went from there.

Unfortunately, what begins in my head as the Pieta of projects generally ends up as a paper mache manger that a 7th grader slapped together.  What is so frustrating is that there really is a true work of art in my mind, but I am no operational artist, and struggle to translate the mental image to the material world.

This slow acceding of my work of art to the realities of my abilities is something I generally refer to as "the whittling process.".  From the first snick of the scissors to the last harried stitch in the quilt, there is generally some piece of perfection lost in each step to the growing desire to just get the damn thing finished.  A case in point would be one of the six unfinished quilts stored in a trunk upstairs...

For those who are unfamiliar with the term, a "watercolor quilt" is one in which a variety of fabrics are chosen because of complementing color schemes from one pattern to the next, so when the fabrics are laid next to each other, a distinct progression between color and pattern emerge.  The effect is generally the same as colors bleeding into one another so that none is distinct, although in this case this is done with patterns on cloth.  I first saw one of these quilts in a fabric store I frequented.  It was gorgeous--perfectly color-compliments, with the square blocks blended so subtly you couldn't tell where one piece began and the next ended.  It was like seeing Monet's "The Water Lilies" rendered in repeating patterns in textile.  The store owner, noting my admiration, told me that I could join her sewing class (for a fee) and meet with the group to learn how to piece such a quilt and pick colors that would work.  Because I dislike waiting and am buoyed by the naive-yet-encourgaging work ethic of "I could do that myself," I elected to skip the classes and just figure it out on my own.  I stood there and memorized the pattern in the color blocks, and the five watercolor quilts to follow are history.

Except that THREE of them are a full fifty percent of those aforementioned unfinished quilts.  The one with the most work done, which starts from mostly-white-with-black-patterns and progresses to mostly-black-with-white-patterns, is the one which is in the midst of the whittling process.  The fabrics I picked were SO COOL, and in my head the repeating patterns in the quilt move from light to dark and back again fluidly and without interruption.  The trick of it, though, is that you don't get to see what will actually emerge until after you have sewn all those fabrics together into small chunks.

For folks unfamiliar with quilting, the general assumption is that people actually cut out and sew together eight hundred tiny squares to create the one big rectangle that makes up the face of the quilt.  More experienced sewers will know that if you are trying to create repeating patterns in the face of the quilt, rather than cutting a bunch of tiny squares, you cut long strips of cloth, sew them together in the correct order, then cut across all those strips to get all those little squares already sewn together.  You ultimately then match up each of these strips of blocks to their sibling strips, and over time your pattern comes together as you sew ever larger sections of these blocks together.

In the creation of this white-to-black quilt, I have already gone through one major stage of the whittling process--accepting that I made a mistake in the selection of the fabrics.  While watercolor quilts blossom when large irregular fabric patterns are chosen (because one small square of that larger pattern will interact differently with each neighboring square depending on what part of the pattern is revealed), I tragically picked a pattern that was too repetitious on too small a scale.  It does not "blend" the way I saw it in my head.  Considering that there's a really good chunk of change in textiles in this quilt as well as a "vision" of artistic intent, the miser or the artiste would not settle, and would rip out the color blocks with the offending pattern.  I am neither a miser nor an artiste, and would rather lessen the perfection of my original idea than go through sixty blocks of sewn strips and rip out the bad pattern and start over.  The mentality of "I'll be damned if I have to..." sets in, and the whittling process begins!

I am currently contemplating stage two of whittling, which is a bigger break from my Pieta than even I am ready to make yet.  Inevitably, for those of us who are committed multi-taskers with three (or nine, or twelve) projects going at once, mistakes are made if proper and complete attention is not paid to the task at hand. I have discovered that, after hours and HOURS spent cutting, sewing, ironing, piecing, pinning, sewing, and ironing again, that I MADE A MISTAKE with one of the strips in the strip-piecing, and now have scores of cut and pieced strips in the WRONG PATTERN.  The miser or the artiste would not stand for this, because if the pattern is off by only one square it creates a ripple effect through the entire quilt, knocking everything out of order and ruining the flow, making it not a watercolor quilt but instead just a big mess.  Rather than going back and fixing the mistake, I'm thinking of just assembling large pieced blocks where the pattern still holds, and then just cutting large squares of the original fabrics and sticking them in.  The end result?  A watercolor quilt?  No.  Something much, much easier and with the potential to be passed off as intentional with the right pretentious phrasing (like, the large fabric blocks interrupting the flow of color represents a syncopation in the melody of the pattern)?  Absolutely.

This whittling takes place in almost every project I undertake.  I'm making great time on my soap project, and will have it completed by the deadline with time to spare, but I'm conscious of the whittling I've done so far, such as accepting that a piece of an egg carton would probably make just as good a soap mold as the more labor-intensive hand-assembled one I'd started off the vision with (although, again, with the right pretentious phrasing...).

So, an artist in the pursuit of perfection?  No.  A damn fine whittler?  Yes, indeed.

False Starts

Did you ever have a great idea that you just had to act on?  It was the coolest thing you'd ever thought of, so doable, something you knew would turn out perfectly because you had the final product visualized in all its glory?  Then, after maybe getting a quarter of the way into it, you realize that executing your really rad idea is actually pretty difficult/time-consuming/expensive/has materials that are inexplicably hard to come by?

I have LOTS of ideas (and quarter-completed projects) like this, enough so that I have had to come up with a way to either 1) force a commitment to each project or, 2) complete so thorough an analysis on the self-proposed project that I maybe stop myself before committing time and materials, and storage space, to their realization.

Over the years, these projects have take the forms of both big ("I want to organize a group to start a community garden!") and small ("Ooooo, I'll use these cool beads to create detailed and realistic bead flowers!"), tangible ("This shirt would be great cut up and then hemmed down to make reusable rags!") and ethical ("I'm going to eliminate all personal care products with fragrance from my life!").  Like many a Sagittarius, pure enthusiasm for a new idea can become so overwhelming that I find myself committed to something that I care passionately about, but then only care passionately for maybe a few weeks, days or, in some instances, mere minutes.  Some of the many projects that I have going currently, are in the proposed stage, and have past due (meaning, on possibly permanent hiatus) include: six unfinished quilts; making soap for gifts and home use; making cheese for gifts and home use; clearing out the basement for use towards a rec room/cheese cave/indoor garden/ additional bedroom/ wine cellar/ etc; putting together a list of possible vegetables and herbs to plant in my non-existent garden this spring; researching how to open a nonprofit; recycling any number of used items in my house; making a rug out of old t-shirts; knitting a scarf with the one boxy stitch I know; and on and on.

The plan going forward is to use this space as a place for clearly articulating what each project is going to realistically require, and to publicly document all steps towards its completion.  Even in the consideration of beginning this project ("Oooo, ooo, ooo, I could write a blog in order to keep myself on task!") I had several different false starts as to different directions this could take, and a small notebook full of blurbs to myself about various approaches and articles and headings and processes for keeping track of whatever projects are in the works.  I have possibly settled on an approach, but I suppose we'll see how well that sticks in the weeks to come.

So, here goes nothing!  I thusly commit myself to:

The Big Idea: making a block of soap

The Small Steps: somehow creating a soap mold, setting aside the time, making the soap, following up on removing it from the soap mold in time so it doesn't completely stick

The Possible Pitfalls: not being able to make a halfway decent soap mold and giving up, not being able to get the baby down for a nap and thus not being able to safely make lye water, choosing to sit around and watch old TV shows on Netflix rather than making soap because I'm so tired and I had to do a lot of cooking for Thanksgiving, choosing to read Tina Fey's book instead because I never get a free moment to myself, and, obviously, lots of excuses about why there isn't time enough

The Timeline: we'll say it's a soap-making FAIL if it is not completed by Sunday night (five evenings hence).

Wish me luck!