Wardrobe Refashion : Post 1 [2/28/09]

As I mentioned in my last post, I'll be taking the Wardrobe Refashion pledge for the next 2-months. As I post there, I will also be re-posting here. Here is the first of my WR posts:
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Hi There!

Hello re-fashionistas! My name is Amanda and I'm a 25 year-old graphic designer from Columbus, Ohio. I've been sewing for about 5 or 6 years now, but have been embracing the "craftiness" my whole life. (I suppose this would be where I say that my childhood "When I grow up, I want to be a..." wish was to be an artist. I guess some wishes do come true...) I love to make things. I started out with tote bags and that has spread into aprons, Christmas stockings, curtains, pillows... I've even taken a stab at quilting. I also love gardening and gnomes, hand-stitchery, paper crafting, among many other things.

I just recently found WR and the timing has been so perfect for me... I just lost my job a few weeks ago, and with no extra money lying around, buying clothes is *so* out of the question right now. I found the blog while looking for free clothing patterns and was totally awed and inspired by all the awesome things everyone has been making here. My closet and drawers are nearly bursting at the seams (it's safe to say that I have both a shopping and "keep everything" problem) and I am super excited about taking the 2-month pledge!

I've already started a super thrifty, cute summer top. I've used some vintage fabric that was given to me (free), buttons and baubles I had lying around (free), and I even found the pattern online at burdastyle.com (free). The only thing I had to buy for the project was some jersey knit which ended up being 20% off! I'll post some photos tomorrow.

This is going to be such a great challenge -- I really can't wait. It's going to be a great push to finish some unfinished attempts at clothes too. I've got a pair of bermuda shorts and a button-down shirt dress that need finished, plus 5 or 6 pairs of pants that need hemmed and altered. Not to mention a baby quilt and a couple of bags. With a whole chest of drawers over-flowing with a various fabrics, plus lots of clothes I never wear but just can't part with... this is going to be an exciting adventure!

Thanks Nikki for starting this awesome group and I can't wait to see what everyone else comes up with!

Happy Sewing!
Amanda

(If there's anyone in the Central Ohio area, please drop me a line -- I'd love to meet some fellow crafters!)

News!

I have some exciting news to share! I have just pledged to take the 2-month Wardrobe Refashion challenge. I found the blog a few days ago and was just in time to sign up for the next round. With the current state of things around here (ie: me with no job, money running tight, and the economy looking grim) I thought it would be a great time to take on a challenge like this one.

For those of you who don't know about Wardrobe Refashion, it's an online community where "Participants of the blog pledge to abstain from the purchase of new manufactured clothing for the period of 2, 4, 6 months or LIFE. They pledge to refashion, renovate, and recycle preloved items with their own hands in fabric, yarn or other medium or make their own from scratch."

So with this in mind, I will not be buying any new clothes for the next 2 months! (Shocking, I know.) Instead, I will be using the plethora of fabric, buttons, and baubles I have, plus the extensive (and embarrassing) amount of clothes that I have and never wear in my closet to create new items to wear.

I am super excited about this challenge and have already started the first project. I will be posting details and photos tomorrow, so stay tuned. Please check out the Wardrobe Refashion blog and sign-on to take the pledge too. You, your wallet, and the earth will be happier if you do!

Happy Sewing!
Amanda

Snow Day

This little story begins with a nice blanketing of snow... Ok, it was more of a dumping of snow, but you get the drift.

Tuesday night it started snowing. A lot. So much so that it was still going strong early Wednesday morning. The text messages and phone calls started coming in around 8:00am. First it was the "it's looking nasty out there, I'll make the call by 10" text, then around 10:00 the decision was made to close the stores for the day. (Honestly, that was the smartest decision made in awhile. Would you rather pay 3-4 employees - along with utilities - to run the store and hope for one customer, or just stay closed and save a little dough? Yeah, not many people buy bicycles in blizzards.) Anyway, back to the story... This good news meant Ben and I got a snow day... A glorious, wonderful, snowy snow day!

I'll start off by saying that I spent the whole day in my sweat pants and no makeup, and it was wonderful! We sat around for awhile watching some bad daytime tv while I worked on my website for a little bit, then Ben suited up to go clear the driveway. (A big thank you goes out to my Uncle Steve for fixing up the snow blower a few years ago, and another big thanks goes out to the whole family for letting us keep the snow blower. It's been a lifesaver!)

Not long after Ben went out into the frozen tundra that was our driveway, I got the baking bug. My February/March issue of Tast of Home had just come in the mail and had a bunch a great looking bread recipes. Oh, ok, I won't lie... I was having a really bad craving for cupcakes. For those of you who know me, you know that I really can't resist cupcakes - especially ones with sprinkles. I LOVE sprinkles... they're like my kryptonite. And yes, I am being 100% serious here. So I knew we had a few boxes of cake mix and frosting in the basement and that a mix only required water, vegetable oil, and eggs, and we had those things too. We didn't, however, have any milk, so I knew making something from scratch wasn't happening, and I soon realized that we only had 2 eggs to use in a mix that required 3. Bummer. Fortunately Ben is really helpful with the math needs around the house. Although it was simple math, I trust his abilities over mine, and we cut the recipe down to 2/3 instead of the whole thing.

To reach the point of this little ditty, here's what happens when I get a snow day:

I spent the majority of my day in the kitchen and made almost a whole batch of cupcakes while I had 2 loaves of my "crazy hippy fruit & nut bread" in the oven. Both turned out quite tasty. (Not long after finishing the cupcakes, I started working on dinner and Ben stepped in and helped. Literally all day in the kitchen.) For anyone who is interested, here's the recipe for the bread:

CRAZY HIPPY FRUIT & NUT BREAD
1 packet dried yeast
1 1/2 c. tepid water
1/4 c. honey
1/4 c. olive oil (or soft butter)
2 c. unbleached white bread flour (with more as needed to make a soft dough)
1 T. salt
2 1/2 c. whole wheat bread flour
Add-ins: (Your options are endless here, this is just my list of add-ins.)
chopped pecans, chopped almonds, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, golden raisins, dried cherries, and dried pineapple (all chopped up to a nice small chunk)

1. Dissolve yeast in tepid water, and let stand 5 minutes.
2. Stir in honey, olive oil, and 2 cups white flour. Sprinkle on salt and whole wheat flour.
*Here's a little tip: add the olive oil first then the honey - you coat your 1/4 measure with oil and the honey slides right out.
3. Slowly pour in water with the dissolved yeast.
4. Stir in additional white flour to make a soft dough. Knead well for 10-12 minutes, until smooth and springy.
5. Let rise to double in bulk. Punch down, knead briefly, and pat into a flat rectangle. Sprinkle on nuts and dried fruit, folding the dough over and kneading gently to incorporate. Or if you're using a mixer, let the dough knead with the dough hook and add in the good stuff. Shape as desired. I made this in 2 loaf pans, but it makes a great flat bread or round loaf.
6. Let rise 30-40 minutes.
7. Bake at 400F for 15-20 minutes, then turn it down to 350F and bake for another 20-30 mins. until nice and golden brown. Let cool to warmish, then eat with butter and honey. Yum!
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So overall, I'd say I enjoyed my snow day quite a bit. I've not made bread since last winter sometime, and the cupcakes really hit the spot. And I got to do it all in my pink sweat pants and fuzzy slippers. Big plus!

On another note, I got 2 new gnomes in the past few months and I planted my seeds about a month ago now. I have great intentions to blog all about it, but with all of the resume writing, portfolio making, and web site creating lately, I've been a little occupied. (Yes, I am finally making the first steps to finding a new job.) Stay tuned -- I have all sorts of great things coming up!

amanda.

I've got tomatoes coming out the wazoo!

So, it's summer time... Some of you might be saying right now, "Duh Amanda... What? Do you live under a rock or something? Guh." Well, no, obviously, but when you take a look at the front of my house right now, it's so very apparent that summer is upon us. And it truly is glorious.

I've been picking tomatoes from the garden for awhile now, mainly little orange cherry tomatoes, but still. Those little guys have been ripening consistently over the past few months (round two has now started booming and turning into little green babies already) and have been delicious, but they're not the one's I've been waiting for. I'm talking about the big guys - the big kahoonas, if you will - that I've been eagerly waiting to see turn red.

I'm sure you all know how it goes: first you get the nice little yellow blooms, then when those fall away you have that little green nubbin that makes you think, "Really? That's going to be a tomato? ...if you say so." Well, that little green nubbin does grow, and it grows fast! Mine did anyway. They got HUGE over night... but they were green. Now, I realize that Fried Green Tomatoes is not just a movie, it's actually a dish, but knowing that the red, juicy, ripe tomatoes were eminent, I patiently waited... and waited... and a little more. Needless to say, it paid off. I have more tomatoes than I know what to do with! Oh, ok, I know what to do with them... but I digress. I'll waste no more of your time babbling, take a look for yourself.

In the beginning, all we saw was yellow...

Then we were seeing green...


Oh, they're so close...


The first big harvest...


That was only the beginning... Check out round 2...

Amazing! It's only August 14th... I've been picking these big guys since mid July. I'm blessed, truly.

Totally Gratuitous

I came across this really neat ceiling fan pull in the Uncommon Goods catalog awhile back:

I love the idea... a little bat that hangs from your ceiling fan. How Cool! (For those of you who don't know this already, I desperately want a bat house in the yard. They eat mosquitoes, and I have plenty of those to go around. Plus they're totally beneficial and helpful animals to have around.) So anyway... This little guy at Uncommon Goods is $50! I just can't justify paying that for a ceiling fan pull. Now, I'm not discounting the craftsman ship and saying it doesn't deserve to cost that much, I just simply can't afford it right now. So I ask myself, what would Crafty Amanda do in this situation... MAKE IT!
So, I made this a few weeks ago out of $5 worth of Sculpey clay:

He turned out perfectly! I couldn't have asked for anything different and I love him! So, it's not hand blown glass and it didn't cost $50... but I think it's WAY COOLER than the other one! Plus now I can actually reach the pull to turn the lights on. (I love to toot my own horn sometimes... Toot Toot!) If you really love him and would want your own batty to hang from your ceiling fan, I might be persuaded to make you one if you're really nice to me... ;)

Oh, and here's Lucy... she was feeling a little left out of the whole "blog thing"

My Own Sci-Fi Movie Set

Although I struggle to keep up on my own blog, I somehow find time to read all of my favorite plant-related, gardening blogs on a daily basis (and - shh, don't tell - the Perez Hilton blog too.) In following these, I've read about and seen a lot of succulent gardens, and to be perfectly honest, the idea of such a garden just didn't really excite me. Until Ben and I were out and about the other day and came across a very interesting variety of succulent plants that seemed as though they were from another world.

Now, you have to understand something here... and it helps if you already know my father. My dad worked at a movie theater when he was in high school at the height of all of the greats, so I have grown up with all the great sci-fi flicks of the 50's and 60's, and have come to share his affinity for such classics... Night of the Living Dead, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Blob, IT Came from Outer Space, Tarantula, my personal favorite The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the ever fitting to my recent gardening pastime, The Day of the Triffids. For those of you that are unaware of Triffids, they are plant-like space aliens that are capable of moving themselves around and attacking people, whose spores arrive on Earth in a meteor shower. It is a truly great feat of 1960's sci-fi kitsch. Rent it and watch it. You'll laugh until your sides hurt. (But please, think of me as a child, scared to death, while you watch it. That will increase the level of humor just a bit.)

Ok, so now that you have this little bit of background, you should be able to grasp the feelings I have for my new succulent garden. It's almost as though it's straight from a bad (or awesome depending on how you look at it) sci-fi movie. I have to say though, aside from the outer-space vibe, the succulent plants are pretty sweet. They're just so different than any plant you might see in everyday life. I especially like the "ET fingers" that are front and center. (Note that they have a translucent tip to allow more light in - like ET's glowing "go home" finger - I mean, how cool is that?!)

And now for a little fun with Photoshop... I just couldn't help myself... neat!

Garden Visitors

*I dedicate this blog post to all the little insects that have given their lives in the name of my garden.*

It's an inevitable fact that bugs would make their home in my garden. I mean, duh, it's nature (Goulet.) I'm ok with this fact of life and these little multi-legged critters, however, what I'm not ok with is when they eat the things I grow that I want to eat. When I planted my garden, I decided that I would give the whole 'organic gardening' thing a try and not use any chemicals. So when I realized that I had a cucumber beetle problem, I searched for a chemical-free solution and came up with this lovely little number:

These were my attempt at cucumber beetle traps. Planks of wood painted "squash blossom yellow", covered in TangleFoot - a sticky glue-like substance that comes out of a caulking tube, never dries out, and is usually used to keep birds from places you don't want them - and then baited with mushed up squash blossoms (their favorite.) The instructions recommended all spice oil to bait them, but said squash blossoms should work too, and they also said to put them on a steak or post in the ground, but I found it easier to just prop them up with pieces of slate rock found in the yard. As you can see in the photos, they did actually work to some extent, but I wouldn't say the solved the problem. So on a scale of 1 - 10, I would say they were a 6.5 -- they trapped bugs, but mainly just got me sticky.

My traps didn't really do much good, but the cucumber beetles weren't really doing any significant damage, so I didn't stress much about it. Now, when I found the Squash Bugs wandering around, I started to be a little more concerned. These ugly little guys resemble stink bugs, and really like to much on soft-bodied fruits. This is a HUGE problem, as I have lots of yellow squash and nice, ripe tomatoes. I kept an eye on them for a few weeks, and when I started to notice more of them AND caught them mating, things had to be done. (They actually had the nerve to copulate in front of me! Oh the humanity!) Ben and I went to Oakland Nursery (the staff there really knows their pests... they're tremendously helpful and I love getting all my gardening needs there) and got some of the really strong pesticide. Unfortunately, this meant no more "organic garden", but the only chemical that would take care of the squash bugs was the highest powered stuff.

So we got the chemicals and sprayer home, but didn't spray right away. We've been kinda busy and I just didn't get around to it sooner. A few days later - it was last Sunday - my parents stopped by with my grandma to visit. Dad and I were sitting on the porch chatting when I noticed this weird, bright green splatter along our white porch railing. As I glanced up at my tomato plants popping above the railing I saw this:

HOLY SMOKES! What in the world was this thing? I'd be lying if I said that it didn't scare the jeebers out of me. It blended in so perfectly with the tomato branches, that if I hadn't noticed the weird green splatter and glanced up, I may have never noticed it. This thing was easily the size of a roll of dimes - in length and diameter. I would say it was about 4-5 inches long and a good inch in diameter. Ben took out his pocket knife to try to pry it off the branch and toss it to the birds. When he did this, that little booger started spitting that weird green goo EVERYWHERE! (Ahh... it all comes together.) Ben was shocked at how heavy it was and when he couldn't get it pried off of the branch, he just sacrificed a bit of my plant for the greater good and broke the whole thing off. (It had already stripped everything off of a few neighboring branches.)

Fortunately when we were at the nursery a few days before I noticed something called a Hornworm pictured on the "common garden insect pest guide" hanging with the pesticides. Well, the horn on his behind was a pretty dead-on give away that he was a horn worm. So later on I Googled it. (Don't you just love how "Google" is now a word...?) Anywho, I found this picture:

I'd say that's the same kind of critter... wouldn't you? The crazy thing was, I was doing some tending the day before and saw some of that poo on a few of my tomatoes. It was so large that I just thought "Huh... that's some strange looking squirrel poop..." Yeah, it wasn't squirrel poo... it came from that creature.

Needless to say that after finding that creepy crawly, we sprayed for bugs that evening.

We have a neighbor who is an Entomologist... He liked my representation of a mosquito.

Can You Believe This?

I just have to share these photos with all of you... I didn't think anyone would believe me without proof, so I have some proof. Our neighbor Mary had these weeds growing in her front bed, and I just couldn't take it anymore - neither could my cucumbers planted near these monsters - so Ben and I went out and tackled them with the saws all. The Pokeweed in the middle grew to be at least 7 feet tall and the stalk was about 2.5 inches in diameter. The Thistle on the right was at least 6 feet tall when we cut it down and the one on the left was about 5 feet tall. It's not very often weeds grow taller than me... but this was just unreal.

Unfortunately, these photos were taken about 2 weeks before we cut them down, but I think you get the idea...

Just as a note, apparently Pokeweed is poisonous, so DON'T EAT IT. Just FYI.

Three New Additions to the Family!

I am so very pleased to be able to introduce all of you to the newest members of the Gnome Clan! I owe a VERY BIG THANK YOU to Ben's mom Judi for these three wonderful gnomes. She rescued them from a garage sale (who would ever want to sell these guys, I just don't know...) and they have comfortably made their home in my garden. They are everything I've been looking for in a gnome, and there are three of them to boot! Thank you Judi, these guys are fabulous... I LOVE THEM!

Punch, tomato tender
(this little guy is named for Judi)

Heinrich, breaker of rocksOtto, watcher of the sprouts

Welcome to the family!

Long time no see...

It's official... I'm the world's worst blogger. It has been WAY too long since I've last posted, and there's really no excuse for it. Both Ben and I have been so busy lately, that every free moment we get, we somehow find ourselves just doing nothing. And to be perfectly honest, it usually feels great. Plus, with the recent heat we've been having and our lack of air conditioning, the last thing I want to do is sit with a computer on my lap. So I've neglected my blog. However, I have not neglected my garden...

Which has been just bursting with wonderful edibles - and believe me, we've been eating them!

Here's what we've harvested since the last post:
[This will be photo-intense]

- Lettuce -

- Radishes -

- Zuccini -
(This thing was easily 14 inches long... and maybe a little more.)

- Yellow Squash -
- Cherry Tomatoes (LOTS of them) -

- Roma Tomatoes -
- Beefsteak Tomatoes -
- Heirloom Tomatoes -
- Red Bell Pepper -
- Cucumbers -
(and friends)
- Gypsy Peppers -
- Jalepeno Peppers -
- Little Red *HOT* Chili Peppers -
- Plus lots of herbs and such -

Everything has been absolutely wonderful and delicious! (Those spicy peppers and some of the tomatoes went into some really great home-made tequila salsa that was just awesome!) I just can't get enough of the home-grown tomatoes. I've had the pleasure of growing up with fresh tomatoes every summer from my grandma's garden, so I blame her for my spoiled nature when it comes to the sweet, juicy, red gems. There just really isn't anything that compares to that taste... no store-bought tomato can hold a candle to the home-growns. The yellow squash has also been quite tasty, and I have to say that Ben does an excellent job frying them. (Thanks to Nate for the sous-cheffing...)So, my apologies for lacking in the posting... I'm going to try to make up for it with a few more posts today to catch up.

Happy Gardening!
Amanda