Craft Blog

The last of my Grandmother's formal gowns to show you.  This one is bubble gum pink!  My husband dislikes this dress entirely.  Double-knit polyester, great lace jacket, Pepto-Bismol color...what's not to love?!  If it were a tad smaller, I'd wear it for a night out on the town!  (If I could find anyone who would go with me, that is!)

This is her 'Mother of the Groom' dress from her youngest son's wedding in the early seventies.

RM Self Portrait Thursday July 24 2008

RM Self Portrait Thursday July 24 2008

Hello lovelies!  Sometimes I use Flickr as a blog instead of posting here on my craft blog.  That is because there are more of my crafty friends on Flickr than there are on Vox and they can easily post comments there.  So, before I forget...

Here are some fingerless mitts I've been knitting for my mom.  She says that the hospital, in which she receives her chemotherapy treatments, is as cold as an ice box.  So, I wanted to make her some nice hand warmers out of the lovely cashmere and silk light-fingering-weight yarn that Amy of www.MadelineTosh.com hand-dyed for me.  It has been a lovely experience!  The yarn, plus KnitPicks size 0 circular needles and a sock pattern that I adapted to sprout a nice, graduated thumb gusset has yeilded an exceedingly smooth knitting week.  The sock pattern, "Spring Forward" by Linda Welch, is found here on Knitty.  My Ravelry page has some preliminary notes for this project here.   Once I have tested my notes on the second mitt, I'll post instructions (free gratis, of course) for adding the thumb gusset, thus turning them into 'Hand Springs' fingerless mitts.

Hand Springs Fingerless Mitts

Click on thumbnails to view larger photos.

My sweet mom...in all her glory!  We went with her to get her head sheared today.  She's about to get her second treatment of chemo this coming week.  Her hair was already coming out in big patches, so she decided that it was time to shave it.  More pics...including a mohawk...in my Flickr Photos.

Mother & Daughter

It's hot as the blazes today...and this hat just doesn't provide any shade!  Ha, go figure.  It's not a hat at all, but a basket that I started (and stopped) weaving months ago!  I just like being silly.

RM Self Portrait Thursday July 17 2008

RM Stamp & Cards

I'm going to surprise you by saying that I am actually a very enterprising individual.  I know, I know...you couldn't tell that from shop during the last year!   I have simply chosen to curb my enthusiasm for business as I raise my young daughter. 

One of the nice things about being 'small potatoes' is that I can afford to sit down and hand-cut 25 business cards at a time from my empty cereal boxes and hand-stamp them using my own fun custom logo stamp from www.terbearco.etsy.com. 

I love the pigment ink I chose.  It's just the right color and sits on the paper rather than soaking in so much. 

Well, as often as I give out business cards, I won't have to do this again for at least a couple of months.  I'll enjoy this part of the 'business' while I can!

-RM

Me. 

My back yard. 

Big sunglasses and a vintage hat. 

A little color-tweaking for the retro 1960's magazine look.

RM Self Portrait Thursday July 10 2008

RM Self Portrait Thursday July 3 2008

So, I'm cheating a little.  This is from last week.  I wanted to add this one because it was taken on my hubby's birthday!  And once again...it's dark here and I have no good light in which to take a self-portrait.  Besides, I cried my makeup off at the movies.  Man...I felt silly crying over a robot! (Wall-e)

Well...I've had a super busy day, so here it is.  The sun was going down by the time I got around to shooting my Self Portrait today, so I just took a close-up of my eye.

RM Self Portrait Thursday June 26 2008

Green is not my best color, but I had to show off my vintage mobius scarf!

RM Self Portrait Thursday June 19 2008

Non-edited to show the great colors of the scarf...and my freckles.

RM Self Portrait Thursday June 19 2008

2 comments

First Lattice Apple Pie

This is my first lattice-topped apple pie...and boy can you tell it!  Well...it looks all rustic, so it won't be as hard to cut into.  It actually is semi-homemade because I didn't start with any 'from scratch' ingredients.  My sister's new chef friend had better stop reading here.  Ha-ha! 

Yes...it's just a package of pre-rolled pie crust and Country Crock Cinnamon Apples and a secret ingredient.  Ooooo...mysterious, isn't it?  Well, I don't think I'll reveal it until after I've tasted to see how it turned out.  However, I will tell you the shortcut that I used for the top crust.  Instead of un-rolling the second store-bought crust, I just cut 1/2 inch sections, jelly-roll style, with a sharp knife and unrolled each section with which to weave the lattice top. 

Oh...and if you don't add the secret ingredient, you'll want to use an 8 in. pie pan instead of the 9 in. or, get two tubs of the apple filling, because it's not enough to fill the pie with just one. (The reason I needed a secret ingredient in the first place.)  And...in my opinion, the Country Crock apples taste much nicer than the usual canned apple pie filling.  (No...I have no affiliation with Country Crock.)

Brush on a quick egg-wash for the pretty-shiny top and follow the baking directions on the pie crust box and you're done!  Easy-peasy.

So, for a quick dessert that took all of 8 minutes to prepare and shove into the oven, it's pretty good, I'd say.

I'll post an update on the taste of the secret ingredient later!

RM

UPDATE:

Thanks for the comments!  Unfortunately, like many things made not prepared from scratch start to finish, this pie looks better than it tastes.  It's not that bad really, but I found that it was more dense in texture than a fresh apple pie and the bottom crust more gummy than I like, probably due to the extra sauce that is in the Country Crock's Cinnamon Apples. 

The secret ingredient was a push.  Since I didn't have enough filling to reach the top of the pie, I added some Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal to the apples before pouring it in.  Probably half a cup or so.  I thought the cereal would add little punches of cinnamon flavor but it really didn't do much other than do it's job as a filler, since the apple mixture already had a very intense cinnamon/sugar flavor.  So...if you find yourself short of (freshly cooked) apples in a pie, pour in some Cinnamon Toast Crunch and it will be fine to stretch your filling's volume.  No harm, no foul.

Later!

RM