buzzville

mail from across an ocean!

There's really nothing quite as fun as good mail, right? ... especially when that mail comes from a far away place! I had a lovely package show up in my mailbox yesterday from Portugal, home of so many fantastically talented crafty women. This particular package was sent by Hilda as part of our May Project Spectrum postcard swap. Check out the fantastic goods:

She made this gorgeous hand-appliqued postcard of the woman and stitched it all to this great burlap-like fabric (only it's not rough and scratchy, but soft and natural)! She also included a packet of her beautiful printed bird postcards that I can share with the world! Look - even the back of her appliqued postcard is incredible:

I feel so loved! Thanks Hilda for this beautiful piece of original artwork! Viva crafty mail!

It's been too long!

Wow! I can't believe I haven't posted in a week! I've thought about doing it often, but I'm really drained, and the thought of posting has sounded like a bit of a chore this week. I've been working a ton, but the good news is that the work has actually been fun for a change! The bad side of this is that I've become a bit obsessive, working from the instant I wake up until I crash into bed at night. I'm learning new things (which I love!), and this tends to keep me incredibly focussed as I attempt to solve problems and figure things out. I have also been completely ignoring all of my in-progress crafting, which is exactly what I said I wouldn't do... shame on me!

To complicate things further, our weekends are booked for the next few weeks doing incredibly labor intensive work in our yard. Last weekend we rented a really frightening beast (a rototiller), and Jerry and I destroyed our bodies wrestling with this machine while tearing our yard to bits. This weekend we need to take a pick-axe to what we couldn't reach with the rototiller, and then the process of grading the turned soil and mulching begins. I guess this is all crafty in a way (isn't gardening crafty?!?), so perhaps I should share pics of the chaos that is currently our yard! This insane weekend schedule leaves me too exhausted to get any crafting done once we've finished for the day.

I'm optimistic that we'll get our yard tamed and under control relatively soon, and I hope to get back to regular crafty content soon. Maybe I'll have some good luck at garage sales this weekend and share that with you. Otherwise, you may find the content a little light here for a bit, but it will return! Wish me luck!

Martha's Cake o' the Month - June

Well, here we are... it's June, and that means that we are half-way through Martha's Cake of the Month project! I have a teensy confession to make: I didn't make the June cake in June. I hope you'll forgive me! I actually made this cake in May because Brynne really wanted a chocolate cake for her birthday. I scanned the recipes for the cakes of the month, found the recipe for the Cocoa Buttermilk Cake, and decided to make it a couple of weeks early. We've found this monthly cake project can be harmful to one's hips, so I figured one less cake this year might not be such a bad thing!

I also fear I'm going to sound like a broken record... Let me preface the description of this cake by saying that I love dessert! Unlike my grandmother, who can make 1 piece of See's candy sustain her for weeks, I would love to have dessert for breakfast, lunch, and dinner! Now, genetics have played a mean game here, and I am apparently not able to live on cupcakes alone, so I try to show a modicum of restraint and feed myself healthy foods, interspersed with the occasional treat. So, what's the broken record all about? Well, this cake was too much! I know I've said this before in this challenge, but Martha must really like desserts that make folks like me (admitted dessert lovers) feel sick! You may start to think I have something against Martha (and god forbid she find these reviews!)... au contraire! I am nothing but a huge fan of hers, and I've basically worshipped her from afar - really! But, I think that her love of sugar and fat together must not agree with me. I need the ratio of fat to sugar in a recipe to remain balanced - as one goes up, the other must go down! Otherwise, my body seems to react very poorly - jittery, can't sleep, feel lethargic, etc. Well, enough of that - on to the cake!

I really liked the sound of this one - I thought that the "snap" of buttermilk would be really nice with a rich chocolate cake, and the flavors would be nicely balanced. I used good cocoa and a whopping 18 ounces of Scharffen Berger dark chocolate (that's 9 bars!) for the frosting. The cake recipe went perfectly and the finished cakes were beautiful. The frosting was also quite simple to make, and I was pleased that I didn't have to resort to any double boiler action - not that this is that hard, but I always get a bit nervous when I have to mix very hot things with cold things and not have some kind of disaster.

I prepared the cakes for the frosting and began to spread 1 cup of frosting on the bottom layer as instructed. Almost immediately I thought something was wrong... I had some crazy amount of frosting in my bowl, and 1 cup of it was pretty skimpy on a 13" x 9" bottom layer. But, I'm pretty faithful to instructions when I do something for the first time, so I just spread it thin. I placed the top layer on and then spread another 4.5 cups of frosting on the top and sides. Once it was chilled, it was ready to slice and eat!

Remember when I said the frosting amounts seemed off? Take a look at the picture of a piece of the cake... tiny layer of frosting in the middle, and then a good 1.5" of frosting on the outside! For those of you who haven't yet made this cake, may I recommend you spread 2 cups on the bottom layer instead? This was kind of crazy... it made it such that each bite was basically all cake or all frosting, but none had a nice balance of the two.

So, how was it? The cake was yummy - chocolatey and moist (thanks to the buttermilk) with an overall good texture. The frosting is what put us over the edge. Too much frosting that was too sweet and too rich. The funny thing is that the frosting is a cream cheese/sour cream base, so we really thought it would be good with the cake. The only thing I can suggest is that my use of ultra dark chocolate overpowered the cream cheese and sour cream - they just couldn't fight back!

As with the other cakes that didn't sit so well at chez buzzville, this one (minus a few pieces for Brynne's birthday celebration) went to work with Jerry where it was rapidly devoured. (As an aside, one of Jerry's colleagues who sampled this cake calls it "the brown cake" in a not-so-flattering way... just so you know we're not the only ones who were less than satisfied!)

You sticklers have probably already noticed that I didn't make the Scrolled Tuiles to decorate the top of the cake. Well, no one was graduating at our house, and I really didn't need to have another recipe to contend with, so we opted out of the tuiles. As for next month, I have high hopes! No buttercream and lots of berries... sounds fantastic to me!

Where have you been?

I love travel - in fact, it's hard to think of a single place I *wouldn't* like to go... drop me off most anywhere and I'll find something fun to do, some good food to eat, and some fascinating people-watching. Getting married and having a child have put quite the damper on my wanderlust. Jerry is as much of a homebody as I am someone who loves being somewhere foreign. This conflict is a constant source of negotiation and compromise in our marriage, and thank goodness Jerry lets me drag him somewhere now and then! Of course, there are certain places that I don't feel comfortable taking Brynne, so we have limited our travel repertoire lately. In fact, I haven't left this continent since 1998 - scary!

I was so lucky to have opportunities to travel when I was in grad school - travel to the sorts of places that most people would never dream of going: Congo and Madagascar. Those extended trips are becoming distant memories, and I hope that someday I can once again travel to truly remote locales. I found this fun little meme via Floating World Views last week. This is the map showing the places I've been (in red). Still so many places I need to go...

I'd love to see where you have been, and get your travel recommendations for where I should go next! (Just don't tell Jerry I'm asking!)

Shoes for Summer

Lately I've been in some sort of fog - my motivation to work for my "real" job is nonexistent, and all I want to do is craft - but when I have time to craft, I just sit and daydream about all the potential projects (oh, there are so many!). In the end, I get absolutely nothing done! I'm a list-maker by nature, so I'm trying to turn all this around by making lists of projects and just jumping in. But, I've also set a rule for myself that I must *complete* some projects before I begin new ones... I don't want to have 20 active projects - 4 or 5 is about all I'm allowing myself at the moment. So, the big problem comes when I really need to finish a project, but I just don't want to sit down and do it! N.B. the beautiful olive green sweater (my first knitted garment!) that has been sitting here, completely finished, just waiting for me to do the seaming... what's my problem?!?

So, this may seem totally unrelated, but somehow the changing temperatures and the prospects of summer have given me a jolt. Last weekend I went out to do some shopping. My goal was to find a reasonably priced rash guard to help me avoid a summer full of sunburns (Yes, I do use sunscreen, but I always seem to miss that one tiny spot that gets horribly burned - I am of Irish descent after all!) - I didn't find the rash guard, but I did find a pair of shoes for each of us. I don't normally fixate on shoes and take pictures of them, but something about the thought of new shoes for the family was extremely pleasing.

This picture has now become a symbol for me - new shoes, new season, fresh start for all of us. This summer is going to be fantastic, and I'm going to finish ongoing projects, start new and exciting ones, and take steps toward achieving professional satisfaction. Don't get me wrong - I'm not going to be too manic! There will also be lots of time for dancing in the living room with my family, making sun tea, playing red light/green light with Brynne in the back yard, splashing around in the pool (must find that rash guard!), and eating all the berries I can! I'm so glad I'm not the only one thinking about cleaning up and fresh starts!

(Un)Finished Business!

While working on my quilt for the Modern Quilt Along, I frequently wondered if the name for the project, Unfinished Business, was a curse. I knew that my husband had chosen the most difficult pattern in the book, but I'm a reasonably confident quilter, and the difficulty level didn't intimidate me... at first. Selecting the fabrics was somewhat challenging, largely because my chosen colors (greys) were not very common in any of the shops I visited. It was also a bit difficult for me to step away from buying only fabrics I *love*, and instead choosing fabrics because they would work with the pattern. For this quilt, I purchased and used many fabrics I didn't particularly like, placing my trust in the pattern itself and haivng faith that I would be happy with the end result.

Cutting the fabric strips and irregular shapes was easy, if time consuming, and beginning the piecing wasn't too bad. This was the calm before the storm... The real headaches with the pattern came when it was time to begin joining the "blocks" (and I use that word very loosely because these aren't blocks in the traditional sense - each one is totally unique). Because I wanted to be somewhat thrifty with my fabric, joining the pieces was like a giant puzzle. I tried to match pieces that would best fit together without a lot of fabric waste while also trying to keep a lot of variety (of fabrics, shapes, sizes) in each of the blocks. I cursed my way through the first "row" of the quilt, but learned some lessons along the way. The next rows came more and more quickly, and by the fourth row, I really felt as if I knew what I was doing.

Because the fabrics are not all joined parallel or perpendicular to the grain, this quilt is pretty squirrely to work with - lots of stretch and wiggling. Squaring up each row was scary (am I cutting "straight"?!?), and the moment of truth came when all the rows were joined... is it square? are the sides straight? Thanks to lots of double and triple and quadruple measuring, the finished top was pretty square.

I decided to quilt as it was shown in the book. I selected random, irregular "blocks" and free-motion quilted concentric rectangles within the block. I didn't try to quilt straight lines (really!), and I wanted them to be funky, irregularly spaced, and full of motion - much like the patchwork itself. I used 4 different color threads (in the bobbin too) to closely match the overall value of each row. But because I was using the same colors of thread on the front and back of the quilt, the quilting thread changes on the back and is more or less apparent depending on the area of the quilt. I didn't bind the quilt, but used the knife-edge technique to close the sides. Rather than topstitching by machine, I handstitched it closed using the ladder stitch.

front of quilt

quilt back is a fantastic fabric from Lonni Rossi's typospheres collection. I love the greys and flashes of metallic silver - perfect for this quilt! I pieced the back in 4 segments that match the 4 segments on the front.

Here are some detail shots:

So glad it's finally finished, and so pleased with the final results. This one has been a long time coming, and I learned a ton in the process. I feel so much more confident as a quilter now... but I think I'm going to work on something a bit simpler for a bit!