In recent years, I’ve cut down on the amount of meat I eat and really ramped up on the number of eggs I eat.  This means that if I don’t want to get bored of eggs, I need multiple egg dishes in my recipe repertoire.  Poached eggs on toast: deee-lish.  Dutch baby (it has three eggs in it, so it totally counts as an egg dish): divine.  Scrambled eggs with omelette additions (such as the Denver scramble, with peppers, ham, and cheddar cheese): yum.  And quiche.

This post will not make much sense if you haven’t read part one.

When I put together my mixed media altered clock, I’d originally planned to use two family heirloom timepieces.  But I only had room for one, leaving my fancy watch needing a home.

My mother decided fairly early on in motherhood that she wasn’t going to allow her children to grow into picky eaters.  This resolution might have been driven in part by dealing with other parents’ finicky children when my mom did some daycare for awhile.

When I am in my studio messing around with mixed media ingredients, it’s messy.  Glues and pastes and paints and sprays and…very messy.  So I’ve been thinking that I need some sort of smock or apron to help keep my clothes clean.  And having seen several YouTube videos on the virtues of the Japanese crossback apron, I decided I’d make one of those.

Sausage rolls? Two ways? Yes, please!

I really do think that knitwear designers must be secret geniuses. Take the sock, for example: a hand knit sock is a tube that makes a 90° turn at the heel and then continues on being a tube until you get to the toe, where you close it up. Or, if you were a Philistine and started from the toe, you would end at the top of the sock.

Chocolate and peanut butter.  The perfect pairing.  Is there any way to improve on this delight?  I would say yes…add some oatmeal.  Then you’ve gone past perfect and into sublime.

For this week’s post, I asked my three nephews to tell me their favorite board games.  The conditions for selection were 1) they had to own the games, 2) they had to have played them, and 3) they had to play them with me so I could write about them.  What follows then is the top five games that they could (mostly) agree on.

I have a few surprisingly vivid memories from a time where I was about three years old.  Possibly a little younger, but I think three is about right.  One of these memories is of being left in the tender care of a grandmotherly lady from our family’s church, while my mom went off and did…mom stuff.  I don’t know.  I was three.

The Invisible Library.  Just those words send a little shiver of delight through me.  Books!  A library’s worth of books!  And “invisible?”  What does that mean?  Is that like a secret library?  Ooooo, I hope it’s a secret library.  MY secret library.

Emboldened by the rallying cry “Do it for the blog!”, I have managed to wade through another craft project that has waited in a corner of my studio for several years. Faux-stained glass.

As I have become in recent years “a woman of a certain age,” it seems more important than ever to exercise my brain and keep learning new things. To that end, I try to read interesting and possibly useful non-fiction books in amongst my steady diet of fiction.

I first saw the original store-bought C.C. Beanie hat on a co-worker, and took a bunch of pictures with the intent of reverse-engineering it myself for hand knitting. Imagine my delight to discover on Ravelry that someone else had already done that work!

Regardless of anyone’s opinion of COVID (leftist conspiracy theory, “bad cold,” world-threatening pandemic, etc), I think that no one can deny that the winter of 2020 when we were all wearing masks was a winter where fewer of us caught colds and flu…and COVID.

Read Part 1 first!

I might have mentioned this before, but I watch a lot of YouTube. A LOT. And one of the largest playlists in my personal YouTube library is for mixed media art. I am particularly fond of the steampunk aesthetic…gears and rust and pipes and valves and mechanical parts that may or may not perform any function.

I might have mentioned before how much I admire authors. I don’t want to use the word “idolize” (mostly because it doesn’t reflect well on me) but that word is probably accurate. And I am fortunate enough to personally know several published authors.

When I was a child, I loved to read. I devoured books and went searching for more. I was in a childhood friend’s closet one day digging for reading material when I found his comic book stash.

When I was a child, anytime my mother did something I particularly liked, usually involving food, I declared that a new tradition, thereby trapping my mother into having to fulfill the “tradition” every year.