Fish Tacos

The Fish Tacos I created when I found out that Diva had DRUNK THE ENTIRE BOTTLE OF LIME JUICE I WAS GOING TO USE FOR DINNER.

That.  Child.  Is.  Driving.  Me.  Crazy.

Fortunately, this forced a variation of fish tacos that turned out better than my last try, so here it is:

Ingredients:

• leftover fried fish (I had plaice, which is related to flounder.  Any mild white fish should work.)
• lime marmalade
• one can corn (not creamed)
• one can black beans
• one red onion
• fajita seasoning
• tortilla chips, cilantro, and sour cream for serving

1.  Pat any grease off the fried fish with a paper towel and chop small.  Mix in cans of corn and beans (both drained).  Depending on how much fish you started with, mince the red onion and add enough to taste.  Make sure you break up the onions as you add them.  Sprinkle on fajita seasoning (I use Penzey’s.).  (This could be even better with fresh corn and/or heirloom speckled beans.)

2.  Put about half a cup of lime marmalade (I had Dundee’s Key Lime Marmalade from the grocery store) in a microwavable bowl and heat until liquified (probably a minute or two).  Again, depending on how much you like the lime/sugar flavor of the marmalade and how much fish you started with (and how much you like or dislike the taste of fish!), you may want to use more.  Pour liquid marmalade over the fish mixture and toss gently.

3.  Let sit for about half an hour for flavors to meld.  Serve in a bowl with a dollop of sour cream, sprinkle with cilantro shreds, and offer lime tortilla chips on the side, or stuff tacos with the mixture.

Read Full Post »

The Chinese Mural

Ok, the paint smells are finally clearing, and I am delivering on the promise to show what I’ve been up to.

Ok, so this was the cute handprint design that the girls deemed “too babyish.”  *sigh*  I thought it was cute…

First day of painting: green and a red garden wall.

Add trees…

That weird stripe pattern is the beginning of the railing.

The first animals appear: peacock, elephants, Victoria crowned pigeon, insects.

The red panda at the zoo is the kids’ favorite, and it likes to sit just like this on the branches over the path.

They’re not the best zebras ever, but this should give you an idea of their size (and thus lack of detail).

Trees, bushes, and the base color of the giraffe.  I was a bit worried I’d mess up the animals, so I avoided the ones I couldn’t use the art projector on.

Empress is a *little* exicted about this… she had to be asked to please not pet the animals until the paint had cured for a week or two!

The lotus pond, moon bears, two lions sleeping on the man-made mountain.

The little details help.  These are peach-faced lovebirds, a dragonfly copied from one in the backyard, and, in the upper left, a tiger and her cubs (who are unsuccessfully trying to hunt a golden pheasant).

Pandas playing and African crowned cranes courting (thanks to photos we took at the zoo).

Ta da!  The toddler bed was turned into a couch with a shelf, a dragonfly lantern, and a fake potted orchid.  They love to read over there.

The view from the desk under the bed.  The dragon-tiled ceiling and details are copied from photos I took in the Forbidden City.

I have a few details left to do on the bed, but it’s nearly done.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief foray into “what Kathy does when the obsessive instinct takes off”. 

Read Full Post »

Paint Pain

My daughters informed me that the time was right to act on that discussion we’d had on what they might like to do if we repainted their room.  Four or more hours each day since last Friday, and I’m still not done, but they’re very impressed.  Heck, Oof is impressed, because one of the trees extends over part of the ceiling.

I’ll be back eventually with more photos.

Yes, that’s a peacock, against a traditional Chinese railing (how?  LOTS of blue painters’ tape!), under a cherry blossom tree, with a vast expanse of garden waiting to be filled between the railing and that wall in the distance.

This is how I “relax” from homeschooling, since they won’t leave me alone long enough to read if I actually sit down!

Read Full Post »

Comparing Apples to Pears to Bananas

Angela at Parisienne Farmgirl is running a series called “Eat like a Parisienne… Work out like une Americaine“.  So far, it seems to involve French cooking, wine, and cakes, and it certainly seems to work for Angela.  I’m waiting to find out what I’m missing, because I’m there on the butter in my cooking, wine, and sweets… but I don’t seem to be getting results like Angela’s.

Now, she has been very clear that she is aiming for health and trimness, not necessarily an arbitrary number.  She described herself as curvy and happy with that.  She put up a photo of Marilyn Monroe; to put it mildly, Monroe would not be considered anywhere near skinny enough to work in Hollywood today.

However, as a bit of an aside in the initial post, Angela quoted a formula that said that for every inch over 5 foot, you get five pounds over 100.

Hence, at 5’7″, this formula would say I should be 135 pounds.  Heck, according to the last standardized height-weight chart I saw, I was in the “morbidly obese” category, and that was a *few* pounds ago.

Except I’m not.  I may be a stout hourglass, but I still have hourglass measurements.  I work out, I dig in the garden for hours (I’m talking turning over dirt to a depth of 18 inches, not lazily poking around with a hand trowel), and I pulled about 60 pounds of kids behind my bike on a six mile ride this afternoon at a decent clip.  The last time I was that weight, I was a plebe (freshman) at the Naval Academy.  The last time I got back to within thirty pounds of that 135 number, friends were worried I was sick.  The last time I lost anything like that amount of weight, I had mono and couldn’t eat more than a slice of bread with a little jelly each day for a month or so, followed and preceded by months of the sight of food making me so nauseous I was hardly eating.

Doctors have told me that I need to conform to the chart, because “everyone” should be those weights.  Why are they surprised when patients throw their hands in the air and cry, “It’s not possible; why bother?”  (Accentuating the “why bother” attitude, my younger daughter just had her annual check up: 50% height, 40% weight… 60% BMI.  Huh?)

We’ve all met people who could seriously stand to lose a lot of weight who say, “Oh, I’m just big boned.”  It’s an abused excuse.  The fact that it’s abused is no reason to ignore that people really do come in different body types.

Just a thought:

Arabian: average height 15 hands, average weight 900 pounds

Photo by Aline Sagrableny from Wikipedia Commons.

American Cream Draft: average height 15.1 hands, average weight 1700 pounds (Photo from Wikimedia Commons, no author listed)

Now, if you were several of my previous doctors, you’d condescendingly inform the Cream Draft that it really ought to lose 800 pounds, because at that height, horses should only weigh 900 pounds.

Except that, obviously, nobody’s going to say that.  Both the Arabian and the Cream Draft team in the pictures are considered prime specimens.  They are the same height, but they have different body types.  And so do people.  Since people don’t vary as dramatically as horse breeds, double the average would be excessive, but not everyone should be aiming for the average weight.  (It would be nice if more doctors would acknowledge that fact instead of pointing at the chart, rolling their eyes, and saying all problems would disappear if I’d only conform to the weight on the chart.)

I was in Cannes, France, for the annual Cannes Film Festival.  The city was awash in all the beautiful people who work in the film industry.  Most of the women on the street were four inches shorter than me and looked like they might weigh 90 pounds.  The locals in the Navy League (a pro-navy club) told us that the locals and people from the surrounding towns avoid Cannes during the festival.

Sure enough, the day after the festival closed, the occupants of the cafes were decidedly different, because the locals were out and about again.  Suddenly, the average age and weight went up significantly.

I have to point out that French women who aren’t adorably skinny don’t write diet books about how skinny French women are!  Nor do they usually write books called Not All French Women Are Size 2, so we forget about them a bit.  Also, French women are- bear with me a second- French.  (Have you ever see a diet book called Slovak Women Don’t Get Fat?  Let me tell you: there’s a reason for that.)  Americans are British, German, Eastern European, and every other ethnicity out there.  My sister-in-law, adopted from South Korea, has trouble staying above 100 pounds.  My mom’s side of the family (Slovak) just tries to not go past cylindrical to pear shaped.  I suppose the average of those extremes would tell you that the formula works, but common sense would disagree.

Thinner is not necessarily better.  The chart doesn’t know you, only some mythical “average” American.

Now go read Angela and find your beautiful best size.

Read Full Post »

New magazine that is simplement incroyable!

No, I did not suddenly forget how to spell.  And, yes, the new magazine is simply incredible.  And, yes, I can say it in French.  (Six years of French and a minor in it, so I can drop phrases and talk to myself in a foreign language… maybe not quite what the educators had in mind when they added foreign language requirements!)

I have previously mentioned the Parisienne Farmgirl’s blog.  Now, let me show you the magazine:

(Click on the cover to see the animated flipping mini-mag with the first dozen or so pages.)  Isn’t it gorgeous?!?  Yes, I have subscribed, and I have to tell you, it goes on for 122 pages, each as lovely as the last.

If you head over to Parisienne Farmgirl and subscribe to the magazine, you can also enter the crepe cake contest.  (A crepe cake, which she says is the Next Big Thing after the cupcake craze, is simply a stack of crepes (flat), with some sort of filling or spread in between the layers.)  I’d show you pictures of my efforts, but you’re going to have to wait until after the submission deadline (May 1), since I have some vague hopes of making the next issue as one of the top ten recipes, and I’d like to keep my bright (?) ideas to myself until then!

Read Full Post »

Often, Simple is Best

As I’ve been getting over the fact that, no, we are NOT moving and, no, I will NOT be getting a farm or goats or even chickens anytime soon, I’ve still been cruising a number of lovely homesteading websites.  (And trying to convince myself that I enjoy sleeping past dawn and being able to go out for the day without worrying about livestock way too much to have the farm I was dreaming of.  Because, of course, I had huge, detailed plans working out on various clipboards around the house about all the different animals I wanted and how it was all going to work together.)  Anyways…

I highly recommend Homestead Revival; I found her overall philosophy about encouraging family, home, and homemaking very grounding.  Plus, her dishwasher powder recipe is wonderful (I was using just Borax and baking soda; the washing soda, borax, and citric acid combo is working so much better!).

Through her, however, I found the Parisienne Farmgirl.  She has French flair.  And cooking, gardening, and fashion.  (I don’t normally “do” fashion; I have always been hopelessly lacking in the style department.  I choose to blame more than ten years in the Navy, wearing outfits that were all khaki, all white, or all black for most of that decade.  Then again, my mom would tell you I didn’t have any style sense before that, either…)

So, trying to wrap my head and heart around the fact that I did not have to say goodbye to this house (and trying to re-discover reasons to like it instead of reasons why I could be happy to move), I decided it was time for some kitchen renovation.  We looked at floors (wouldn’t you know it, the only pattern available in the square size and exact color to go with the existing paint was one of the most expensive linoleums in the store?).  We looked at countertops (easy to pick, hard to pay for).  I picked up a $1400 stove for only $799 at a Sears outlet because it had a huge dent in the stainless surround (and we had the $70 part ordered from Amazon, delivered for free, and swapped out within a week.  Holy cow, I adore finally having two oven spaces in my stove.).

Then, I looked around and had to admit that the kitchen could use some organizing and counter-clearing before we sunk any more money into it.

You know how things just accumulate?  Someone moves or downsizes and gifts you with some dishes.  You add a stack of adorable bowls that are just what you’ve been looking for to compliment your dishes.  You come back from China with a sudden taste for the good green teas (maybe that’s just us…).  And it all gets tucked in, wedged in, squashed in… until, one day, you realize that it just isn’t working anymore.

First problem: I couldn’t reach my toaster oven without a lot of digging.  Plus, the coffee maker was just too much work to drag out of the cabinet, especially before having had any coffee.

Solution: possibly the cheapest appliance garage ever.  No, not a cabinet extension, just some fabric.  When I made the curtains, I bought everything that was left on the bolt of this toile.  I’ve used it to make cushions for the high chair, a curtain to hide the back of a bookcase that blocks the door between the kitchen and the library, and curtains to cover the storage shelves in the laundry room.

This curtain is simply a long rectangle (not quite twice as long as the length of the two sides of the hidden area), hemmed on all sides, with very small grommets pounded in along the top edge.  Under the cabinet, three screws hold up a piece of coated florist’s wire, which simply strings through the grommets, and then gets wound around a screw to secure it.  It slides very easily.

My new “garage” perfectly fits the coffee maker and the toaster oven.  Morning coffee has quickly become an appreciated luxury.  We’ve used the toaster oven more in two weeks than in the past two years.  I can’t believe I didn’t think of this sooner!

(One note: if you do this, make sure the curtain is pulled well away from hot appliances!  When the toaster oven is in use, I pull the curtain all the way back to the wall and pin it there with something.)

Of course, this freed up lots of space.  I put some saucers and coffee cups that match my main dishware in the hard-to-reach corner previously occupied by the toaster oven.  This allowed me to rearrange the dish cabinet so that I didn’t have so much stacking, and it made room for my new rice grain bowls.  (I have just fallen absolutely in love with Etsy.  I’m sure the rest of you all know all about it, but I’m only just discovering it.  I’ll have to show off some of my finds in a post soon.)  I had to get rid of a countertop spice rack I’d never liked to empty the corner for the new garage, so I wound up totally relocating my spices closer to the stove and the main prep area.  The shelf directly over the coffee pot is now entirely turned over to hot chocolate, coffee, and teas.

After all the rearranging, which took several days, the kitchen is much more enjoyable to work in.  Believe it or not, I cleaned out and reorganized so well that I have several empty shelves and some cabinet space that I don’t know what to do with!  I had already found a shelf for the phone books and turned one drawer into the “current pile” storage, instead of leaving the pile on the corner of the counter.  So, for now, the empty spaces remain empty.

My counters are suddenly almost completely bare and successfully staying that way!

What a weird sensation…

Read Full Post »

The Old is New Again

Late Thursday night, my DH headed off to bed, questioning why I was still up.

“But Jen is in Texas.”

Huh?

“Jen.  At Conversion Diary.  So the 7 Quick Takes post doesn’t go up until 1 am our time, and I have to get on it right away if I want to be near the top of the list.”

He rolled his eyes and went to bed.

Another benefit of being up late, blogging: I heard the milk truck.    Yes, I have a milk truck.  We just started getting milk delivered again.  The previous company, a local one that, sadly, went out of business, used to deliver around 2 am, and I really startled that delivery driver when I opened the door as he was filling the box a couple of times!  (Also the blog’s fault.)

Waiting for 1 am to tick over, I heard a truck stop outside.  Weird, I thought.  Then I heard clanking coming up the front walk, followed by the *swiffff* of the cooler box opening.  More clanking and the *shuff* of the cooler being closed.  Music to my ears!

Read Full Post »

The Culture is Not Your Friend

My DH took Diva and Empress to the annual Daddy-Daughter Dance at our parish a few weekends back.  It was tremendously girly, and the girls came home bubbly and bouncy.  They had a wonderful time and stayed up way too late to tell me all about it.  Once they were finally persuaded to calm down and go to bed and were out of earshot, Daddy moaned that he needed some form of detox and started looking for his favorite potato chips and the most un-girly Wii game he could find.

But the girls looked really, really cute.  (No, my DH can’t smile for a camera to save his life.  You should see our wedding pictures; he looks like he’s in pain in most of the shots.)

Then DH started telling me about the details of the night.  The included ”Daddy bucks” were for use at the gambling tables (for grade schoolers?  they couldn’t think of anything else?).  The initial music was a live singer doing Frank Sinatra covers; DH said he was really great, he ad libbed lyrics, he seranaded individuals, etc.  However, then the DJ came on, the music got progressively louder, and the dads gravitated to the end of the gym where you could still hear yourself think while the girls danced to the not-always-appropriate music nearer the speakers.  Oh, and if you didn’t want to gamble with your Daddy bucks, you could put them in the raffle drawings, including one for a “Breaking Dawn” DVD set.  Goody.

I recently had a discussion with another mom at our homeschooler park group who bemoaned her Catholic parents just letting her watch anything, including Madonna, chalking it up to lousy Catholic morals.  Ok, yeah, but my in-laws are Evangelicals, and they have the exact same problem: even pieces of the culture that are marketed to young (and younger and younger) kids aren’t always appropriate, but we’ve had a horrendous time convincing them of that.  They sometimes blithely ignore our wishes and have shown our kids things we objected to, with a, “But it’s only a cartoon!”  Ok, but when it’s Happy Feet, and the penguins are singing “I Wanna Sex You Up”, don’t you see the problem with that, cartoon or not?  (Apparently not.)

Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry has always been about pushing the limits, “What can we get away with to get attention?”  Nothing has changed, it’s only accelerated.  And every year, we seem to push sexiness and boy-chasing further and further down the age scale.  “Oh, but Hannah Montana is a tween show,” they protested.  Ok, then why was she all over almost every single piece of six-year-old clothing the year Diva was in that size?  Let alone what happened shortly after that annoying shopping year, when Miley Cyrus turned eighteen and “grew up” by going hyper-sexy.  I wonder how many moms were wishing they’d been a bit more discerning about what their six-year-olds were watching, when their seven-year-olds had to be weaned off idolizing Ms. Cyrus as she tried to publicly self-destruct.

A Daddy-Daughter dance sponsored by a parish ought to be a safe place, culture-wise.  I mean, half the point is to fight the culture’s corrosive influences by giving the girls a special night with their Dad.  As someone once told me, “Honey, make sure her daddy tells her he loves her.  That way, when some boy says, ‘But, baby, I love you!  Come on!’ she’ll know what real love and a real man looks like.”  Want your daughters to have healthy, lasting marriages?  Be a good dad and watch what they watch and listen to.

People, the culture is NOT your friend, especially when it comes to raising girls.  Do you want to encourage your girls to gamble?  Or go after dangerous guys?  To dress sexy?  To push the limits on modesty and behavior?  I’m guessing not.

Let’s think a bit more, please.

Read Full Post »

Decadent Monday Dinner

Ok, you may or may not agree with me on this when you find out what it is, but let me tell you…

THIS STUFF IS AWESOME!

(ok, it may have been the huge amounts of butter and olive oil, combined with a chaotic day, and the decadence of cooking this ONLY for me and not having to share for once…)

I got the idea from a book I just finished, The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball.  Kimberlie mentioned it in a 7 Quick Takes a few weeks back as a “why I never want a farm” kind of read.  I read it for the completely opposite reason: I want a farm.  Badly.  I’m not getting one any time soon, but we had a possibility that fell through for a job change… and now I realize how much that desire never died.

The book is an interesting read.  There are occasional recipe descriptions (but no actual “1 cup of this, 1 tsp of that…”) and lots of farm life.  For the morally sensitive, yes, she sleeps with him before he proposes (the food gets more descriptive time) and moves in with him more than a year before the wedding… and then nearly leaves him right after the wedding.  But, finally, she does realize something plenty of us need to realize: travel or running from marriage or running from the committment of the farm isn’t the solution.  We’re most afraid of ourselves, but hiding it under movement and committment avoidance.  In the end, she goes home from her writing assignment in Maui, dives back into the farm and her marriage, and then wrote a book about the entire experience. 

Anyways, when the author first met her future husband, she cooks something like this for the farm crew, although I think she said she used kale.

Poached Eggs in Swiss Chard

one baby leek or several scallions (sliced, white and green parts)

big bunch of swiss chard (stems and leaves, sliced into ribbons)

half a stick of butter

olive oil

balsamic vinegar (I used pomegranate-infused)

eggs

leftover shrimp scampi (Optional.  DH made it for my birthday; the shrimp had garlic, thyme, and even more butter.)

slices of homemade bread

Dubliner white cheddar (or any other sharp white cheese; I think orange cheddar would be the wrong flavor for this)

1.  In a small frying pan, melt the butter.  Add sliced leeks and saute until soft.

2.  Pile in the chard, stem pieces first.  Cover (I used my dinner plate) and let cook down slightly.  Drizzle generously with olive oil and balsamic vinegar.  Stir, re-cover, and cook until limp.

3.  Make a bit of a well in the limp chard mixture.  Think “nest”; the pan should not show through the bottom.  Crack an egg into each nest.  Re-cover and let the eggs poach.  (I nestled some shrimp in between the eggs at this point.)

4.  When eggs are white and cooked through, but not hard, you’re done!  Serve on top of thin slices of homemade bread (mine had a seed mixture in it).  Top with thin slices of the cheese.

Read Full Post »

7 Quick Takes Friday: What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Last Sunday, several people at church commented to the kids about summer being “half over”… which it isn’t for us, since we homeschool.  In fact, it’s all over.

You know how they tell you that the population of the South didn’t really start to increase significantly until the invention of the air conditioner?  They aren’t kidding.  There are reasons for this, and August is the main one.  So, instead of listening to a month of, “But I don’t want to go outside!  *whine*  It’s too hot!” we start school at the beginning of August.  This has the lovely secondary effect of us being done with school by the beginning of May, when the weather is frequently lovely and the garden needs a ton of work.

All that being said, I offer (in homage to teachers past who seemed to love the old standby): What I did on my summer vacation, by the Political Housewyf

1.  I made an awning.  Three 2x2x8 treated pine poles, pipe strapping (DH insisted I shouldn’t screw the poles directly into the dock walls), six large screw eyes, six D-rings, a package of huge grommets, some PVC pipe and the stand from the failed patio umbrella (to hold up the fourth corner, where I couldn’t install a pole), and yards and yards of fabric (on sale!).  The D-rings stay in the grommets and hook quickly into the screw eyes.  It takes about two minutes to walk down to the dock and put it up.

And this view is part of why I haven’t gotten a whole lot of blogging done lately…

2.  I read Eats, Shoots, and Leaves.  The cover has a panda with a smoking gun running away.  (If you don’t get it, you need this book!)  I loved it and discovered that some of my odd punctuation practices would be considered proper in British punctuation but not American.  Thanks to my high school English teachers (who were better at imparting grammar than enthusiasm for Shakespeare), none of the grammar rules was new to me, but the book is very funny.

Sticklers of the world unite!  You have nothing to lose but you’re your misplaced apostrophe’s apostrophes’ apostrophes!  (Contrary to what some of you may think after reading my blog, I do know grammar rules… I just choose to break them upon occasion.  And I shall continue to do so. )

3.  I killed a whole lot of trees doing adoption paperwork.  Our dossier finally went to China in June, got assigned the all-important log-in date (LID) quickly, and… now we wait again.  We hope to see our LOA from China before the end of August, which then triggers- get this- even more paperwork.  But at least we got some updated photos.  (No, no photo here.  Yes, everyone else does, but “everyone else” usually has a adoption-specific website that doesn’t get into criticizing certain governmental policies.)

The good news is that I have rediscovered the joys of the Rumor Queen’s website, populated by number crunching waiting parents who, like me, want more info than the adoption agencies are usually willing to commit to.  (The agency says, “Well, it could be four to six months…” and the number crunching waiting dad says, “The average for the year, over two hundred familes, has been 74 days.”)

4.  I made sushi.  No, no raw fish (which is technically sashimi, a subset of sushi).  A trendy little sushi place in Richmond (I don’t think we’re cool enough or left-leaning enough for it, honestly) had a special one time we were in there on our way back from running adoption paperwork in DC.  They called it Kong’s Lunchbox, and it had tempura-fried banana, peanut butter, and grape jelly in a sushi roll.  The kids adored it, which is why what was supposed to be a photo of happy kids eating sushi has no sushi slices in it.

Ah, there it is, along with some tempura-fried figs and pickled ginger.  Good stuff.  (My DH informed me that the tempura-fried okra was not acceptable.  I suspect it’s because the tempura doesn’t coat heavily enough to disguise the vegetable.)  (Tempura-fried green beans are really good, too.  Start with fresh, raw ones.)

5.  I grew rice, although, really, it’s very low-maintenance, so I can’t claim much credit.  It started out tiny and pathetic.  Recently, though, I told Empress to stand behind it to show off how tall it is… except that you can’t really see her in the photo, the rice is so tall!  So, I took another shot with her in front of it.  The rice seems to take up a ton of water; I’m not keeping it full of water constantly, because of mosquitoes (I let the top of the soil dry just a bit in between floodings), but it does get watered every few days in this heat, especially since it is in a windy location (it makes the nicest swishing sound in the breeze), which could be causing it to lose water faster.  Just this morning, I found a fat, bulging part that is about to erupt into the seed head!  Woo hoo!

6.  I spent way too much at my friend Jen’s favorite local yarn store in DC, Yarn Cloud.  Yarn stores are usually nice, but this one is gorgeous!  Well-lit, easy to navigate, and the yarn is well-arranged.  What do I mean by well-arranged yarn?  Some was stacked neatly on shelves, but lots of it was hung on peg board display hooks, which encourages you to touch the yarn… which is how my bill got so big.  Once you start petting the yarn, all kinds of wonderful projects come to mind, and oh, that linen blend feels interesting and…  (If you’re on a strict budget, DON’T PET THE YARN!)  The priority right now, however, is to get the baby’s blanket on the loom: a single-ply silk blend weft on a plied silk blend warp, both in a gorgeous, deep shade of red.  Yes, photos will be forthcoming whenever I get going.

7.  I pulled my SIL’s Christmas present out again.  It’s an embroidered map of Middle Earth.  I spent more than an hour tying knots to make Mirkwood last night, and it’s nowhere near done.  (As I told her, “The forests are taking hours each, and that’s just the small ones on the fringe of the map that don’t figure in the stories.  I’m not sure I like you this much…”)  I had been avoiding it, because I couldn’t figure out how to do mountains.  I think I figured out a decent solution, but you’ll have to wait for a photo; it’s just too unfinished right now!

As always, I’ve been a bit wordy for “quick takes”, but there it is!  Go check out Jen at Conversion Diary for a weekly dose of 7 Quick Takes from her and dozens of other bloggers.

Read Full Post »