this creative place

 Things are happening around here. And readers, we are not moving far away, we just need to move closer in to our workplaces. Our house will be listed very soon and it feels exciting!

I thought I would show you the fruits of my recent organizing. Imagine this: a clean and neat craft cupboard where I can find everything! "Oh, you need a thank-you note? Second shelf down on the left." "Valentine supplies? Bottom shelf." I got rid of a LOT: a big garbage bag went out to the dump, yard sale pile, and then lots of little bits to special people here and there.

Knitting project in the works for a lot of babies waiting to be born... Booties meant to stay on little feet that are shaped like little Volkswagon buses, because that is the shape of a nice, chubby baby foot. And if you are a regular reader, I am sure you are familiar with what that looks like. I found the pattern on Ravelry, but I had to make a lot of changes to it, so I will rewrite it here when I have finished.

Sylvan's shelter diorama is finished! He picked the Mongolian yurt. We felted using wet and dry techniques for the yurt and the sheep. And for the base, we got a lovely piece of birch plywood that he made a watercolor wash on, then added colored pencil to indicate grass. He made the figure out of beeswax, and we added a fireplace inside (with a fire made of colored wool), and a little sleeping bed. Do you like the tuft of smoke?

 You can just see the fireplace in the picture below:

And the beautiful colored pencil geometric construction that Jonas made this week. His shading is really excellent and I love his color choices.

 After the internal cleansing we did, I have so many new ideas about food and my body. I learned a lot about what my body likes, needs, and doesn't like. I learned that I need a big lunchtime salad and that I feel a lot lighter without gluten products. So I have been experimenting with some different ways of baking. This recipe has been adapted from the beYOUtiful cookbook, La Tartine Gourmand  by Beatrice Peltre. You should get your hands on it, it is so worth a look.

Banana Chocolate Chunk Muffins---Vegan and Gluten Free

This will make one dozen muffins and a small loaf of bread

4 T. flax meal soaked in 8 T. water for a few minutes

4 ripe bananas

2/3 c. canola or vegetable oil

½ c. applesauce, unsweetened

2/3 c. maple syrup

1 ½ c. nut meal (almond or pecan)

1 ½ c. brown rice or millet flour

¾ t. baking soda

1 ½. t. baking powder

salt

1 t. cinnamon

chocolate chunks (good quality chocolate, semi or bittersweet), however much you think is enough

Chopped nuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 350. Oil pans, or use muffin cups

Put your bananas in a standing mixer and mash them. Soak your flax meal for a few minutes.

Mix up your dry ingredients in a separate bowl: flour, meal, baking powder and soda, salt, cinnamon.

To the mashed bananas, add soaked flax, oil, applesauce, and syrup, and mix well.

Now add dry into wet in a couple of additions. Then fold in chocolate chunks and nuts, if you are using them.

Scoop batter into muffin cups filling up to about ¾ full. Put the rest into a greased loaf pan.  Bake at 350 for 20 or so minutes. When they start to smell good is the time to test them.

~Holiday 1: Preparing~

~favorite handmade ornaments~

all the Eichenlaub news fit to print

Christmas Eve hike up Beech Hill with friends and kids and Santa's Little Helper, in the frigid wind and gorgeous afternoon light. The wind was bitter and our cheeks were shiny and pink with cold on the way down. But our hearts were light and warm from good companionship!

It's important that everyone get their daily required dose of baked goods this time of year. Fat Means Flavor is Jake's idea for a way to advertise butter.

beautiful pie crust in process by my mother-in-law

Still Making Things, little clutches from a pattern by KeykaLou. Cute Cute Cute! And I came up with a few pattern shortcuts after I made a few. :) The making part took a little while to return, but it's back now, as I begin to feel less like a Mama with a brand new baby and more like a person again. A person who can see her friends! And stay up past 7 pm most nights! Who can, once again, bake for her family!

This person, below, just turned 13, even though this picture makes him look like he's going off to college! What a big (bigger than me!), handsome, clever, and intuitive fellow.

The 3 Fs

Friends, Family, Food. The most important and the best. (And reading.)

This year I didn't have to host a big Thanksgiving and I didn't have to travel far either. Yay and hooray! We had a white Thanksgiving and our first snowplow!

good cheer!

In other news, let me tell you how thrilled I am that our 3rd grader had his first homework: to make foccacia.

He copied the recipe at school and brought it home, read it himself, gathered the ingredients, kneaded the dough, with only the occasional check-in with me.

He was delighted and so proud, literally skipping through the house as he waited for it to rise. With no standardized testing interfering with instructional time, a teacher who requires children to greet adults respectfully (and stand when an adult enters the classroom), knitting and handwork, and homework like this, I am grateful every day for the education my boys are getting. Oh and there's still time for academics, and I do mean all of them, not just language arts and math!

and the craft was all around

birthday table setting

In all rooms, in all media, in all corners, at all times of day, some secret, some not secret, with friends, alone, with Christmas music or hiphop, while reading, at night, morning, and afternoon.
Crafts with scissors and glue.

Or just scissors.

Fabric, of course. These are going to a sweet family of three: hankies for the whole family!

So I was invited to participate in a cookie swap, a first for me. I blithely said sure, thinking I'd make a batch of cookies and bring them to swap a few with the ladies involved. Actually what I had happened upon was a cookie swap not intended for the faint of heart.

pj pants for my dear boys

shhh! secret!

(Did I mention that the instigator might have a future in roller derby? Yup, she's hardcore as well as a fellow fan of hedgehogenalia and cute little toadstools.)

So we were to make two dozen cookies for each of the participants (6 total, including ourselves), which friends, let me spare you the math, is 144 cookies total. (In laywoman's terms that translates to a metric $%^@-ton of cookies.) The idea is that you can make up little boxes for teachers and friends, etc. which on paper is totally, absolutely great and logical.

I broke it down into a half-day of dough making and a half-day of baking, followed by an hour of icing. Which worked out fine, as I had chosen a recipe for sliced cookies. But now I am faced with transport: iced cookies do not like to be squished. I have every available cookie sheet and one pizza pan covered in iced lemon sugar cookies.

And then there was my own dear sweet boy who turned twelve this week. The morning of his birthday was quite the same as the morning of his very first: rosy dawn and snowy. He was wide-eyed and curious about the world then as now, though over the years we have gotten to know his unique twinkle, humor, generosity, and grace. He loved the tricky candles that kept relighting until we were gagging from the smoke!

Thank you all for contributing to my growing list of Grandma-isms! Jake is totally digging them, especially "Lord love a duck!" since one of his students is a real duck-lover. Please do add more as they come to you.

The Buttercup Bag Sew-Along was a delight---lots of quiet concentration, some laughs, differing approaches in all of our collective creative wisdom, great fabrics, and some yummy treats. I brought Cheddar Cheese and Dill scones from my very favorite baking cookbook, Once Upon a Tart. (And as an aside, the distributors all seem to be out of stock of this gem, so quick, buy up the ones on Amazon! A used one is going for $1.50, for Pete's sake! I am serious, do not let this one go out of print without owning it.)

that's mine, up front with the blue buttons,

a gift for a favorite girl called Sophie

Someone around here recently had a meltdown about the kids not being more on top of their chores (hint: it wasn't me). In the back of my mind I had been meaning to make something based on an idea Soule Mama had on her blog awhile back, called a chore board. I was too lazy (still am) to find the link on her blog and re-read the post for the details, but whatevs, I think I got the gist of it here and have adapted it to our use here with input from the lads.

So essentially it's just a bulletin board covered in some pretty fabric, with some pockets on it. Each boy has two pockets, an upper one and a lower one; they each picked the fabrics they liked. The top pocket is for Chores To Be Done, and the bottom one is for Chores that Have Been Completed. At the far right there are two more pockets: Indoor Chores and Outdoor Chores. Each boy has three chores of his own that stay the same each day, each written on a little cardstock ticket. Then each boy picks one Indoor and one Outdoor chore (also on the cardstock tickets), or alternatively THREE Indoor chores (since going outside is sooooo boring in this gorgeous summer weather we are finally having), tucking them into the To Be Done pocket when they are selected in the morning. Once you have completed a chore, you move your ticket to the bottom pocket. If you do extra chores each day, above and beyond your own three and however many Indoor/Outdoor ones you have selected, you get a point towards some incentives like selecting a favorite dinner/dessert, watching a movie, etc.

The result has been very positive, so far. One boy would much rather live in his books, which sometimes results in an unpleasant crash when he is asked to participate in normal household life. Today, knock on wood, he was engaged in chores for most of the morning, and then had some very lovely playtime with Legos and his brother, and a moderate amount of reading. Which I think brought him some balance. And certainly helped us, both emotionally and with the regular maintenance of the home.

So that I was free to work on this:

My next Barcelona Tiered Skirt.

And this.

The first Blueberry Pie of the season.

The filling recipe is from the Moosewood cookbook, but since I was out of lemons I used lime zest and juice. Delish, but honestly, hard to screw up a blueberry pie with fresh berries. The crust recipe is from Jerome and Frank, my two boys from Once Upon a Tart (have you ordered it yet?!), who helped me get over my pie crust anxiety so that I will never have to buy a gross store-bought one again. They give such wonderful step-by-step instructions in their book, with pictures. And there's all these great sidebars and stuff, like little quotes, as in Jerome saying something along the lines of: "I never use lowfat milk when baking, I mean why would I?" I just love those guys. Are you sold yet?