What it says on the tin.
Photo by my dad (Ken), faked Life cover artwork by his dad.
Day of the Dead Goddess and her offerings
My aerobics instructor many moons ago gave everyone little gifts. Other got pens, stationery, etc. – I got a little walking triceratops. His stomping mechanism broke quite a while back, but he’s one of the few tchotchkes* I’ve kept around, and I can bounce him along and go “grr grr grr” as needed.
He had a turn around the desk this morning. No villagers were harmed.
* spelling according to Google, on which all knowledge resides
Two Christmas stockings. Mine was knit by my mother in the early 50s. The other was of felt, made for her by a friend. Seemed an odd choice, but it’s got bells on so came out and went up seasonally with the other.
The Elder Women in my family considered tea towels a subset of dish towels. All of them should be soft and lintless. Tea towels come out with the fancy aprons when your luncheon friends, particularly the snooty ones, are going to be invading your kitchen.
Tea towels were fine linen; I still have (and USE) those inherited from my grandmothers and great aunts as they wear like iron.
Dishtowels were often from cotton flour or sugar sacks or the like. When I was in college my HS art teacher was scandalized when he ran across me buying cotton diapers; he confided to my mother that he hadn’t known I had gotten married (I hadn’t). She was dumbfounded when he asked her when I’d had my baby.
To my astonishment (undoubtedly due to your upcoming question) this genuine cotton meant-to-be-a-dishtowel circa 1957 showed up while working down the rag box recently. It bears my first attempt at embroidery. This little cherub is singing from a hymnal; her sisters were doing the “wash on Monday, iron on Tuesday” drill. I got partway through a second and ran in terror from such fancywork for decades.
Another useful trick is using a full (dry-style) cup for half of what you need. The ingredients should just touch the edges of the bottom and the lip. Forgive the drawing-with-the-side-of-the-wet brick quick-and dirty.
One of my vices.
Minimal-waste way to cut rounds:
This image immediately makes you think of:
Poll:
- nestling owls
- an amigurumi pattern
- Russian nesting dolls
- bacon with inverted toner fatigue
My Tame Tiger Torganization fan club button, from a kids’ show in the 50s.
Nightgown for my mom from a pattern I first worked up for her in 1984. I started with a much-beloved nightie that she’d worn to near-transparency. She’s modest and likes the style for its warmth (!). I used a sprigged heavy brushed tricot, similar to challis in softness and feel. When we Skype in our jammies she’s usually wearing her current one under her robe. Post from 2016.
OCD guys in the shipping department: this package of thin paper plates was swathed in bubble wrap.
re: freezing pies
You guys are making this too hard. You freeze crust discs.
Slap your pie dish upside-down on a piece of clean cardboard and draw at least 1” outside its edge. Cut out.
Do this again, slightly outside the first circle, so that you have two cardboard discs.
Make your crust. Lay the smaller disc on it and cut around it as many times as you’ve got dough.
Layer the crust blanks on the bigger disc of cardboard with waxed paper between.
Top with the smaller disc.
Pop it all in a ziplock and store in the freezer.
When you’re ready to make a pie, take out one or two discs. Lay the bottom one over the pie dish and let it soften/slump while you make the filling. Don’t let it get too soft.
That’s all there is to it.
Anklet to fit my mother’s first cousin once removed my second cousin brother* Chris, as an exercise.
Yes, the yarn is really that hideous.
- It’s a test
- I will in all likelihood never knit him a pair of socks. If so, not of this yarn.
- He’s colorblind (really) so trying it on wouldn’t gross him out. I might have problems with his dogs.
* My sister and I now call him this as it’s so much easier, and nobody cares.
How to prevent a dog from lunging:
This is a quick, amazing trick that works as long as your lead is long enough. It doesn’t hurt the dog. In my dog-walking days I used it on young dogs that outweighed me by about half again and would easily have pulled me flat.
Dyeing with black walnuts:
It’s the HUSKS, not the shells you crack to extract the nut meat. Where do you get them? You pick them up before mowing your yard, and they’ll stain your hands (which is the idea, right?). I see that entrepreneurs sell them online, too.
One of B. Kliban’s famous cartoons.
Big Shoulders Department:
After enough time has passed, kids will figure out what grosses out their parents (mostly mothers) and adopt it, sometimes with a slight variation. Often it’s tied to a retro movie with photogenic actors strutting the old stuff.
Look at Joan Crawford’s giant square shoulder pads and Yves St. Laurent’s fashions.
Crawford and Loretta Young led the big-shoulders crowd. In Young’s case, her gowns were built up and out to distract from or outright camouflage what she considered her long, scrawny neck. When the studio insisted on a wide bare neckline, she almost always twisted or raised a shoulder. In the second photo she’s working it all.
IIRC, Godfather 2 came out when the drop shoulder style was in full cry. I was so startled by this image:
Square pad AND a puff! But she looked good! How could that be?!
For costuming for a clown belly dancer, her “belt” like this was made of red-and-white plastic fishing bobbers. She clacked rather than jingled.
I am deeply suspicious of what this piglet has done with its littermates.
Mug Cozy custom made by Irene Ramalho:
It fits the mug perfectly (hard to engineer when the handle connects to the top, important for balance in large mugs) and has an space where the lips meet its rim (oh stahp you guys).
There’s some parallax, but it is a big mug and I do have small hands.
It has a bottom, too! I’ve never seen one with a bottom! I keep forgetting to take a shot as this is one of those magic auto-refilling mugs. Pour the tea over into something else, you suggest? Hmm.
The knitting pin is the one I’d have chosen of all her lovely ones, too. More of Irene’s superb engineering and attention to detail. Yes, I slid it down to see if the magnet through two sweaters would give apparent nipple enhancement. It did, but it’s best on the shoulder. Probably a good thing?
Blue highlights on black hair.
Old tatting sample board. Making a picot.
Tub of tatting supplies. About half was off-loaded to Virginia.
Tatted snowflakes of shiny thread, sparkley ribbon embroidery floss, and crystal beads.
There’s a limit to how far you can get with trying to make it make sense. This is deep into hindbrain territory: the emotional drivers that really run how we act.
Also, if you suspect, deep down, that you haven’t earned what you’ve got, then it’s terrifying to think that others will notice and be able to take it away from you. This is far below conscious level.
Related: the greatest fury comes against someone who’s seen you make an ass of yourself. Impossible to forgive their witnessing.
Kimball forebears. My paternal grandfather is standing at left.
Paternal grandmother. I cherish my grandmother’s high school graduation picture. I also have a little corked bottle of sand she scooped up on a beach on a trip to the Far Ocean (Pacific, from Nebraska) before she was married. I’ve been able to release back into the wild other less critical things of hers by keeping those.
As to the maternal side: my mother’s mother, Nana, was the youngest girl in the family; the kids ran: Jessie, May, Ethel and Edna (identical twins), Hazel and Helen, with the one boy, Bill, in there somewhere on the younger end. He wasn’t old enough for WWI and too old for WWII. The boys that were his older sisters’ age were in graves in France or mown down by the influenza pandemic by the time the girls were in long skirts. May died (diptheria?) in her teens. Bill, Edna and Nana married, the other three were Maiden Aunts.
The family homesteaded in Pender, Nebraska, about as far north and east as you can get without falling into the Missouri River and fetching up in Iowa.
Their father died young from a concussion from falling off a stage. No, not the kind with horses, a community theater one. Lizzie, Nana’s mom, was hard put to deal with her (at that point) seven kids experiencing one of the childhood epidemics, and had given birth to Helen a few months before. Ethel had a wooden leg since childhood.
Nana strongly resembled her mother: classic English faces. They could have modeled for this Royal Doulton figurine (my watercolor of Nana):
All the women in the family did “fancy work” (everything had two “good” sides). All of them knew how to crochet, knit, tat, do petit- and gros-point, embroider tea towels, etc. Aunt Jessie and Auntie Ethel were considered the most adept. I have linen towels Jessie wove. Nana knit (eventually ten sweaters/year for her five grandchildren’s birthdays/Christmases), Hazel majored in tatting and was relied on for edgings for handkerchiefs and miles (literally) of trim and insertion for pillowcases. Shower invitation in the mail? Call Hazel who’d go to the linen cupboard for you. Nana taught me to tat; I was the only kid who showed any interest in it, so Hazel’s things came to me.
In a family of brilliant, sharp-tongued (particularly Ethel), vivacious women, Hazel was the quiet one who stayed home. In a family of thin, small women who bore osteoporosis gracefully well into their nineties, Hazel developed acromegaly and became even more large and ungainly by comparison. Her sisters would occasionally haul her out for luncheon, where she embarrassed them by choosing fancy desserts and directing the waitress to bring hers at the start of the meal.
She sat in a Queen Anne armchair (the kind with wings) by a window with the best light for her work. She used hatpins to work the picots and usually had a couple stuck through the upper bosom of her house dress, which made the obligatory arrival-hug a challenge. Even when expecting company she preferred to go without stays, though she’d have lisle stockings rolled down to her ankles and Enna Jettick shoes. They all wore these in black (perhaps they owned stock); Hazel’s had lower heels.
There are few photos of Hazel past childhood, though I’ve got a good one between my ears right now, along with her raspy voice.
My grandmother lived in Nebraska but ordered her Enna Jettick shoes from “back east”. Due to an early accident, her feet were different sizes. These were also beloved by my great aunts, schoolteachers, and not a few orders of nuns. Heeled black lace-up oxfords. Margaret Hamilton wore them as both Oz personas.
My snow shovel:
My snow shovel is a plastic child’s scoop screwed to an adult ergonomic handle. It’s impossible for me to pick up more than will hurt me (even with heavy, wet stuff) and it pushes readily (which can be the better option).
Not exactly eating off Sèvres, but this cat I knew had her own designated Speshul Buffet Place to get noms. Her usual service monkeys were on a trip to Egypt.
Origami, Gecko and Fly:
I lust over this. Not to try to fold it, but to watch a master do it. I suspect there might be several days of pre-folding, starting with a piece of paper the size of a king bed sheet. It would be worth a lifetime of finished points, neh?
Being formally dressed is so wonderfully period. I love that we can tell what the guys’ hair smells like.
Drain rack over sink:
If you have a deep enough window and can find a shelf unit that will span your sink, it’s not difficult to assemble your own. I set this one up in 2013. The trick is that the legs stick up different heights.
This was when I first put it up. It now sits further back into the window.
I put it together, tried it, adjusted it, in a few days adjusted it again so there’s complete head clearance.
My apartment building is old. All the tile surfaces (including the window ledge) slant towards the sink.
xxx