Birthday pictures!

Ty sampling the icing:

The cake & I:

Birthday present from the Jaegers:

Aran Skirt update: row 91 of 244 on the second piece!

My mother always took a picture of us kids on the first day of school. I don’t go to school anymore, but my husband does. Here he is on his first day of his last year ever as a student!

Praying Mantis invasion at work:

You can see a little bit of me in this one:

Felt like reading a bit more recently, so when Tyrone picked up Thomas Pynchon’s latest _Against_the_Day_ (at 1000+ pages), I decided it was time I finished _Cryptonomicon_ by Neal Stephenson (at 1100+ pages).

Oh, you spotted the bookmark. They are really lovely, and crocheted by Virginia Kennedy. Ty and I both got one for Christmas. I like the little gold flecks on the ribbon.

Now if I was really talented, I would write some sort of secret crochet code ala Dicken’s Madame Defarge , while reading _Cryptonomicon_, and make subversive bookmarks for my friends.

We biked to the track to celebrate in Tyrone style. He won 5 for 7 bets. I only won what I told him to bet for me.Last night he mentioned in passing a rhubarb upside-down cake. I found I had just enough flour and eggs to make the pineapple upside-down cake from the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook. It turned out pretty nice, and he was surprised to see the cake appear a couple of hours later.

My mother had just sent us a ton of rhubarb on Sunday night. It totaled 14 cups cleaned. I had to borrow some from my neighbor last Thursday to make 2 sets of rhubarb custard bars for the potlucks. (I definitely owe her some bars/cake now) The bars went over great! Each only had one piece left! I’ve been modifying the recipe to use up a bunch of powdered sugar. It really makes the custard more fun somehow.

When my mother found out that Tyrone like rhubarb, she started bringing me a big bag every couple of weeks. The “big bag” usually yeilds about 14 cups, which is way too much. I guess they’re not making wine with it this year.

I enjoy making rhubarb custard bars. This year, I made the first batch with Splenda, and it was so weird that I’m never making pie crust portion with it again. I’ve used 1/2 splenda, 1/2 sugar for the filling, and that seems to work out well.

Last night I cut up enough for another round of bars (5 cups), and 2 cups for Rhubarb-Strawberry Sorbet. The recipe was a variation on the Strawberry Sorbet that came with the ice cream maker:

2 C Rhubarb, cut into 1-inch pieces

2 C Strawberries, hulled, quartered

1 C Sugar

1 C Water

2-3 Tablespoons lemon juice

In a blender, pulse the strawberries + rhubarb + water. Pour into your ice cream maker with the sugar and juice. The original recipe called for 1/4 C of corn syrup, but I don’t like cooking with corn syrup. The sorbet actually turned out pretty tart. I added 2-3 tablespoons of Splenda, mid-processing, to make it sweeter without adding to the calorie content (we get enough of those).

On Saturday, we worked on the yard. Here is the backyard, pre-transformation:

The newest issue of CRAFT has an article about constructing fences. I had many sprouting potatoes, and wished to plant some. The littler garden I made wasn’t so much a raised bed to plant into, but a bed where I can mound the soil better as the potatoes grow. Here is the front view, crocheting twine to hold up the fence:

After a few hours of fence construction, I ran out of straight logs and energy. Bricks were supplemented for the other sides of the wall. Tyrone uprooted a brick pathway in the front yard because the cottonwood tree had already uprooted it halfway. It was a good re-use of bricks. It would have been fun to have a totally surrounded stick fence.

I re-planted some herbs in the corner.

BONUS TYRONE PICTURE: unthatching the lawn with his new metal rake (he broke my plastic one):

The Indiana Review has a podcast up (a podcast is like a downloadable piece of radio) of Tyrone reading his poem “Specter”.

Click on the link, and press play right underneath where it says “Bluecast” on the side.

Also, meet Frank, our new tomato plant:

My dad started a bunch of seeds in February, including tomatoes, peppers, and hedge trees (aka hedge apple trees, aka, osage orange, aka horseapples)

My sister’s SO, Ivan could not make it to Easter. We sorta expected him, sorta didn’t.

This picture was meant to show him what he was missing: a bottle of mudslide, a customized egg, my sister, my mother, and I.
Tyrone and I dyed the eggs on Saturday night. When it came to applying the crayon, I used the “invisible” crayon, leaving behind white splotches. White-on-white is hard to write, and my egg looked like I my signature when I was six years old. On the other hand, Tyrone was very precise: straight lines, filled-in polygons, and painstaking attention to detail.

Then, when it came to the dyeing, I had different combinations of colors: base colors, ombre-effects, and hold-the-egg-in-halfway-for-two-minutes-to-gradually achieve breathtaking results. Mid-way through, Tyrone started mixing colors, adding extra dye tables, and throwing caution to the wind. I guess we all have our standards.

This is the time of year sweaters go on sale. My goal is to “harvest” natural fibers to recycle at $1/sweater at the most. I really want to work on some shibori techniques: tying/puckering/manipulating the wool so that it resists shrinking in parts. Here’s a before picture of a failed shibori attempt:





Tyrone has asked me to make some sort of arm-covers for his slowly disintegrating computer chair. Last night, I finally followed through. I took the arms off of the failed shibori sweater and eyeballed a pattern for the arms of the chair. Here is a top view:





The openings of the arms were hemmed together with a blanket stitch. There was a hole in one of the arms, so I used an eyelet hole stitch in orange to liven it up. Here is a writer-view:

Here is a side view:





Click on any of the thumbnails for a larger image.