Penultimate Pea

Well, the holidays have kind of kicked my ass, but I'm hoping to be better about blogging (and making art, and exercising, blah blah blah) in the new year. I'm usually really into gift planning, trying to pick out the perfect presents for everyone, shopping, wrapping, the whole bit. This year I really only planned one gift though. Ryan's been saying for years that he wants more art for our walls, so I've been shopping for prints on etsy for the past few months and sneaking them into the house. Here's what I got:

Naturals postcards from photobird

Morgan by ashleyg

August 2007 postcard by yespress

yellow owl by sugarloop

fox in the woods by eekdesign

little papercuts by myfolklover

Up in the Trees by myfolklover

Waxy drawings by charmfoundry

Also, I love Jen Corace (oops! can you tell this present was also maybe a little bit for me?!), and was excited to get this print of hers from Tiny Showcase:

I ordered a bunch of frames online and am kind of kicking myself for not getting less art and spending more on nicer frames, but we'll at least get some stuff on the walls, and maybe at some point down the line I'll replace some of the frames.

Of course, I waited too long to order mats and I couldn't get them made in time for Christmas. Gah. But Ryan seemed to like all of it and it'll be nice to finally have art on the walls. I'll put up pics when I get around to getting the mats, putting hanging hardware on and figuring out where it's all going to go!

What did you get or give for Christmas?

Hope you're having a lovely Christmas, enjoying your Chinese food and a movie, or just having a wonderful Tuesday.

So, the past few days have been a blur of cookie madness. I've got two batches done and four more doughs just waiting to be rolled/sliced/shaped/baked. I'm sure I have chocolate under my nails and I wouldn't be surprised if I've got peanut butter in my hair. It has been cookie madness, I tell you.

But everything's been going pretty well, the cookies are delicious so far, I'm on schedule and I would be all set with lovely overflowing packages of homemade cookies for all twenty-five of Ryan's relatives this weekend. If, that is, we hadn't gotten a foot of snow dumped on us this afternoon and another huge storm set to come in on Saturday night. It's looking highly unlikely that we'll be heading out to Boston on Sunday. I can freeze the doughs that I haven't baked yet and save them for a potential future get-together with the family (or just many many nights of fresh baked cookies here at home), but that still leaves me with, oh, about three hundred ginger almond crisps and mint chocolate snowflakes. I guess if we do get totally snowed in we won't go hungry.

Ginger Almond Crisps
This is a very slight adaptation of a Martha Stewart recipe. I've omitted the crystallized ginger and used less lemon zest than called for. These are delicate, subtle cookies, better suited to tea than coffee; slicing them very thinly is key.

1 cup sliced almonds
3 ½ cups flour
1 cup sugar
1 Tbs ground ginger
1 tsp fresh lemon zest
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1 cup unsalted butter (2 sticks)
½ cup molasses
1 tsp vanilla

1. Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Spread almonds in a single layer on a baking sheet. Bake until golden, 5 to 10 minutes. Remove almonds to a shallow bowl to cool. Turn off oven.

2. In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine flour, sugar, ginger, lemon zest, baking soda, and cinnamon. Add butter, molasses, and vanilla extract, and beat until combined. Stir in almonds.

3. Divide dough in half. Shape each half into a 7-by-3-inch rectangle about 1 1/4 inches thick. Wrap in plastic, and refrigerate until very firm, about 2 hours.

4. Preheat the oven to 350ºF. Line baking sheets with Silpats or parchment paper.

5. Using a sharp knife, cut rectangles crosswise into very thin slices, thinner than 1/8" if possible. Arrange on prepared baking sheets 1/2 inch apart. Bake until just beginning to darken around edges, 8 to 10 minutes. Transfer crisps to wire racks to cool.

One advantage of having a baby is that Christmas presents for the grandparents (and great-grandparents) will be easy this year—pretty much anything related to Emmett will probably be welcome. And while I could've gone with "I LOVE MY GRANDPA" mugs and sweatshirts emblazoned with "WORLD'S #1 GRANDMA" in puff paint, I decided to take a somewhat classier approach (with no disrespect to all the #1 Grandmas out there).

I'm hoping this will be the start of an annual tradition—I think it'll be nice to see the progression of these over the years (well, for the first few years at least…I don't know that there's much difference in the profile of a fourteen and fifteen year old!).

This was a relatively simple project, and went pretty quickly (the hardest part was getting Emmett to sit still enough to get a good photo).

1. Take a good profile picture. Good lighting and a solid colored background are important (I used a white background, but a dark one might work as well or better).
2. Crop the photo if necessary and resize to the desired size in your favorite photo editing program. You should set the resolution to your computer's screen resolution (100ppi in my case).
3. Lay a piece of white paper (thin computer paper is ideal) against the screen and lightly trace the outline of your profile. It helps if the room is dark when you're doing this.
4. Cut out around the outline, lay the resulting stencil (wrong side down) on a piece of black paper, and trace around it.
5. Cut out the silhouette from the black paper, being sure to cut inside the line you traced. You may need to improvise a bit around small details and sharp corners, as using a stencil tends to round corners a bit.
6. Cut a piece of nice white paper the correct size for your frame. Use spray adhesive to lightly coat the wrong side of your black paper silhouette. Center on the white paper and smooth down. Sign and date if desired, put it in your frame, and voila!

I've felt so disjointed lately…I feel like I'm working on stuff non-stop, but don't have anything finished to show for it. Too many projects going on at once. I sat down to write my master list on Saturday, with all of my projects broken down into steps and next actions, to hopefully alleviate some of this feeling—it was three pages long. Trying to keep all of it going simultaneously (while also caring for a baby and trying to take care of household stuff) has been overwhelming to say the least.

And I end up mixing projects together and hinging one piece of a project on doing something unrelated, so that neither of them gets done: I want to get holiday cards made, which means taking photos of Emmett, designing the card, and getting it printed. But as long as I'm ordering something from the printer, I think, I should really get some business cards made up, which means finishing a sculpture that I'd actually want to put on a business card and then designing those too. Logical in some way, but probably not so efficient, and utterly unrealistic to get done in the next three days.

I'm trying to figure out ways to pare things back and not get myself totally wrapped up in non-essential stuff. The project above is one of the things being cut out. We're going to "Quinn Christmas" (Ryan's extended family's big get-together a few weeks before the holiday) this year for the first time, and in my excitement I started planning little gifts we could bring for each family. Oh, I thought, I'll just make some cookies (which I do each year around the holidays anyway), and each individual or family can get a plate or box of them. But then I was browsing through a catalog and saw these cute embroidered felt ornaments and thought, hmm, I could make those, and wouldn't it be nice to tie one of those to the top of each package? Totally ignoring the fact that I haven't embroidered anything since I was six (when I used to wish for rain so that I could use the indoor recess time to do cross stitch—yeah, I was a nerd even then). I cut out my twenty-six bird shapes, I got out an old embroidery book I happen to have but had never looked at, I googled various stitches, I sketched out possible designs and tried various knots…I got frustrated because I had no idea what I was doing and it wasn't coming out the way I wanted it to.

And then I looked over at Ryan, peacefully reading on the couch next to a sleeping Emmett, and got really pissed. Who was he to be relaxing when I was sitting there feverishly working on intricate handmade present-toppers for his family?! And it took me a few minutes of fuming before I realized that no one was making me work on this stuff. The crafting and creativity, it's like a disease sometimes. It's okay if I don't make handmade presents for his family. Hell, it's probably okay if I don't even do any baking—this year at least, everyone will just be delighted to see the baby. Sometimes I get so caught up in this Martha Stewart madness, wanting everything to be just so, thinking I need to create this beautiful, perfect world. And, time and time again, I realize that it just ain't so. In fact, I think it often kind of annoys other people (who, in their infinite sanity, do not feel compelled to do things such as making homemade marshmallows or hand-stamping wrapping paper). I love crafting, cooking, creating stuff, surprising other people with little goodies and homemade gifts. But I need to step back sometimes and remember that if I'm not actually enjoying it, I've really missed the point.