Canning, the new obsession

Because I have a husband who works near orchards, I have been picking fruit like crazy all season-- you could say C. and I have turned it into a sport! Hence, what to do with all of that fruit? These things can be canned! This is my new hobby, and I love it, it's so much fun. Obviously, it's much cheaper to buy canned peaches and jars of tomato salsa at the grocery store, but I found that orchard fruit is much cheaper if you pick it yourself, and it tastes amazing! Another way I have been economical is the fact that in the 1980's, my mother in law was doing a lot of canning, and has a 20 year old treasure trove of canning jars and supplies. And not just a few supplies, but A LOT of jars! Above are some of the circa 80's jars she had. I also have created some labels, to make each jar that leaves my hands a nice little customized treat. If you have Illustrator or a computer program that can manipulate PDF files, you can download them here. If not, I can make some for you!

Making My Own Birthday Cards

Perusing the scrapbooking aisle at A.C. Moore, I'm noticing that the scrapbooking sections are much nicer looking these days. But since it's pretty easy for me to make my own labels, I have a bunch of birthdays coming up, so I made some "Happy Birthday" labels, to be printed with clear 8 1/2" x 11" full page label sheets, which you can feel free to download here.

Nice Detailed Video of custom apparel production!

I just found this Eco Apparel - Factory Tour explained by a nice graphics guy showing all of the process details, neat!

I really like the idea of custom apparel because what is ordered is developed specifically for the customer.

The First Lady likes retro girly dresses!

On the Huffington Post recently, they posted that Michelle Obama is wearing another Talbots dress I worked on!

They mislabel the dress as red, but it's actually orange and white, and there is another colorway in blue that I personally like better. It's another girly summer smock, and I helped with making this dress look good in plus sizes, reduced the bulk in the lining (because a lot of factories don't make their samples with separate lining patterns, they just copy the shell) and helped to make those scoopy armholes look nice on a lot many more shapes of women than our muscle armed first lady.

Wearing a Dress in Public Twice!

So Michelle Obama wore a Talbot's dress on the cover of the May 2009 issue of Essence, and then was photographed in it again July 6th while boarding Air Force One on her way to Russia! That image can be seen here and here. I really like that dress, mainly because I worked on improving the pattern and fit of the dress. We were working on interpreting the fashion design to make the bodice fit a woman with a chest, and making sure that the skirt draped properly on all figures. As you can see from the technical drawing, it has great details on the top of the bodice, which the First Lady seems to want to cover up with a cardigan!

It's Mohop Shoe Time!

So this summer will be filled with fancy events, like weddings and little parties, so I'm practicing walking on my platform Mohop shoes, because they've been hibernating for months, waiting for it to get warmer outside. For all of these events I will be wearing merely one shoe! Several different ways! Yay!

My New Favorite Multifunctional Shoes

After breaking this pair of shoes in on one long blistery ICA tour guide trip via the T and back, these shoes have proved their worth indoors and out! Especially in American households, like C.'s fmaily, where the family wears shoes inside. The rubber outsole doesn't really attract dirt outside, however, it isn't hard for dewy grass to get the leather insole a little wet...

Sheep Gal Has lots of baby lambies!

This is from a blog I heard of from the "Ready Set Knit" podcast. Some cute little videos of baby sheep! Awwww!!!!

An easier yogurt recipe

A couple of months ago, I made yogurt from a very elaborate professors' recipe that was pretty paranoid about being sterile and clean. In the June 2009 Yoga Journal, which will eventually be found on yogajournal.com There is a much less rigorous version of the recipe that pretty much says the same thing,which sterilizes the milk longer without mentioning to sterilize the yogurt jar, and saying that 112 degrees, not 110 degrees, is the magic tempurature that yogurt bacteria will be happy in. Try it!

Puma City Ocean Race Pop -up store in south Boston

The Volvo Ocean Race is coming to town soon! And if you were ever curious about how a shipping container building gets put together, that's what they're made of, by architecture firm Lotek. Eventually, the store will be built into a multi-level cantilevered shipping container buildling as shown on other sites, but I visited it before they put on the levels. It's going to be parallel to another cantilevered building, the ICA.

My next shoe purchase:

I've never bought a Patagonia shoe before, but I hope this one fits!!! It's called Sugar and Spice, and it has a removable outsole and an inside slipper you can keep on your feet! I'm imagining walking over the wild boston streets and trudging over the rubbly parking lot to the ICA, and then arrive, slip off the outsole and do my ICA tours in the slippers- FABULOUS! Patagonia also covers this shoe in their sustainable sourcing tracking site, "Footprint Chronicles"

Lets drink lots of petrol and destroy lots of cars!

Fast & Furious opened to theaters today, and it's bound to be a silly action movie, but they use a pretty nice car in the end, a whacked out Subaru WRX STI, so I wanna watch it! Nyah! Apparently they needed a ton of cars and copies of cars in order to make this movie, and they also had to destroy lots and lots of cars for their action scenes, but because I love Subarus, I'm just going to let it go....

Pea Shoot babies

These are the pea shoots four days later. After I eat these, in a few days, I hope to consume the rest of my sprout seed stash, some alfalfa, broccoli, and cabbage.

More Sprouting

This time, I am using pea seeds to make pea shoots, and I'm growing them in a container with water and orchid mix to make the stems a little longer and to see if the leaves can get bigger.
I'm noticing that the grocery stores are selling more and more spouts and pea shoots these days. One of the reasons I started making my own sptrouts was because the store bought mung bean sprouts were in huge bags and I could never get through it all, but some of the other sprout containers are sold in smaller portions.

Maaking more food for feeding myself

This rye bread was started with a rye pate fermente starter and then put in the bread machine and baked in the oven, the dough was awfully goopy and wet, but yummy results in the end.

I made Yogurt!

I used this professor's recipe, because it had nice instructions for sterilizing stuff, and I needed to use up some milk! I'm using it in shakes and breakfast. I definitely think that it isn't hard, I just had to control the temperature of the yogurt while it was making itself.

Day 4 Sprouts

day 3 sprouts

Sprouts!

So in case you were wondering, I make my own sprouts, I think they're cool because I can make them cheap and they're alive! I have two sprouting systems and this is Day 1 when I soak the seeds, which I get at the Greenstar Co-op in Ithaca, NY (they have the BEST, high quality sprouting seeds in nice, small quantities) Above is a siphoning tray that I bought at Greenstar, and below is a Mason Jar system. The siphoning trays have Mung Bean and alfalfa sprouts, and the Mason jar has broccoli sprouts.

No paranoia in falling w/YakTrax

Here I am with another product suggestion! I just got the glow in the dark version of YakTrax, and I was cruising through Northpoint Park with them above.

They work so well! Boston currently has a ton of rotten old snow that's been recently covered with more snow, then rain, which turned into ice overnight, so even if the neighbors did shovel their sidewalk, there is a slick, unseen, DANGEROUS coating of ice on the ground. And my sister had to walk to work this morning, so I let her borrow them, and they remove that fear of falling on ice and snow, and you don't lose time because you don't need to walk slower!

something new NOT to throw away, but not yet...

Long time no post-- In November I heard a presentation by a product development company that works with Recycline- a company that produces all of their plastic personal care and kitchen and serveware products out of recycled #5 plastic. Now you can go to a Whole Foods store and drop off used #5 plastic yogurt cups, etc. and brita water pitchers! About time those things had another place to go besides the trash!  

** Hey, I just stopped by Whole foods all ready to drop off my used Brita water filter, and nope, no place yet to deposit it for recycling. For those who are wondering, it's the River Street market in Cambridge, MA.