2011 October | Perpetual Tea Party

Pumpkins and the Princess

31 October 2011 Written by Kyoko 0 Comments

Monday is such a silly day for Halloween so we celebrated it on Saturday. Serendipitously, we were blessed with beautiful weather! We had no real plans for the day, but since we got up and about too late to go to the market, we headed out to Sauvie Island to seek out a pumpkin patch. There are many pumpkin patches here, we drove passed by two really big ones when we found this most beautiful one ever.

Immi loves pumpkins, I have no idea why, but she really does. I didn’t make her princess dress, but I did whip up her tiara to match the wand I made for Immi some time ago. I almost contemplated buying a mass produced made in china plastic and probably toxic crap of a toy tiara but made this instead. My goal (aside from refusing to pay for worthless item, keeping one more item out of landfill etc. etc.) was for durability and comfort. I doodled the design, glittered a fabric using non-toxic water resistant glue, stitched it onto wool felt, added elastic band and attached a salvaged heart-shaped red rhinestone.

Stacking Bracelets

28 October 2011 Written by Kyoko 0 Comments

I made some bracelets.

Baking Bread

20 October 2011 Written by Kyoko 0 Comments

I finally had a chance to try the “easy” bread recipe which my friend kindly shared with me (Hi Lissa!). It took me a while to try because I didn’t have large enough dutch oven, but found just the right one recently (antique cast iron one at a bargain price…which of course meant it took me some effort to resurrect!). Ingredient list for bread is amusingly short (flour, yeast, salt and water) but the instruction called for “Clean Kitchen Towel” which [sadly] I didn’t have, so I stitched one up. This way, it won’t get used for wiping dirty hands!

The pattern is from Sublime Stitching, I just changed the scroll to read “bread”.

Here’s the kitchen towel in action (the dough is resting before baking):

And here’s the freshly baked bread!

It was very easy (as promised!) and seems like ‘no-knead dutch-oven bread‘ has been a popular way to bake bread in recent years (There are many basically the same recipe/instruction for this type of bread all over the internet but I found the photo instruction in the link helpful if you want to try it yourself!). This method did produce very tasty bread (for very very cheap, I might add), and even Immi ate lots of it. Portland has many fantastic bakeries and I’m not about to put them out of business (ha!) but we always run out of bread mid-week, so I’m hoping to remedy this situation. I have some ideas for altering the recipe/process for increased convenience, I shall report back when I get it to work!

Purple Wrist Cuff — Finished!

18 October 2011 Written by Kyoko 0 Comments

I finished the wrist cuff.

I really enjoy making wrist cuffs, even thought they aren’t all that versatile as far as accessories go, being appropriate mostly just in autumn and spring (long sleeve get in the way, and it looks too hot in summer, though on second thought — it’s probably fine here in Pacific NW!). I practice various stitches on it, and learn a new trick or two (I leaned to install hooks properly though you don’t see it in the picture). I’d love to make an entire dress but I don’t have the time, space, supply, skill or patience for it at the moment, so I’m rather content making these instead.