Tag: home

  • Home for the holidays

    Home for the holidays

    Every year I whip up a little holiday postcard and send it winging to far-flung friends and family. It’s a long-standing tradition of mine, and an important constant when many other holiday plans change from year to year. This year’s card reflects my own personal plans for Christmas this year—I fully intend to spend some…

  • Festooned with greenery

    Festooned with greenery

    If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, or you’ve met me or the Tailor, you already know about our penchant for storing food and taking seasonal eating to hardcore extremes. But our nuttiness about walking the talk extends far beyond the pantry. Another aspect of our attempts to live as sustainably as we can…

  • Blueberry Sunday

    Blueberry Sunday

    For months now we’ve been finding new ways to use our stores of dried, home-canned and preserved blueberries. But we almost forgot about the containers of fresh berries we threw in the freezer—and on this unseasonably cold* morning, whipping up a little reminder of summer seemed like a good idea. So the Tailor fired up…

  • Opening night

    Opening night

    When I walked into the PLU Gallery this morning to document the Mnemonic Sampler show when it opens, my brain had somewhat of a short circuit. Since I was out of town for the past few days, all of the installation work was done for me (thank you a million times over, Heather C.!)—so this…

  • Work in progress

    Work in progress

    Swatch books are very near the top of my list of Favorite Things Ever. There is something so satisfying about having every color, pattern, texture, or finish right at your fingertips. I love sitting at my table, with a cup of tea in hand and six hundred sample chips spread out before me, ready for…

  • Red kitchen redux

    Red kitchen redux

    The season is turning ’round these parts—it seems the whole world is tinged with hints of red and gold. We had another warm weekend, but I’m not fooled; behind the hot sun are chill mornings and the rush of the harvest. So it was another canning weekend for the Tailor, supplied by our latest farmer’s…

  • Blue blazes

    Blue blazes

    They’re predicting 105 degrees today here in T-town—that’s an all-time, record-breaking high. Now, if you’re in the Midwest, the South, or the Southwest and you’re reading this, you’re probably thinking, “And this is news how?” Well, this is where the part about “all-time” comes in—since white settlement of this area, at least, it has never,…

  • Recipe for a summer day

    Recipe for a summer day

    First, invite your family down for the day. Squeeze out some fresh lemonade; and fry up a free-range chicken. Then mix up some cream, sugar, and fresh berries (plus just a pinch of that lemon juice to bring out the flavor); pack ice and salt around it; and start crankin’. Let everyone pitch in—the longer…

  • Sugar serifs

    Sugar serifs

    What with a string of out-of-town visitors and deadlines to distract us,  the Tailor and I let our first anniversary slide by without much fanfare. This week, however, we remembered the nostalgic, circa-early-1980s, licensed-character Wilton cake pans we borrowed from his parents last winter, and decided a belated, totally un-wedding-like anniversary cake was in order.…