Lorelai's House

An excellent new book was recently published called "One Yard Wonders", which contains patterns for a whole host of things that one can make with...drum roll...one yard of fabric. One of the cutest projects is a little fabric dollhouse, created by this blogger here. Here's my attempt, for my friend's 4 year old:

That's the front. Here's the inside:

I had some challenges with this, which are so difficult to explain that I'm not going to try. Just know that there is a mistake in the pattern, the correction for which I found online today -- but for some reason, could not find on Sunday. Now that I know what I'm doing, I'm sure I will make it again. It's not hard in terms of the skills you need, but it did take a bit of trial and error to figure out how the pieces come together. I also opted not to embroider my flowers or felt decorations, I just hauled out the hot glue gun!

For other photos of this project (some of them furnished!) made by much more talented people than I, visit here.

Happiness Project: Energy & Sleep

I'm following along on Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Project challenge. Here's my third installment:

First, just let me say that I promise there will be more fiber-related posts here soon enough. It's just that I am thoroughly enjoying my little Happiness Project right now, as well as some other self-improvement related items, and I have a tendency to get just a tad focused from time to time. Going forward, I think I'll probably post on this topic once a week...but in the meantime:

This week's Challenge was getting more sleep. As it happened, a few weeks ago I read a sample chapter of The Happiness Project online, and decided right then that I really needed to try enforcing a bedtime on myself. I frequently find myself up roaming around, surfing the internet, flicking TV channels, reading, or sewing until midnight or 1 am, which makes getting up in the morning for work beyond painful. And (thank God for Gretchen Rubin making me feel like I wasn’t totally alone in this), I also put off going to bed because I just don’t want to take out my stupid contacts, even when they get so uncomfortable I want to scratch out my eyeballs. Consequently, I spend most days in a fog, dragging myself from home to work and back again.

Given that most nights I don’t get home until 7, an 11 pm bedtime seemed the most realistic to shoot for. Initially, I went to bed at 11 but couldn’t fall asleep, so I surfed the internet in bed using my Blackberry until I got sleepy. After a few nights of this, I actually began falling asleep fairly quickly; in fact, I can now barely manage to read a few pages of a book before I’m asleep. There have been a few nights where I’ve even managed to go to bed at 10:30, nothing short of a miracle for me.

I’m still having problems staying asleep, though. Certainly having this bad cold did not help one bit, as it is one of those colds where every time you lay down to sleep you immediately start coughing up phlegm (sorry, TMI). But some of this is also the cat’s fault – he has suddenly taken up yowling in my face at 4:30 in the morning, for no apparent reason (he is on a special dry-food diet and I fill his food and water bowls before I go to bed). I’ve tried shutting him out of the bedroom at night, but that just makes him mad: he’ll go into the bathroom and start banging the cabinet door under the sink, which makes an unbelievably loud ruckus. (Seriously, it’s astounding what this cat can do without opposable thumbs.)

On the upside, I do feel like the earlier bedtime is helping me, mainly because I am having an easier time actually waking up in the morning, and I feel much more alert during the day. I still get tired in the afternoon, but it’s not as bad as before.

The downside is, I also feel like I’m getting less done – less reading, less sewing, less knitting, less writing, less guitar practicing (otherwise known as the things that make me stay just this side of sane). I haven’t quite decided how to remedy this, although it did occur to me that ever since getting my Blackberry I spend my train rides surfing the internet, and maybe that’s not such a productive use of that time (I now thoroughly understand why they are called Crackberries). I also need to be better about using my weekends, which tend to get filled up with errands....which, alas, is exactly the state of affairs for the next two days. But I am determined to get some sewing done this weekend, so I hope to have something to share in that area very soon!

Happiness Project: Energy & Vitamins

I’m following along on Gretchen Rubin’s “Happiness Project” challenge. Here’s my second installment:

I am not what you would call a “high energy” person. I am a card-carrying introvert who feels drained by sustained contact with people, and I hate anything that requires groups (including sports). I do not like exercise, and contrary to all published scientific studies I do not find that it gives me more energy. Mostly, it leaves me tired, hungry, cranky, and annoyed that after half an hour on an exercise bike my thighs are not visibly smaller. For whatever long-repressed reason, I require immediate gratification, and exercise just doesn’t cut it. I also seem to never be able to get enough sleep, so much so my doctor had me tested for sleep apnea last year. The tests found no medical reasons for my poor quality sleep, but did show that I don’t spend a lot of time in deep sleep (which explains why I dream so much).

But I had finally had it with feeling so dragged down all the time, and so a few weeks ago I started doing something I’d been meaning to do for years: take a multi-vitamin every day. Now, there’s a lot of conflicting thoughts about vitamins and whether they are truly effective. This is something people need to research for themselves and discuss with their doctor (personally, I liked this “plain English” analysis here at the Harvard School of Public Health's website.)

My own doctor had encouraged me to take a multi-vitamin, partly because of my terrible eating habits but also because I live in the northeast, where most people have a Vitamin D deficiency in the winter, plus I’m at risk for osteoporosis. I had tried taking vitamins before, but stopped after a day or two because they made me terribly sick to my stomach. I discovered that this is not uncommon, and that taking them after I’ve eaten lunch (my main meal of the day) made a world of difference.

The first vitamin I tried was one I had bought awhile ago, some sort of “active woman” formula with a bunch of dietary supplements in addition to your regular vitamins and minerals (stuff like black cohosh and chasteberry extract). You were supposed to take 3 of these pills each day, which included 3333% Vitamin B-1 and B-12, 500% Manganese, and 417% Vitamin C. After three days of taking just one pill per day, I was completely hyper (probably due to the high vitamin B content). As I started reading about some of the supplements in the pills I got a little bit leery of what I might be introducing into my system, and I also realized that this formula included iron. I knew that my iron levels were fine, as I had been tested for anemia awhile back, and I learned that too much iron can be a bad thing (unlike too much vitamin B, which our bodies just expel). I switched to a more traditional multi-vitamin (the one pill a day that has about 100% of everything) that did not contain iron, and that appears to be a better choice for me – no feeling hyper.

The other good thing about the traditional multi-vitamin? It only cost $6.99 at Whole Foods for 90 pills ( the “365” store brand).

After three weeks, I definitely feel better (or did, anyway, until I caught this horrible cold that I am still fighting). I’m still not about to go run a marathon, but I do have a bit more energy. I also seem to not be eating as much, and I can’t help but wonder if I’ve been overeating because my body was just trying to nourish itself, and now that it’s getting basic nutrients it’s requiring less food. (My pants, alas, are not any roomier, but there was an entire tray of baklava at my disposal over Christmas.) I also feel like my head is much clearer, with much less brain fog.

So, all in all, an excellent baby step towards feeling better. Now the challenge is to keep remembering to take them!

And So It Goes...

Years ago I started using Clinique products, and the sales lady in the white coat said that my skin would get worse before it got better, that the products would bring out all the icky stuff buried deep in my skin. I thought this was the most ridiculous sales pitch in the world, but as it turned out she was more or less correct.

I bring this up because after two weeks of taking vitamins, sleeping more, and eating better...which I will write about later this week...I am sick. This is Day 4 of it, coinciding with a never-ending snowstorm here in the Boston area. I am mostly a homebody, but I am going completely stir crazy and my nose is all red and the Nyquil did NOTHING. And, this is exactly what happens every blessed time I try to be more healthy - I get sick. I'm thinking that much like the Clinique soap, getting healthy means getting worse before getting better, and that this is just my body's way of getting all the crappy residue out. (The fact that my dad was sick over Christmas and several of my coworkers are sick nothwithstanding.)

The only good thing is, I've had plenty of time to sit on the couch and knit, and managed to finally finish my Malabrigo twisted rib scarf in the "Charrua" colorway. With, um, some help:

Be Kind to Yourself

I have struggled with my weight for years, along with a lot of my female relatives. A few have managed, somehow, to win the war either by losing it or by accepting it, but most of us battle on. We worship at the Church of Weight Watchers, and while math is not our strong point we can convert calories to points quicker than most people can blink. That formula is our 11^th commandment. Growing up, “being good” meant iceberg lettuce and cottage cheese for lunch while staring wistfully at the box of cookies perched on top of the fridge, an altar to whatever the Patron Saint of High Metabolism might be. Even now, I cannot go into a grocery store without hearing my mother’s voice in my head as I survey the contents of my cart: last night, Cool Ranch Doritos were buy one/get one free, and as I put both bags on the conveyor belt I could hear her saying, as if she were standing next to me, “A moment on the lips, forever on the hips”.

To which I mentally replied, “Well, at least I put the Haagen Dazs back”.

Then I came home to find a Weight Watchers magazine in my mailbox, which was odd because I didn’t subscribe to it.

Subtle, huh.

The truth is, a few years ago I rebelled, quit “The Church” (for at least the seventh time), and spent an entire year in therapy trying to get to the route of my food issues. In retrospect it sounds ridiculous, but at the time I didn’t realize that what I had been doing was considered binge eating – basically, bulimia without the puking. And it honestly wasn’t that I felt bad about myself, or had no self-esteem, or even that I was bored – it’s that all this awful stuff had happened and I had utterly no idea of how to cope with it…so I ate. I knew how to do that. And then, for reasons I don’t remember, my doctor (not my therapist) set me up with a very old-school nutritionist, who in one 45 minute appointment managed to undo six months of therapy by insisting there was no emotional component to food. Yes, I’m pretty sure she sucked lemons for fun.

Recently, I discovered the show “Fat Friends”, another BBC gem (for which I cannot find a good internet link). What I both hate and love about BBC programs is their utter, brutal honesty. They have a way of creating characters that on one level are stereotypical – but at the same time so complex and real they almost make you want to cringe because you can so relate…like the fat boy who gets beat up by his schoolmates, who turns out to be overeating as a result of his parents divorce and feeling like he is responsible for taking care of his mother (who is clearly incapable of taking care of herself and has reassigned her son to the role of “man of the house”). Or the woman who finally loses a ton of weight because she thinks her husband is ashamed of her, when it turns out he actually, genuinely loves her regardless of how much she weighs, but was living in terrifying fear that she was losing weight so she could leave him. The program underscores two things for me: one, being overweight is so not about the food, but about the underlying emotional turmoil; and two, if we spent half the time we use up obsessing about our weight and the size of our bums on something really productive, the world would be SUCH a different place.

And yes, I would like to send the Lemon Sucking Nutritionist a copy of this program.

I write all this because it’s New Year’s Eve and I’m on the precipice of, yet again, trying to get a grip on my weight. Since leaving NYC I’ve managed to put back on the weight I lost a few years ago, partly because a whole NEW set of things happened that I didn’t know how to deal with. (That’s the thing about life, really – you can stop making old mistakes, but there are always new ones that come along.) It’s also partly because I got really unfocused, and started confusing “self kindness” with “self indulgence”. In her book “When You Eat at the Refrigerator, Pull Up a Chair”, author Geneen Roth makes some critical distinctions between these two things, chiefly that self-indulgence is “continuing to do what is harmful to you after you realize it is harmful”, whereas self-kindness is “stopping doing what is harmful to you”. The proverbial light bulb went off in my head when I read this last night, and I realized that more than anything else, “Be kind to myself” would be the best possible motto for 2010, and a great way to frame my Happiness Project work in the months to come. Because isn’t being happy the ultimate kindness we can show ourselves?

Happy New Year. (Champagne has 2 points).

Happiness Project: Energy Consumption

An oddly restful Christmas holiday with just my parents and grandmother, and I am delighted to report that my niece called from California to tell me she loved her new quilt. She has yet to realize the patchwork is different -- miracle of miracles! She and her sister also loved the Project Runway dressmaking kits I got them, as well as the extra bits of fabric I sent, and my sister reports that they are Very Busy playing Fashion. Tim Gunn, watch out! My own favorite gifts include marshmallow lip gloss and an itunes gift card from the cat (aka my sister), with which I was able to download a bunch of much-wanted songs by Snow Patrol.

But moving along...I mentioned that I am embarking on Gretchen Rubin's "Happiness Project Challenge". January’s topic is energy, and (obviously) I got a little bit of a head start on this one…for some reason this whole thing really motivated me, and if I’ve learned anything it’s that very little motivates me, so I need to ride the wave while I can.

So. I started focusing on energy by looking at my energy consumption. At least during the winter months, when I am not running the air conditioner, my energy consumption is actually fairly low. I live in a small apartment that is in a converted mill, and that decision alone significantly reduces my own personal carbon footprint. My electric bill runs an affordable ~$30 a month, so there’s not much financial incentive to further reduce my costs. Plus, I own a car that gets 35-40 mpg, I take the train to work every day, and I recycle as much as possible. On the downside, as a renter I have no control over my appliances, which from what I can tell are not of the energy efficient variety, but I can use the cold water cycle in the washing machine, adjust the settings in my fridge/freezer, and limit the use of my dishwasher….all of which I do regularly. And, although heat is included in my rent, I have also made sure that my windows are shut tight, and I close the blinds at night to help retain heat.

My energy sins, though, are as follows:

• I habitually forget to turn off the bathroom light.
• I leave my phone and ipod chargers plugged in.
• Things like my DVD player and printer, which I use infrequently, are plugged in and turned on.
• My sewing machine is always plugged in.
• I have a small fan in the bedroom that runs 24/7.

As “baby steps”, I’ve gone around the apartment and unplugged all the things that I use infrequently, and I’ve left myself a note on the door to remind me to turn things off – like the fan and the bathroom light. I know many of you are thinking, why on earth is she bothering to write an entire blog post about putting a note on her door…all I can say is, this is so antithetical to my default behavior it is almost akin to my skin spontaneously turning blue. I’m Just Not That Organized. But also – the point is that even small changes in our lives can lead to improvements, and a series of small changes can have a tremendous cumulative effect on our wellbeing. Even if I manage to save $5 a month on my light bill, that’s $60/year…which is a week’s worth of groceries, a new sweater, or a contribution to a charitable organization. And somewhere along the line, a little bit less of fossil fuels are being used on my behalf.

Next up in the energy challenge: Physical energy!

Needhams

I rarely cook. I'm single and have a small kitchen and rely on my microwave more than is necessary. A combination of forces this weekend, including a ridiculous snowstorm and the upcoming holiday, have driven me into the kitchen. Yesterday, in addition to the pink popcorn, I made these peanut butter cups, which were good (although tricky), and later I'm going to try making this caramel corn. Or at least I was, until my morning project completely derailed me...both me and my kitchen are currently covered in bits of melted chocolate and coconut, and I had to take a breather.

So - about these needhams. My paternal great-grandmother was something of an awesome cook. The stories my dad tells about her whipping up magnificent chocolate cakes at the drop of the hat are family legends. She died when I was three, but one of my earliest memories is of standing in her pantry on top of a little step stool, watching her pop popcorn, which is what she did whenever I visited. I called her "the popcorn Nana" (literal even then...) to differentiate her from my other Nana, my great-grandmother on my mom's side - who was also an excellent cook in her own right.

One of the things "the popcorn Nana" made for my dad when he was a kid was needhams. I think this is an old Mainer thing, because pretty much anyone not from Maine blanches when they hear the ingredients. Baked potato mixed with coconut and powdered sugar...well, it is a bit of a stretch. When I was younger, there was a company called Seavey's in Lewiston, Maine that used to manufacture these, but they went out of business a few years ago. Their needhams were a good-sized square, individually wrapped in a wax-paperish bag. You could buy boxes of them at the grocery store, and every once and awhile they'd make an appearance during the holidays at our house.

Back in 2005, one of my dad's sisters gave me Nana's recipe for the needhams. Let me just say that when I moved out of that apartment two years later, I was still finding splotches of melted chocolate in cracks and crevices. Dipping sticky coconut in melted chocolate is an under-appreciated art form, is what I'm saying. Luckily, they tasted fine, but they did not in any way resemble the needhams anyone else in my family made.

So this weekend I tried again. Last night I baked the potatoes and made the filling, spreading it out on a pan, and stuck it in the fridge. This time I didn't even TRY for squares and went straight to making little balls before dipping it in the chocolate. The first few looked nice - rustic, handmade, but certainly edible. But after a few dips, the coconut got mixed in with the chocolate, and the next few were a little, well, ploppy looking. Exhibit A:

What is missing from this photo is me, covered in chocolate.

I've stuck the pan of coconut in the freezer, where it is currently sitting, in hopes that it will firm up more and make the dipping easier. The recipe encourages the use of paraffin wax in the chocolate, which I don't use because the idea of it grosses me out a little, but it will give the chocolate a nicer, glossy finish.

If you are motivated and have some time, here's the recipe, complete with my editorials. Let me know how yours come out!

2 medium baked potatoes

4 1/2 cups confectioners sugar

1 pound shredded coconut

butter size of a pea

1 teaspoon vanilla

24 ounces chocolate chips

1 or 2 squares of paraffin wax (3 inch squares)

Mash hot baked potatoes with the butter, and gradually add the sugar. [Editorial: what turns up in the bowl resembles glue. As far as I know, this is the intended outcome.] Add remaining ingredients. If the mixture is too dry, add more potato. Pat into buttered sheet 9 x 13. [I just lined a cookie sheet with wax paper.]

Chill mixture overnight. Cut into 1" squares. [Good Luck.] Take a portion of squares off the pan and stick the remainder back in the fridge, as these dip best when chilled and not at room temperature. [Amen.]

Melt chocolate chips on top of a double boiler. [I microwaved mine.] Add wax if desired. Dip squares into the chocolate, then place on wax paper to harden up. Since mixture is rather sticky, putting the square on top of a two-prong meat fork to dip into the chocolate seems to work well. [I wouldn't know, as I can't get squares to begin with.]

Needhams freeze well.

Edited to add: sticking the coconut mixture in the freezer about 30 minutes prior to dipping enabled me to get something resembling a square/rectangle. Alas, the freezing made the dipping more difficult, as the chocolate began to set up pretty quickly. I'm thinking that the paraffin wax might be necessary after all...next time.