friday fixations

{sh*t liz lemon says}

{my tripod} I've been taking pictures without it lately and it shows. I took my camera off it so I could take pictures outside of the house and then it was -40 and I still haven't really gone anywhere photo worthy. Now I'm too lazy to 1) get it when I need it; and 2) screw my camera back onto it. I just deleted about 20 slightly blurry pictures off my computer from last week, so I had better get that tripod back in action or you're never going to see another picture again.

{big knickers} There's just something about this high-waisted underwear that I find really appealing. I want all of them (especially the florals).

{the tiny chopped salad} I read about chopping salads to absolute bits and decided it might be a nice change instead of my usual ribbon-sized slices. My last salad consisted of cabbage, spinach, carrots, purple onion, and mushrooms chopped into little bits (I put the carrots through my mandolin on the julienne setting and then cut them into bits cross-wise) and served it plain so we could add our own dressings. I thought it was the best salad yet. I could actually take a forkful of salad and lock it on with some meat for an even more complete bite (which is how I like to eat salads anyway) and chopping everything just made for a better mouth-feel and taste (if that makes any sense). I'm definitely a chopped salads fan now. (I had pictures of this one.)

{colourful books} Mom got me this one for Christmas (because of my insatiable love for pink) and now I want more from the series (for a whole matching shelf, natch). (And yes, despite having an iPod, I'm still 100% for real books. You know why? When you buy an e-book, you can't loan it out and you can't sell it or give it away [to those in need or otherwise] when you're finished with it. So e-books are sold at practically the same price as a real book with none of the benefits that go along with having a real book. Therefore, I see no benefit to supporting that industry from a customer view-point. [I get it from a seller view-point. Oh yes. That one's obvious].)

{jill bliss} Have I ever mentioned how much I love the art of Jill Bliss? Well I love it. So. Much. I want it in wallpaper. Or these frilly leaf garlands which I have no actual use for or place to put them, but I just want them all the same.

{this crazy cartoon} Boy, if only I ate cookies by the sleeve... I mean, if only I ate store-bought cookies. I definitely have the ability to eat cookies by the sleeve.

{heart pillow embroidery} I should really learn how to do this. It's awesome.

{pink} aka poink if my dumb typing fingers have anything to say about it. I've mentioned this before. Sorry. I just can't stop thinking about it. And I can't stop thinking about it because it feels wrong to think about. Especially for my living room. Especially for a grown-up living room having nothing to do with baby girls or teen princesses. I keep thinking that possibly pink could be grown-up, it's all about the shade of pink and possibly the amount. But I have no idea and, frankly, I'm rather scared to try. I've found some inspirational colour mixes in a variety of places all of which look mighty fine for grown-up versions of pink. There's raspberry, cotton candy, and putty beige (which looks more like a peachy-pink to me). Possibly pink looks more adultish when paired with mustard, sea foam green, or orange. And almost as if confirming my choice, these shades of pink look really good with colours that are pretty darn close to our existing paint and trim. What do you think?

pasta cooked in sauce

I've decided I'm not going to give you a recipe for spaghetti and meat sauce. Aren't you already overwhelmed with a hundredity-billion different pasta sauce recipes already? I kinda think so. And besides, anyone who's ever cooked anything already has a pasta sauce recipe tucked away in their brain. You don't need someone on the internet giving you another one (we both know you'd adjust it for what you have on hand anyway).

This is just a little suggestion for the pasta portion of spaghetti and meat sauce. I just tried it and it kinda worked pretty fantastically and I was so surprised it worked, that I had to share it with you.

Have you ever considered cooking the pasta directly in the sauce?

Probably not and neither had I, but then I read it (on the internet, of course. It's where all my crazy ideas come from) and I thought that maybe it was possible.

After our pork and noodle dinner for Chinese new year, in which we seemed to both be scrambling to get the most noodles, I thought it was due time I made spaghetti. We don't have it very often so it usually really pains me to run all of that water for one tiny pot of pasta. Especially since I carefully measure the spaghetti portion to ensure we don't overeat and with that, it just seems like a whole lot of wasted water (and time waiting for it to boil) for a smaller portion of spaghetti in a huge pot.

I started making my sauce last night and I agonized over whether I should just try cooking the pasta in it. So what if it didn't cook? I could fish it out of the sauce and start again. It wouldn't be a big deal. I could just dump (almost) a full can of chopped tomatoes and their juices in and keep a couple cups of water handy just in case. And these types of things always stay on my mind until I do them and when's the next time we'd be having spaghetti, anyway?

Once the sauce was at the simmering stage (with all its lovely juices bubbling), I stuck a tiny wad of noodles into the middle of the pan and pushed them into the sauces so they were barely covered. Then I got braver and put another tiny wad, this time snapped in half, to each side (because only so much full-length spaghetti can fit in my frying pan) and pushed them down. Then I got about two cups of water and poured a little of that in to start so the noodles were just covered. Then I waited.

Overall, the entire cooking process took around 10 minutes which is almost exactly the same time it would take for noodles to boil conventionally. The only difference was that I had to keep checking on the noodles to see how done they were getting, to try and stir them up (to keep them from sticking), and to make sure they were still covered with liquid. I only added water when the spaghetti looked less covered with liquid and I ended up using about three cups of water (along with the tomato juices) in order to cook the spaghetti completely.

It worked so well and the pasta tasted... richer? More tomato-y? More one with the sauce, I guess. The sauce itself had thickened up a lot, too, by the addition of the pasta's starches. Overall, I'd call it a success which makes me wonder why we've all come to believe that pasta needs so much water to cook. All of it seems really wasteful now.

If you're adventurous (or eat a lot of pasta), this might be something you'd like to try. I don't think it would work with creamy sauces (mac and cheese... mmmm... probably not), but if you're making a tomato-based sauce already, this might be a nice option.

the dragon age

Yay! I'm excited about this year! Probably because it's the year of the dragon and I've always had a real love for dragons. My family used to celebrate each Chinese new year with some homemade (or take-out) Chinese food, but we haven't done it for years. So this year I'm doing a little pulled pork dinner (maybe with some noodles -- the longer the better -- for long life). Do you ever do anything special for Chinese new year?

I found some interesting links for new year traditions (I always love reading my horoscope):

{superstitions}

{horoscopes}

And some super cute stuff related to dragons!

{dragon pillows}

{dragon cards}

{dragon cookies}

{dragon dinnerware}

{dragon ring}

{asian print apron}

Gong Hai Fat Choy!

DIY: recovering a chair seat

It is -44 -42 C today, so to decrease my stir-crazies (because I have barely breathed in any fresh air this week), I finally recovered 

this chair

which had a huge rip in the corner of the fabric

but I really loved the fabric because I thought it was original and I just couldn't part with it.

But I had to part with it because this chair is hard as a rock. It was time to put some padding on it. And hell. It's -42. I opened the curtains at 10 to keep the window-cold out just a little bit longer. What else am I supposed to do? Vacuum or something? Pssh. (yeah ok, I vacuumed a bit.)

So get on your full body long johns, brew some tea, and read what I did:

First, I had to rip off that SOB fabric. It was a nightmare. So, like, I start pondering, "Am I so desperate for stuff to do that I really need to fix this chair right now?" I made some tea. I came back ready for round 2 of swearing.

Then I marked out the size of the seat on a new piece of foam. I randomly found this brand new piece at the thrift store for $1.99 (it was still in the plastic bag). I'm sure you can find this stuff at any fabric store, though. This is also proof that I've been meaning to get on this task for quite a while now.

I traced it. Boom. Chair seat outline. If your foam has a definite top and bottom, make sure you've lined up the seat so the foam sits on it properly, but like, don't stress about it. I wish I hadn't stressed about this so much (you'll see why later). Then I used plain ol' scissors to cut it, but a sharp serrated knife would have worked just as well, too.

I added some batting to soften out the foam (mine has that egg carton look on top -- foreshadowing. I'm doing it) and because what the hell, I've got some. Then I figured out (read: eyeballed) how much vinyl I'd need. It's like wrapping a present (which I'm not really that great at anyway). Or half wrapping a present as you're not going to cover the bottom of the seat with fabric.

I started by stapling the large edges by pulling the fabric as tight as I could and stapling it down. I really wanted to have a nice neat line of staples along the edge, but the wood was like cement over there and no amount of pushing and hammering (or constant swearing) could get a staple into it. Oh well. Put them in further. No big whoop. No one's going to see it.

To get a nice corner, I trimmed some of the extra fabric (not too much! I just cut enough to help with folding. Always opt for too little than too much). Then I pulled the middle corner tab up towards the centre, pulled it tight, and stapled it in. After the middle point is stapled in place, the corners are really easy to fold neatly in so you can staple the whole mess down (one corner at a time, please). There are a lot of ways to do chair corners, so if this isn't working for you, just do it the best you can so it looks neat from the top. Now trim off the rest of the excess fabric.

 This seat just sits on top of the frame (no screws required -- shouldn't they be required?), so all I had to do was place the seat back on the chair frame, and voila! It's like getting a brand new chair! Pretty easy, right?

Now here's the part I kind of regret. Since the foam had texture, for some reason I can't explain, I figured it should face up. But despite the batting, I can still see the bumpy egg carton texture. So if I were going to do this again (and I'll be doing it again for the chair I'm sitting on right now -- but that's for some other -42 day), I would make sure that bumpy foam was facing down so the top was smooth. Not that it's a big deal, mind you. It's not terrible (especially since this chair lives in my craft room), but I would prefer it to be smooth. It's just something to think about if you're using egg carton foam, too. Anyway thanks to that egg carton foam, the chair is super squishy and soft now so I can finally do proper crafts in comfort.

Way back when I got this chair, mom spent forever and a half stripping it down to its natural colour which is why I haven't painted it. Now I'm wondering if I should or is that just the sitr-crazies talking. Thoughts?

getting back

I'm finding it incredibly hard to get back into blogging. I don't know why I'm feeling this way, but I'm finding it really hard to feel any excitement or desire to write a post. It's not that I'm not working on projects and stuff that would be great for the blog (or that I'm not taking pictures with the intention of using them for posts). It's just that every time I sit down to actually blog it out, I find myself writing and deleting and rewriting and deleting again and then I load pictures only to delete them and then I try putting them into a different format and then I delete them yet again. So, needless to say, this last week has been incredibly frustrating for me. Maybe what I need to do is just post something -- anything -- and it'll help me move back into things.

Let's try that, then, by posting a few of the pictures I took with my good camera before and during Christmas (which was a terribly sad amount -- or a large amount of the same picture at different angles so... pretty blah anyway).

These are the bird ornaments (well, two of them) that I made for the ornament swap I involved myself in this year. They're made from air drying clay with a little swirly dip-dye technique. I might make more birds or other clay items, because I really loved working with that medium and the outcome was pretty great. If I do, I'll maybe do a tutorial for you.

As a finale to Idle Husband's advent calendar, I walked over to Tim Horton's for some of their Christmas themed goodies. They ran out of the gingerbread doughnuts (sad), so I got the gingersnap cookie along with the chocolate candy cane doughnut and candy cane white hot chocolates. Everything was very good, though I thought the cookie was a little under-cooked towards the middle. I think I was a little tougher on them just because I was bummed about buying this cookie when I can easily make gingersnaps myself (and I'll never in a million years make my own doughnuts).

I was really sad not to see any Christmas flowers on my cactus this year, so I moved her to an even cooler room and almost two weeks later, she started putting out buds and then, boom! Flowers. She obviously likes her new spot (the craft room) a lot better. Despite what you'd initially think, a cooler room makes cacti (and succulents) so much happier!

Have any of you fellow bloggers ever felt this way? How did you break out of your blogging funk?