Checking in on the Garden

My onion sets are doing well, I have nearly twenty green onion shoots poking up through the soil! I'm so excited! I'm growing things! Since I've never actually gardened before in my life, I've decided to take the pressure off myself this year. This is my mad scientist year, where I just experiment with everything. Plant dozens of different kinds of plants and just see how they grow and behave, which need more care or less, which ones I'm absolutely terrible at maintaining and should probably avoid in the future...

They're so cute!

My grandmother dug up some of her chives and brought them to me. I think I'm going to actually sink these into the ground out front, rather than keep them in a container.

I'm totally having a love affair with my bleeding hearts:

They are one of my very favorite flowers. If I could figure out how to incorporate them into a cut flower arrangement, I totally would. But they look pretty nice on the back porch.

Out front, my little seedlings are doing well. I have two kinds of peas that have sprouted and are looking very hardy.

I also now have varieties of carrot sprouting, as well as basil, thyme, marjoram, summer savory, lavender, all in addition to the multitude of greens that are already sprouted.

That's my tarragon. I've also discovered that borage has adorably fuzzy leaves. The only thing still holding out are my peppers and tomatoes...

I also put a tub of tulips on the front porch. They were budding when I bought them, I was excited to see they bloomed into a vivid purple! I love purple.

Most of the houses in my neighborhood have spectacular tulip and daffodil gardens in full bloom right now. It's totally making me jealous. Next spring, my flower garden is going to be spectacular!

Edit: This evening I checked on the garden with Mr. Bear, and we found that our storage onions have sprouted as well!

We also just got our first box of local organically grown produce delivered by the local co-op, Fresh Abundance! Life is delicious right now!

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What to do with those pesky scraps? A Tutorial.

If you're anything like me, after a burlesque show your craftroom is strewn with scraps from your many many costumes. Now, you could just throw all those scraps away, or you could make them into awesome souveniers of the show!

Our most recent show was the Hot Mess show, in which I was variously a Twisted Sister megafan, Snooki from the Jersey Shore, a contestant on Rock of Love, and a protester outside an abortion clinic. The scraps I had left over from said show were all of the dayglo green/zebra/leopard variety, and to me scream "Zombie Prom hair accessory", so here we go:

Supplies: A cutting mat, a rotary cutter or scissors, a ruler or straight-edge, some patterned felt, a pile of scrap fabric, bobby pins, needle, thread. You could use ribbon, buttons, just about any kind of scrap embellishment you wanted on these, they really lend themselves to adaptation.

First, lay out your scrap fabric. It doesn't have to be squared at this point.

Cut away and part you don't want to use. Pictures, patterns, seams, etc.

You should now have some oddly shapes bits of fabric.

Line up the top rough edges of your pieces.

Lay down your ruler/straight edge/ etc. and more or less line it up with your top edge. Square off the top edge with your cutter. If you don't have a fancy ruler or rotary cutter, you can absolutely just mark your cutting lines in pencil or chalk and cut them with regular scissors. No need to be fancy, unless that's what you're going for!

Using the top edge as a guide, cut your fabric into even strips. I cut mine 1" wide.

Square off the bottom edge and remove the excess from both top and bottom.

You can square the sides too, if you want, but they're not as important.

You should now have a pile of strips.

For contrast I took the patterned felt I had left over from making my pasties. What are pasties? Why, these are:

Just a taste of how awesomely tacky my costumes were!

Turn your felt face down, square the edges like we did with the fabric, and cut into even strips smaller than your fabric strips. I cut these in 1/2" strips. Once again, feel free to just draw your lines on and cut with scissors if you like.

Rotate your ruler or straight edge and cut the strips widthwise into small strips. Mine are 2" long.

You should now have piles that look somewhat like this.

For the following steps, bust out that needle and thread.

Take one of your strips and determine how big you want your bow to be. This one will be about 2 1/2". Overlap the ends of your strip and thread your needle.

Do a running basting stitch up and then back down through the middle.

Gather your strip into a bow.

Take a piece of felt and wrap around the middle, covering your stitches.

Slightly overlap the felt in the back and cut off any excess. Stitch the felt in place, being careful not to push the needle all the way through to the front. Don't break your thread when you are through.

Now we're going to attach the bobby pin. Mine is brown, I couldn't find black. You don't have to attach it to a bobby pin, either. You can put the bows on barrettes, or pin backs. Have fun with it!

Place the bobby pin in the center back of the bow, and whipstitch around it several times to lock it in place. When it is secure, make a knot and push the needle under the felt, pulling the thread through. Cut off the thread close to the edge of the felt so that it is hidden.

Your bow should now look a bit like this.

And the front.

Use it to pin your hair back and no one will know you haven't brushed it today! Genius!

Realize you have lots of different fabric scraps left over and get to experimenting with different pattern combinations and sizes. Give away to other performers and momentos of the show, or to friends who couldn't make it. Contemplate opening an Etsy shop to sell the excess because you now have enough supplies to make hundreds of these things. Enjoy!

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The Hot Mess Show

Phwew! That was a lot of work, and now that it's done, the frantic costuming and prop-building is behind us(for the moment) and I actually have time to tend my garden and walk my dog again! Hurray! Here are some Before and After show shots:

Lots of delinquent schoolchildren ready to rock n' roll! I'm the tiny one center back.

Last-minute pastie making is a time-honored tradition in PnP.

Lovely Honey and her garters.

My amaze-tastic headphones and guitar for the opening act!

Post-show dance party! It looked just like that, too. A haze of impressionistic color.

Digital Boy d.j. solo for the first time! Note the fuzzy green legwarmers.

At this point in the evening, Divine was simply crying and hugging everyone.

But still with it enough to belt!

It was a super fun show, over-the-top raunchy and hilarious and offensive and irreverant. The stress of getting everything ready for the show melts away on show night for me, and it's just me getting to play on stage with my amazing friends while people watch and have a great time. My life is soooo fun!

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Seed leaves!

They're not true leaves, but actually part of the seed that will nourish the seedling until it gets true leaves. I'm still excited. Even if I can't get anything to grow past this stage, I know I can still make sprout sandwiches!

Sure, they're pretty much all varieties of lettuce, but it's nice to just see something green coming up.

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In Defense of Grannies

This post over on The Purl Bee expresses perfectly my perturbation at all the craft books/magazines/sites/etc. that all too often use the tagline "Not your Granny's X". My grandmothers are amazing women who work a kind of witchcraft my generation has forgotten. They can get stains out of anything, their needlework and stitchwork is beyond anything I can aspire to, their kitchens turn out culinary masterpieces and their gardens look like paintings. I should be so lucky to knit like my grandmothers, sew like them, bead like them. Maybe your grandmother couldn't stitch a blanket to save her life, but leave my grandmother's handiwork out of it!

Parenthetically, I think this may need to be my next quilting project:

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The Revolution Will Be Green and Leafy

Mr. Bear and I spent the weekend working on the yard and gardening. One of our goals, inspired by Gayla Trail(whose books you really must read!), is to grow all our own salad greens. Once our first head of lettuce, arugula, spinach, etc. becomes viable, I don't ever want to buy greens at the store again. A small and achievable goal, which hopefully will boost my gardening confidence. My arugula is already starting to sprout, much to my delight!

I love love love my potting bench. And I love love love Mr. Bear for getting it for me. He's the tops. I carried that big bag of soil up to the deck from the garage all by myself! It wasn't easy. I have no upper body strength.

We took Ponyo to Manito Park on Sunday, and there happened to be a plant sale! It was the last day so everything was super inexpensive. I got two tomato plants, two basil plants, a California Wonder bell pepper plant, and a Lily of the Valley, for a grand total of six dollars! And a stack of seed starter cell trays for free! Total kismet.

We found the French wine crate at a thrift store and thought it would be perfect for my onion sets(we checked to make sure it was heat-treated, not pressure-treated, first). I thickly and deeply sowed half the crate for green table onions and thinly/shallowly sowed the other half for storing onions.

The bleeding heart came from a nursery, along with a tub of purple tulips, which are on the front porch soaking up sun. The potting bench is always in the shade on the back, making it perfect for the bleeding hearts.

Speaking of Ponyo, here she is at her target weight of 20lbs(she's a bit of a runt). She was 27lbs when she was rescued, which was much too much for the poor girl, as you may remember from this post. Lots of walks and exercise and a reduced food diet later, she's slim and energetic and can go off her diet! More food is always welcome to corgis, which is how she became obese in the first place, so we're being very cautious with her.

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