Home-All-Day Beans

Now we are home all day, every day, thanks to COVID-19.  I'm a little distracted and I'm prone to teariness - is that what you're doing? I start something, walk off, and do something else, and stare into space, and burst into tears.

We are playing board games, doing chores, watching movies, eating our normal good food with extra desserts (morale booster!), and deliberately, consciously, running around in the fresh air every day. I am an introvert and a homebody, so overall, if I don't look too hard at what is causing this situation, I'm content to cuddle down and nest with my dear ones. 

So, the beans. I actually don't have a photo of these beans because they only look like black beans, a little bit soupy. Enjoy these photos of Phoebe playing her daddy Uno instead!

As I put the beans in my slow cooker this morning, I realized they are just absolutely what I want to be cooking in this strange time.  They are forgiving of my distraction, they do well with little check-ins throughout the day but they're fine without, they might get done early if the beans are fresh and then they can sit and wait for dinner.  They use pantry staples, and they are cheap and nutritious. They don't make a big mess, which is lovely because even though I have time - lots of time! -  to clean up the kitchen, I'd rather be sewing.  These beans are the kind of  simple, fundamental food we didn't realize we were craving.  They are creamy and salty and while they have flavor, they can be a side dish or the main dish of a meal.  Tonight we ate them spooned over cornbread with a crunchy purple cabbage salad with cilantro and lime and frying cheese. Also great next to garlicky greens and mac and cheese, or over rice with salsa.

Home-All-Day Beans
Put 1-3 cups dry beans, whatever color you like, in slow cooker in morning (I typically do 2 cups black beans in my 4-quart cooker).  Add water to cover by an inch or so.  Add a tablespoon or so of olive oil, a few shakes of cumin, a sliced garlic clove or two - I just slice it in my fingers with a paring knife, very quick and casual.  Turn on High. In an hour or so, stir the beans, add a little more garlic or cumin, and keep it all cooking.  I check on the beans intermittently, tasting and adding more garlic and cumin if I feel moved, and when they are almost soft, I add salt (the experts vary on when to salt cooking beans - eye roll - I get contrary sometimes and add it whenever I want to).  Sometimes I turn the cooker down to Low.  Sometimes I take the lid off mid-afternoon if the beans have more liquid than I meant them to have.

Phoebe lost the Uno game, can you tell? Be well, friends. Let's keep in touch and lift each other up.

Phoebe Gets Her Quilt

It is a big deal for me to finish a quilt! I started Phoebe's quilt in October 2018 and finished 14 months later.  Now, each of my children sleeps under a quilt I made.  Oh, that makes me happy!

For Phoebe's quilt, I used crib sheets and scraps of clothing that she and we wore.  I limited the colors to pink, blue, and yellow, but I mixed in little exceptions to liven things up.

I am quite serious about sewing down my stash, so I used the white fabric I had on hand for the squares, which means there are actually two slightly different whites.  For a few weeks after I made this choice, I was ashamed; the church of my childhood believed in  matching as part of its religion. For years, I have been slowly growing away from this perfectionism. Quilting and mending are spiritual metaphors for me, I reminded myself, so these whites are my choice to "gather up the fragments and let nothing be lost" (paraphrased from Jesus' words in the book of John after he extended the little boy's lunch of  bread and fish to feed thousands of people).

Another use-it-up material did not work out so well for this quilt.  I bought pink yarn from the creative reuse store, making ties in the center of each pieced star with the goal of little felted balls.  But when I put the finished quilt through a hot wash and dry, the ties would not felt: the yarn was not 100% wool.  Cussing a little and refusing to drive and seek pink wool, I re-did the ties with pink perle cotton in my stash.

I like to work in a bit of machine quilting on my quilts, but it didn't seem to fit in Phoebe's quilt.  So I handquilted the whole thing in white perle cotton, outlining the stars and then highlighting them further with diagonal lines.  I am not fond of quilting that runs all over a quilt, but prefer quilting that works in harmony with the patchwork.

Phoebe's quilt pleases my eye.  She loves it, and so do I.  I am already deep into another patchwork project for the patchwork surprise I adore, as well as the pleasurable mental work of planning and dreaming The Next Quilt until I blink and find myself cutting fabric for it.  I'll keep you posted.

Still Here

I have plans to knit myself a robin's egg blue hat.  I'm almost done with a pair of striped socks for Phoebe. 

The superintendent came to the PTO meeting tonight, and I am now fired up about inequitable school funding and considering more ways to get involved. Mr. Thrift is not pleased, as I run intense about stuff like this and he would prefer I calm down. I might.

The oldest has a new pet, a sweet little bunny,  that she worked long and hard to prepare for, but I was still out to the Amish stores yesterday to buy pellets and see about getting hay for her to burrow in. 

I bought the most beautiful, soft fabric at the creative reuse store the other day - I think, I dare to hope, it may be cashmere; the strongest, most declarative green  - not kelly, not dark green, just a strong, rich green green.  

I overheard a standholder at market say she needed to get rubberbands for the egg cartons, and I had a bag of rubber bands down to her the very next market day because I am oversupplied.  We were both tickled.  And this is also the stand that still has local storage veggies, which I am so grateful for because buying and eating local food is my act of defiance and hope in the face of very large world problems.  

Phoebe has had a dreadful cough and of course, it is worst at night and people are sleeping poorly around here. We read the news about the coronavirus with disbelief and worry. 

I do laundry every day.  I keep up!  I keep the family in good food.  I have a sore foot that is healing very very slowly, so I can't jog as much and this is changing my mental and physical health.  I do Pilates.  I try. 

Ben has soccer games and soccer practices just about all the time (it seems).  He just absolutely loves it, so I try to work on my attitude about driving him all over creation.  We carpool, and I take my knitting along, and I enjoy my boy enjoying himself. 

I am studying sourdough bread.  I have borrowed books on the subject, and one or two blogs I read.  I made a few notes.  I make something with sourdough every week, as I have for about 10 years now, but I am tweaking and understanding it differently, and the feel of the silky strong dough is pure delight in my hands. 

I finished Phoebe's quilt.  That does really need its own blog post. I'll be back.

A Blue Blouse for a Kilt

Years ago, my sister brought Genevieve a little red kilt from Scotland.  Now it's Phoebe's turn to wear the little kilt. Since most of Phoebe's clothes are hand-me-downs from a very clever group of mamas, she didn't really have a top to go with it.

I bought this blue fabric at JoAnn's because the blue scrap I had in my stash just wasn't big enough and I really wanted that strong, bright blue for my strong, bright girl. Phoebe and I poured out the buttons and put our heads together; I love the combination of ladybugs and little vintage flowers!  Then I found this scrap of woven ribbon in my ribbon drawer and scratched my head good and long over where to use it.  I put it on the mandarin collar and divided it evenly down the sides of the placket (it doesn't actually reach the hem), making little black machine-embroidered welts to finish the tops and bottoms.

The blouse is from this pattern, and I do actually still have the flowered blouse that I made Genevieve. It's hanging in Phoebe's closet and we'll see if I can get her to wear it.

The blue blouse turned out so cute, and Phoebe wears it, so that's a win, too!

Use-What-You-Have Mittens for Phoebe

No surprise, Phoebe's sloth mittens were too small for her this fall when I dumped out the boxes of kid winter stuff and checked.  Sidenote: one of my biggest thrifty tips is thinking ahead to what you will need and then having the time to find it at a time/place/price that is good for you! So as one season is ending or a holiday is getting closer, I am taking a little time to look at my supplies and think.

So, I thought Phoebe and I would have fun picking out new fleece for mittens, but on the morning that we could run to the nearest fabric store (JoAnn's - ugh), she was dragging her feet about running errands.  I delved into my little box of fleece scraps just in case and you know what? I found enough scraps that suited Phoebe and her new winter coat! 

The purple plaid is actually a beautiful, fine merino wool from a scarf my friend gave me after her dog chewed on one end; she was hoping I could use it to make something.  I did, Stephanie!  The teal fleece is just regular polyester fleece left over from something.

From last year's experience, I put elastic in the wrists.  I made casings from red fleece bias binding - scraps from the Christmas stockings.

Phoebe likes the mittens and wears them and that, I tell you, is Something.  She has strong opinions on her clothes, and I navigate carefully to teach her dressing well and also respect her opinion. I am not the parent who lets the kids wear whatever they want.

The pictures of her on the porch in her winter coat show that she paired a red striped shirt and navy striped leggings - I suggested the denim jumper and red socks. Success!

This outfit is a combined effort: she put the short-sleeved dress and leggings together, I made sure she had a navy cardi and pink socks and bypassed the flowered sneakers.  I think the splashy roses look good together! Wonder what other combinations we will cook up together. . .

Our Family Trip to Seattle and ONP

Back in June, we went on a family trip that we had been anticipating for a long time.  My husband and I had been saving money for years, funneling money into a savings account whenever we could, sometimes only $50 a month, sometimes nothing for a while. We wanted to take this trip before Genevieve started a job (that could happen very soon, friends! she just turned 14!) and after Phoebe was independent of diapers and naps and strollers and such. This summer was that perfect window.  Let's look at our trip through the thrift lens.

We chose Olympic National Park just west of Seattle because it looked like "Acadia of the west" according to my husband, and last summer, we had a super-successful family trip to Acadia in Maine. Our family does well with a location that allows slowing down and deep playing and gets us out in nature, so we lean towards national and state parks for vacations right now.

The kids adored flying on a big airplane to get to Seattle (my husband and I tried not to dwell on the environmental cost of the flying).  We booked our flights months ahead of time on Spirit Airlines - we only paid for two checked bags.  We did not pick our seats or take carry-ons.  Instead, we each had a personal item - a backpack filled with snacks and entertainment - and I chose all Air BnB houses in Washington that had washing machines so we could take limited clothing and shoes in our two checked bags. We flew out on a Tuesday, and home on a Wednesday, the cheapest days to fly, and the Wednesday happened to be July Fourth, so we got a free, beautiful fireworks show when our plane took off from Seattle at 10pm. It was perhaps not the smartest choice to fly a red-eye flight against the time change from West to East Coast, but we suffered through the first day back with coffee and early bedtimes, and then we were fine.

Because my husband travels a lot for work, he had saved up his rental car points.  We were able to rent a car in Seattle for 10 days for a little over a hundred bucks. Before we rented the car, we got around Seattle by bus and by Uber, which thrilled the kids.

We chose our activities in Seattle and Olympic National Park carefully, considering what really sounded fun and interesting to us. Some of the activities cost a lot of money, but that's what the savings were for!  We went on the Great Wheel of Seattle and on an under-the-streets walking tour; we explored the Klondike Gold Rush Museum (a national park - free!), and watched boats and migrating salmon at the Ballard Locks (also free!). We stayed with dear friends in Seattle, such a treat. We had to take a ferry to continue our drive to ONP and thoroughly enjoyed the wind, the wake, the novelty of the ferry from top to bottom. We loved the Forks Timber Museum and Makah Museum, but eschewed the (expensive) hot springs at Sol Duc for looking like a regular old swimming pool. We hiked and hiked and hiked - stopping to play in the water, pose in the trees, and just generally luxuriate in the crisp air and gorgeous sky and mountain views.

I had done some brainstorming ahead of time for meals that I could easily source from any grocery store that would be nourishing, cheap, and relatively easy to make, especially with the unknown kitchens in the AirBnBs I had booked.

This is what I did:
Breakfast 1: eggs, toast with butter/honey, fried mushrooms or oranges, coffee, milk
Breakfast 2: peanut butter/honey toast, bananas, coffee, milk
(We rotated between these two breakfasts)
Lunches: all eaten on the go from our backpacks around Seattle or ONP: bread, cheese, sardines (sometimes), pickles, granola bars, apples, seltzer
Dinner 1: jarred spaghetti sauce, spaghetti, steamed fresh broccoli
Dinner 2: grilled salmon with lemon, baked potatoes + butter, lettuce + croutons + olive oil & balsamic
Dinner 3: grilled kielbasa, pierogies sauteed with onion, (frozen) peas
Dinner 4: pasta + canned white beans + frozen spinach + garlic, roasted fresh cauliflower
Dinner 5: grocery store fried chicken, mashed fresh potatoes, sauteed fresh (local!) spinach with lemon + butter

We did eat four meals out when it was otherwise not possible to cook (travel days) or there was a really cool local place we wanted to try, and we also had some ice cream snacks and espresso and such along the way.

Fun with pipe-cleaners while we wait for food; the backpacks eased the tedium at other times, not just the flights

We ate every last scrap except a half-jar of peanut butter before we boarded the plane, and the security people threw our peanut butter away because it was classified as a liquid and thus illegal to take on the plane. Peanut butter as a liquid!

My plane buddy after the red-eye flight, 3:30am in our bodies when the plane landed.

Overall, this trip was a huge success. We did not actually use all of our vacation savings, and we have immediately started building it up again.  I was worried that Phoebe was still too little to benefit much from the trip, but oh my goodness, if you ask her, she will still tell you about the Great Wheel over the ocean and about nurse logs in the Hoh Rainforest and when she rode in the canoe with Mommy and Daddy while Genevieve and Ben had a kayak.  She was perfectly behaved and occupied on the 6-hour flights (another worry of mine), and occasionally she and I stayed at the AirBnB in the afternoon so she could catch up on her naps and mama could, whew, do her introverted thing. Now that I've actually sorted through my photos, I'm going to make a photo book to go with the travel journal we kept - using a coupon for a free book, of course!

A Little Vintage Feedsack for a Little Nightie

This vintage feedsack scrap came in the box from Laura - all the sky-blue and coral polka dots, pretty roses, and yet not at all dainty or saccharine. I paired it with this pale blue striped cotton because I do really like light colors in sleep clothes, especially summer ones. 

I was thrilled to find the perfect coral bias tape in my stash, so I used it inside and outside the bodice. The buttons are Beatrix Potter. (side note: I have always adored the name "Jemima Puddleduck" and thought she must have a delightful story, but recently found the book in our Little Free Library and was in for a nasty surprise as the fox gets after her. I'm going to put it out of my mind and think instead on her lovely name.) 

Unfortunately, the age of the feedsack scrap means that it's not holding its seams very well.  I may be patching it up a few times, but it's worth it for Phoebe's pleasure in the nightie and my pleasure in the colors together. She's such a dear.

Phoebe is Four

Phoebe has been celebrated for several days now.  She is just a delight, especially when we wonder aloud who would need a present? Or what are these cupcakes for? And let's have a party just because, right? And when Phoebe remembers all over again that it's her birthday, she bubbles over with joy.

Yes, darling, let's have lots of joy. Let's remember the first few moments of your life, your wondering eyes and calm.  Let's see again the sweetness of your brother and sister meeting you for the first time.

We need this joy to counterbalance, to season, the pain of other dear ones who are sick and dying.  And I do believe there is joy for them on the other side of death, but for us who stay here? Oh, that is hard. Phoebe asked me the other day: "when is Uncle Ron going to come back to life?"  Getting Jesus and Easter and our loved ones all stirred in together.

Joy and pain.  The contrast that makes the patchwork of life.

 Let's look now at the Phoebe's birthday cupcakes - made and decorated by Genevieve, shared with preschool friends and then later with grandparents.  I don't have a good photo of the layer cake I made for Phoebe - it's from Smitten Kitchen Every Day and I highly recommend it.  Easy to make and one of the best-tasting cakes I've had in a long time. It was a yellow cake with fudge icing, and Phoebe requested "pink and purple" ice cream, so we had strawberry and raspberry ice cream to go with it.

Happy, happy birthday, darling girl! Many happy returns!