Gingerbread Villages

This is the time of year when typically, our Christmas shopping is done (yes, really. Don't hate me - I like to get it out of the way so we can enjoy the season) and we turn our attention to holiday fun. One of our favorite holiday traditions is to make gingerbread houses with our godkids. We started this a number of years ago, and discovered that this is an activity that everyone can participate in, regardless of age. We also have amazing conversations as the six of us sit around the table for several hours.

We do quite a bit of preparation for this extravaganza, usually starting a week ahead of time, but you can start even earlier if you freeze the dough. Bruce and I make the dough and use templates to create the pieces of the houses. I created templates using 3" x 5" file cards which turns out to be an ideal size. We can get 6 individual houses from a double batch of gingerbread dough, and the finished house size fits on a bread board with enough room to still have a yard to decorate.

Here's Bruce cutting dough to templates:

Once baked, we store the pieces in zip lock bags for up to a week.

On decorating day, we set up work stations at the expanded table. Everybody works on a cookie sheet with a lip (to keep stray decorations from landing on the 1970's shag carpeting in our dining room. Oy vey.) We have a long shopping list of "construction candies" and I open everything and put it out in bowls for easy access. I make a huge batch of royal icing, and fill 6 icing bags which we stand up in heavy coffee mugs for easy access. Everyone also has a flat spreading spatula. Here's the "before" shot of the work table:

Here's an action shot of the "during"! Evan and Mary are consulting on Evan's liberal use of sprinkles. Caitlin is deep in thought (this is the day she got icing on her back...we still don't know how) and Bruce is in the throws of creating a groovy jalopy out of pretzles and life savers. Sarah is just off camera to the right. My work station is in the bottom middle of the photo.

Graham crackers as interior walls help support heavily decorated exterior walls. We've also used big marshmallows inside to help prop things up. This is Sarah's pretzel log cabin, with assembly in progress. Note her cool fruit roll-up roofing with candy cane beams...

The finished village...

Happy Frosting to all, and to all a good night.

Kira and her Quilt

Kira gets acquainted with her new quilt - dressed to match!

Balance

I don’t remember the first time I ever heard a cello. I do know that my first musical exposure was listening to Aaron Copland’s “Billy the Kid” on the stereo as a newborn. Because my parents are musicians, I was immersed in music early and often, and by the time I was in 4th grade, my instrument of choice was the violin. The reason for this choice was youthfully simple. My next-door neighbor, 4 years older than me, played the violin. Somehow I missed the significance when in junior high he switched to the double bass. Regardless, the violin was the center of my life for 25 years.

And then I changed careers. Forgive me if I don’t recount the whole event here. It makes me tired. I will share a regret from my career change: the selling of my teaching cello when I moved to CT in 1995. It was a good, solid student cello and a pleasure to play. But when I moved to a studio apartment in Greenwich, I didn’t have space for it. In 2009, As Bruce’s birthday approached, I hatched a plan to get him a C-flute as the yang to his Celtic flute’s yin. He was overwhelmed with this gift and immediately wanted me to accompany him on my Celtic harp. I was not so enthusiastic about this idea. The harp is pretty, but hard to play and limited in range.


Somehow, in the wake of Bruce’s Flute Birthday, the idea of replacing my cello was surfaced. With some advice from Mary, the new cello arrived. I haven’t shared too much about it since, mostly because, well, I’ve been practicing it instead of writing about it.

In fact, there is quite a lot of practicing going on at our house. We’ve both found teachers, we’re both working on technique, and we’ve both slipped into a regular practice rhythm that makes our evenings quite pleasant. Jack has made his peace with the flute, and with the cello itself, although he is not too keen about the cello case…

It has been a long, long while since making music was something enjoyable. But now, the cello, along with the quilt projects, my riding lessons, the summer cooking and baking, the lampworking, my godkids, friends and family, are all serving as counterbalance to the stress and strain of work...it feels like achieving balance might, might just be a possibility.

Welcome Kira Helen!

As I was posting the last entry on July 11, Kira Helen was arriving in the world! Here are a few photos of the quilt, with the binding on, and both sides showing. Hopefully, there will eventually be pictures of Kira *with* her quilt. :)

The Great Cousinly Quilt Adventure

When last we left our two intrepid cousinly quilters, they were feverishly piecing quilt blocks in hopes of finishing said quilt in time for the arrival of baby Andrews. Today, we pick up our tale...

The blocks are pieced, the sides are assembled, and the quilt is quilted!

Here is Kris's side, all blues and greens and perfect triangle points. Please note the high-tech quilt stand (Bruce).

And here is Tobi's side, all yellows and oranges and limes, and not a right angle to be found.

Kris's blocks with quilting:

Tobi's blocks with quilting:

Next up - the binding, and hand finishing, and we're done!

The Annual Glass Class with Caitlin

For the past 4 or 5 years, Caitlin, my eldest godchild, and I have celebrated her birthday by taking a lampworking class together. We really enjoy Stephanie's classes, and we've followed her to a couple different venues. We like the set up at Hudson Beach Glass best of all the places we've been. The 2-day format gives us 10 hours of torch time.



Here's my work station. Safety glasses, matches and shaping paddle in upper left. Torch, unlit, in the center. More shaping tools to the right of the torch. Glass rods to the right.



Stephanie doing a demonstration during class. Please ignore the "pooh" tshirt.





Caitlin at the torch. She's using the shaping paddle to steady the mandrel while she works the glass in the torch.
Caitlin's finished beads at the end of the first day.

A really blurry picture of my beads at the end of the first day. The two beads in the foreground have jellyfish designs encased in clear glass. I really need a better photo of these.

Advanced Improvisation with Denyse Schmidt

Yesterday, I spent the day in the Bridgeport, CT studios of Denyse Schmidt where she and her assistant Richard taught their new course in Advanced Improvisation. Part retrospective of Denyse's quilting evolution, part design concepts, this was a low-key, hands-on, personal exploration of design. There were two participants besides myself, so the teacher-student ratio was exceptional, and the high point of the 5 hour session was having both Denyse and Richard pulling fabric and ping-ponging ideas with me at the design wall.

Here's where the day started:

Sketching potential design ideas:

First-pass fabric choices, pulled by Richard, with greens added by Denyse:

Bringing in the berry colors:

Ending up with a rugby-striped theme and the pieced blocks in stripes:

Denyse in action with another student's blocks:

Denyse and Richard have a similar asethetic, but different approaches and they play well off each other. It was an interesting and engaging day, and I finished the day in a completely different place from where I started, and landed in an unexpected place, with an unexpected palette, and an unexpected layout. And, pretty much, that was the point.