OMG Broc-O-Lee

So Robb and I grow lots of things in our garden. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, that kind of stuff. But for some reason, there are some items that you find in the produce aisle of your grocery store that you never think you'll see growing in your backyard. For me, broccoli is one of those things.

Last winter, on a whim, I ordered up some broccoli seeds from the seed catalog. (I know, I'm 80 years old and I order seeds from a catalog, I get it.) We were getting our usual haul of goodies to plant and I thought, why not? I'll throw some dirt in a cup and see what happens. (OK, tangential question: where on earth does a broccoli "seed" come from? Is it, like, in its little nubs?) Either which way, the seed germinated and out came this leggy, sad little shoot. When you look at a thing like that, it's hard to imagine that it might someday grow up to be a strong, robust, fibrous broccoli plant. And at the time, I had NO IDEA what a broccoli plant might even look like. Is it big? Does it grow underground like a pineapple? I had no clue.

Basically, it's supposed to be a springtime cool-weather veg, and nothing really happened with my sad leggy little pod between February and May. So we just planted a couple of them in the ground and sort of figured they'd die. I know! It's terrible. But it's true. We had no faith in this plant AT ALL.

And then sometime around August, it started to become...a plant! It was right next to the "weed patch" (as shown below) so at first I thought it might just be wild foliage or some heinous orchid. And then...it started to grow these little nubs that looked like...can it be...broccoli!?

In the last month, it's grown to be an actual vegetable in its trademark broccoli shape. I like to think of their heads as many little afros that come together to form one large afro.


A word on the practicality of growing broccoli: this has got to be the dumbest plant for a home gardener to grow. And by dumb, I mean impractical. Look at how much room it takes up! And for just that one little head of broccoli!? (Granted, it could grow more heads...this could just be a puny or malnourished broccoli plant.) Also, it took EIGHT MONTHS to grow? That is nearly as long as it takes for a human to grow a baby....like, a cognizant creature with nerve endings and motor skills and "feelings" and all of that. It just seems a little silly that broccoli would need so long to grow. AGAIN, this could just be that we got it in the ground too late, and it barely held on through the heat all summer, and now what we're seeing is a "miracle broccoli plant" that happened to produce after all of its hardships. What I'm trying to say is, I do accept some responsibility for the silliness of this plant's performance.


One thing I know for sure: it's going to be very hard to eat this thing. I mean, we've only got one! Do we just eat it raw? Steam it and eat it with salt and butter? Do we put it in a stir fry, or maybe smother it with cheese sauce? Do we invite guests over so every one can have a nibble, or do we savor each bit for ourselves? It's turned into a very stressful situation as you can see.

Wow, I never knew I had so much to say about broccoli.

Do let me know if you have any suggestions! Both for how we should eat it and what I did wrong when growing it. So much to learn and ponder!

Emergency T-Shirt!

So, foolish me, I thought it was fall. I mean, wasn't yesterday actually technically the first day of fall? Because I was thinking about things like crisp apples and crunchy leaves, I dressed myself in a smart white button-up shirt with a light brown corduroy blazer and wore it with jeans and boots. Well, I knew something was wrong when I walked to work and ordered an iced coffee instead of a hot coffee whilst sweat beaded my forehead. And I knew something was really wrong when even the air-conditioning in the office wasn't enough to keep me cool. By 4pm, I'd come to accept that it was actually about 90 degrees out. AND, I had to go to a party after work. A big, sweaty party. It was 6pm when inspiration born of desperation (and fear of perspiration?) suddenly hit: I will make a t-shirt!
I rifled through a cabinet at work where I stashed a bunch of shirts that Robb had put in the "give-away" pile at home. (Literally, a pile of shirts on our bedroom floor.) I brought them to work thinking I'd donate them to a thrift store in the neighborhood some day, but...well...six months later and that hasn't happened. And thank God! Because yesterday I was soooo grateful to find a t-shirt to whack to bits which I could then wear to a party.

You may be wondering, Liana, do you have a sewing machine at your office? The answer is, no! But I do have scissors. That said, I introduce to you the first ever no-sew emergency t-shirt.

Because Robb wears t-shirts that fit, I had a fairly reasonable size to work with (meaning I didn't need to change the bottom at all). Otherwise, here's all you have to do to make your own no-sew emergency t-shirt:

Whack off the sleeves right along the seam. Cut out the collar, too, while you're at it. Then cut across the seam at each shoulder. Each of the four tank straps get folded into thirds (like you're folding a letter to put in an envelope). Then cut little notches through all three layers about 1/2" from each strap end. To make a cord to loop through the holes, I just cut off the seam from the discarded sleeve since it's sturdy and already hemmed (nice and neat, right?). Weave those puppies through the holes on the front and back straps, making sure the straps are even (this required a trip to the loo with scissors...if you're at work, try not to let anyone see you do this as it's never easy to explain why you're taking scissors into the bathroom.) Tie the ends of the cords in double knots, and voila! You're done.

Here it is from the side. You can tell I can't keep from staring at the hypnotizing red blinking light of PhotoBooth. (It has a zombie effect on me.)

And here it is from the back. Which is sort of nothing special.

What IS special is that I got to go out last night and feel comfortable and happy and smart. Not only that, but several people even commented on the shirt! Granted, they mostly commented because they liked the bicycle. (This is, incidentally, a shirt designed by our friend Jen in San Francisco who has an awesome line called Nooworks. Hi Jen!) But it was still fun to explain that I made a shirt at my desk. Who knew this was even possible? Well, now we all do.

My Superstar Crafty Mom

So I was thinking the other day, what's the first thing I ever "crafted"? The answer is actually hanging in my bedroom (in what I like to think of as the "ultra-girly corner" of an otherwise nice, grown-up bedroom). This mirror is my first memory of trash-to-treasure crafting, and it's something that I made with my mom. Or, more precisely, my mom made while I looked over her shoulder and begged to help.

I'm going to guess that I was about five or six years old when we made this. The mirror originally had a bronze floral frame, and even my five-year-old self knew it was kind of gaudy. Mom took it outside, laid newspaper over the mirror itself and tucked it in under the frame, which I recall thinking was very smart. Then she spray-painted the whole bronze floral latticework white.


When the white paint had dried, the two of us sat down in the living room and painted all of the flowers--some white, some blue. I seem to recall that I was in charge of painting the yellow centers. And I imagine that we did this while watching One Life to Live (our favorite soap opera at the time.) And voila! We had a flowery mirror fit for a little girl's bedroom. (Or...ahem, a grown-up person's bedroom.) To be honest with you, I am completely incapable of knowing if this mirror is atrociously tacky or outrageously beautiful and hip. It's one of those items that has sort of merged with my identity and the story of who I am, and as long as I don't break it in a move some day, I will likely have it for the rest of my life.

At this point--if you didn't get it already from my lead-in--I'd like to state, for the record, that my mom has been my crafty inspiration my entire life. She let me destroy the kitchen with adolescent candle-making, sewed our dresses when Erin and I were in the musical Oklahoma!. And she is basically the brainchild of our family tradition of having "crappy craft Christmases" on years when we're all feeling a little broke. To be honest, those Christmases, where virtually everything wrapped under the tree is some sort of handmade wonder (or catastrophe), are all of our favorites. This painting above, in fact, was a gift from my mom on one of our crappy craft Christmases! Not so crappy, in my opinion!

And so were these vases, which she decoupaged using her secret decoupage technique! (You can see I've put the vases to other crafty uses, storing my various crappy crafting supplies.)

She's pretty good though, right?

And in recent years, she's even started selling her handmade decoupaged pendants online like a total rockstar. Go mom! She's been killing it over at Ebay for some time now, but just last week she expanded onto Etsy to open up her own online shop.

I was so proud of her that I had to gush to the online universe. I guess you could say I'm a pretty big fan of her work.

Oh, and special shout-out to my sister who taught me how to embed links this week. Thanks, Erin!

Crotch Shots Part Deux

So remember back in April when I was the smarty-pants who figured out how to repair a rip in the crotch of her jeans by ironing a patch onto the inside of them? Well, guess what. That didn't work. I mean it did, sort of. Like, until I WASHED them. And then the patch started to peel away from the jeans, and this stiff, gluey patch fabric was then poking my inner thigh every time I walked until it managed to work its way through the hole in the jeans, hanging out of the flap like a little crotch flag. Did this keep me from wearing the jeans? Hell no! They are my favorite pair of jeans, after all. Consequently, the tear got worse. And not only that...another rip was forming on the other side! It was a triage situation, clearly. And so the time came to present to you...Crotch Shots Part Deux: the second crotch repair.

This time I wasn't gonna mess around. This time, the fix was gonna last. So instead of going with some cheesy iron-on denim, I reached for heavyweight khaki fabric to make a pair of long-lasting crotch patches.


It is imperative to note the origin of these crotch patches. They came from none other than the "seahorse pants"--an amazing discovery in cousin-in-law Tara's giveaway clothing pile years ago. I was going through her old clothes, which were a goldmine of awesome finds, when I stumbled upon these pants and proceeded to laugh for the next three months. Tara couldn't quite explain how these pants came into her possession and swears she never wore them. (The tags are still on the pants to prove it.) I took the pants thinking someday, somehow, I will want to include an embroidered seahorse motif on something. I'm thinking it will be on the back of a denim jacket...when I'm in the "seahorse gang" (or something). In the meantime, the khaki was used for crotch patches.

I sewed those puppies on around all of the edges using a zigzag stitch, which allows the fabric to stretch a little without tearing the stitches. And for a person who insists on quoting Sally O'Mally about once a week, flexibility is a must. ("I can KICK, I can STREEEETCH....and I'm 50!")


I then turned the jeans right side out and did another zigzag stitch right along the rip, going back and forth a few times, so now the two sides of the tear are bonded together by the strength of a wide zigzag!

Around this time I realized I probably shouldn't have used brown thread. In my defense, I didn't have any blue thread laying around and the notions shop is just too far away. I know, I know, it was a beautiful day and I should have rode my bike, but I didn't. Instead...I opted to use a blue pen and color in the stitches. Trashy, I know! First, I colored in the faded spots and patch fabric with a light blue marker.

Then I went over the brown stitches with a blue ball-point pen. This will probably fade completely the next time I throw the jeans in the washer, and at that point I'll either buy a sharpie or decide I don't care.

When it was all said and done, I must say, I was quite impressed with the crotch repair. And as long as the patches don't fall out, rip, or otherwise fail, I don't think anyone will even notice them!

Unless you're looking at me from this angle. Which you shouldn't.

A Gift for a Gift

Many months ago, Robb and I received a wonderful early wedding present: a gift card to buy fabric at Purl Soho. Sigh...

The gift was from Melanie, which she spontaneously decided had to happen after a phone conversation we had one day where I told her about my dream of having handmade napkins at my wedding. More specifically, I asked if she had heard anything about Purl having a moving sale, because my wedding budget was getting a little tight. (At the time, Purl was packing up to move from their tiny beloved little shops on Sullivan Street to the glorious behemoth shop they've now opened on Broome.) She said she'd give Joelle a call to find out, and then promptly called up the shop and ordered up a gift card for me and Robb to buy our napkin fabric.


When I did finally manage to make my way into the shop, I thought that choosing fabric would be the hardest thing on the planet. Almost every fabric that Purl stocks is tip-top gorgeous. Cute, bright, fresh. It just makes you feel good to look at it all together. But when I walked in, my eye immediately went to the left wall, three shelves up, where I found Denyse Schmidt's Hope Valley range. But which colors and prints to choose?? I wanted them all! I left the shop without buying a thing, befuddled as to how one can even begin to narrow down her options within such a pretty range.

When I told Melanie about my predicament--that there were just too many options--she very nonchalantly informed me that she had a fat quarter stack of every color and print in the Hope Valley range in her office. Marveling at the fact that Melanie is apparently some kind of magician, I took the stack home so that Robb and I could play with the options. We finally settled on the floral prints in every color.

For such a wonderful wonderful gift, I decided that Melanie needed to be thanked with a gift. While flipping through Joelle's Last-Minute Patchwork + Quilted Gifts one day, I spotted the pincushion and couldn't believe my luck. What better way to showcase the eight floral fabrics in one tiny, bright little package? And Melanie loves to hand-sew! And doesn't she need a pretty little pincushion?

I got to work right away. And let me tell you, Joelle doesn't lie--it's quick to make, and it really does belong in the "2-4 hour gift" chapter. I snipped out the leaf-shaped pieces from some spare fabric and sewed each one together (attempting to keep the points straight). Once the pieces are attached and turned right-side out, it makes this sad, deflated-looking hacky sack. But a few good handfuls of stuffing, and you've got yourself quite a rotund little pincushion!

The book advises you to loop embroidery floss around the pincushion seams in order to make a nice, uniform shape. Unfortunately, my seams were so sloppy that I needed something a little thicker to cover them up--that's why you'll find Rowan's All-Seasons Cotton yarn delineating the sections in mine. A little chunkier than floss, but better than sloppy seams any day of the week.

Once I spend a little time making a gift for someone, I find it impossible to just shove it in a gift bag and hand it off. So to wrap it up, I grabbed one of the leftover wedding napkins (washed, of course!), and did a little improvised furoshiki.

First, I laid out the napkin in a diamond shape with the cushion in the middle. Then I folded in the corners to meet the cushion.

Next I folder over each side of the napkin.


I then folded up the bottom, folded the top into a point, and pressed it down envelope style.

Since I didn't have a card on hand, but I DO have a sewing machine, I zigzag stitched around a piece of cardstock with hot pink thread...
Wrote a big note of gratitude, and pinned it on top.

Voila! And that's what I call a gift for a gift.

This and This and This

For the last few days I've been asking myself, what did you do this summer? Because for me, in a weird way, summer really only started on July 31, the day that Robb and I returned from our honeymoon. All of the time before that was spent in a strange nether-daze called "holy %&*@, I'm getting married!" where you are aware that the sun is shining and barbecues are happening, but all you are REALLY doing is thinking about your wedding budget or if you remembered to remind your mom to order the white citronella candles, NOT the yellow ones, and that they must be votives not tea lights.

And so, now that we're back and enjoying this latter half of post-wedding summer, I flipped through my photos and wanted to do a show-and-tell. Starting with this lovely photo of corn off the cob that I roasted half to death until it was charred and sweet and perfect for salsa. This, by the way, is what you do when you buy 15 ears of corn for a barbecue and forget to cook them. You save them and make roasted corn salsa and roasted corn guacamole for the barbecue that someone else is throwing the following weekend. Here's the tomato we used to tie the salsa together. Just one tomato = a giant vat of salsa (to use a technical term, of course).

And here it is sliced up all pretty like. Almost like a nectarine, no?

The same day we baked some Moroccan flatbread, which starts out as three packets of dry yeast in one cup of water. A science experiment no doubt.

After mixing it up with bread flour, cumin, coriander, and mashed up chickpeas, the bread is baked right on the oven rack at 450 degrees. They come out hot and chewy and looking oddly look like giant chocolate chip cookies. Jamie Oliver tells me in his recipe that you can cook these suckers right on a barbecue grill. This is officially on my "before summer is over" to-do list.

As explored in a previous post, we discovered the giantest cucumber I ever did see. Though what I didn't tell you was that we took it to Robb's bar whereupon most of the clientele posed with the cucumber photo-booth style.

Then Robb cut it up for the bar to share, dipped in none other than a big bowl of skanky ranch dressing. We only made it through half of the cucumber. Rumor has it that one of Robb's friends took the remaining half home to "scare his girlfriend." I have refrained from asking any other questions about what he meant by that.


Robb's peppers have played an integral role in our summer cooking, which I like to think of as our "spicy season." Here we've diced up some mild tangerine dream peppers with some hot salsa delights.


And then cooked them down with tomatoes from the garden and black beans to make a super killer pot of chili. Note to self: cut the cherry tomatoes in half before putting them in the pot (otherwise they become little flavorless heat bombs.)

And since I've been back at work, I've been editing a book that covers all possible areas of DIY life, from crafts to cooking to starting your own business to beauty. So it is no surprise that while editing the beauty chapter, I became very inspired by how to do a DIY bouffant. Here is my first stab at one, attempted without a rat (a piece of phoney hair used to make the "bump" at the crown of the head) or any hairspray. I think my attempt looks more like a hair hat comb-over than a bouffant.

But it's only my first try. Expect to see more and bigger bouffants from here through the end of summer. I just think they look so nice with summer dresses!

Very importantly, we finally made it to Coney Island. How can a whole Brooklyn summer pass without at least one Saturday spent at Coney?

And, as we all know, no trip to Coney is complete without wasting away a few hours at Beer Island. For those who've never been, Beer Island is basically a parking lot filled with sand where one can go buy beer. They also have a pretty killer jukebox. (And as we also know, no trip to Beer Island is complete without somebody getting pushed out of their chair and falling into the sand.)

Slowly but surely I'm finding things to do with the oodles of glorious fabric left over from our wedding. What on earth will this become? We'll find out, now won't we...

Soon enough I'll pick up my knitting needles to finish the not one but three projects I currently have going. Let's see if I'll be able to remember which row I left off on in the various stitch patterns.

As for tonight? I do believe I'm going to take a stab at this kneadless bread recipe that my coworker Dervla swears by:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/dining/081mrex.html?_r=2&sq=no%20knead%20b
(She says her parents make something like two loaves of this a day, which leads me to believe that it is pretty tasty.)

And I'd also like to go camping. And play croquet in the park. And bake a pie. And go to Playland. THEN, I will have officially had a full summer.

Wee Wonderfuls...Where Are They Now?

Friends and fellow crafters, I'm so excited to blog about our newest STC Craft book to hit stores! Wee Wonderfuls is a collection of doll patterns from Hillary Lang that I had the honor of working on last fall/winter. As I carefully read the pages, I found myself with a sudden unmistakable urge to make just about everything in the book. It was coming up on Christmas, so handmade gifts were going to happen no matter what. I asked myself, why not make these little stuffed dolls for my parents and big sister? I mean, who says a grown man won't love a striped, stuffed giraffe?

And that's precisely where we'll start. Wes, the Baby Giraffe! (Ahem...pardon the quality of the book photos here...I didn't want to bug our design department to acquire nice jpegs of photos from the book so instead have captured them using PhotoBooth on my Mac. Trust me, it goes with the theme of this blog post...amateur photography at its finest!) I was so smitten with the baby giraffe that I decided to make one for my dad in a retro print with wide yellow, orange and brown stripes. A friend aptly noted that the giraffe was made in "70's stewardess uniform fabric." I like that! Hopefully Dad does too.

So I asked my family to send me photos of the creatures I created since I didn't get to photograph them adequately before I gave them away. Plus I was curious about their new homes! So it was much to my surprise today when I received this photo from my dad showing that Wes, the Baby Giraffe apparently lives inside of a junk drawer. I actually have no idea what's going on here! Why is there a punch bowl filled with antique glasses? And so many old knives? Can you even spot the giraffe? (There were actually better photos of the giraffe than this one, but I was just amazed by the "styling" choices in this shot and had to share.)

Next up was the topsy-turvy doll (which Hillary has named Margot). This one was such a challenge! A topsy-turvy doll is essentially a two-headed doll--you flip up the skirt on one of the dolls, and beneath (like where you would expect her legs to be) is the other doll's head! And on the reverse of one doll's dress is the other doll's dress! Amazing, right? I wanted to wow mom with an extra-challenging construction, so I knew this one would be for her.


Here is my own rendition of Margot (alongside Wes, the Baby Giraffe in his cart!). This side of the topsy-turvy doll is the "pretty" side. She has a nice up-do, created by weaving yarn in and out of her head and then twisting her braids into neat little buns. Her dress has that sweet little green ruffle at the bottom, and her expression is just a little bit coquettish. I love her!

And then there's the other side...she turned out a little, well...homely. And her face is just the teensiest bit lumpy. Her's was the first side on which I attempted to add the hair. I learned the hard way that, when sewing on the hair, you need to pull the needle from the center of the head out to the edges...not from the outside edges toward the center. When you do the latter, it warps the shape of her face and gives it a slight Jay Leno effect. It's okay, though...that's what the other "pretty" side of the topsy-turvy doll is for!

Finally, there was Bjorn Bjornson, the button-joint teddy bear! I am absolutely madly in love with bears, so knew I had to take on at least one of the teddy bear projects in the book. And who better to give it to than my sister, who dutifully buys me a bear calendar every year?

Here's the photo that Erin took of the bear on her camera phone. (At this point, I didn't even think it was worth it for her to send me a real photo as it might look too good compared to the other photos in this post.) To mix it up a bit, I used a pink heathered tweed for the bear's body instead of the white polar fur shown in the book. I know, I know, it gives the bear kind of a piggie effect. Especially with those little beady eyes and its tight, rotund belly. But I adore how his arms and legs swivel on their button joints so that he can put his hands to his mouth as though surprised, or have a seat on Erin's couch (as he's doing here).

All in all, they were an odd crop of characters, but everyone was delighted! As Hillary says in the introduction to her book, "there is a toy for every member of your family and circle of friends, boys and girls of all ages--nobody's left out." I couldn't find that to be more true!

As for the quality of my toy-making skills, I must say that I'm sort of in love with their quirks. And I love how much I learned in the process! So now I must quote Hillary once more as she sagely points out the real spirit of toy-making: "You'll find there is a lot of wiggle room when making toys: uneven seams, wonky embroidery, lumpy stuffing....still cute. With handmade toys, imperfection is part of the charm."

Once again, I couldn't agree more.