The Beginning of Fall

I want to start this post by mentioning how busy I've been over the past six weeks and make reference to how fast time goes, but that's how I always start my posts and it's getting a little tired.

So, I'll just say "hello" and jump right into it.

I made another Halloween Tree a few weeks ago using a black decorative tree that I bought on sale after Halloween at Michael’s last year. The branches are made from covered wire that can be bent and arranged in different directions. I wanted this tree to be distinct from the one that I made back in 2007, which you can see by clicking here. That first tree has skull, pumpkin, and bat ornaments, and a trio of witches and their black cat gathered around a tombstone at the base.


For this new Halloween tree I made crows (one is hanging as an ornament and another is sitting on a blackened pumpkin at the base of the tree), pumpkins, apples, ghosts and an owl from Sculpey brand polymer clay. Unfortunately, I didn’t read the Sculpey baking instructions prior to putting the first batch of ornaments in the oven and they ended up burning a bit, hence the blackened pumpkin that the crow is sitting on at the base of the tree. The bottoms of the apples are slightly scorched, as are the bottoms of the ghosts, which makes it look as if they were floating low over muddy ground before finally floating up to settle in their haunting spots in the tree.

In the photo above you can see one of the blackened pumpkins that was burned in the oven. I made other pumpkins but they were so charred that I had to throw those out. I was much more careful with the second batch of pumpkins, as you can see!

Has it really been 4 years since I made that first tree? It seems like only yesterday. Maybe that’s why I felt so confident in relying only on my memory for baking my Sculpey for this new tree rather than actually looking up the directions. Lesson learned. Both of my Halloween Trees are now on display in my living room along with my other spooky seasonal decorations.

Anyway, you may have noticed that the quality of the photos of my new Halloween Tree are much better than my first tree. Finally, 7 long years after buying my first digital camera, a simple little Olympus point-and-shoot thing, I now have a new camera. It’s a Canon EOS REBEL T3 digital SLR and, boy, does it take some beautiful pictures. My new Canon can also make high definition videos which opens up a whole new world of possibilities. I bought a tripod, too, because I am terrible for moving the camera when I take a snap, and I have plans to make some short stop-motion animation films so I’ll need my hands free to move things around.

But rather than get way, way, way ahead of myself, which is what I always do when I have a new toy and a never-ending supply of creative ideas and plans (I love planning!), a few weeks ago on September 18th I started out with my Canon by taking a few sunny morning shots of flowers out in the garden.






There are so many interesting little details in these flowers. I love that the resolution of the original photos is so high that when I zoom in while viewing them on my computer, I can see the specks of pollen on the flower petals.


These flowers look like they ran to hide when I started clomping around the garden in my rubber boots and were too scared to come out from under the chair to have their picture taken. Either that or they’re napping in the shade.

And then there’s the fruit. The tomatoes were almost ready to be picked when I took these.




The black currants, on the other hand, were not fit to be picked at all.


These are some sad looking black currants. A nice snack for the birds, perhaps.

And finally, a lonely gooseberry. I was only able to find three on the whole bush.


The weather was awful this summer in St. John’s which is why nothing really grew or ripened normally. I’m already planning for next year, though. I want to grow some of my favourite vegetables, namely pumpkins, butternut squash, zucchini, carrots (the regular orange kind but also purple and yellow), beets, and garlic. And more tomatoes, of course.

I picked the ripest tomatoes and used about 14 or so of the smallest ones on September 24th to make a roasted red and green tomato and red pepper soup.


It was so, so, so good. I only made enough for two small bowls but it was worth it. I picked the remaining tomatoes this week and gave them to my father who used them to make green tomato sandwich spread.

I’ve made so many baked things over the past couple of months that I’m having trouble remembering everything, but I know for sure that I made the following:

• Mini apple raisin cinnamon rolls;
• Chocolate brownies with walnuts;
• Chocolate and pumpkin-walnut marbled brownies with chocolate drizzle on top. These were made with leftover pumpkin puree from Halloween 2010 that was found in the deep freeze but they were ridiculously good nonetheless;
• Oat and apple muffins;
• Blueberry and currant bran muffins;
• A small cherry, blueberry, and apple cake;
• Banana chocolate chip muffins;
• And mini banana bread loaves. 

Unfortunately, I didn’t take pictures of any of these, despite having a new camera. I’m going to make some Halloween themed chocolates and chocolate-covered pretzels this weekend to bring in to my coworkers, like most of the things I make. I want to try making my own pretzels at some point, too. I'll try to remember the photos this time.

If I was kept in a darkened room with no windows and no access to the outside world, I swear I'd know that autumn was on its way simply by the insatiable baking itch that always comes over me this time of year. But if I did look outside, I'd instantly know the time of year because when else do the garden gnomes and other assorted decorative wee folk come together? Here’s a photo of my garden denizens' annual fall council meeting which they are holding before they make their way into the shed for the winter.


Notice how the Disney Seven Dwarves are off to one side keeping to themselves. But you can't really expect such icons of the silver screen to hobnob with the regular wee folk, can you?

The end of summer and other odds and ends

My grandmother was in town recently and so to celebrate her upcoming birthday on September 1st, I made some goodies for a party that my mother held in her honour.

I made a 6” lemon cake with lemon buttercream and matching mini cupcakes.











Plus, I made some regular size vanilla cupcakes. The pink ones have strawberry vanilla buttercream, handmade white icing roses dusted with white Wilton Pearl Dust, and white sugar pearls. The white cupcakes have vanilla buttercream icing and handmade icing flowers with silver dragees and dusted with pink Pearl Dust.



Finally, I made some chocolates. The leaves are dark chocolate with toffee bits and toasted pecans, and the flowers are marbled dark and white chocolate.



Happy birthday, Nanny P.

Nan’s birthday marks the end of summer, even though fall doesn’t officially start until late September. Where did the summer go? I feel like the past two months have whipped past me, and the weather was so poor it's almost as if summer was never here. But I do have some evidence of summer. I took a few pictures of the garden a few days ago simply to document the fact that we did in fact have one beautiful day here in St. John’s this year. I even managed to grow a few tomatoes.










The garden not only has tomatoes, it also has great amenities for travelling birds, with only the most finely appointed and tastefully decorated houses and washing facilities. When I saw this little birdbath featuring Winnie the Pooh and Piglet sitting on a log and having a conversation amidst the Hunny pots, I had to have it. The water collects in the top of the bigger Hunny pot.




And I found this wacky mustachioed-man's-face-carved-into-wood birdhouse at the dollar store of all places. So, naturally, I had to have it.



It was next to impossible to get a picture of the garden without getting a gnome in the shot. Here a gnome, there a gnome, everywhere a gnome gnome. Also, a few of the Seven Dwarves made an appearance.








I like that this little fella on the rock looks as if he’s tutoring the turtle sitting on his book. He used to have a small lantern hanging from his outstretched hand but I think it got carried off by the wind or something.



I also discovered that there’s a rather odd-looking flower growing in the flower bed.



Looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book, a rare Who-daisy perhaps.

I can't wait for fall.

Making (and baking) the most of my free time

Now that I have finished my M.A. (I'm just waiting on the university registrar to process the final project grade and gimme my hard-earned piece of parchment—C’mon, c’mon, c'mon!), I’ve been busy looking for other things to do. Yesterday I signed up for cake decorating classes, and I’ve been  buying new cookie cutters so that I can practice my sugar cookies and improve my royal icing decorating techniques.

The impetus for signing up for the classes was the sugar cookies that I made on Thursday evening. After following a terrible recipe for royal icing from a well-respected book on decorating sugar cookies that encouraged profuse thinning of the flooding-consistency icing, I had the most disgusting looking sugar cookies that I have ever seen. The cookies oozed icing all down over their sides and onto the plate. They looked sick. Ugh. But, man, were they tasty!

No matter how yummy my ugly cookies might taste, I’ve realized that half the battle with baking and working with icing is having the right recipes and the right tools, and I've never bothered much about the tools. For the cake decorating course, I had to buy a beginner’s kit that has all the tools a beginner could want. Now that I’m turning my love of baking and decorating into more of a regular hobby and I'm beginning to amass various cutters and tips and couplers (which sounds vaguely like a collection of medieval instruments of torture), I feel better prepared for any decorating situation that might come my way. Nope, nothing can go wrong now!

Aside from baking, I’ve also made a commitment to drawing every Saturday morning while I listen to CBC Radio One, which on its own has long been my standard Saturday ritual. So for the past two Saturdays I’ve been holed up in my office/craft room with my pens and some proper drawing paper. Again, like with baking,  half the battle with drawing is having the right materials, like the right pens and the right paper. I'd never bothered to buy proper drawing paper until last week, but the price (confession: I got a good discount!) is worth it—it’s easier to draw on and shows the ink better (it makes black look blacker!) than plain old computer paper, which in my inexperience and ignorance I’ve been doodling on all these years.

So now armed with the right tools, I will draw every Saturday.  I figure I have to put some time aside for it each week or otherwise I’d never do it--that's just the way my organized brain works. My only rules are (1) I have to draw for at least an hour, and (2) the drawing doesn’t have to be good but I do have to finish the drawing rather than throw it in the garbage halfway through, no matter how awful it is.  The past two sessions have produced three odd scenes of Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the distance, as if it is being viewed from the balconies of apartments. Although I wasn't consciously aware of it as I was drawing, I think that somewhere in the dark recesses of my mind I was inspired by that cool, orange-y Grand Marnier ad, “La Vie Grand Marnier,” that I saw on my last trip to Florida. It played at the beginning of a lot of the films and TV shows on the plane, so I saw it a bunch of times.





I love the style of the animation in that ad. My drawings are not nearly that good, however, and because I have no intention of showing them to you (not unless I've had a few shots of Grand Marnier first), I'll describe them to you. The first one is a night scene with a befuddled looking French artist/mime cliché, complete with a black beret and stripey Breton shirt à la Picasso, attempting to put the moves on a sophisticated Parisian woman. The second one is another night scene of a lone woman with big hips in a polka-dot dress with a glass of wine looking out over a balcony at Paris. Maybe she’s alone because her stereotypical French artist boyfriend is hitting on the more sophisticated woman in the first drawing, or maybe she’s alone because she wears hideous polka-dot dresses. I don’t know. The third one is like the morning after the other two drawings; it has a hairy looking Eiffel tower in the background of a breakfast table set with a strangely anthropomorphic coffee service. Two coffee cups look at one another adoringly while a despondent coffee pot looks off into the distance, trying desperately hard to appear indifferent but the plume of steam coming from his spout/nose betrays his true feelings. Meanwhile, three coffee spoons are lying on the table nearby gossiping amongst themselves about the whole affair and looking rather smug. And yes, there's a croissant on a plate, but it doesn't have a face and so it doesn't appear to be feeling anything at all.

I’d show the drawings to you but they’re awful. I wondered whether or not to put my signature on them, or whether I could put someone else’s signature on them to hide the fact that I drew them. As if people would actually believe that "Picasso" came back to life just to travel all the way here to break into my office/craft room, quickly draw three crappy scenes of Paris on my discount-bin drawing paper, and then disappear again. But the point is not to try to draw something good or even mediocre (and I'm a champ at the medicore game); the point for me is just to DRAW. The one thing that having no free time for the past few years has taught me is that I should strive now to use my free time doing all the things I said I’d do when I was up to my eyeballs in research and essays and intellectual pursuits. Like drawing, for example. And making cookies. And making little toadstools from felt.

And so, last weekend I made a prototype for some felt gnome-home toadstools I want to make. Look:








It's about 5 and a quarter inches tall. It’s my first time making one, and so there are a few kinks that I still want to work out before trying another one. I got the free pattern here. It's actually a pincushion pattern, but I can see making a whole bunch of varying sizes to make a Christmas gnome village. Last year I said that once I had finished my M.A. I would make a Dr.Seuss-style Who-Ville Christmas village. Maybe I could make TWO Christmas villages, a felt-y one for gnomes and another one for Whos! Hey, the sky's the limit now, what with all this free time!

Igor

I survived Hurricane Igor, the Category 1 hurricane that blasted the Eastern region of NL on Monday. My garden gnomes were blown off their big rock perches and onto the ground by the force of the wind, but they fared better than I expected and are still lighting up (they're solar powered). One gnome is holding a little candle that lights up when it gets dark. The other one has a nest at his feet full of bird eggs, which also light up at night for some strange reason. I can see the gnomes in the garden from my kitchen window. One keeps looking at me a little funny, though, like he’s too shy to make direct eye contact so he just grins and looks off to one side. The other one appears to have glugged down a few glasses of scotch and just stares off into the distance. But they were like that before the hurricane.

Luckily, there was no damage to the house from flying gnomes or flying anything-else, other than the little bits of leaves, dirt, and debris that were plastered onto the siding yesterday morning after all was calm again. My neighbour’s fence blew down, though, and this is Day 2 of the power outage  at work. So, no work again today.

My thoughts are with the thousands of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians who are still without power, whose homes are flooded or property is damaged, or who are in danger, have been hurt, displaced, or set back in any way because of the hurricane.