Category Archives: Fall

My Favorite Month

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My thoughts have been everywhere lately, but November is here, November is here!

I know I’m partial to November because it’s my birth month (eek! I’d better get working on finishing up my list of 33 things), but I’ve always loved Thanksgiving and cannot believe the holiday is just 3 weeks away. Since my parents’ kitchen is torn up and my sister-in-laws and their families are not coming back to TN, we’ll be hosting dinner at our house and doing the bulk of the cooking including the turkey (eek again! though I’m excited about this as well).

We’ve been enjoying this Fall so much. All the leaves have been absolutely beautiful and it’s been hard for me not to take photos of them everyday. The warmish weather has been perfect for lots of outdoors time and vitamin D loading.  Instead of hiking around my favorite lake, I’ve been putting the toddler on my back and hiking in the surrounding hills which has been such a nice change.  Last weekend we saw a the largest deer I’ve seen in the wild – a 6 point buck – and the weekend before we spotted a flock of ten turkeys.

In a little over 24 hours, I’m headed to one of my favorite cities (and former place of residence) for a long girls’ weekend.  I am so excited!  It’s been 18 months since I’ve gone anywhere by myself, and I am more than ready to get away. I’m thinking of taking my hexes with me, so I can start sewing them up into pillow tops.  I’m definitely participating in Erin’s pillow challenge next week, but I want to sew mainly simple projects because I desperately need new pillows everywhere. I’m hoping new pillows will make me less disgusted with the in limbo state of my house and serious lack of decor.  I’m thinking about making Will take me to Ikea for my birthday since the October trip I planned didn’t work out in the end.  I know I can’t solve all my house problems at the big blue box, but maybe if I had frames for unframed artwork and curtains for empty windows and some kitchen storage containers, the small happinesses would outweigh the larger things like hatred for our floorplan.

I’ve also been thinking more about cooking and have a challenge idea I want to share, but that will have to wait for next week. I need to pack!

Thinking About Fall

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Mid October. Despite the changes outside, it’s still been hot. Today I woke up to a cold morning and a chilly house, and now I’m thinking about:

- Going hiking this week. The drought we’re in makes for spectacular colors.

- Cooking all sorts of Fall foods like bread, soup, baked pasta, pie, anything roasted, and maybe even a casserole or two.

- Perfecting my recipe for mulled wine, and remembering the gluhwein I drank in early December in Berlin almost a decade ago.

- Using my Bridgman Pottery butter bell again, now that the butter won’t turn rancid overnight.

- Wearing pants and sweaters and scarves everyday, especially the new sweater my parents brought me back from Italy.

- Attempting to find myself a pair of boots that are comfy, cute, and at the right price.

- A whole bunch of family birthdays (including mine!) and the holidays, and wondering if my parents’ new kitchen will be done by Thanksgiving.

- Filling my compost bin, and bagging leaves to mulch next year’s garden.

- Turning some of my garden beds into raised beds, and planting asparagus and garlic.

- Planting my fig tree.

- Flannel sheets and pajama pants.

Yes, flannel sheets and pajama pants might be the best part of Fall.

The (Very Late) End of the Garden Notes

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It’s now mid-November, and I originally started this post at the beginning of October when I remembered I never wrote my garden notes for September. I’m trying to catch up with everything unfinished, so here it is:

By mid-September, we were mentally done with the garden. There was still okra and some tomatoes, but the blight finally got to my vines and everything started to look crispy. I figured the squirrels and birds can get what is left.

Originally I thought I would have planted some winter vegetables for the Fall like brussels sprouts and chard. I didn’t realize that my little plot would be completely full, and nothing would be done early enough to plant for the Fall/Winter. Next year, I’m going to make sure there is some empty space for all those delicious green things that come up after it gets cold.

Our goal for next year is to till a much larger plot, and have more room and rows to reach our vegetables. Nothing was more frustrating that being unable to reach half of the stuff, because it was so dense and just plain inaccessible from the outside. I can’t decide what I should do with the little plot we made this year – I’m thinking of either planting garlic or asparagus, or maybe rhubarb. I need to refer to some of books to see how asparagus and garlic do together, because maybe I’ll just plant both. Though I might be too late for any of those now.

The other thing I am going to do soon is start covering the ground to make some more beds the easy way and plant bulbs. I’m not letting another Spring go by wishing for more flowers than the few tulips I get that grow inside a bush. My mother-in-law is gathering seeds from all her dead flowers right now, and she is saving some of everything for me! There is a wonderful book I discovered a few years ago called The Way We Garden Now by Katherine Whiteside. It is full of easy projects to improve your yard no matter if your yard is an acre (or more) of lawn, less than a quarter acre, a brick patio behind a condo, or a balcony in the city. The instructions are simple to follow and the whole book is filled with whimsical watercolors by Peter Gergely. If I even get to a handful of Katherine’s projects in the coming year, my outside life will lovelier, yummier, and more colorful than this year.

Dogs and Frogs

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I started this quilt for a special baby in the womb more than a year ago. My plan was to give it to him or her soon after the birth, so I could sew a personalized label on the back with the baby’s name and birth date. Well the baby was born – a sweet boy named Jesse! – and the quilt was finished within a few weeks of his birth, except for hand sewing the last couple of inches of the binding. And so it sat for a year. Clearly I have a procrastination problem, especially where hand sewing is involved. I always think I hate hand sewing, but once I start I remember that I actually enjoy it. How could someone who loves to make things a la the Alabama Stitch Book hate hand sewing?

This past Sunday was the annual Tashlich service at my church. Tashlich is the Jewish ritual usually performed on Rosh Hashanah of the casting away (often by throwing breadcrumbs into a moving body of water) and examination of your sins of the past year. It makes a lot of sense to me to do this at this time. Fall always feels like a beginning, because a new year of school has started, and the lush green Summer starts to fade as the trees and plants end their growing cycle and start preparing for the next. While I usually make a bunch of resolutions on New Year’s day, I’ve been participating in Tashlich for a few years now* and it seems a much more meaningful way to reflect and change than writing down exercise 3-5 times a week or cook more vegetables for dinner on a piece of paper. As I thought about Jesse’s quilt and hand sewing, I remembered a line from the Tashlich prayer: Let us cast away the sin of stubbornness, so that we will neither persist in foolish habits nor fail to acknowledge our will to change. A foolish habit indeed. I have pinned the prayer to the bulletin board above the computer and near my sewing area, where I keep not only my inspirations but the things I want to remember. But even though baby Jesse did not receive this quilt, I still think one year old Jesse will enjoy it.
Now, a few details about the quilt. Jesse’s parents love dogs and the dad also has a bizarre passion for frogs, so I couldn’t think of better fabric to use for this quilt than animal prints by Heather Ross. I kept the front simple with 8 inch squares paired with a cream border. I decided to piece the binding which was fun and something I will do again in the future, since I really liked how it created a subtle border with little pops of color. I like to make the back of my quilts reference the front but almost be a new quilt, so I chose brighter colors along with a strip of rejected squares from the front. I knew I wanted the turquoise fabric somewhere in this quilt, because it is from a bolt I bought at one of our auctions and Jesse’s dad works with us. For the label, I used the method in Last Minute Patchwork + Quilted Gifts which I love and first used for this quilt along with a micron pen. The quilting is just a simple grid I’ve seen a lot of other quilters use, and I like how it creates a frame in each of the squares. I was hoping to get some better photographs but it’s been raining here for nearly two weeks, so inside on the bed was the best I could do. In retrospect, I should have put a sheet on first, but I didn’t realize how bad the mattress cover looked until after the gift was given at Jesse’s first birthday party and I finally had a moment to sit down and upload all the photos I took that day. Another foolish act, but probably not a sin.
*Even though I’m half Jewish, we never celebrated Rosh Hashanah in my home growing up. It wasn’t until I started attending a Unitarian Universalist church which uses rituals and sources from many religions, did I learn about Tashlich.