Tag Archives: Tutorials

A quilt for the baby

Posted on November 18, 2014 by | Comments Off on A quilt for the baby

I am blessed with a man who is willing to try anything and is good at just about everything he tries. As far as Mike is concerned, so long as there are Youtube videos, her can probably figure it out.

So it was no surprise that when he started sewing clothes for my step-daughter Gabbi last year, he was a much better sewist than I am right out of the box. (His attention to detail is and patience are a lot greater than mine as well.) This week, he decided he wants to make a quilt for our baby’s nursery and this is the one he selected:

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I’m super excited, because I love this quilt and it fits in perfectly with out son-to-be’s room, but there is no way I could possibly have the patience to cut out all those fiddly coast lines! Lucky for me, I don’t have to.

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Mike did task me with picking out the fabric I wanted for the continents. It was much more difficult to put seven prints together than I thought it would be, though. I originally tried using fabrics that sort of represented each continent (i.e. stars/stripes on North America, bold pinks and reds for Asia) but it the fabrics were fighting with each other and it looked too noisy.

 I’ve pulled together five options from our own fabric stash and the local fabric shop. I like them all in different ways but I would love to hear what you think.

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First up is dots of different sizes and colors.

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Next, the blues.

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This one is all bold prints. mostly from the latest Denyse Schmidt collection.

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This is an even bolder collection that I put together from what we have on hand, but it needs to be filled out more.

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Finally, the plaids. I love the gentle colors in this grouping but I think it is too pale to go with the rest of his nursery.

Keep in mind that the water background will be either white or a pale, pale blue.

Help me out, readers! Which collection do you like best with the pattern? Or should I scrap these and start over?

 

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Growing Mushrooms: Oysters and Shiitakes

Posted on March 20, 2012 by | Comments Off on Growing Mushrooms: Oysters and Shiitakes

Don’t laugh, but back in the fall, Zac and I went to a bonfire potluck, and had some mushrooms and a bit of a conversion experience. Amid the cider, butternut squash soup, and piles of apples (everything homegrown and homebrew, of course), there was one dish that outshone them all– oyster mushrooms, sauteed with garlic.

“I grew them myself,” she said, “it was so easy. Actually, it had taken so long for me to get a harvest, I’d given up on them and forgotten about them, until, all of a sudden, the logs fruited, and, mushrooms!”

Sold!

So, this spring, we picked out a few packs of spores from Fungi Perfecti. We decided to start with the easiest varieties: Oyster and Shiitake.

These two require deciduous hardwoods, and do best on logs that are cut in the early springtime, since that’s when they’re full of sap and moisture. So, last we spoke, Zac was headed out into the woods to find an oak tree.

He got one:

After that, he cut the tree into six 4-foot lengths, and drilled holes all over the length of the logs.

  The mushroom spores (sold under the horrifying name of “plug spawn”) come on short little lengths of dowel rods– you fit the dowels into the holes, like this:

 And then hammer them flush with the surface of the wood:

 After that, to prevent some other type of fungus from getting in, and to seal your mushrooms spores in, you paint over any openings with wax. This includes the drilled holes:

 and the sawed-off end of the log:

After that, you stack them in a rick in a dark, damp place, so that the logs can stay moist.  We’re going to keep them underneath the porch.

This gives the mushroom spores time to colonize the whole of the log. After about a year, you can force the mushroom-inoculated log to fruit, which just amazes me– those tiny little dowels are going to turn these logs into food. I don’t really think I’ll believe it until I see it.

Which will be in March 2013! I think it’s best that I forget these guys are even under here, because I don’t think I could have the patience, otherwise. Stay tuned!

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