Christmas Craft: Quilted Stockings

So I made these (I think) really adorable stockings. I was most pleased with how they turned out! We went to our favorite fabric store, Purl Soho, a few weeks ago and picked out fabric for our stockings and for the Balsers' (for their Christmas present). Then I drew a pattern (using some fancy Anthro tights as a guide) and got to work. Below are the results.

Look, quilted!
And, at P's request, monogrammed. I think the letters turned out quite lovely (although cursive sewing is not easy).

We made them for the Balsers as well, and left them on the sofa filled with goodies on Christmas morning.
Their fabric is of a different palette, and the girls' stockings feature some lovely adornment, but the pattern is the same.This picture of the stockings is a little like an "I Spy" page. Find the picture of the Seminarios. Find a button. Find a goose. Go on, try it!

Merry Christmas, all! Okay, okay, it's a few days after Christmas, I know. But did you know that the twelve days of Christmas actually begin on the 25th and go from there? So, really, I'm just preserving the traditional way of celebrating.

~L

Not Much to Say...

Just a little note to wish you a happy and wonder filled Christmas Day!

We are so blessed.

Christmas is in the Air!

Sorry our blogging has been a little spotty this month -- December is not really a calm, relaxing time for us, what with P and his job in retail and me enjoying the full-tilt sprint to the end of the semester. What we do have time for, though, is decoration (or, as I Freudian Slippily told my mom, "displays"). I don't know if you know us, but we're kind of big on the way our home looks, especially during the holidays. This is actually somewhat comical and quixotic, because hardly anyone (other than P & I, of course) ever sees the inside of our apartment. Nevertheless, we toil year after year to put together perfect holiday displays. And, hey! Now we have a blog, so everyone can see the inside of our apartment and its charming Christmas makeover.


The anchor of our Christmas display? A $4.99 silver tinsel tree, bought at a fire sale two days after Christmas.

Since you can't just put red and green on a tinsel tree, we opted for shades of hot pink ornaments:

This year, we expanded our color palette slightly to include some teal as well:

These new ornaments (from Anthropologie) are my favorite:

I think it worked out really nicely, don't you?


And, of course, the presents under the tree had to match (okay, so we're a little OCD about our decor).










For our hearth (also known as the repurposed headboard that supports our tiny TV), we went with a "feathers n' candy" theme. What? You didn't know sweets and tweets (he he) went together? Well, consider yourself informed.
P.S. Those stockings? I made them. Sewed 'em. More on that to come.

A lovely dove, reclining on a cherrywood branch. Yes, Virginia, those are pink feathers in the background.


Sweets. I got this idea from Real Simple and, fittingly, it was pretty easy. Just some pretty little glasses filled with sugar and topped with miniature marshmallows and candy canes. Voilà!






So, that's it. Our little corner of Christmas happiness. Okay, so that's not really it. We also have a window display (twine, big lights, and satin balls), a nativity (in the "curio cabinet" (reconfigured children's desk) above the piano), and a small grove of tinsel trees (blue, purple, and pink). But if I give all of those away now, what will I blog about the rest of the week?

~L

I was called Ma'am by a Nun.

I was sitting in Taco Bell, too full from over ordering, reading a book.

I looked up
and a Nun was standing at my table
with a little wooden bowl
with money in it.

I thought she would sit down.

"St. Joseph's Orphanage?" She held out the bowl.

"I'm Sorry?"

"St. Joseph's Orphanage...Yes or No."

"Oh.

No."

She looked somewhat surprised for less than a second. Then she said,

"God Bless you, Ma'am."

And she moved to the next table.

I felt it was calculated.

~P

And the Tags Go To....

You. Us.

As promised, we want to ring in this gift-giving season with a little gift-giving of our own!

L and I wanted to give away something that you could only get from us...Love. But, it turns out people are giving that away by the gallons! Really, just by the buckets full!

So instead we made you these:

Handmade tags that we made with our hands.

I know, right?!



We took this stuff, which we had laying around the house...and the store:




...and made Gift Tags for your four most extravagant gifts. They are very fine. They don't involve a drop of hot glue (all hand sewn buttons), and L machine-sewed the fabric on the back...oh yeah, and there is fabric on the back!


I guess you could use them for what ever you'd like; we hung them up and thought they looked pretty good like this:

However, as with all extremely thoughtful and exorbitant gifts, only one person gets them. So here's what you do:

Post a comment.

Wait until Monday the 7th of December.

Watch the Drawing.

When your comment gets picked email us your address.

Wait a day or two...or four.

Receive our heartfelt, hand-forged, heavenly tags to pin on your shirt, or slap on a box, or donate to the Smithsonian. Ya know, Wah Eva.

Happy Christmas Everyone!

~P


Oh Yeah, and there are a lot of new people reading 'cause Lisa listed our factual Thanksgiving post on this blog HERE. Well, let this be our welcome to you, all of you! Whether you're Strangers or Friends, Cousins or Cousins of Cousins, come often and get yourselves some tags out of it.

Now Bring Us Some Figgy Pudding

...okay, or maybe something a bit, well, prettier.

Stay tuned, dear readers, for tomorrow is December 1st, and occasion for another giveaway here on Garden Street.

Too hard to wait? Here's a hint: this time, the gift is homemade, and perfect for gussying up those Christmas packages. Drop back by tomorrow for a chance to win!

{photo by rockinghelvetica}

Faux Christmas Polaroids

Jordan at Oh Happy Day had this fantastic find on her blog a week or so ago, and I've been playing around with it ever since. It's a program that makes faux Polaroids of your digital photos. Here are a few shots of Christmas on Garden Street:Okay, yeah, it's faking it, but come on! It's so much fun to goof off with (and it provided the lovely new Christmas background for our blog). Plus, it has all kinds of terrific little quirks, like having very few features, taking a little while to develop, and only allowing you to upload 10 photos at a time (replicating the 10-shot film package of a traditional Polaroid). So go make some 70s-style memories already!

~L

Today.

Today L and I got into a fight.



She said I had to have something other than Pumpkin Pie* for dinner.


I disagreed.




Now we're not talking.


But that's because I walked away and started blogging about the conversation that I walked away from.


Now she's looking at me out of the corner of her eye.

Suspiciously.


Oh. Wait. Here she comes.... Gotta go.

~p

*The pie in question is the one pictured above...I made that. For reals.

Just Me Giving Thanks

You guys,

I know that all Americans feel a certain amount of nostalgia when thinking about the first Thanksgiving:



The Pilgrims



and Indians,



The Turkey





and yams. The football,



and fighting.



The tense silence, and then the purchasing of land with bees.





No wait. I meant beads.





Every year, the same traditions passed down through generations, all commemorating those three fateful ships...

The Pita,

The Rita,



and the Santa Maria.



They first docked that moonlit night thousands of years ago, at that place so close to where we now live, that has its own special place in our hearts (out here), and that people who don't live out east can't know anything about. The magic of it, the majesty, the wonder of how three ships could make it down 5th Ave and find that first American resting place, 30 Rock.



Well, it was a miracle that's what. And isn't that what Thanksgiving's all about? Miracles?

~P

Words, words, words...

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Words. I think a lot about words: what they mean, why they mean those things, how those meanings shift from locale to locale, generation to generation, person to person. How is it that an arbitrary compilation of letters can come to represent not only the crude necessities of life (a furry, four-legged creature that goes "me-ow"? How about C-A-T?), but the ideas and concepts that give meaning and dimension to those lives: love, honor, faith, charity, kindness; brutality, hate, jealously, malice?

I am somewhat of a writer; I write scholarly essays, blog posts, and, occasionally, fiction. It is an eternal struggle to discover the most fitting vocabulary, the most effective word order to communicate the meaning I hope to convey. Words drip meaning, they ooze implications, and bleed significance. Words are never innocent; they are never never virgin. Words are always already marked, and they have power; words do things.

In The Real Thing, a play by British playwright and wordsmith Tom Stoppard, Henry (who is a stand-in for Stoppard himself) rhapsodizes about the power of words. He explains:
[Words are] precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more.... I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.

One of my mom's favorite stories to tell about me is how she used to threaten me when I was younger: if I didn't get my chores done, I would be grounded from my books. Other parents out there may not understand; perhaps you would be happy if your children deigned to pick up a book, but my parents were more relived when I would put the book down and venture among the living.P and I sometimes discuss possible disabilities: would you rather lose the use of your legs or your arms? Wheelchair or crutches? And, most importantly, blind or deaf? P is a pretty spectacular musician, one who relies almost wholly on his ears. He, therefore, always opts for blindness. I, on the other hand, always opt for deafness. The thought of never again reading words with my eyes is almost unbearably sad to me. You see, I not only love the thought of words, their sinuous connotations and denotations, I also adore the way they look, those arbitrary lines and curves filling up a blank space with thought, faith, nuance.

For some, words are merely a method of communication. For me, however, words are friends, lovers, combatants -- they can simultaneously weigh me down and set me to flight.

This, of course, is also why I love libraries: vast depositories of words, a dizzying number of sentences. When I'm feeling particularly metaphysical, I like to imagine all the words that have ever been set to paper in the history of the world: an inventory of all human thought that has been inscribed. It gives me a little vertigo -- kind of like falling through space or trying to imagine the difference in size between an atom and the universe. I am a supernerd, but even now the thought of an old, beautiful library packed floor-to-ceiling with books gets me a little warm under the collar.

Hamlet, when he pretends to be crazy, mutters "words, words, words." This is the paradox of words: they are joyous and wondrous, yet troubling and maddening. Simultaneously neutral and freighted with meaning, one could spend an entire lifetime chasing them down, trying to arrange the right ones in the right order to call forth meaning out of nothingness.

~L

The Old New York.

I was at work yesterday and the big talk was snow. The store is getting set up for the Holidays (which you can't call Christmas, because there are lots of Holidays, but we are using an awful lot of pine trees for Kwanzaa.). Someone had heard on the news that it could snow in the morning.

So there we were setting up ornaments and singing,

'Fah who for-aze! Dah who dor-aze!
Welcome Christmas, Christmas Day'*

And outside it started snowing. On Fifth Avenue in New York City, it snowed. And we had been so busy we almost missed it. So me and my manager are sitting there clutching mittens and scarfs to our chests watching the first snow fall over this amazing back drop and one of the associates next to us said, 'Yeah, I saw that earlier...I thought it was trash falling.' Which can happen in New York and does look like snow.

~p



*I had to look up the lyrics as I thought they were these:

"Ah Roo Door and Ah Roo more and Welcome Christmas, Christmas Day!"

What did you think they were?

I'm Thankful for Funny.

Comfort Food

Beautiful Soup

Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!

Beau--ootiful Soo-oop!
Beau--ootiful Soo-oop!
Soo--oop of the e--e--evening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!

Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two
Pennyworth only of Beautiful Soup?
Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?

Beau--ootiful Soo-oop!
Beau--ootiful Soo-oop!
Soo--oop of the e--e--evening,
Beautiful, beauti--FUL SOUP!

~Lewis Carroll

I have to agree with Lewis Carroll's lilting praise on this one: on a damp autumn night, there is nothing quite as satisfying as a steaming tureen of beautiful soup. When we were younger, my mom would regularly make us grilled cheese sandwiches and cream of tomato soup; this meal remains one of my most basic comfort foods. Since then, P and I have adapted this formula slightly: vegetarian chili in place of the cream of tomato soup; pepperjack grilled cheese (I guess we just mostly Tex-Mexed the meal). I love soup and sandwich nights.

A couple of weeks ago, P came home from his fancy store with this book:

It is filled with mouth-watering soups suited to the fresh ingredients available in each of the four seasons. We, of course, have been enjoying the book's suggested Fall fare, and, boy, is it delicious! Our favorite so far is a terrific adult spin on my old grilled cheese and tomato soup combo: Fabulous Fall Root Soup and Grilled Gorgonzola and Apple on Sourdough. The recipes are both scrumptious and simple: two words I like very much.


Fabulous Fall Roots Soup
Makes 8 servings

4 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 1/2 cups chopped leeks, white and light green parts only ( 3 to 4 medium leeks)
1 1/2 pounds carrots, peeled and diced
1 medium rutabaga (1 to 1 1/4 pounds), peeled and diced
8 cups chicken stock (we used vegetable stock)
Kosher salt
1 1/4 cups crème fraîche
3 tablespoons finely chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley

1. Heat butter in a large, heavy pot (with a lid) over medium-high heat. When melted and hot, add leeks, carrots, and rutabaga. Sauté vegetables until softened, for 10 minutes or longer. Add stock and bring mixture to a simmer. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer until vegetables are very tender, for about 30 minutes.

2. Purée the soup in batches in a food processor or blender and return the soup to the pot. Whisk in 3/4 cup of the crème fraîche. Taste soup and season with salt, as neede. (The soup can be prepared 2 days ahead. Cool, cover, and refrigerate. Reheat over medium heat.)

3. To serve, ladle soup into shallow soup bowls. Garnish each serving with a generous dollop of the remaining 1/2 cup crème fraîche and a sprinkling of parsley.


Grilled Gorgonzola and Apple on Sourdough
Makes 4 servings

1/2 Granny Smith apple, cored but unpeeled, very thinly sliced and tossed in 1/2 teaspoon fresh lemon juice
8 crusty sourdough bread slices (3/8- to 1/2-inch thick)
8 ounces creamy blue cheese, such as Gorgonzola, Fourme d'Ambert, or Bleu d'Auvergne, thickly sliced.
4 tablespoons chopped pecans
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted, plus more if needed

Layer one slice of cheese on bread; top with pecans. Gently press pecans into cheese. Place apple slices on top of cheese and pecans, then top with second slice of bread. Brush both sides of bread with melted butter and grill until browned on both sides.




So enjoy some fancy fall comfort food -- and let us know what your favorite soup/sandwich combo is!

~L