Factory work

"Can you and me have our own factory where we make things?" Dean asked last night. Ah, that's my boy! I have this pretty detailed vision of the studio space I would want in the house we'd live in if we ever won the lottery (where Dean and I would spend lots of time together, making things) -- it looks nothing like the utter mess that is the spare bedroom in our current, real-life house where my arts and crafts stuff is "kept." I need to find the buttons I bought (seven years ago?) to be the noses of the dogs on the paper-pieced quilt I started for Dean way back; I showed him the 25 blocks and he likes them very much, so now I need to make them into a quilt and give it to him before he leaves for college. But trying to figure out where I put that little bag of buttons is going to take, really, pulling the entire mess of the room apart. Do you ever do this -- I had for years been storing this little bag of buttons in the drawer of my nightstand and must have once decided that they didn't belong there and moved them. Why oh why? They weren't hurting anything, I knew where they were, and they had been there for years already at that point -- why did I move them and risk the chance that they will never be found?

The dashiki ironing project of yesterday took (drum roll, please) about 5 hours -- active hours -- of my time. I ironed for over three hours straight. The cloth was left to dry overnight in the basement after the marathon hand washing session and gets its final ironing today. I'll be curious to see how many other parents were willing to do the hard labor for their child's school project, and I HOPE no one actually put the cloth in a washing machine, as I *think* she'd now be in the market for a new machine.... The kids used melted crayons, not paraffin, for the batik process; this would have been a-ok if they were working on small, picture-sized works. But for 2.5 yards of fabric, it was a total and utter nightmare. Dean may be upset that the purple dye they used turned a little on the pink side once it was washed out -- oh, I hope he's all right with it! My basement sink will never, in any case, be the same.

Oh, and if you eat pork -- I highly recommend this rustic pork ragu recipe. I don't usually follow a recipe exactly, only because I either don't have the precise ingredients on hand, or it's something that Ken or Dean won't eat unless I make a change, or I'm feeling lazy. But this was a rare occasion when I did have everything and followed the very simple recipe and it was quite delicious on a cold winter's night.