This was a fairly simple and oh-so-satisfying project. I bought the pashmina (silk and cashmere) for a few dollars at a thrift store and used it as a sort of throw in my son’s room when he was a baby. It was just the right color at the time, but after it outlived its usefulness, I felt obligated to wear it.

The problem was, it just wasn’t my color, so I never did. It seemed too luxurious to get rid of, so finally I decided to overdye it. I had to choose a color that was in the same vein but deeper. This coral color (Deka calls it “Hibiscus”) seemed just right, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. The color is very slightly uneven, but to me that’s just part of the charm of hand-dyeing.

I have to confess, though, that I’m still a little lost as to how to wear a pashmina shawl—maybe I should look for an online tute? The beading is also a little fancy for my taste. I could remove it, but that feels a little drastic. In the meantime, the shawl is keeping me warm at home.

For tips on overdyeing, see my post How to Overdye. If you’re in the US, I recommend dharma trading for supplies and directions. Remember: only try this with natural fibers, and please not with anything precious, because you never know what your results will be.

I threw in a few other things while the dye was ready, including this tablecloth from the thrift store here:

You may remember it from this earlier post. I love the dipped-in-Kool-Aid look it has here—so much more interesting than the brown on white. I’m planning to make some travel sacks for my daughter to pack her shoes and dirty laundry in. This always seems to be an issue when we travel, and it’s nice to have something handy and cute to use.

Speaking of fiber arts, the haiku sweater is off the needles (woowoo!) and Amy Karol had this great post on knitting attitudes the other day. And by the way she seems to have found a similar cookie thing like ours (where you can print letters) at Williams Sonoma. She’s a much more patient mommy than I am because she let the kids do a bajillion different words. I’m inspired.

Also, regarding fiber arts, I was totally happy to see the return of annekata. She had quit blogging for awhile, but she’s back!

Congratulations to the winners of the ALA awards, especially to my friend Laura Watkinson, who translated Soldier Bear, winner of the Batchelder award, the best work of translation of the year. Wow!! Soldier Bear was originally written in Dutch by Bibi Dumon Tak. It tells the true story of an orphaned bear cub adopted by Polish soldiers in Iran during World War II. Can’t wait to read it.

It’s always exciting to find out the winners, and this year I was totally psyched to see Laura so honored. To find out more about Laura, check out her website here. She lives in Amsterdam, and we met through SCBWI.

I’m also so pleased to see two former Vermont College instructors winning the Newbery and the Caldecott: Jack Gantos for Dead End in Norvelt and Chris Raschka for A Ball for Daisy.

Coming up: a dyeing project and an interview with app developer Sarah Towle.

I sent hubs to the store the other Saturday and asked him to buy some vegetables for dinner the next day. He came home with brussel sprouts. Really? Yes, really. Does your husband ever come home with brussel sprouts? Didn’t think so.

I had never, ever cooked brussel sprouts. I always thought of them as something kids on tv were forced to eat. I had never even knowingly seen them in real life until eating them a few years ago at a fantastic restaurant in Charlotte, NC (Rooster’s). I dreamed about those brussel sprouts for months (no, seriously, I did! Scout’s honor!) but never tried to recreate them. They were cooked in bacon fat, I’m pretty sure. Sigh. Oh bacon fat, I love you, but sadly, you are not an everyday food.

We didn’t have any bacon in the house anyway, and the stores were closed for the weekend by then, so I pulled out my trusty How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman, and sure enough, there were three brussel sprouts recipes.

This is the one I had the ingredients for: Roasted Brussel Sprouts with Garlic

Yum! Winner! The kids wouldn’t touch them, but they were pretty curious about them.

One note on the recipe. Though the sprouts are supposed to be browned in the end, I would check them several times during cooking to see when they get tender. They can get too brown, and it’s hard to judge from the recipe instructions. The ones you see here are actually a little bit too brown, and this is when they start to get a little bitter. I actually made the recipe twice last week, and the second time I cooked them for a bit less time on a bit lower temp, and they were even better. Our convection oven makes things a bit tricky to calculate, as it cooks faster and the temps usually need to be adjusted.

Like I said, they should be brown, but take them out when they’re all the way tender. The balsamic vinegar really makes it here. I think they could use even a little more garlic, since you’re really just using it to flavor and not eating it (at least we don’t eat whole cloves—-maybe you do—no judgment. I love garlic).

I’d like to try the other sprouts recipes, too. And I’m thinking this nut topping would be awesome with the sprouts since it has a wonderful bacon-y like crunch and flavor. Mmmm…here I am dreaming of brussel sprouts again. Good thing they’re in season right now. Thanks, hubs, for the inspiration.

 Here they are in the pan in step 1 of the recipe. Aren’t they cute?

I seem to have a thing for tiny-ness. These beauties are from the Waldorf School Christmas Bazaar here in Hannover. Aren’t they awesome? The little wooden table and chairs were for my niece, but now I’m sad that I didn’t buy any for our kids. And let’s be honest, I want my own, too.  What could be better than having tea out of acorn cups while sitting at your tiny, tiny tisch? We did keep some of the tiny dolls in dresses, and well, there’s always the May bazaar!

There’s something a little bit magical about small toys out of branches. They make me think of Miss Hickory coming alive and the way, when I was a kid, I hoped my own pine cone/ moss/ acorn arrangements would turn into a colony of wood sprites.

The finger puppets went to my kids, so they’re still around. They’re so very German—-the little people are called zwerge, which is kind of like dwarves but only in the Snow White’s dwarves kind of way. They are maybe a little closer to what we’d call gnomes.

And here they are all together below, so you can see scale. Also below are a beeswax candle shaped like a beehive, a hand-sewn first aid kit (complete with a piece of candy), and a knight’s tunic. Playing knights is very important here. I don’t know if it’s a Waldorf thing or a general German thing, but you’ve really gotta invest in swords and pretend chain mail if you want to keep up with the cool kids.

Some of these items (tiny dolls with dresses, knight’s tunic, first-aid kit, beehive candle) were made by Waldorf school parents and students. The others were made by vendors at the bazaar, I think some by these folks.  The website is all in German—sorry—but sometimes you can find Waldorf stuff on etsy if you search with that term.

Speaking of tiny things, Angry Chicken had a fun post about them just this week, which led me also to these cool tiny things and an awesome new-to-me blog. 

Okay, I really have to get back to my writing work. Things are happening with my book projects—so happy.

Fairly often when I pick up my son from Waldorf kindergarten, there’s some little treat they’ve made that Frau F. insists I try. I’m not one to ever turn down a treat. Once not too long ago there were these tiny almond-meal cookies that I just couldn’t stop thinking about later. Such great texture, not too sweet, perfect. When I asked for the recipe, though, Frau F. said it was something her daughter had made up and she didn’t really have a recipe. Rats!

I kept obsessing and finally found this recipe, then altered it to suit me. In Germany, there seem to be a lot of tiny cookie cutters, which I just love. I mean, sometimes you only want a little bite, right? Or a bunch of little bites. The cookies just seem better that way. Unfortunately we don’t have but a couple itty bitty cutters, since the kitchen store was nearly sold out last time I looked, but I’ll try again.

Yeah, I know this is kind of a Christmas post in January, but who says you can’t make cookies now? Who?

The cookies turned out really well. Very tender and great flavor, though they don’t look like anything special at first glance. They were all gone in a flash.

ALMONDY COOKIES  (heavily adapted from cooks.com)

250 grams butter (2 sticks plus 1 1/2 TB or so)

1/2 cup white sugar

1/4 cup brown sugar

1 egg

1/4 tsp. almond extract

1 1/2 cups almond meal

1 cup  all purpose flour

2 cups spelt flour (did I use white or whole grain? I can’t remember but either is fine)

pinch of salt

Cream together butter, sugar, egg, and almond extract. Beat in flour, almond meal, and salt.

Make a ball and flatten it, wrap in wax paper and place in the fridge for an hour or a day.

Preheat oven to 325°, roll out dough, and use cutters to cut shapes. Ours were a little thicker—in the 1/4 inch range but you could go thinner, depending on how crispy or chewy you want yours. Just watch the time—you definitely don’t want to overcook them.

Bake for 8-10 minutes. They should be very lightly browned.

**

The words on the cookies is an inside joke. Santa brought a nifty contraption that allows you to print words on your cookies. Little Miss wanted to print everyone’s names, but the letters are really too fiddly and tiny to do that much work. I told her to pick one word we could print on lots of cookies. She came up with “Leibniz,” which is the cookie brand of Hannover’s famous Bahlsen factory. This cracked me up, as it’s like printing “Keebler” on your homemade cookies.

Leibniz, the father of calculus, was from Hannover, and they love to name things after him here. So awesome.

Oh, we also tried these Swedish Rye Cookies from 101 cookbooks. They rocked.

I’m baaa-aaack. We had a long and lazy Christmas and New Year’s break, including a wonderful visit from family  (thank you, family, for visiting us in northern Germany in winter—-you’re very brave).

The picture above was taken on New Year’s Eve when the whole neighborhood was having a fireworks battle in the streets. The normally orderly Germans kind of go nuts on Silvester, as they call it, and make a huge racket with fireworks for hours. The air is thick with smoke, and the sidewalks in the morning are filled with trash. For more info on Silvester in Germany, check out this article.

Did I finish the sweater? Alas, no. A cold slowed me down, and a wrong turn made for a pitiful first sleeve, but the good news is I think I’ve found a way to fix it, and the other sleeve is finished. It’s been a learning process. Chug, chug, chug.

I’ve been re-reading the first Mason-Dixon knitting book (blog link here). It’s so funny. I love that conversational kind of craft book that is really more about getting you inspired than about specific projects (though it has those, too). I tend to like reading about knitting even better than knitting because I knit so slowly. I’ve got to learn the Continental method—-did you know Germans have a slightly different way of knitting that is much faster? Whenever I knit in public here I always get weird looks.

Anyway, I’m back in the swing, with all kind of things to share and all sorts of plans and ideas. I’ve got two writing projects going at the moment, the YA novel and a nonfiction project, and those are taking up the majority of my work time. The good news is they seem to be going somewhere, so I’m all juiced up.

 I’ll be back soon with more. Crafts! Food! Interviews with writers and creatives! Thrift store finds! German architecture! Can you tell I had a little much caffeine today? Let me know if there’s anything you’d especially like to see more of.

See you soon!

and Happy Chanukah, too!

Things are slowing down here at the Pearce household as we finish up our gift buying and attend numerous school events.

I’m still working on that sweater. Who knows if it will make it under the tree or not, but if it does, it will most certainly be in pieces. I’ve run into a conundrum with the sleeve length after thinking I had finished one sleeve. Hard to explain, but if I can make two matching sleeves that fit, it’ll be a Christmas miracle. The good news is, the color combo is working, and one of my two expert family knitters will be visiting soon.

The picture above is from the main Christmas market here in Hannover. I really wish there were such a thing in the States. They beat the mall up and down the block. It’s like a temporary wooden village built in the pedestrian zones, where they sell gift items, fun snacks, and gluehwein (a hot alcoholic drink). I am so going to miss the Christmas markets next year after we’ve moved back.

I hope to see you again soon, but it may not be until after the New Year, so until then, cheers!

It’s that time of year again, when the German sun sets at 4 p.m. in a blanket of gray, and even a candlelight lunch doesn’t seem like a ridiculous idea.

In this season I always think of a poem by my friend Etta, and today she’s agreed to share it with us. Thanks so much, Etta.

MOON SHINE

I.

There is never enough light in winter.

Even in the room you chose

for its double window,

the sun barely gives enough

to read by.

*

I imagine you at your desk

scrambling to catch

what morning light there is.

II.

You have made me think about winter.

how the sun is closer to us

but its light is less:

an inverse, illogical proportion

that my science can explain but not excuse.

A tilting on the axis,

a simple change of wavelength,

hardly seems enough to cause

a melancholy season.

*

Winter’s saving grace

is cloudless night,

each star a perfect prick

in blue; midnight’s moonlight

compensates for gray noon,

bleeding cold life

through your thick curtains.

*

Etta Jensen-Barnes

Etta and I have been friends since first semester of our freshman year, when we took poetry with the late, great Robert Kirkpatrick. After that class, I became an English major and never looked back.

With so little light, I’m grateful to have the tree up and the advent wreath to light each day. Did you know German tree stands hold no water? We learned that this week. It’s traditional to get your tree on December 24th and to keep it up until January 6. Trees are cut much closer to the time of sale, so they don’t really need watering during that short period, I guess. We brought our American tree stand, so we’re watering ours anyway. Some habits die hard.

I love this idea for a children’s Christmas tree over at elsiemarley, and also check out her list of Christmas activities to do with the kids. I especially like this woven ornament idea from the crafty crow.

Also, randomly:

An editorial about amazon’s sneaky new promotion. But hey, hardcover book sales  in stores are up!

Also, I’m making progress on the sleeves for this. Maybe, maybe it’ll be done in time for Christmas. But I’m not above wrapping it up in pieces. Watch me.

Also making progress on my novel and trying to get an old nonfiction writing project restarted. Back to work.

Nearly every year, I like to make a bunch of one kind of gift that I can give to any number of people: relatives, neighbors, friends. It’s always good to have some on hand. I try to keep it something fairly simple so it’s not a stressful process.

Here are a few of my favorites:

1) Hand-Rolled Candles

I just discovered rolled beeswax candles (above) and have only actually made them with the kids at a bazaar. They’re dead easy but so pretty, and the kids loved the process. Instructions here. We did not prime the wicks, as suggested in the link—not sure if ours were pre-primed or what but they burned just fine.

2) Hand-Decorated Cloth Totes:

This is another fun one that’s useful, too. For information on materials, click here.

3) Self-Mixed Loose Teas:

I like to make Rooibos Chai, but over the years I’ve also made up various combinations involving spices, citrus peel, even dried cherries. Get creative with your favorite flavors.

4) Body Balm:

Another good, easy one is Lavender Body Balm. You melt beeswax with some oils and voila!

5) I don’t have a picture of this one, but Spice Rubs are another good gift, especially if the recipient likes to grill. I love Stephen Raichlen’s basic barbecue rub, from his book, How to Grill. Penzey’s is a good place to get the bulk spices.

Cardboard Christmas Trees:

This one’s more a craft than gift but it’s so easy to do with the kids or to make a bunch for table decorations. Make them fancy or plain. You can recycle them and make them again next year, which is one of the things I love best about them. Instructions here.

What do you do when you run out of yarn in the middle of a knitting project? It’s the sort of thing that happens to someone like me, who knits by the seat of her pants, without a whole lot of knowledge or regard for things like gauge. You play, you pay.

This project that didn’t go as planned, to put it mildly. I started it for my daughter when she was two. I was trying to knit  a size 4, because I thought it would take me two years to knit my first sweater.

While I was knitting it, three things became clear:

1) If it wasn’t pink, she wasn’t going to wear it.

2) If it didn’t feel like Old Navy cotton pajamas, she wasn’t going to wear it.

3) I had miscalculated gauge (or something) by a long shot, and the body of the sweater was so big it might even fit me. And, oops, there might not be enough yarn for arms. And double oops: the yarn was now out of “print” so I couldn’t get more of it. Yes, I recently tried ebay. No dice.

Not quite able to rip it out, I put it on the shelf. Fast forward five (yes, five!) years later. Suddenly Little Miss is interested in colors like green. She wears wool sweaters. She finds the abandoned project in my knitting basket and professes love for the color and softness of the yarn.

“Mommy, please, please, will you make it for me?”

“Well…..”

The arm problem is still here, but rather than settle for a vest, or shortened arms, she wanted to pick out an alternate color for the arms. We had the best time at the yarn store downstairs, setting out yarns on the weaving stool and carefully choosing buttons.

I explained the whole dilemma to the store owner in German—-so proud of that accomplishment! I love having a friendly acquaintance with the neighborhood shop owners, especially when they even remember your mother who visited last summer.

I was a bit surprised when Little Miss picked out the gray (!) rather than a multicolored Noro I had been eyeing. Hopefully she’ll actually wear the result.

Thinking of making a band or stripe on the gray arm (in the teal color—I do have some left). What do you think? And as the shop owner pointed out, I could also add some ribbing on the bottom or neck in gray. But I may need some help from the more experienced family knitters for that.

I’m writing this post in the hopes that you’ll spur me onward. Off to go knit…

Oh by the way, the pattern is Haiku from Knitty (by Kristi Porter), and I do not place any blame on the pattern for my problems. It’s actually really lovely to knit. A perfect first sweater and fast-going even for me, the perpetual advanced beginner. But, you know, get someone to help you with gauge if, like me, you don’t know much about it. The pattern isn’t written for a particular type of yarn (love the flexibility) which means you need to know your business in the gauge department.

Stay tuned for an upcoming interview with the lovely and talented Sarah Towle, app author.