Geeking out foodie style

What with waiting for baby (13 days left, theoretically) and our house (right now our closing date is set for my due date–tee hee), I can’t say I have a lot of extra motivation to start any projects.  Mostly, I’m just trying to keep busy with housework, cooking, and chasing after Noah.  It occurred to me that I should read more though as I’ve mostly been driving myself crazy looking for furniture on Craigslist.

I’ve been plowing through more than my usual quota of cookbooks, but this one I’ve been savoring:

 

I dearly dearly love good examples of food writing.  Don’t just give me a pile of recipes named after your Grandma without some introduction to the beloved woman!  Food is an expression of our lives, and I want to read about other people’s lives in food.  Molly O’Neill took on the task of collecting recipes from home cooks around the country for the past decade!  She does more than simply catalog recipes–she tells us who these people are.  This book is huge (nearly 1000 pages), and I’m grateful that she had an editor who allowed it to be so.  It’s good food too, just the usual home cook cookbooks full of mother-in-law recipes that are missing that one special thing, the absence of which will render the dish so-so or perhaps inedible.  That I get to read about so many people like me who derive so much joy out of cooking for others is bonus!  Am I taking this heavier-than-a-cast-iron-skillet book with me to the hospital?  You bet your biscuits!

My husband, continued this theme by coming up with the neatest birthday present ever.  Several years ago, I viciously, recklessly and savagely went through all of my issues of Gourmet up to 2004 and cut out the recipes that I thought looked the most promising and tossed the rest.  Nathan, knowing that I needed some quality reading material as well as some fresh inspiration took it upon himself to right the wrong I inflicted upon myself in the form of 60 pounds worth of back issues of Gourmet ranging from 1980 to 1996. 

I’m ITCHING to get cooking in our new house, and I dare say I will be more than occupied with new things.  If a girl has to turn 30 within days of giving birth, I dare say that a little dose of such husbandly romanticism will take away the sting every time.

What to do with swatches

Being (sort of) in the process of moving, I’ve been going dotty with planning the design of our new house.  I really love mid century pieces in general, and I think I’ve been to most of the stores that have anything of the sort in my area in the past couple of weeks because I figure hauling Noah and my pregnant self around is still easier than Noah and his brother or sister after the baby comes.  I’ve come up with a lot of ideas and so far found a great ottoman to reupholster for $16 and a mint Danish modern table that we bought from a really nice couple for a song on Craigslist a couple of weeks ago (this is from the sellers and while it’s not the best picture, we’re storing it at my parents, so I couldn’t take a better one).

The table has 4 chairs which isn’t ideal for as much as we entertain, but the style of chairs are easy enough to find, so I’ll add to them as I find them.  I knew that I would want to reupholster whatever we found because I’m a bit color crazy.  I put a lot of thought towards what kind of fabric to use.  With the certainty of many kids being in our house for a long time, I wanted to have a surface that was very easy to clean, and not surprisingly I wanted it to be cute too.  I settled on oilcloth since the patterns are way more fun than vinyl and it’s a little easier to work with while upholstering (which is good since I am a dead beginner in upholstery though I’ve watched my Mom cover about a million dining chairs).

I ordered swatches of laminated cotton from Oilcloth Addict on Etsy as well as some swatches of Marimekko oilcloth from Textile Arts.  There really wasn’t a contest here.  The laminated cottons are really just that–think of quilting cottons that you ran through a laminator on the thinnest setting of plastic (Did I mention it has a rather unappealing sheen?).  It’s great for crafting, but this is not something to do much more than that with.  The Marimekko, while wicked pricey, is like butter.  The coating is matte, the cotton is nice and heavy, and it all manages to have a soft, pretty drape.  Given that I can get at least 4 chairs done out of 1 yard of the fabric, I felt less guilty about committing to it.  Since our table is Danish, I kind of like the idea of keeping it all Scandinavian by using Finnish fabric.  I really love the lime/light blue/navy combo of the Pidot:

All this background, and I haven’t even gotten to the point of this post.  At any rate, when I ordered the swatches, I expected to get little bitty squares of fabric.  What I got from both Oilcloth Addict and Textile Arts were large chunks of fabric for mere pennies.  Scraps have a long life in my house, but home dec fabrics have an interminable life.  I can never find anything to do with them.  As luck would have it, Noah has been tearing through his bibs.  He’s a pretty clean eater, but even the best bib has a hard time standing up to oatmeal with berries.

And as much as I don’t like sewing oilcloth, it is such a great bib fabric.  I traced around one of his bibs and I cut out two after I pieced together the samples rather haphazardly.  I backed the bibs with an old towel that has definitely seen better days.  For the two bibs, this project cost me $3.50.  Pretty incredible given how expensive it would be to buy yardage of the laminated cotton, and how unthinkable it would be for me to buy Marimekko yardage for a BIB.

As Noah loves eating AND when I sew for him, he’s pretty happy with this project, and I’m happy to have a couple of extra bibs for Noah to share with #2.