The Bag and The Wallet: A Tragicomedy Love Story

Still haven't finished catching up on my blog reading but this story happened a few months ago.  It's very wordy, because I love to be wordy (and had a blast writing it), so feel free to just skip to the pictures. Hah! 

Voiceover from the Trailer:
I used to love my old bag. But time had beaten it up and my needs had changed.  It was heavy and not that suitable for work. I was taking a separate tote, in addition to my purse, and that was taking its toll on my shoulder and sanity.

Act 1: Girl Meets New Bag
But I couldn't find one I liked.  Then I spotted the ByeByeLove Bag.  And needed to make it. It would hold all the things I wanted to hold - shopping bags, wallet, keys, sunglasses, headphones, clipboard, iPad, my pencil case of teacher supplies... yay!

I tinkered with the pattern.

I added a darker bottom and put feet on it, just to give it a little protection from the floor, and I changed up the pocket flaps.  I'm just not a rounded pocket flap kinda girl.  You understand.

It was a marriage of linen and cotton. I lined it with foxes.

I carried the bag for a couple of weeks.  It was glorious!  It was suitable for work, it looked professional, and it also didn't seem out of place for the rest of my life, either.  I got compliments galore, folks asking where I got it, and they were floored when I proudly said I made it. All was well.

Act 2: The Accident
And then one morning, at work, a flustered staff member knocked her entire cream & sugared coffee all over it.  And in it.

I did the mature thing, or at least I *appeared* to do the mature thing. With students around, I didn't want to give them a poor example of how to handle a first-world problem so with said co-worker being very apologetic and even more flustered, I was calm and proceeded to dab at it with paper-towels, wiped the coffee off the floor, saying all the while, "It's okay, it's just a bag, these things happen...."  Inside I wanted to cry and was trying to figure out whether it could be washed and whether the stains would be set before I even had a chance to TRY to get them out.

The second I got home I consulted the experts. I decided I could chance washing it. I soaked it liberally with the stain remover, crossed my fingers and held my breath, pushing fears for shrinking and other calamities as far out of my mind as I could.  Oh, the subtle ironies of a pattern's name....  Bye-Bye, Bag I Loved!

Act 3: Insult to Injury
While the bag hung on the drying rack, and I waited to see if the stains had indeed been removed, I also needed to meet a deadline. I needed background and foreground for a quilt I had to finish.  I needed to plunge myself into a project to distract me from the laundry coma my beloved was lolling in...

I went to my safe haven - my Cheers, to drown my sorrows in bolts and fat quarters, carrying the wallet that matched my old bag, the one I'd forsaken, in my hand.  I ran errands, and had quite the handful by the time I'd hit the quilt shop so I'm not sure if I'd dropped the tattered green beast in the parking lot beside my car or if I'd stupidly left it on the front seat and had the door not lock properly when I hit the button.  I don't know. But I didn't have it in my hands when I went to pay.

It wasn't in the store - all the patrons and staff helped me look.

It wasn't in the car or beside the car.  It had only been twenty minutes.

Gone. (Bye Bye Wallet!) I went straight to the bank on the corner to cancel my credit card and get a temporary debit card so that I could at least pay for all the fabric I'd had cut.  I was not incredulous when, after I'd explained my missing wallet situation and tried to cancel my cards, the bank clerk asked if I had ID.  Seriously???  I do have the app on my phone (always in my back pocket, thank heavens!) so I could list off the account numbers and last transactions...

I paid for my fabric at the store with the hand-written temporary card (with that big, white, shameful label that screams to everyone "I was careless with the real one") and trundled off home, heart sinking as I made a mental list of all the ID I would have to replace, and those departments and bureaus I would have to call on Monday, and all because of a stupid cup of coffee, if not for which I'd still have my bag, wallet inside, and not missing/stolen/otherwise AWOL.

I prayed that whoever had it, merely took the money and dropped the ID in the mailbox or turned it in somewhere claiming to have found it.  The money (though I certainly can't afford to just drop money in the street) really didn't matter if I could avoid calling the ministry of health, replacing my social insurance card, my driver's license, vehicle registration....  Someone could be going through my receipts and information and stealing my identity.  Yuck.  I felt violated and icky. AND! What if they cashed in my full loyalty card at the yarn shop - nooooooooooooooo! - and made a break for Belize with my Air Miles?  (Okay, in reality, the miles wouldn't get them farther than Edmonton, but still...)

Late afternoon on the Sunday, the doorbell rang and I ran to find a man holding my ID-laden wallet in his hands.  Before either of us spoke, I nearly burst into tears, thanked him almost a thousand times, and gave him a huge hug.  I had nothing to offer him in terms of a reward, other than my gratitude.  Anything immediately valuable had been stripped, of course, including my hidden small note euros and pounds.  (I live in the hope that a spontaneous scavenger hunt or some other impromptu excursion will take me overseas where that ten pound note would save valuable time or at least avoid calamity...) They even took the pennies. Canada phased them out of currency, but they hadn't yet been phased out of my wallet.  As my conversation with the ID rescuer continued, red flags went up and I began to suspect that he might have been involved in its disappearance as well, but I dismissed the idea as unimportant, in the grand scheme.  Again, I expressed my sincere delight at having my license and certificates and health card and social insurance card and all the other little bits that would have taken ages to list and replace back in my hands with hours of phone calls and running around now off my to-do list.

Act 4: Can't Even Look At It
So now I have the wallet back and, while I'm relieved, it feels tainted. Someone rummaged through the whole thing. It had betrayed all my secrets and didn't even put up a fight. I can't bear to put the new temporary debit card in it, no matter how temporary and laden with the still-stinging sense of recklessness. I surrender to the awkwardness of a sandwich-sized ziploc bag to carry my cards.  The wallet's gotta go.  It's beat up anyway. It was as old as the bag it matched which was now in the bottom of the closet.  It's time for the light bulb idea that our protagonist comes up with - new bag is lonely.

Flash to a furious digging through the notions box for hardware for a long-intended, never started project.  Cut to woman with rotary cutter and flying fabric.  Cue 80s-style sports montage or woman at sewing machine: close-up of foot pedal to the metal, iron pressed up-down-up-down, brow wipe.....

Act 5: Hello, Hello, Love!

They meet in the hallway, introduced by clunky best friend, Keys O'Lanyard.  "This is Necessary Clutch Wallet."  And you know what, these two?  Cut from the same cloth.  A matching set.  They belong together.

Add in one of those cheesy camera masks that zooms in a heart-shaped focus on the pair before the heart turns pink with the words...

The End

End Credit notes:

In all seriousness - these are great, well-written patterns, though not necessarily for beginners.  Use a denim needle and some WonderClips. Take your time and enjoy it.  And no, this isn't product-placement.  I haven't been asked or paid to put these things in my "movie." :-)

Lemons to Lemonade: Scrappy Non-Afghan Floor Pillow

You know when everything seems to be going along a little too well?

I had knit all five panels for my scrappy afghan.  The length looked to be good and I had figured that it would shrink up about 30% from cast-on to bind-off edges, and about 15% from side to side when I felted it. The measurements seemed like they would provide a decent-sized throw afghan.

This is what FOUR panels looked like:

Seemed about 5' square.  Nope.

Then I sewed the panels together.

Oops.  I'm not sure what happened - maybe the seams pulled the panels shorter than intended? Maybe the same thing caused them to expand the other way?  Who knows...  But I ended up with a knitted beast of a  piece of fabric about 9 feet long and 4 feet wide.  Yeah.  That's not a great afghan size.  Unless you need a stadium blanket for 6 people. Honestly, I had no idea until I'd sewn all the seams and stretched it out.  And then, I just about fell over with laughter.

To heck with it, I decided.  I'll felt it and worse comes to wear, I have a ton of colourful homemade felt from which to sew things.... Into the washing machine and three hot water cycles!

It felted beautifully.  Far nicer than anything I've felted before.  But it was far too thick to cut apart for a patchwork afghan, and not the right size to leave it as it.  Solution?  Floor cushion!

I made myself a template and shaved the corners down so I wouldn't get that weird pointy corner cushion thing happening.  I cut, clipped and sewed.  Let me tell you, hauling all that thick fabric through my machine wasn't super-fun.  Might have gone better if I'd remembered to reduce the foot pressure but hey, you live, you learn.  I used a knit stitch to reinforce it in case of sudden impact.  (In my neck of the woods, children love to flop on over-sized cushions.)

3/4" seam allowance.  Just to be safe.

It was sewn together for a couple of weeks while I tried to figure out what to stuff it with.  I wanted foam chips but nowhere in town had them. I wasn't going to pay to have that volume of stuffing shipped to me.  This was supposed to be a scrap project costing me exactly ZERO dollars and only leisure time.  Eventually, I bit the bullet and opted for polyfil.  I'm not a fan of the less than smooth way it distributes itself, though I tried to minimize the lumpiness by lining the inside of the cushion with a woollen quilt batt that I'd never use because it was hand-wash only.  There's about 8 lbs of stuffing in there so when it comes to a certain nephew rough-housing on it, it won't be sliding around...

Scrappy Afghan Floor Pillow
Knit from Patons Classic and Lion Brand Fisherman's wool leftovers and felted
approx 36" square, 8" high

All in all, I'm calling it a win.

Sourdough: The Complete First Series (photo-heavy)

So I mentioned that I picked up this book.

And I mentioned that I'd started a starter and planned to make sourdough. The starter now lives in the fridge, by the way.  I named it Keith.

Keith

Then came about a week of trials and a whole lot of errors.

Episode One: The Trusting Home Chef
I am a person who follows a recipe very faithfully the first time I make it.  I made my starter from my other starter (two starter process - odd I know) the night before and left it to get all fluffy and yeasty. It was beautiful, stretchy and sticky, and there was more than enough for two so in the morning, I saved the extra second starter and popped it in the fridge with Keith.

Son of Keith

Then I measured out my ingredients, dissolved Second Starter in a little warm water and dumped in my flour and salt.

It felt dry.  However, this author is an award-winning breadmaker with international credentials so I trusted that he wouldn't steer me by the wayside. Bah!

It's not a tumah...

Dough did not relax during its initial pinch-knead-rest cycles.  Dough did not rise in the first hour in the bowl stage.  Dough did not rise during its 3-6 hours in a colander lined with a floured tea towel stage.  After a few hours, I grew desperate and popped it in the warming drawer of the oven on the dough-proofing setting.  Dough did not proof.  Dough dried out.  Dough was a brick. Dough ended up in the garbage never having realized its destiny. Bah!

Theories:
1) I need to use my kitchen scale for bread ingredients - don't know why I didn't.  Really foolish. But 2 cups of flour and 8 7/8oz can be dramatically different things.
2) The kitchen is too chilly for rising.
3) My warm water was too cold in the beginning.


Episode Two: Scale Away With Me
This time I weighed my ingredients. I ended up using almost 1/2cup less flour (from 2 cups total!) Professional bakers always use weights instead of volume, right?  Hmm.

A little like old chewing gum

Dough felt better but still stiff. It didn't rise a lot in the first stages but I figured in the colander stage, this time it would work. Bah!  Once in the colander and covered with the tea towel, the top of the dough again dried out. Disgusted, I left it sitting on the counter as I whipped up another second starter.

Theories:
1) I have often heard that Canadian flours are harder and you need less of them for most recipes that aren't developed in Canada.  Weighting or not, the amounts are going to be off.
2) I'm not getting the dough enough moisture or warmth. When using a two-bowl covering system (the book recommends covering the dough in the first couple of stages with the bowl that held the flour), probably shouldn't use a plastic bowl to cover.  They don't collect condensation on the inside and don't absorb the warmth in the air.

Episode Three: Jungle Fever or The Sun Rises Faster
In the morning, I had a fresh batch of Second Starter. For those keeping track, this was my SECOND Second Starter, which overnight, had outgrown its container and was slipping out underneath the lid it had managed to pop off.  Don't care, I'm using it anyway.  I plop that starter into some very warm water and whisk it until it's all dissolved and the kitchen smells like a brewery. I also discover that Dough Two, that I abandon on the counter and forgot about, has managed to do some rising underneath the dried out top.  Hunh.  Well, I figured, set it on a pan, cover it and we'll bake it with Three, just for sh*** & giggles.
I measure the flour by feel.  I add only as much as the dough can handle and still look like the picture. I'm okay with it being a little sticky if it's still elastic and pliable. It has a little give to it. The first pinch-knead-rest cycles feel awesome.  I'm thinking that I might have nailed it this time.  I start plotting bakery takeovers like Daniel Day Lewis... There will be Bread! I even have a bit of a crazy old prospector jig in the kitchen. (There Will Be Blood - Anyone? No?)

Getting closer

This time, I mist the inside of the covering bowl and place warm towels over it.

And it barely rises.  I give it 7 hours and it barely gets bigger. And it's starting to dry out. I know the recipe said small loaf but COME ON!  Two rose higher and its half-crusty already. Bah!

I heat the oven with a small pan on the lower rack.  I place deformed and dried out Dough Two on the sheet with sluggish Dough Three.  When the oven is hot, I readjusted the temp, throw pour boiling water in the hot pan, slide in the sheet and bake.

That's Two on the left, tiny Three is on the right. Dark photos at 9pm - sorry!

Bread has good flavour.  It's a little too done on the bottom and man, it's dense, but it's enough of a step forward to keep me going.
Theories:
1) In my growing impatience and familiarity with the recipe, I mis-measured the salt. Salt kills yeast.  Dead yeast=no rise.
2) My water in the beginning was too warm.  Hot water kills yeast.  See above.
3) The oven was too hot.  It has difficulty at very high temperatures so rather than crank it up and turn it down, set it to the lower temp in the first place.
4) The hot pan for steam was too close to the bottom of the baking sheet.  I should've set it on the very bottom of the oven.

Episode Four:  The Reckoning
I will lick this thing if it kills me.  This time, I use my wrist to determine water temperature. I measure the salt precisely before adding to the flour, of which I use just enough to arrive at that perfect tacky dough feel.  I cover with a metal bowl.  The pinch-knead-rest goes perfectly.  Meanwhile, I have turned on the fireplace in the living room.  It does its one-hour in the bowl near the fireplace in the warm living room.  I transfer the dough to the lined and floured colander.  This time, I place a wet tea towel over the top of the colander.  It returns to its set near the fireplace.

Four hours later, it's doubled in size.

I heat the oven to 425, not 475.  I place the steam pan in the bottom of the oven.  I add my hot water.  I move my too good to be true at this point Dough Four to the pan, which sticks to the towel a bit and mucks the top but I don't care. I cut the v's and I slide it into the oven.

Instead of a prospector jig, I'm holding my breath, like I'm defusing a nuke.  (Red wire? Blue wire?  Oh, no, they're all yellow!)


And it's beautiful.

And delicious.  

It's a small loaf but it's a decent size if you don't want it to get stale. And I have cracked it.  I own this recipe! Haha!!  Back to the jig.  Cue the butter!

Final comments:
1) I love that the starter is just flour and water.  It relies on wild yeast.  Therefore the recipe was remarkably cheap to screw up several times.  Flour, water, salt, starter.  That's it. Hmmm, chemistry and biology working together. Delicious and educational!

2) The book, though I have no doubt of the talents of the chef, is not written for the novice/average home baker.  If I hadn't made breads from scratch before, the first few attempts would probably put me off trying again.  It was MY experience with bread and Canadian flour that allowed me to tweak what was going on and not his advice.  However, now that I know that the flour measure will be tremendously off, I feel confident trying other recipes from it.  Find an easier recipe if you've never made bread before.

3) It makes great french toast.

Disaster Cake

Sometimes you are desperate for a little cake.  Problem?  Everyone around you is on a diet and you can't bake a whole cake or bring one in.  And it's 10 o'clock at night.

In desperation, you turn to the internet to find these rumoured microwave cake-in-a-mug recipes.  You think to yourself, "How bad could it be?"  There's a part of you that knows, deep down, that this won't end well, like when a  promising date snaps at your server before you've even ordered.  But rather than say, "Thanks, I'm going to save us both the trouble and end this now," you throw the ingredients and way too much (one whole) egg for a single serving cake, into a mug and microwave away.

Yuck.  I tried not to waste but I just couldn't take one more rubbery bite of it.  Microwave cake recipe inventor, what did flour and sugar ever do to you to deserve such a horrible fate?  What did *I* ever do to you?  I love cake.  Cake is one of my favourite things in the whole wide world, the one food I could eat every single day, and you dressed up in its ingredients and paraded around making a mockery of baked goods everywhere.

It's the kind of epicurean misadventure that makes you wish the internet was intelligent and could tell you at the top of the search results page when something was a terrible idea.

Not cool, internet.  Not cool.

From Awful to Aaahhhh!-ful

I am in Edmonton and have discovered the perils of online hotel bookings.

At first, I drove up and found out that the difference between a good part of town and a dodgy one is less than a block.  Then I had that sinking feeling as I parked in the check-in zone and walked in.  It was dark and grotty.  It was dirty.  It smelled. The carpet was buckled.  There was a large tank of green water with what I can only assume were fish behind the algae.  The front desk staff, two of them, were both arguing with customers, one of which was an unattended child left to his own devices for the day.  In my writer's imagination, I'm sure I heard the crackle-snap of a dying fluorescent tube and a malcontented fly.  This picture illustrates the general impression it made on me, though the picture is far more cheerful:

I became uneasy.  My room wasn't ready yet so I left my bag at the desk and went to get the school clothes I was supposed to buy with some birthday money I got (Are you ever too old for birthday money? Thanks, Mum!).  I traipsed through stores I usually have success in but couldn't focus enough to really invest in much.  It was crowded, most of the salespeople gave the impression of being annoyed and almost everything I liked was over-budget or not available in my size.  And I kept thinking about that place...  And I knew I couldn't stay there.

Then the wheel spun back up and when I collected my bag from the [chain hotel to remain unnamed unless you're travelling to Edmonton, in which case, email me], the evening shift front desk clerk was very understanding and didn't charge me any sort of cancellation fee.  I think he sensed I might cry if he said I had to stay there, in Stabby Town.  (Yay for Gary!)

Needing to stick relatively close to downtown, I wandered a little over the river and found the Metterra on Whyte Ave.  Whyte is the loveliest artsy indie strip in Edmonton and if I hadn't been a half-hour drive from it when I lived in Edmonton, I would've had a much different relationship with the city.  The staff has been wonderful, the lobby is gorgeous, they have lovely little perks, I can walk to all the cool shops, restaurants, and my favourite little grocery store in the city.

At the end of a long corridor, I entered this beautiful and tranquil space.

The windows run the length of the room, the brightest and airiest hotel room I've ever had the pleasure of staying in.

There's even enough space to do yoga if I wanted to.  That is, if I weren't wearing the bathrobe and lounging on the comfy bed with tiramisu from the restaurant I had supper, oh so happy that I booked a grotty little room somewhere else.

This is the view:

The haze in the air is the forest-fires burning in British Columbia, not smog.  The smoke hit Saskatchewan two days ago...

And the powder room.

Because I know you wanted to know.

Scott's Chicken Wings

This recipe was passed onto me by Scott.  Scott is my good friend's sister's boyfriend. (uncle's cousin's dermatologist's paperboy - which makes us as close as Helmet and Lonestar.  Spaceballs, anyone? No?)  I met him once when a large number of us went carousing.  But before we caroused, there was wine.  And tapas.  And these incredibly, ridiculously easy and delicious wings.  I begged him for the recipe.  Begging works.

Ingredients:  

Chicken drummettes or wing tips, or go crazy and get both
Lime juice, about one cup for every 20-30 pieces of chicken  (You can use the RealLime bottled stuff.  It'll be okay.  It's not considered cheating. But using lemon juice would be.  Use the lime.  Do it.)
Montreal Steak Spice.

Yup.  That's the good stuff.

Marinate your chicken in the lime juice for at least a few hours, preferably overnight.  We were lazy today and used ziplocs so that we could turn and flip and toss without a lot of mess.  (Little did we know...  Mess will find you other ways...)
Heat your oven to 350 degrees F.
Place your chicken pieces on greased or lined cookie sheets.  Sprinkle liberally with Montreal Steak Spice.

 Liberally!  With intent.  In fact, just to be sure, when you think you've added enough, turn your cookie sheet one-eighty and check there is no nekkid chicken from the other angle.

Now, I will point out that I over-crowded my chicken today.  Try to only marinate as much chicken as will reasonably fit in your oven.  Also, use a rimmed baking sheet, especially if you plan to over-crowd your chicken.  Why? You can either cook your chicken on rimmed sheets or use one to hold the scrapings of chicken juice-turned-charcoal from the bottom of your oven.  (I did say that mess finds you in other ways...)

I had made these wings before on a non-lipped sheet without incident but today..., today, I over-crowded and it bit me in the ash.  We had three fans going for a half an hour and had to interrupt cooking for a quarter so just use rimmed sheets.  Do it.

Bake your wings for 30-35 minutes.  Flip and be a libertine once more with the steak spice.  Sprinkly wantonly!  Return to oven for another 30-35 minutes or until chicken is browned and beginning to crisp.

Serve with napkins.
Also goes nicely with a side of sports, particularly if your team is doing well.  Go, Riders!

Silliness. On all fronts.

Hey there, Thumbper. What's the matter?

Ooooooh. Ouch. Plastic bakeware-safe knife, you say? Because I didn't grease the brownie pan properly in haste to watch the hockey game? Because I was rushing to grab a brownie on my way back to the tv and slipped with the plastic bakeware-safe, good-for-lettuce, knife? And what's with the overly-dramatic lighting?

No, I don't think you need stitches. Yes, it's deep but that's what Superglue's for...

Walk it off, Thumbper. Walk it off.

Nightstand Revisited

It is customary for Mother and Father to holiday each winter in a tropical vacation with Sister or myself usually in charge of airport drop-off and retrieval, pet maintenance, snow-shovelling and house-guarding. It is also customary for them to experience a flight-delay on the way home. (This time - volcano. Truly.)

It's nice after traveling, especially if you have a habit of getting waylaid, delayed and tarmac-stayed towards the end of your trip, to come home to a treat. I figured that maybe the time had come to tackle the toppers she wanted for her nightstands. (The ones to hide the "incident".)

Trouble - I had NO idea what kind of pattern I wanted to do. When Mum requested them, she gave me virtual carte blanche, except to say, "Maybe some yellow?" Pattern, no. Style, she trusted me. And the fabric sat in my hands for weeks. I was paralyzed by the freedom of it all.

Oh, inspiration! Thou art a fickle mistress!

(Which is a line from the first act of the elizabethan tragedy this project was becoming... Line 164 to be precise.)

Then I remembered that she liked how the runner I made turned out. So I just started cutting....

And cutting....

Fretted about how to get the curves right and not use bias binding.

It took me a Saturday. No more, no less. Go figure.

(So it may not have ended a tragedy but Aristotle would have to be satisfied by the Unity of Time, Place and Action! That's for you theatre and philosophy nerds....)

What do you think? Maybe less yellow?

Act V, Scene 3, Line 82:

But it be a butter yellow, and not glaring, like the offending sun of morning hung o'er.

Exeunt.