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Keepin' ya in kippahs

I love my son's preschool. We have 3 kids and we've moved around a bit, so we've seen a few. And of all the many preschools we've had dealings with, this one is far and away the most haimish while still being organized and a "tight ship".

But the one thing they aren't all that good at is keeping track of personal belongings. I sewed a blanket for my daughter's nap-time there. They lost it. I sewed a blanket for my son's nap-time--they lost it. And then one day my son came home without his kippah. It happens to be a special kippah - the one we gave him at his upsherin (1st haircutting). But it's gone, and probably for good. I have to say, I was sad.

My son read my sadness. He decided he didn't want to wear kippot to school any more, in case he lost them. After I got over my mope, I realized this was not the message I wanted to send. But at $15 - $25 a pop, I didn't want to have to buy kippahs for him all the time and this place just doesn't place a high priority on personal belongings. So I went to sew him one.

There is a pattern you can buy for kippahs, but I don't own it and I didn't feel like wasting the time with the mail-order process. (I'm sure it's a good pattern though, it's a good company.) And I saw a few patterns available on the web. So I downloaded the most sensible looking pattern and whipped it up.

The arc of the wedge was all wrong. I wound up with a nice little cap that would maaaaybe fit on the head of an American Girl doll. Feh. So I had to redraft the curve. After a few tries I got a nice fit for an almost-4-year-old's head. And then I decided that since I went this far I might as well draft one for my husband. You can't really just scale up - but after drafting the 1st one I knew where the curve had to be and I got it right in 2 tries, so it wasn't a lot of effort.

These take almost no time to whip up, and barely any fabric. They have a nice curve to them - not too high (dorky) and not too flat (unprofessional looking). The boys now want to match - easy to do! The pattern is on the front page of my website in pdf form and here's a photo of the boys wearing the test kippot below:

So now there's a tested kippah pattern out there for quilting cottons. Have at it, sewing yiddishekeit!

Windsurfing... the blind leading the blind

I've gone windsurfing at Foster City Lagoon a grand total of 3 times. It is a very inexpensive and safe way to get up and running, er... sailboarding. And once you take their intro class, you can do an all day rental of rig and suit for $20. They're open all year. It's a location with conditions which are about as non-threatening to a newbie as possible. All of which means that you can go practice quite a bit.

But I haven't yet, mostly because it involves getting babysitting which is a lot more than $20, and carving out time. This did not stop me from writing up a Basic Windsurfing Tutorial. On the contrary, I wanted to write it up while I was still a complete sailboarding moron.

First off, I wrote the tutorial mainly for me. My mnemonic ability has taken a beating these last few years. With a few weeks' interval between outings I wind up staring vacantly at the rental board for a few minutes before I can recall what I'm supposed to do. If I write it down I have both the memory enhancement of writing it down along with the ability to re-read it when I need it.

Second, it's so hard to remember what it's like to be new at something, that if I waited until I knew what I was talking about I would no longer remember what were the key ideas I kept forgetting when new.

So anyway, if you're a sailboarder and you somehow ended up here looking at my anemic blog (I'm sorry for you, really I am) I would love it if you would take a gander at the tutorial. Please let me know if I screwed up anything major.

Yakking Green Things

• I'm halfway through The Omnivore's Dilemma. It's a good read and neither dry nor preachy.
  
• Like me, my husband's first career was in academic science. He was a climate researcher (I was a molecular biologist).
  
• I live within a mile of the Pacific ocean. I see plastic bags floating next to the kids playing in the surf. You can't walk on the beach without stepping on someone's cigarette butt or discarded trash.
  

These are the things that pull me green.

I also live in a part of the country that is staunchly green green green. In some cases, nauseatingly, self-congratulatory, obnoxiously green. In other cases, cute-to-the-point-of-twee green. And in nearly all cases, expensively green. Green is for the wealthy... the well-educated holier-than-thou infinitely-more-chic-than-you elite.

These are the things that make me want to leave ziplock baggies full of compostable dog poop on the lawns of city officials and bicycle-nazis everywhere. So sue me.

Anyway. Thankfully rational thought trumps visceral reaction, and I've been slowly implementing green changes in the way I run my house. Biodegradable detergent, a rag to clean the table instead of paper towels, more diligent recycling... and more. I picked up Sewing Green which is a decent book that covers things found in plenty of other books (Sew and Stow comes to mind) but puts a recycling spin on all of it. This gave me the idea of making sandwich wraps out of PUL (PolyUrethane Laminated fabric) and quilting cotton in order to reduce ziplock bag use. And that got me to thinking about all the other ways in which I use ziplock bags... plastic bags destined for the landfill.

The problem with sewing your own ziplock bags is that for food safety sake, you need to get them very clean between uses. While it's true you can wash and dry PUL on hot repeatedly without problems, it is still a hazard to leave crumbs and moisture in corners of bags. I thought about making 3 sides out of velcro to eliminate corners, but frankly, I thought that would suck. Sewing velcro on things just barely makes it into the "good" column in my list of super powers - that stuff borders on evil in so very many circumstances. And then I had the lightbulb moment - why does a bag need to have corners at all? The sandwich bag companies make them rectangular to maximize use of material, but I don't need to do that. So there it is - I drafted an oval bag shape - no corners for crumbs. E=mc^2 it isn't, but hey, it's free.

It's a fairly small bag. I'm finding all these reusables are pretty bulky to put in a kid's lunchbox, and you're not using these for sandwiches (wraps are much better for that purpose). It holds a reasonable serving of berries or crackers or cookies or whatever. If you want it bigger, print it out at 125% or more.

You can get 2 bags out of a fat quarter of PUL (PolyUrethaneLaminated fabric - used extensively for cloth diapering and hospital settings - tolerated even by most people with chemical sensitivities), a fat quarter of quilting fabric, 4" of velcro and less than a half yard of binding. You can make it without the binding - just sew lining to exterior most of the way around the "mouth" RST, flip and edge stitch the flipping-hole closed - but I like the look of binding better. Anyway, it's a minimal investment of time and materials.

Half Bass Bag, Part 1

I'm feeling needy and unfulfilled, so I'm designing something for myself. I want it to be germane to me and my valid feelings, so I'm calling it the Half Bass Bag. Once it's drafted and tested I'll put up the pattern as a "free but please make a charitable donation" item on my website because, y'know, this is how most people with advanced degrees from ivy league institutions Make The World A Better Place.

Onward.

If it's going to be a Half Bass Bag, it behooves me to make sure the "half bass" part is accurate. (For the record, I was bummed that I could not find any donkey fabric.) I have Robert Kaufman's fish fabric from the "Sports Club" line, but not being a fisherwoman myself, I am not certain which of the fish are bass species. I know there are a large variety of bass and many aren't even closely related to each other. My closest experience with bass involves them being already gutted, scaled and usually pre-filleted. I wouldn't know a live one if it bit me in the... bass.

Here's a photo of the fabric. I've put a pin through what I think are the most likely suspects based on a Google Image search. If there are any fishing folks out there who can confirm my picks or direct me to a correct fish on the fabric, I would be ever so grateful. Here's what I'm working with, and thanks in advance:

Blueberry breakthrough

For years I have avoided making blueberry hamentashen because blueberry jam tends to boil and run at oven temp. The jam goes all over the cookie sheet and pours onto the bottom of the oven, leaving a big mess and a bunch of empty hamentaschen at the end.

I was in the grocery store looking for fillings for this year's batch, and my eye fell on pie filling. Aha! Pie filling is meant to be put at high heat... and presumably it's made up so that it stays where you put it. So blueberry pie filling went in the basket, and blueberry pie filling went in the hamentashen. I guessed right... pie filling works very well:



Finally, after all these years I can make blueberry hamentashen with wild abandon. I even updated my recipe in the online archive.

Be happy, indeed!

Hag sameach, everyone.

Pick-a-poodle

I am making 3 poodle skirts. Two are for my daughters, one is for my friend's daughter/daughter's friend. My youngest and the friend both wanted pink skirts. My youngest was quite specific: she wanted a black poodle with a black sequin leash:



So I need to decide on a combo for the friend. For reference, my older daughter has a turquoise skirt with a pink poodle and opalescent pink leash. I have 3 options for the friend. The first is to duplicate exactly what my youngest has. The merit is that it's high contrast and easily visible. The downside is that variation is fun.

The second option is to change the leash to matte silver:



The upside - the matte silver is seriously cool in person (doesn't photograph accurately). It looks very good with the matte silver embroidery around the applique. It's still pretty high contrast and easily visible from a distance. The downside is that at first glance it doesn't seem noticeably different than DD2's version.

The third option is to change the leash to matte silver and the poodle to white:



The upside - very obviously different than the others. There would be 3 different colors of poodle for each of the 3 girls. The girl's complexion is very fair and really is at her best advantage when wearing light colors. See above about how cool the matte silver looks in person. Downside - much lower contrast. (Still obviously a poodle skirt.)

I am planning to make crinolines for the girls. I am hoping that by making the skirts stand away from the body a bit the details of the sequins and appliques will be more visible. But I won't know until it's all complete.

Anyway, if you have an opinion about which combo I should do for my friend's daughter please post in the comments.