Because One Person Asked

Here it is in all of it's orange-y glory!



So far I've made peanut butter cookies, white bread (which turned out a little flat), pizza dough (so much better than frozen) and oatmeal cookies. I've realized that it's not doing anything I can't do, but, really, I don't have the forearm strength to knead dough or cream butter and sugar well. Therefore I am happy to have this stand mixer.

Xander likes it too. And Josie, she makes me pick her up to watch.


Now the big question is what to pick for the rebate. The current rebate is to get an extra bowl, a food grinder attachment or a shredder/slicer attachment. I'm thinking the extra bowl would be good for when I make and frost a cake. But then I think of the fun I'd have slicing and shredding vegetables. And then I think of how I don't feel like grinding food, so I'm striking that from the list. Should I get the bowl or slicer/shredder?

It's here, it's here!

Some of you may recall that back in July I had The Challenge. Brief refresher - do all of my chores in July and I could get a fancy stand mixer. And, if you couldn't guess by the lack of follow up, the result was Challenge Fail. I blame it on Chris being gone for a week in July and going on vacation for a week in July. I really didn't take that into account when I thought of the whole thing. Hey, I did get more of the house cleaned than usual, so it wasn't a complete waste of time.

In August it occurred to me that my birthday was coming up in September, so I started dropping subtle hints to Chris. Like when he asked me what I wanted for my birthday I would say "A KitchenAid Artisan stand mixer in Tangerine." Yeah, he didn't get the hint.

So after my birthday I asked if we could use his hotel reward points to get the mixer. It didn't come in the color that I wanted, but it would still be free. Much like the Dyson vacuum cleaner I received last year using his hotel reward points. Darn, I miss that vacuum.

Anyway, there were not enough points to get the stand mixer. Argh! But there were enough to get a gift card. And there were enough credit card reward points to cover the rest of the cost. So can you guess what I ordered and arrived earlier this week? Did you guess a KitchenAid Artisan stand mixer in Tangerine? Because, believe me, Majestic Yellow and Green Apple also caught my eye.

Ok, I did get the Tangerine! I'd post a picture, but I figure that would move me from the 'slightly obsessed' side of the line to 'completely lost it' side.

I broke it in earlier with a batch of peanut butter cookies. Some bread and pizza crust will follow this weekend. I will probably take pictures of those.

For Fun

There's this website called Woot! that sells one item a day, usually technology related. It has a related site for shirts called Shirt.Woot! where there is a new shirt everyday. There are also some ongoing contests that artists can submit and possibly get their shirts up for a day.

I'm sure if I spent time I could get lots of shirts from lots of websites that I want. Here are just a few that I found on the Woot site. Instead of showing the entire shirt, I'll just show the design (because that is how I saved them).

Because I do love math:

Order of operations is so important in real-world applications:

This one is called "The Four Little Ponies of the Apocolypse."

I just find this one amusing:

Trying Something New

Anyone who has met Chris knows he loves the band Pearl Jam.

Side story: Our 13 year old babysitter does not know who Pearl Jam is. I told her it was a band and not to tell Chris that she didn't know them. Then I felt old.

Chris has gone to many PJ concerts and gotten a t-shirt at most of them. And every once in a while someone will give him a PJ t-shirt. As time goes by the shirts get worn out or shrink and get retired to my craft closet or my pajama drawer.

Before we left Ohio, I decided that the time was ripe to begin The Project. I would create a quilt out of the Pearl Jam shirts!

First step, talk to my Grandma V about quilting. She has lots of experience at hand quilting and gave me a basic run through. She scoffed at people who use machines to quilt, so that's a little intimidating.

Second step, cut up the t-shirts. I kept looking over my shoulder at this point, waiting for lightning to strike me down. After much deliberation on my part, I decided to cut out 9.5" squares.



Then after more deliberation, I cut the bigger pictures in 9.5" by 15" rectangles.


There is one that will be 15" by 15" when I am done. I think I found all of the shirts that were retired, worn as pajamas or worn for workouts except for two that were shipped off to California.

The third step was to cut out matching shapes of lightweight, woven interfacing. Interfacing is ironed on to things to give it more stability. It will make the squares and rectangles a little thicker than I'd like but they won't pull and bunch as easily when doing the actual knitting.

The next step will be to actually iron the interfacing onto the squares and rectangles. However, the project was left in Ohio and will be put on the back burner until August.

The hardest part is picking what color material to use as border. Chris said black, but he also wants to hang this quilt on the wall and black will probably show cat hair and dust pretty easily. Any thoughts, what color would go well with all of those shirts?

For me? I shouldn't have!

In the house where we are living, the kitchen has these nice greenhouse windows. I'll show them to you sometime when I give you a 'tour'. I considered buying some herbs to grow in the windows and then I'd always have fresh herbs when I cook. Back home I can't do that because of the cats. But if I did that here, would I even use the herbs? And what would I do with them when we move back?

Instead, I decided that I will just always have fresh cut flowers in the window. Chris grabbed a bouquet when we went grocery shopping the first week here. Some of the flowers died after a few days, but the rest lasted nearly three weeks.

While I was out today I decided to pick up some gerber daises. I love these flowers. They are so big and so bold. I tried growing some in flower pots back home but they never flourished.


There is something about having flowers around the house that just always makes me smile. I used to have a hang up about having Chris get me flowers, but I've gotten over that. If I want flowers, then I'll just get them myself. Although, Chris is always welcome to bring home some for me.