Sunshine Lemon Curd Bread

It’s very surprising to me that I would write a blog that involved cooking since I’ve never been an

Sunshine Lemon Curd Bread

engaged cook. I’m functional but not an artist. Back in the day, I did love to bake. The aphorism, “cooking is an art, baking is a science” speaks to me. My mother was a chemistry teacher and I’m fond of chemistry especially chemistry jokes. To me baking is a lot like chemistry with its precision and combining of different ingredients to create something new! Transformation at its most delicious.

I recently bought a bread machine, the third of its kind. I hadn’t used one or baked any bread in a long time. The first few outings were not a success. Through the advice and encouragement of some FaceBook friends, I persevered.  You can see the photograph here, fresh from the “oven.”

I like this recipe.  The bread is so moist you can eat it plain. Lemons remind me of sunshine in this cold, never-ending winter.  Because it is yellow, lemons promote a clarity of the mind, psychic powers, mediumship and refreshing.  In addition, lemon is cleansing and refreshing.  Sometimes I think lemonade should be called lemon-aid!  Plus yellow is my favorite color!

Here is the bread machine recipe.  If you would like to make it by hand, King Arthur brand flour has a lot of good tips for making bread machine recipes by hand.  

Sunshine Leomon Curd Bread:  For a 1.5 pound loaf

2/3 cup old fashioned rolled oats

1 1/8 to 1 3/8 cup milk

1/2 cup lemon curd

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

1  1/2 teaspoons butter or margarine

3 cups bread flour

2 teaspoons bread machine yeast

Settings:  light crust.  The recipe says that it will work on rapid loaf setting but I was not successful in that.

This came from the book The Bread Machine Book of Helpful Hints by Linda Rehberg and Lois Conway.  St. Martins, 1995.  It has many delicious recipes.  PS, just so you know, recipes are considered lists of directions and ingredients and are not copyrightable.  

May your day be refreshing and delightful on this SUNday!  Blessed Be.

 

Eleanor Roosevelt Projects

I am brave when it comes to quilting the tops of quilts.  For someone who doodles a lot, I should be braver and more willing to experiment.  I’m too critical.  I had this project a long time before I tackled it.  There is a story attached.

Many years ago, I bought a kit of squares to embroider.  They were in a pretty gray-blue, one of my favorite shades of blue and they made a lovely shape.  I started it and quickly became bored with it.  I offered the quilt squares to my grandmother, thinking she’d give them to one of her friends.  I forgot all about it.

About ten years ago, I learned to quilt.  It was slow going and I was discouraged but continued to try.  I got a bit better.  Then my mother handed me a package of batting and a quilt top.  It was those squares.  My grandmother must have been in her late 70s or early 80s when she embroidered them.  My mother had pieced it together and she wanted me to quilt the top.  I was intimidated.  Deeply so.

But this year, I decided it was time.  I was reminded of the quote by Eleanor Roosevelt:  “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.”  I decided to categorize this as an Eleanor Roosevelt.

I made the backing and quilted it.  There were little dots as guides for the intended quilting so I was able to mostly follow them.  They were very faint.  The quilt is large and I did the quilting on my fancy schmancy machine which has a wider throat but was not terribly amenable to the size.  It was hard work and I quilted for days and days.  As I wrestled and quilted and sewed,  I thought about my grandmother and my mother.  I felt deeply connected to them, to the stories of my life, and to a sort of continuum of stitching and creating women.  The energy of Craft moves us all into the flow of community.

Finally it was finished.  The back is a mess but the front is awesome.  One step forward and a “good first effort,” if I do say so myself.  And I made the label with blue birds.  There’s a story there:  One summer my mother, grandmother, and uncle were bemoaning the fact that they didn’t see many bluebirds anymore.  As we were talking, we look out the window to the bird feeder and there’s one bluebird, a pair, two pairs until there were four pairs of bluebirds who became regular visitors.  I always associate bluebirds with the trio of my grandmother, mother, and uncle.

Stitch A Book of Shadows

There are a number of stitch journal projects out there on the internet and the blogosphere.  It is very inspiring.  Some are very structured and they keep track of the names of stitches learned and practice.  The journal becomes a reference book to consult again and again; and it’s also a way to track the progress of your skills.  One of my favorite of this kind is on Mary Corbet’s Needle n Thread.  As awesome and cool as it is, it’s still a lot like a school blue book or copybook.  Sometimes I can’t sustain that kind of structure.  I always want to veer off track or color outside the lines.

The Crazy Quilt Journal Project is also incredible.  At the beginning of each year, people sign up to create a journal by doing a crazy quilt square each month for the whole year.  I didn’t sign up but I’m on the mailing list and I get emails with pictures of some incredibly beautiful crazy quilts.  Plus, several of the bloggers I follow, write about their journey.  The next favorite thing for a stitcher to do after stitching is a handful of M&Ms and writing a blog.

One of the most inspiring is a blog post on Million Little Stitches.  She has been doing fibre journals since 2008 and last year she participated in CQJP.  She shared her final journal in this post.  In two fabric pages you see what happened to her each month stitched on one side and her crazy quilt on the other.   What a fabulous way to journal or for a Wiccan to keep a Book of Shadows!

I didn’t realize it had inspired me so much until I was in the middle of a meditation during our Full Moon in Virgo celebration this past weekend.  It came to me that I needed to journal my meditations more faithfully and find a way to express the wisdom I was gaining.  The the picture of this wonderful journal showed up in my meditation along with the pattern for the wisdom of the meditation.  I’m almost finished with it and will post it when I am finished.

I’m not sure what will be in this Book of Stitchy Shadows.  I’m making no promises to faithfully transmit all the ritual meditations or whatever.  I am participating in a wonderful monthly stitchy sampler program by Rebecca Ringquist at Dropcloth and those will fit in nicely.  We shall see at the end of the year when I put it all together.

 

It is called The Craft, you know

 

Shop Till You Drop Quilt by Gail Wood.

Today, I started an offshoot blog to The Rowdy Goddess blog and it’s called The Rowdy Goddess Crafts.  I do a lot of sewing, quilting, and needlework and I like to talk and write about it.  Often people don’t want to hear about it or read about it, so I’m doing an off shoot.  Last fall when I was being care-giver to my mother, I found that my normal coping mechanism to tune out stress, reading, wasn’t working.  Because of the situation, with its constant interruptions and worry, I couldn’t concentrate enough to follow a story line.  Since I was at her house, I didn’t have access to my usual quilting toys.  What I found I was hankering for was to do some embroidery.  I pulled out my handy-dandy iPad (I didn’t leave all my toys behind) and went on to Amazon and ordered an embroidery kit, a hoop and some embroidery scissors (I have a major jones for scissors).  Thank goodness for Amazon prime.  It arrived two days later and I had something to do while my mother slept.  The embroidery calmed me, nurtured me and reminded me there is beauty in the midst of stress.

Since then, my love of hand emboidery is revived; and I’ve been thinking of 2013 as “the year of embroidery” for me; including  completing things, learning new skills, and finding new ways to express my creativity and love of the Craft.  Tom Cowan in his book, Shamanism as a Spiritual Practice for Daily Life, writes that once you begin a daily spiritual practice such as shamanism, you will find that the practice opens you up to other arts and that you will also begin an art practice.  I interpret art very broadly to mean any kind of way you express your own gnosis or understanding of the Universe.  Lately for me, it has been through needlework.

When I became a Pagan in the early 1980s, I was (and still am) a feminist.  I attended meetings, belonged to the National Organization of Women and attended conferences on women’s issues.  There was an undercurrent of attitude amongst these business and academic women that in order to be equal, feminists should eschew traditional women’s arts and crafts.  Needlework was not so much denigrated as ignored.  There were some overt statements but these activities were not prized.  Even among Goddess women and Witches, these crafts were not valued.

Nevertheless, it is called The Craft.  And what is magic but taking the odd bits of intention, desire and energy flow and weaving them together to create a new wholeness (holiness)?  Spell work is essentially craft.  Pulling together all the various bits and bobs and energetically sewing them together to create change through need and desire.

Embroidery, especially, had been something I’ve gone back to again and again.  After spending a decade or more working full time and going to graduate school part time, I did nothing but embroider and watch tv for a solid three months.  After all those years of only studying and working, I looked to find myself again.  The graduate degrees are very prized accomplishments, but I think the embroidery helped weave it into my whole self.  I had to step away to concentrate on learning and achieving, and in order to bring those achievements into my life, I had to use thread and fabric to create the whole picture.

May the beauty and peace of what you craft help you weave heart into Be-ing.

Happy Valentine’s Day.