Oh yes, it’s hard to see, but I also made matching corduroy bows! Ah yes, the skirt is corduroy from my stash, along with some vintage cotton(!) ricrac that I just picked up at an estate sale, and some old black lace I had in my lace drawer. The bottom ruffle was supposed to be longer, but I ran out of red corduroy. And I am loving my serger, I got some extra black on red detail by serging the bottom and top of the bottom ruffle rather than hemming them. Way easier and cheaper too! Well, not if you count the price of the serger, I haven’t done nearly enough sewing to amortize that cost yet!

Also, I am re-in-love with my ruffling foot. Gathering foot? Pleating foot? Whatever. It is awesome. I used it to gather my skirt, and it is so much easier than basting and hand gathering! Which I had to do for the bottom ruffle since I ran out of corduroy and the one downfall of ruffling feet is they are hard to tune exactly. Gathering the bottom ruffle was not fun. (Yes this picture is from a different project.) But the extra thrilling part? This is an antique Singer ruffling foot, but it seems to fit and work just fine on my antique Elna. SO HAPPY! I thought I was going to have to invest in all new feet for my new/old sewing machine, but the old metal Singer ones I have seem to more or less fit. YES!

This is one of those ‘duh’ things. We have these awesome natural building blocks that Rebecca’s DPa (grandfather) made by chopping up scrub he cleared for her aunt’s wedding reception… I wish I had scrub wood in my front yard I could turn into blocks! Rebecca added our rock collection (from the island that *we* got married on and visit periodically, obviously this should be re-named the wedding rocks and blocks) to them. My first reaction was, why are you getting out the bag of rocks? I thought we were going to play with blocks. My second reaction was, duh, obviously these things should be played with together. So there you go, rocks and blocks. I bet your blocks are missing their rocks. You should go fix that now.

Also, I just finally finally finally finished my 2007 photo year book. I started it a couple weeks ago, and it has been a constant push and a constant effort to not be a perfectionist, but just to get it all together, even if some of the page layouts come out half empty and I haven’t spell checked everything and the font sizes and styles might not be completely consistent. Major creative endeavor I can check off. Who wants to guess how embarrassingly many pages are in it? The answer is more than the days in a year. Ack! Because being selective takes more time, and clearly all the pictures of my daughter need to be preserved for all time. Obviously Although a big reason, and more than half the book, are two major vacations, one a two week business trip my husband took to Tokyo that I got to tag along on, and the other a family (great grandmother on down) trip to Central America. They could have had their own books, but then I wouldn’t have made it to 2008 yet. I am perpetually two years behind, and I would really like to fix that. But first I have a lot of blogs to catch up on, and a pattern I’m writing for Etsy that I would have liked to be done with by now too.

This is cheating, but if you like to make rice balls, and you like to only cook with brown rice, if you just can’t make them sticky enough, I had an epiphany. I’m sure other people have discovered this before, but I’m still going to enjoy my mischievous flash of brilliance. What is sticky and made of rice? Mochi! What is the easy way of making mochi? Using mochi/rice flour and microwaving it with water and sugar and flavoring. What happens when you add a little mochi flour to the brown rice along with the soy sauce/vinegar/ponzu sauce/sugar/salt/whatever for your rice and then microwave it to make it hot? It gets sticky! Is this cheating? Of course. Does it work? Yes! So now I can make brown rice onigiri that don’t fall apart. Just add a sprinkle of mochi flour to your rice when it is hot and you are mixing in everything else. Magic sticky rice glue.