I have been thinking about it all morning. The steak we had at Rancho Loma. It was stunning. It was sublime. It might just be the most perfect steak ever. And I want some more. Short of a return visit to Rancho Loma, I might just have to find me a meat market here in Houston.

It isn’t like I haven’t looked before. I have. I just haven’t found an old school butcher like I am looking for. Ideally I want a neighborhood place that is actually in my neighborhood, but I am not oddosed to driving across town if I find the right place. It isn’t like we eat beef often, but I want to know what I am getting and where it is coming from. I want local well cared for beef.

I know the farmers’ market has a few local ranchers hawking their wares. As far as I know, a quantity of beef needs to be purchased. I will look into it further when we go tomorrow morning.

Also on the shopping list is some fresh local tomatoes. The ones at the store are hit and miss. While they aren’t dreadful, what we had at Rancho Loma was superb. There is a standard that has been set. The salad course of our meal was heirloom tomatoes from their garden with fresh mozzarella and basil with a flavored olive oil and white balsamic granita. I am not about to be making any granita any time soon, it is more laborious than I care to be, especially when I have made a close enough approximation with the aged balsamic vinegar I already have on hand. I just think we need better tomatoes and I think it won’t be a challenge to find them at the market.

The other fresh meal we have been having is guacamole salad. I hesitate to call in guac because I don’t use the traditional spices. Again it is a close approximation. Last time I made it I added the corn cut from three ears, pre-cooked. Heavenly. and Gone.

I think we will have the guac tonight and the tomato salad and steak tomorrow night.

Life is good.

That would be my mom. And her birthday is tomorrow. But I am thinking about it right now and these days, that is when I need to act, when I am thinking about it. There is a somewhat less than delightful mania going on in my brain these days and I find I have to take extra effort to stay in the moment and do now rather than acknowledge something for later because later? It’s gone…

Young at Heart is a birthday card I made for my mom and it went out in the mail today which means she will get it late, but she will get it! The florio piece is on the back of it and I did that and blogged about it before(click for the full view). It’s images of my dad from his photos from the 50s. She. might. just. cry…

My only hope now is that I got the year right and that she id in fact turning 78. If she is turning 77, well then, I might just be in trouble.

My crafting ADD has definitely been established as both a phenomena within a single craft (multiple works in progress) and a multi-craft issue. Last week, my brain was definitely missing a beat as it went into a bit of an overshelmed state.

Of course there is knitting going on. And art journaling (not one but two online classes at the moment with a list of several more I am interested in). I am also taking an online workshop for Carla Sonheim’s book Drawing Lab. And a less intensive online class called Delightful Doodles.

Both the drawing and doodling classes are through the Artists of the Round Table site linked to the left.

If that wasn’t all enough, let’s just take a mini-vaca weekend away into the Texas interior. On the way to the best meal ever, we stopped in Fredricksburg for lunch. While there, we also stopped at a yarn store. Truth be told, I checked the yarn store map and the only one on the way to Coleman, TX was in Fredricksburg and that determined our route. I went to this charming little yarn store and I didn’t buy yarn! I did, however, get this kit for my intro into rug hooking. And guess who got a similar kit?

Not one, but two hookers in the house!!

Green paper, a blog I discovered recently and linked on the left, has issued a collage challengeand provided a collage page as a PDF download for the challenge.

I am not sure I am finished, but for purposed of this challenge, I need to call it finished and get it posted. I might do some further embellishing with pen and stuff.

I used one of the beer six-pack panels on my ring journal for this because I sometimes like the stand alone nature of a piece not bound into a journal. The heavier weight of the cardboard as a base offers a little more freedom to accessorize.

If you go to this link you can scroll down a bit and see what others have done with the images. The images in my post are thumbnails and you can click on them for a bigger view.

It’s what’s for lunch.

I worked on a second Remains of the Day journal. This one is 99% recycled materials. The cover is made from a piece of junk mail and an old blouse, embellished with stuff from the stuff stash. The pages are made from security envelopes salvaged from the mail trash and scraps of paper from various other projects. It isn’t what I want as an end product, but much closer.

Time to eat my cake.

For the past several months, I have been taking Kelly Kilmer’s A life Made by Hand journal class. I definitely like the process of creating something and have several journals from that class going. They are all in process and will be for some time. A lot of my fellow students work a little more deliberately focused and see a journal from start to finish iver the course of a few weeks. I am more about refining the process to find my style, I think. Doesn’t that sound better than I have craft ADD?

Last week, I started Mary Ann Moss’ Remains of the Day class. It’s a different process and I am having a hard time in my brain separating the two as different. I think ultimately, I will be combing the two as my own. I am not sure what preconceived notions I had about the ROD class, and I am  in no way saying I am at all dissatisfied as there is plenty of new information an d technique I am soaking up. I just feel like I am missing some connection. So while I wait for my ROD a-ha moment to happen, I am going to just keep plowing forward in my own little process until something clicks into place.

These pages are the front, inside cover, two random spreads, and the back. When it is colsed the journal is about seven inches square. The largest spread is 5.5X13. some of the pages feel too plain, some too busy. I think part of refining the process will come in actually working in the journal and finding the balance. That is part of personalizing it and I get that.

Ultimately, I would like to offer these journals for sale in the ARTreach gallery/store. I think it would be a good low-end item for that. My goal is to make them mostly recycled materials and I am going to get a few going over the weekend in an effort to refine the procedd to a point where I feel it is something worth selling. I know by the time I am done with this journal, it will be much cherished, but today it is in the meh column.

I am soon on my way to the grocery store to stock up for a weekend of eating crap. I haven’t had a total crap binge in quite a while, and the last time, I noticed I would have a few bites of something and then move on, so even though I am thinking binge and saying binge, it really won’t be a binge. Yay for me…

The list so far? Cheddarwurst, Velveeta mac and cheese, Pepsi, chips, sushi, ice cream(maybe), and I am thinking of maybe having a nice juicy burger for dinner unless something else catches my eye. I think I might actually walk the aisles and see what else sparks my nostalgic indulgence radar.

Adios muchacha…

Yesterday was the beginning of WWKIP Week and the knitting readers I meet up with monthly decided to combine our monthly meet-up with some public knitting at the mall. We met at the fireplace area at Memorial City Mall and had 4 new to us knitters join us.

I decided to bring Lady E along to knit on because she is so showy with all her Noro-licious color changes. I am about 5 or 6 balls into this and the stole is about 5 feet long with at least another foot or so to go. I am totally enamoured with this bit of knitting just as I am every time I start one of these. This is my fourth one if I am not mistaken.

Not sure if I have already mentioned it, but Elizabeth and I joined a Frida Kahlo art journal Round Robin. There are 11 women participating, and by the end, we will all have a Frida Kahlo art journal with a page contributed by each member. the deadline for mailing them is tomorrow and mine is finally ready to go out the door. I decided that rather than a traditional journal format, I will use materials salvaged from the trash. The panels for my pages are the sides of six-packs. The theme for my journal is Dia de los Muertos. I used loose binder rings to hold the pages together and it will live on a shrine that is another work in progress, hanging from cup hooks, I think. I say I think, because my first plan was to collage a tin or box to hold it, but I think I want something more available. Of course I might also change my mind again a time or two since it will be about a year before I get it back again.

My first felting project was a Lady eleanor Stole gone wrong. I was 2 balls of Noro Kureyon into it when it occurred to me how warm it was sitting in my lap, and how inescapable that warmth would be the more of it I knit. Kureyon is wool and a worsted wool at that. That means it’s heavy. A little too heavy to get much use in Houston.

As I folded what I had already knit in half, the knitting was covering my laptop that was on the table in front of me. I knew from reading about felting that most things shrink 30%. this seemed about a third bigger than my laptop…hmm…

I made the decidion to sew up the sides of my bag and give it a try. She turned out pretty good and I learned some things about felting in the process. I also didn’t have to rip out all that knitting. the bag was a perfect fit for my at the time new Mac iBook. Now that the iBook has a new home, I use the bag as a knitting bag or sometimes as a lunch bag or just…a bag.

More recently, I knit this Lady E as part of the Gratitude Project for my friend Beth. This one was in a bulkier yarn and soft and luscious in shades of pink and black. I tried knitting a basic striped wrap with this same yarn and it looked like barf. Lady E was the perfect solution.

About three or four years ago, I had some extra birthday cash that coincided with a less than pleasant dental appointment. As a reward for keeping the appointment and making it through it, I stopped and bought some Noro Silk Garden Lite that was intended to make a Lady Eleanor that wouldn’t be interminably hot for the Houston clime. There was a sale involved plus a quantity discount, so I ended up with 14 balls of the same color and dye lot. Woohoo. I think i was in there choosong for more than an hour.

I thought the yarn was various shades of pinks and browns. I think I even remember the blues peaking about. I had no idea about the lime0ish green, or even the mossy green, but I have to say I absolutely love them. With noro, there are often color surprises hidden deep within the ball making it necessary ro look closely to know what you are getting. I am sure I didn’t know this then but really, I wouldn’t want it any other way.

This Lady E is color way number 2014 lot B. somepeople, when knitting with Noro, will painstakingly cut and splice so that they have a continual progression of color patterning throughout their garment. That. Will. Not. Happne. Here.

I am about halfway through the second ball and finding it rather addicting. L O V E it.

It was so easy to blog every day when color week was going on…having that prompt made it more necessary in my brain, I guess. Today, my brain is just misfiring, so there shall be no cohesion or effort toward such in this post. You’ve been warned.

Last week I had a little knitter finishing spree and I finished up 4 older projects. Do I have pics? No…but I was feeling very accomplished and most of the items will end up in the gift/sale bin. I did manage to cet a scna of the Traveling Woman shawl.

I started and finished this on our trip to South Africa. It’s knit from Colinette Jitterbug sock yarn and it is a nicely saturated mix of denim blues. It was headed to the gift pile, but Elizabeth put a stop to that, gently suggesting we keep it. The pattern was quick and relativelt easy and I think I am going to knit it agin, maybe in some Malabrigo silky merino.

In lieu of finishing up a few things, I finally cast on for another Lady Eleanor wrap. I will leave musings on LAdy E to her own post because really, she deserves lots of eye candy. I am using some Noro Silk Garden Lite that I bought a few years back just for her.

I am a little concerned about the Round robin Journal project I started in one of my Ravelry groups. I make every effort to not be attached, and this doesn’t feel like attachment as much as just wanting it to progress to its conclusion. It should be over already, and I have only gotten 4 of the 9 journals, one of them my own. It seems to have stalled out and I am at a loss for how to nudge it along. All things in time, I guess.

On another journal note, I am getting ready to participate in a Frida Kahlo round robin journal swap. I am mostly ready and still have about a week and a half before my journal must be mailed. I am trying to not be intimidated by the project. I sort of feel like I don’t knw enough about Frida to do a page in 11 journals, but I think it will evolve for me as I go so I am not stressing about it or anything, but it is on my mind.

I am also trying to keep momentum with my online journal class and really the only thing for that is just doing the artwork. I find a spurt of desire around it every few days and have just been going with that particular flow.

Maybe now that some of this has spilled out ontot he page so to speak, my brain might get back on track…maybe…