Our little house on the prairie

Hi, y'all,

did you have a nice weekend?

I was very lazy last weekend. Since New Year, Hubby and I do some sports three times a week and we had to lick our wounds and soothe our aching muscles… 

On Friday I tried something new: Goat cheese tartelettes with cranberries and spring onions - was yummie!

I didn't have a ton of motivation for baking but some apples which had to be used. Therefore I made pancakes but in the oven (low-fat, you know). I already mixed the batter when I realized I was out of parchment paper. Well, no problem, I thought, let's take some remaining tinfoil instead - should work fine. In fact, it didn't and I had a hard time getting the pancake off the tinfoil. On the plate it looked a bit like roadkill but tasted pretty good.

Sunday afternoon I made a typical Swabian bread and apple pudding (again, low-fat). It is usually made of stale bread rolls (Swabians are famous for their thriftiness and frugality), apples and vanilla sauce baked in the oven.  Works fine with toast, we know that now :-)

I already announced that I wanted to sew a softshell jacket for a colleague's baby due in February - if I had enough material. Good news: I did! Second good news: It worked out! As I do not have a serger/overlocker I covered the seam between body and hood by hand in order to have it look neat and to avoid any irritation on the sensitive skin on the baby's neck (see picture no. 2). And it turned out like this:

I did without the cuffs because the sleeves were so small and as the material stretches only slightly it would only have ended in a mess. 

Last week I learned that a colleague from Berlin, who I thought was my age, gave birth on 9 January. I only heard rumors about her pregnancy but when I saw the mail with picture, name, size and weight I knew: Ernestine Victoria is real, no rumor :-) And for a little girl with such classic names I had to sew something similar classic. Quite spontaneously I thought of such a bonnet, the girls in the tv show "Our little house on the prairie" always had on. White cotton fabric and matching white yarn I had in my stash so I could even adorn the bonnet with some embroidery (which I wanted to try for some time now). Hope, little Ernie and her mama like it :-)

Besides this I was busy collecting pickles jars for the dry goods in my kitchen (my sustainable Tupperware alternative, if you will). Because they are stored in drawers I cannot see what's inside and thus am in need of some labelling. Right now I just take some sticky notes, but that is far from pretty. Then I thought of printing circular stickers but in this case you would still see the green rim of the jar lid and I would have to permanently re-print the stickers - not very sustainable… Then it hit me: I could paint the lids with black chalkboard paint and label them again and again with chalk - so easy and neat, I think. When I'm done I will show pictures.

Enjoy your week!