The holiday weekend is drawing to a close.  It’s been pretty eventful – Thanksgiving dinner, cheesecake, and lots of WoW.   Thursday was Thanksgiving.  Friday was putting the up tree – and discovering the damage caused by a flood earlier this year.  It was also my first girl’s night out in ages – which resulted in the next morning writing about 1000 words.  Nothing to sneeze at.  And yesterday was a visit from some very dear friends, and cooking.  In WoW that is.  Taking advantage of the Pilgrim’s Bounty holiday event – I maxed out my cooking – after going into the session with a 4.  And today was a quiet day – I only went out to take Dan to the train station.  It’s today I want to talk about.

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Ahh multi-tasking – something I do most of the time.  For example, today was I was baking a pumpkin cheesecake, while cooking some hamburgers and putting lights on our Christmas tree.  But last night – I was pointedly not doing anything regarding cooking or house work, so I put the multi-tasking to good use.

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Happy Thanksgiving!  I didn’t have to do any cooking today, but I did do some baking.  I baked a pecan pie for Dan and my brother and sister in law – and that’s been eaten before I could get a picture of that.  The picture I did get was of the pumpkin pie that I made for the Kid – he wanted one all to himself, and we didn’t even take it with us to dinner.

Of course, it almost wasn’t a pie.  First, I had trouble finding the pumpkin – Libby’s farm had a real rainy season, and there was a pumpkin shortage.  Then, after I carefully divided the large can of pumpkin so that I could make just one pie, I almost added twice the sugar and spices!  This is what happens when you try to bake before coffee.  Then as I was adding the sweetened condensed milk, I happened to look at the recipe – which called for evaporated milk!  Being that it was already mixed in – I poured it in the pie plate and baked it off, no knowing if there was a pie disaster or not.

It wasn’t.  The Kid just had two pieces and liked it – which is all that matters.  And now we move on to the massive cookie baking spree – once I get the tree up tomorrow.

This is the stocking I made for my niece Molly, who was born just this year in January.  The stockings in my family have a bit of a story.  My grandmother, who had the same name as me, made a stocking for each grandchild and great-grandchild as they came along.  My son’s was the last one she made.  So a year later, when my sister-in-law joined our family, I made a stocking for her, so she would have one on my parent’s mantle.  And since then, I’ve made one for every new family member – including Dan.  Molly is our latest.

The stocking is a Bucilla kit – one that I picked up as a lot from a website in a huge after Christmas sale.  This kit was a bit simpler than some of the ones that I’ve made – being that it only is made up of 38 pieces of felt.  Usually there are about 80 or so pieces.  I enjoy doing these sorts of crafts – because there is such a variety of things to do.  Bead and sequin work, applique, and embroidery.  I have to say with this stocking – I think I finally got the technique of the embroidery of the name right – every other one I’ve done looks a bit wonky.

One thing that I always worry about with these types of projects are whether the materials that come with the kit will last for the whole project.  I always find that the beads that hold the sequins on usually have a pretty high percentage of faulty ones – and one year, I bought a whole tube of clear seed beads just in case I ran out.  What I’ve been doing  is saving the materials from projects once I finish them, just in case something is wonky with the kit.  What happened this time is that I got to TWO red sequins before I was finished with them, before I had to open the red seed beads.  And I almost didn’t have enough white embroidery floss.  The icing stitching of the gingerbread was supposed to be two strands of embroidery floss, but I used four instead.  So when I got to the white stitching that pus the stocking together – I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough.  That was the first time with one of these kits that I didn’t have at least one piece of floss left in a particular color.

The window on the left is a bit helter skelter – I’m not sure what happened when I appliqued that piece.   Because of the dangling Y, I couldn’t center the name, which bugs me just a bit.  But on the whole, I’m pleased with how it came out.  One of the wonderful things about these projects is the 3-D quality to it.  You can’t see it in the picture, but the various pieces are stuffed, and the effect is quite striking.  While I’m sure  Molly – being just shy of a year old – won’t know what to make of it – I really hope her parents love it.

And so – this starts off the Christmas Crazyness of 2009.  I still need to find some sort of handmade ornament to make, and the cookie baking will commence soon.

*Photo taken with the iPhone and the native camera

…Or something like that.  It’s the week before Thanksgiving, and with the Christmas season bearing down on us, I’ve been trying to button stuff around here to get ready for it.  We’ve actually finished our Christmas shopping for the immediate family, and now we don’t have that much extended family to buy for.

One thing I did get done this week is the stocking for my niece.  There will be a post on that at a later time when I get the chance to take pictures of it.  But it needed to get done, so it can hang on the mantle at my parents with everyone else’s.  But I’m pleased it’s done, and my craft table has been put away again, so we are on schedule for putting the Christmas tree up on Saturday.

The sweater I’m working on is almost finished the body – I did the short rows in the chest today, and now there is just three more inches of body before I start the sleeves.  I’m looking forward to that.  Though – usually when I do a sweater – I do one sleeve first.  But these should go easily.  I am sort of apprehensive about steeking though.  I’ve never done that before, and I’m going to have to bring up the sewing machine, but the whole thing makes me a bit apprehensive.

In the mean time, I need to find some yarn to make me a new hat.  Found my winter coat for this year, and of course I need a hat to go with it.  And I need to start planning my socks – got a new book I’ll talk about at some point.  I need to keep the house clean too – we had a showing today, and there is one tomorrow as well.  That can be a task in it’s self.

And cooking – today I made potato soup.  It was very good, I just need to figure out what the nutritional values are.  I’ll run it through a recipe generator on my iPhone, and maybe that will help.  And I made bacon-wrapped chicken breasts – which were a big hit with the boys.  And brownies.  Geekadelphia had a party this week, and I made the brownies – with an HP logo on them.

And now – once this post is done – I need to check out the PS3 game Prince of Persia  – that’s what came from Gamefly this week, and if I find the controls to hard, or just not my cup of tea, I need to send it back.

Have a good one.  More from me later…

MA

Welcome to the Modern Domestic Geek.  I hope as the weeks go by, you start to see what I mean by the term.  I think I came up with it to try and describe what I do and who I am.  I’ve always been one to embrace tech – I’ve built my own computers, I know how to set up a home theater, I’m a gamer.  But while Windows was taking it’s time to install, load, or the other things – my hands would be kept busy by needlework, knitting, or even a jigsaw puzzle at some point. When I struck out on my own, I found I had love of baking, and in the past couple of years, have tried tweaking recipes to find the perfect cookie, or pie.  And when I married my wonderful husband, I started to teach myself to cook – to really cook from scratch, though I would throw a convenience food in there.  And most recently, I’ve started to teach myself pastry decorating, with fondant, buttercream and the like. And I’m always looking for a better way to do things in our household – the best way to clean things – how to keep things organdized and looking nice, etc.

So how do you put a label on all this?  The Modern Domestic Geek seems to cover it all.  And one with this label – you don’t have to be a female, you don’t have to work out of your home.  I can remember a friend that was trying to put her resume together after staying home taking care of her kids and managing her household.  She asked me what she should describe that as, and I told her Domestic Engineer.  Because really – people like us are the wearer of all hats, the jack of all trades.

So this is what this blog will be about.  A little bit of this, a little bit of that.  Tips on how I use technology to make my handwork and crafting easier.  I hope to interview a couple of people that I admire as Domestic Geeks, and show a little of how their life is.  We’ll see how this thing plays out.  Because of course, blogging is one of those things that interest a Modern Domestic Geek.