I heart presents

I know, I know. The joy is in giving, not receiving. But I love presents. LOVE! LOVE! LOVE presents. There's nothing better than coming home from work and seeing a lovely stamp-covered box waiting by my mailbox. (I really do like giving people stuff too. But, c'mon, how do you not love getting stuff?)

So, I did a little screechy/squeely happy dance when I saw this a post for Sew Liberated's Holiday Traditions Exchange.

Think Secret Santa. But cooler! And with strangers!

Here's how it works:
After you sign up for the swap, organizers e-mail you the name of your swap buddy. Your pass along mailing addresses. And each party has to send the other a handmade holiday decoration, a copy of a favorite holiday recipe, a "tradition tutorial" where you write a note about your family's holiday celebration; and a mix cd or book, which is optional.

The Holiday Traditions Exchange is a swap that incorporates craft, cultural
sharing, and thoughtful reflection about what the holidays mean to your family.
It’s an opportunity to celebrate all that is non-commercial in this holiday
season – and an opportunity to adopt a new, fun tradition for your family’s
holiday repertoire.

I think it sounds badass. Plus, I totally confess to being in love with the idea of getting presents in the mail! I'm already thinking of what I'm going to make...

The joys of home ownership.

Halloween isn't officially here yet, but we Chicagoans have already busted out our gloves, scarves and in some cases hats.

Now, given my whole addiction to coats (and my belief that my fall wardrobe is by far my best) I'm usually down with this lovely season change. Even if you can't help but avoid that horrible feeling in the pit of your stomach that's a reminder that the total, unadulterated shittness that is Chicago winter is just around the corner.

But my autumnal funfest ground to an unhappy and unexpected halt on Tuesday when I broke my never-enforced rule of not turning heat on before November.

I came home from work after a particularly long and arduous day wanting nothing more than to pile on jammies, blast the heat, down a Benadryl, curl up under the covers and sleep away the previous 24 hours. My plan worked splendidly until I tried to turn on the furnace that heats my bedroom. (My octogenarian condo unit has two gas furnaces.) There was all kinds of air blowing. The issue was that none of it was hot. Or warm. Or tepid. In fact, it was down right cold. I let it run for an hour before I figured out I was just making myself colder and colder and threw in the towel (blanket?) and went to bed.

The lovely (and painfully expensive) HVAC man is coming tomorrow morning. Good thing I got paid today.

A binding matter

Last night, I spent time at my quilting heaven to take a class on how to bind quilts. You quilty people know all about this, for those newbies, binding is what you see on the left -- that border that goes around the quilt, sort of sealing your the raw edges and layers of a top, batting and a bottom together. It's half done by machine and half done by hand. (The machine part takes maybe half an hour. The by hand part takes HOURS.)

I won't post pictures of my current binding project because it's a gift for a reader and I want them to be really blown away when they see it for the first time.

Anyway, the method of binding a quilt is as varied as quilts themselves. Every person has a slightly different method. And I think it's all about personal preference. Here's a pretty good how-to that pretty much matches how I learned.

Jingle jingle

Check out this cute stocking that the gals at Quiltology made! If you think it's nifty, you should sign up for the class with me on Nov. 23. (I decided The Boy needs a proper stocking to hang with the Noodles Fam this holiday.)

We can have drinkies before. And, um, maybe have beverages afterward, too.

Numero dos!

Behold! My second tote. I fixed a lot of errors I made in the first version, and introduce a few more in this model. (Note the slightly crooked pocket. Oops. C'est la vie.)

But, all in all, I'm pretty pleased with the outcome of this one. It's not as wide as its predecessor, which ... well, I'm not sure how I feel. But still, overall, I give it two thumbs up.

I'm sorta itching to start my third bag, but I confess to being not entirely enamored with my stash of home decor fabric as I thought I was. Especially after looking at the really fun stuff over at Sew, Mama, Sew, which I think would look AWESOME in this pattern.

Hum. Oh well... that's OK. Check out the current selection of fabric for bags. The one furthest on the left will probably need a lining in it, but overall, it's ... eh. I dunno. But I can't really justify dropping more money on fabric until I at least use SOME of this stuff.

Watcha think?

Eureka!

I'll post pictures later, but I totally figured out the whole french seam things. (Really, it's a wonder what happens when you stop and read the instructions. Miraculous, I say...)

Anyway, I'm almost done a second tote, which looks a whole lot more finished than the first one I did. Maybe by the third one, I'll say: wheeeeeee!

In the meanwhile, if anyone sees Santa, please tell him I wants yards and yards of this!

OMG! BUNNIES!

Ok, so this blog is quasi-anonymous, but for those of you who know the name behind Noodles, you know I've got a freaky little penchant for bunnies. True fact: my mom has an abnormally large collection of Waterford Crystal rabbits, too. So, it's obviously a genetic predisposition.

A few jobs/cities ago, this fabulous editorial cartoonist gave me a copy of a laugh-until-you-almost-pee book, "The Book of Bunny Suicides."

So, needless to say, I let out a near ear-splitting shriek when I saw this adorable free Halloween embroidery pattern over at Craft Gossip.

How damn cute is that?

It's in the bag!

I totally blame Jessica. After all, she was the one who just HAD to show me this bad-ass tutorial for a tote bag over at Sew, Mama, Sew.

So Saturday morning, after Weight Watchers, I took a little field trip up to Evanston to pick up some home decor-weight fabric at Vogue, which has the slogan "enabling fabraholics since 1945." Many, many, MANY dollars later, I made it home with all kinds of good fabric and a mission to try the tote. Plus, I figured, if it worked well, I'd add it to my list of Christmas projects.

I made some modifications to the original pattern, and I'm still completely freakin' baffled by the french seam concept. (Seriously, I'll pay good money to someone who can explain to how to do that shit.) But, all in all, I'm pretty pleased with my prototype. AND, thanks to my voluminous fabric haul, I've got all I need to make the Christmas totes. (It's like, I'm prescient or something...)

So, anyway, check it out! I'm particularly pleased with the pocket. Which, in all fairness, was pretty much the simplest part of the whole damn thing.

Watcha think? Should I put it in the holiday to-do list?

A handmade holiday!

Earlier this week, I said I was trying really hard to make a lot of my Christmas gifts for friends. I'm not particularly craft, but I try my best. But, even if you have to left thumbs (ha! get it?) you can make it a handmade holiday too!

Check out cool stores in your town, or go nuts on Etsy.com. Try baking cookies for friends instead of some perfunctory gift. Check out Uncommon Goods, one of my favorite stores. Sure, not everything there is handmade, but they have a great selection of, er, uncommon goods. If you're in Chicago, check out Renegade Handmade in Wicker Park. And there's the Renegade Craft Fair's Christmas Show in early December in Pulaski Park.

Want more reasons why you should add handmade elements into your Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa/Yule, etc? How about the more than 28,000 people who've signed the Buy Handmade pledge, which says:

I pledge to buy handmade this holiday season and request others do the same
for me.

The Web site lists all kinds of reasons why you should make it a handmade holiday. Here's one more just from me: Handmade presents mean you can probably save yourself some kind of I-Hate-Humanity meltdown at your local overcrowded mall. And will keep your blood pressure from boiling and and your liver from malfunctioning (after you've consumed all the tequila necessary to compensate for that annoying teenage sales clerk at the mall who just couldn't bear to stop texting and ring up your order.)

You also get the benefit of giving someone a one-of-a-kind gift.

Pretty cool huh?

Strip piecing and other taudry tales.

There's a practice in quilting called strip piecing, and it's essentially when you sew one long strip right after another, so you don't have keep lifting up the foot of your sewing machine. It makes what piecing the top part of a quilt (the part that's all patchy and cool looking) go a lot faster.

Truth be told, I love piecing. Period. (Unless and except for the times when I screw up seams, stop, rip them out, then have to start over again. Not so much with the soothing.) But other than that, it's nice and Zen and you really feel like you've accomplished something when you're all said and done.

So, tonight I tried out the new glasses (more on that later) and set to work piecing my strips for my Urban Amish quilt. (Side note: Who knew the hole in my needle was really that big? It's a freakin' wonder I haven't gone blind yet trying to sew with my old Rx. But I digress.) I got about a quarter through. I'm hoping to finish piecing everything tomorrow night, so I can head to Quiltology for some studio time this weekend on the design wall. (Also, as I look at the picture, I'm realizing how dirty my machine is. Time for a dusting...)

Anyway, I know a bunch of you guys aren't quilters, so I thought I'd show you some pictures of the quilt in progress and explain how it gets put together. It's just like Legos -- you start from smaller parts, put them together to make bigger parts, which then connect to even bigger parts.

So, first I started with fabric. Which I cut according to my pattern. Then, I matched up pieces, which is pretty random, because this is a fairly scrappy quilt. But I did have to have a set number and certain width strips in each section:


Here's what one set looks like, rolled up:


Next, when you get ready to sew each set, you lay them out:


Then, you begin sewing along the edge, using a 1/4 inch seam:


And you keep going, feeding in one strip after another. After each strip has one seam, you press them with an iron:


Then, you repeat, attaching a sewn section to a sewn section. Then iron. Then attach a sewn section to another sewn section:


Until ultimately, you have something that looks like this:


There will be about a dozen of these, which will then be cut into two squares, and laid out and sewn to other squares to form rows. Then the rows are sewn together and voila! A a pieced top of a quilt!

Class dismissed!

The Christmas countdown begins.

I woke up this morning feeling _ and sounding _ like death. And after notifying work of my plight, I crawled back underneath the covers for another five hours. It's amazing what drugs and the equivalent of another night's worth of sleep can do for a girl.

So around noon I woke up, feeling better, less deathy and, truthfully, bored. Since my boss insisted I spend the afternoon resting and drinking tea (honest, I volunteered to do stuff), I decided to dig into my Christmas crafting projects. (Because my money gets sucked up by my mortgage, and thus, I feel poor ... I am trying to make it a mostly handmade Christmas.)

My first round of gifts won't be shown on the site, since recipients are likely reading. But they're super cute placemats that I made with some bad-ass oil cloth I found at Vogue Fabrics in Evanston. For the record, oil cloth is a bitch and three quarters to sew. I'm not sure if I'm 100 percent pleased with the results, but you guys better damn well gush when get them in the mail! (Or else, bitches!)

After that, I moved on to my next quilting project, which I think should be badass. Here's some pictures of the fabric that I cut.



By the time The Boy got home, my pants and the floor, and the table, and the sofa, but miraculously, not The Mutt, were covered in thread and fabric scraps. But yay for a found day of productivity.

So cool!

Check out this easy-to-do coffee-sack bulletin board project over at Maya Made. I really like the way it turned out and think it could be a great _ and cheap _ DIY decorating project.

Oooh, the gifting possibilities are ENDLESS!

Spooky

Halloween approacheth.

And in the spirit of witches and goblins and pumpkins and sugar-enduced comas, I thought I'd share this ghostly picture of yours truly, captured several months ago by The Boy.

Luckily The Mutt doesn't appear to be too creeped out by the flash of Noodles.

Got a seat?

The Washington Post had a laugh-out-loud enjoyable story in the magazine section yesterday, which told the story about one man's quest to sit in the literal seats of power.

T.M. Shine cracks my shit up in this piece, which I think should be recommended reading. He does a tremendous job of taking a story that some might just thing is pointless and crafting something that's well-told and funny with humor and voice.

I'm totally impressed.

Sugar rush

I walked around in the Southport corridor after brunch today, and my already-full stomach decided to pick up dessert bites for later tonight. We planned to walk to Julius Meinl, my favorite favorite favorite shop at Southport and Addison.

But we were full and I got distracted by Sensational Bites anyway.

Needless to say there were four things in this cute little box I brought home. But by the time I got home for pictures, well... yeah.

Defying gravity.

Yeah, yeah. I know. I'm years late to this party. But the Mother and I finally got to see Wicked today. And holy shit, it was freakin' fabulous. I was totally crying my eyeballs out at the end. Like, audibly sniffling. (Although, full disclosure: I've been known to get weepy at a particularly good cotton ball.)

We both agreed that it was superb, especially with Annaleigh Ashford as Glinda and Dee Roscioli as Elphaba.

I guess I was kind of suprised by the depth of the plot. I hadn't read the book (possibly, mistake No. 1), but there was much more substance and subtext than I thought there'd be.

Here's a sample of my favorite quotes:

"Where I'm from, we believe all sorts of things that aren't true - we call it history!"

"Because I knew you, I have been changed for good."

"Something has changed within me. Something is not the same. I'm through with playing by the rules. Of someone else's game. Too late for second-guessing. Too late to go back to sleep
It's time to trust my instincts. Close my eyes: and leap."

So anyway, if you're one of the three people who haven't seen Wicked yet, get on the boat with us. It was absotively fabulous. And just to reinforce its fabulousness, here's a picture of the marquis outside the Ford Center for the Performing Arts/Oriental Theatre in Chicago.

Smartypants!

Today was filled with musical moments (more on that later, but suffice it to say that I FINALLY saw Wicked.)

The Mother and I wrapped up our busy night listening to music, sipping wine and reading. (We're such an intellectual family. Or just have livers of steel.)

I wound up playing her my new personal anthem, a song I discovered thanks to the most faburific mix CD made by my pal Amy.

The song is called "Smart Girls" and is by Jonathan Rundman.

The lyrics were so good, I couldn't help but share with you guys, because ... you're either a smart girl or, hopefully, in love with or looking for one.

I highly recommend, by the way, you look for an MP3 version of the song, because it's damn catchy.


SMART GIRLS

listen to me boys and learn important things
benefit from wisdom that experience brings
I will be specific, I will be direct
when you look for love, look for intellect

smart girls shine like laser light
‘cause they’re so sharp and they’re so bright
smart girls know the human heart
‘cause love is science, love is art

smart girls do their best and take a second look
smart girls wear their glasses to read their books
practice the piano in the afternoon
and hold your hand by the light of the moon

smart girls shine like laser light
‘cause they’re so sharp and they’re so bright
smart girls know the human heart
‘cause love is science, love is art
you’ll do well if you take my advice:
fall in love with a smart girl

smart girls make the grade, study through the night
smart girls pass the test, get the answers right
they’ll meet you after class at the library
and speak your name so quietly

smart girls shine like laser light
‘cause they’re so sharp and they’re so bright
smart girls know the human heart
‘cause love is science, love is art
you’ll do well if you take my advice:
fall in love with a smart girl

Farmers' Market memories

Farmers' markets are getting ready to shut for the season around Chicago. But I thought I'd put up one of my favorite pictures from a great market we stumbled upon this summer on Whidbey Island in Washington State. Ummmm. Lavender.

Itchy fingers and other crafting desires.

Finally! Yesterday, the package I'd been waiting for arrived. In an an example of my total lack of impulse control, I went nuts in the sale section of Sew, Mama, Sew! earlier this week. And FINALLY, Friday, it came. I think I squealed like a little girl at Christmas.

I've been DYING for a new project (Seriously, my fingers have been twitching. It's sick.) since I finished my last quilt. And while I have the pattern for what I thought I'd do next, I think I need some more practice on perfecting my quarter inch seams.

That explains why I decided to trot out the trusty Urban Amish pattern again except this time, make it a little less mustardy, a little more funky and substantially smaller.

Behold! My new fabric! I can't WAIT to start cutting. Watcha think?

Pig? Or Mutt? You decide.

What a smartypants.

Check out Currer Bell's super innovative (and tres thrifty, I might add) invitations for a bridal shower. They're completely adorable and cost only $30 to do.

I bought print-at-home stationery at a Papyrus store (it was on sale!) and designed the nightie and text on Photoshop. I used a picture from the Web to draw the outline of the nightie. Then I bought little stick-on bows at Michael's to dress the invites up a bit. The total cost was $30.

Holy shout-out, Currer. Two noodles up for you!

Silly blogger.

Sorry for being delinquent in my posting lately, but I've been wrestling with the HTML on the blog. For reasons that I can't quite figure out, my sidebar _ the lovely bit o' info on the right of the screen _ has decided it'd much rather hang out at the bottom of my page.

Not sure what gives, but it's annoying as hell.

Got any suggestions?

From my photo vault.

Captured: Sunday morning in April 2008 along Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Full moon over Lake Michigan.

Sandwiched between bodies on the standing-room-only bus home from work, I managed to see the most spectacular moon rise I've ever seen. There's no pictures to share since I left my camera at home and my blackberry wouldn't cut it. But trust me, this massive golden-orange moon, just rising over Lake Michigan as the sky was cut with clouds and sunlight.

It was truly a sight.

Grumpiness brightens my day.

I was doing a google search for pictures of grumpy girls to illustrate my mood today when I discovered Grumpy-Girl.com.

Aside from finding a store that sold things that said: "Grumpy Noodles," I'm not sure what could be better. (P.S. Also see Angry Little Girls.)

Me. Today.

Scrub-a-dub-dub. Mutt's in the tub.

The madre is coming to visit this week, so The Boy and I spent today scrubbing our abode from head to toe. Or, more appropriately, from ceiling fan to base board.

Even the mutt got her thrice-yearly bath in anticipation of the big visit. But, given her freaky aversion to the bathtub, (but not Lake Michigan. WTF?) she wasn't 100 percent thrilled about her involuntary participation in the day of making it appear as though we don't live with dust demons. (Ahhhh. Artifice. How I love thee.)

Anyway, Macy Mae exacted her revenge on us doggie style. (Eds: Snicker.)

She flew out of the bathroom like her ass was on fire, and ran batshit around the condo for a good 10 minutes, plowing every inch of wet _ yet subtly oatmeal-scented _ fur on the carpets, sofa and in between our sheets.

Guess it's true. Payback is a bitch.

Salmon. It's what's for dinner.

It's recipe time here at Patches & Paws. This week's installment is healthy (mostly) and delicious (completely) and 100 percent melt-in-your-mouth-succulent.

Seriously. This dish, which I call "Lick Me Baby One More Time Soy-Ginger Salmon" is so good you'll wanna run around naked. Or maybe that's just the wine talking...

1/3 c low-sodium (or regular) soy sauce
2 T olive oil
1/4 t ginger powder (Or 1 T fresh minced ginger)
3 T minced garlic.
1/8 c brown sugar.
1 1/2 t lemon pepper
1/3 c orange juice

Directions:
In small saucepan heat soy sauce and olive oil. Add remainder of ingredients -- except orange juice -- and bring to low boil. Stir until sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat. Let cool for a moment and then pour over salmon filets (I usually use one large filet cut in half or thirds), which have been placed in a baking pan. Brush marinade over fish and chill, covered for about an hour. Then add in orange juice and mix, re-basting fish. Let marinate Then marinate at least 2 more hours. (I've let it sit in the fridge all day.)

Once you're ready to cook, put the salmon filets in a new dish, retaining some of the left-over marinade. Turn over to 375 or 400 degrees. Then cook for about 15 minutes. (About half way through, spoon some more of the retained marinade over the fish to keep it moist.)

I usually serve it with some fresh-steamed broccoli or green beans and some brown rice. Pair it with a crisp chardonnay and you've got yourself a meal that'll be so good you'll want to lick the plate. (I promise.)

Cheers!

Get your fall on.

Dude. I'm so autumnal.

Paws in the park

The crazed mutt got to blow off some energy with a frisbee in the park today. The good news was that I only beamed one person with the stupid toy. (Apparently, I'm not so much with the aiming. Whatever. It's hard to throw properly while nursing a cup of my breakfast roast with skim milk.)

In true Macy form, she found the stinkiest, rottingest spot in the grass and rolled herself into stinky-upside-down puppy heaven before plowing full-force into our laps, spilling coffee along the way.



More picture of Sunday morning park revelry, which also included five police cars, one ambulance, one police helicopter and eight other dogs. God, I heart Sundays.