June 1st couldn't have come at a better time. 30 Dresses in 30 Days is officially over, and it coincides with the day I have to pull on the proverbial big-girl pants in the family. The summer in film has officially begun and so far the calender is booked for the entire month of June and well, well...well, pretty much all of July... and I guess August is booked now too. This means pretty much single parenthood for me. I can hear the collective sigh of film spouses all over the city.... in fact, I'm considering starting a Film Wives Club, complete with boozy meetings in my backyard while the children play.
From The Archives: "Let It Come Out Of My Hands"
The good news is that I get a lot of shit done in the summer. I go into work mode and knock a lot of my list. The first thing I'm going to do is move part of my studio from the basement to my bedroom. Really sad to say I just stopped going down there. The weather got nice and the dark damp basement turned into the last place I wanted to go. So I think I'll bring up one machine on a table, a cutting mat on a table and stock the empty dresser in my bedroom full of necessities. Conveniently, this old house has a built in wall ironing board already in the bedroom. Doesn't get better than that. The rest can stay downstairs. I have barely sewn a stitch since making a puppy bed for Lucy and it's time to get down to business.
From the Archives: "A Photo Tour of A Day Alone"
I am practicing (ahem) wild gardening this year. Due to the fact that we got a puppy who has yet to understand the boundries of Mommy's garden, I decided to "carefree plant" this year, paying very little attention to what and where seeds were going, and what was happening with them other than to water. Turns out ignoring my seedlings almost entirely has worked out. Almost everything is thriving. If it continues this way and I recieve a nice bounty you can expect a book out early next spring called "The Lazy Gardener with a Puppy Gets Lucky".
Really, I am hoping for some bounty, but I also want to focus more on another part of the gardening world this year, which is canning. My backyard is too small to really grow the quantities I would need to really seriously can. (Besides the wildly overgrown blackberry bushes) But buying flats of fruit and vegetables from the country roadsides has enough of the charm and nostalgia in it for me to enjoy buying and canning immensely. I've done simple jams and canned fruit in the past, but I have never pickled a thing in my life and I have no idea what else goes on in the canning world. I'd like to give it a go. Are any of you canning? Any advice or good canning recipes?
