Epic Horror Quilt Attempt - Block 2

Ok - I'm actually freaking myself out now.  Not cause my embroidery skillz have surpassed menacing and have reached super-scary, but cause this is my 4th post in 4 days... in a row!  AH!

Ok - this was another easy one.  I did it in one night.

Do you dare guess what it is?  Ok, if you're scared that you will fail miserably I'll tell you.

This one is called "Woman Eats Wine Glass."

See how she's eating it?  I gave her special freaky-deaky teeth cause I thought anyone who ate glass should be kinda freaky looking.

I also took a photo of the Halloween print fabric that I'm gonna use with my embroidered blocks.

It's kinda hard to tell from the photo, but the black and white one with the ghosts and the owl is all covered in glittery silver, and the three on the bottom row starting on the left side all have metallicness to them.  They're all pretty cute anyway.

So there you have it.  If you fell off your chair out of sheer surprise at my follow-through, I don't blame you one bit.

My next one is gonna be a bit more complex, I'm hoping.  

Caramel Dried Apples +++++=+++!

Um, yeah, I'm excited too.

I have a few apple trees in my yard.  One is a gravenstein, which means I had apples a couple months before everyone else.  I wasn't really sure if I was going to get many apples this year cause last year was a whole lotta nothin, and the tree is in kinda bad shape.  I didn't actually pick any of the apples cause the tree is tall and the apples were up way high.  I just waited for them to fall and picked them up off the ground.  Between the bruises from the falling and the scab that always plagues this tree, there was lot of cutting away that had to be done.  Even so, and even with giving buckets of half rotten apples to my chickens, and even with the deer eating a good amount, I still wound up with tons of apples.  I made a couple pies and a couple cakes, but then decided to dry some so I could maybe make pies and cakes with the dried apples in the winter. I read on this food drying yahoo group that some people dip their apple slices in stuff before they dry them for flavor and one of the suggestions was jello powder.  As you can imagine, since you know me so well by now, I was simultaneously aghast and intrigued.  But mostly intrigued.  I had a box of tropical punch jello and gave it a whirl and tried them and then I COULD NOT STOP.  I moved onto custard pudding powder (cause I happened to have that handy too), then butterscotch pudding powder, then cinnamon and sugar, then mixed spice and sugar, and last but not least....brown sugar and butter powder (aka butter buds).  I also went ahead and did a batch of butterscotch pudding powder with brown sugar and butter powder, as well as the custard pudding powder with the aforementioned brown sugar and powdered butter.   They are soooooooooooo good.  See illustration below...

I dried them all under 105 degrees so they each took anywhere from 12 to 36 hours.  The caramel apple ones (brown sugar and butter) took the longest cause all that brown sugar formed a super glaze on the outside.  Oh mama.  As you can see I left the skin on in order to preserve some semblance of healthiness in this snack item.  It makes them a bit more chewy.

Oh, and I found out the hard way that if you dehydrate fruit or vegetables under 105 to keep them raw, and you intend to store them for a while, you need to freeze them for 24 hours to kill any eggs that may or may not hatch out into little teeny worms at a later date.

I now have a half gallon of each of these flavors sitting on my self.  I love them.

Update later in the day:  The half gallon jars are not sitting on my self - they are on my shelf.  Heh.

Mulled Blackberry Wine Syrup

Yes, indeed.  Another timely post by yours truly.  I know that you are very excited, but calm down now so I can show you this really horrible picture. 

Nice, huh?  Man, my photog skillz have sunk just a notch below my menacing embroidery skillz, which are just trailing below my blog posting consistency...skillz.

Ok - so if you ignore the photo that I put there for you to look at and you skip right to this part RIGHT HERE - you will find out that I made something really freaking cool.

So last year around mulled wine times (aka xmas), I was making tons of mulled wine with the blackberry wine I had made and documented here.  Somehow I got this idea that mulled wine jelly would be really good and I got all obsessed with looking it up and I think I might have even found some kind of recipe, but then promptly forgot all about it.  Fast forward to the day before yesterday.  I was in my kitchen telling my sister about this fermented syrup that I was about to make - and that I made it last year (I guess I didn't post the recipe then - so today's your lucky day!!) and suddenly I remembered my whole plan of mulled wine jelly and...well, you're about to find out what.

See, I made regular blackberry syrup last year, but then I took the pulpy seeds from the blackberry juice I made in that post and I fermented them with some yeast for a few days and made a syrup with the resulting juice.  It's really cool cause both syrups are made with blackberries - but they taste totally different.  I got the recipe from a really cool book The Good Stuff Cookbook by Helen Witty - which I highly recommend, btw.  There are a couple recipes in there that follow the same technique of fermenting fruit, then adding sugar and making a syrup - and I only generally followed the recipes - so I will just go ahead and post mine.  If you are rabid for the real deal then let me know and I'll see what I can do.

So, as per usual, this is going to be more of an instructional paragraph, than a real recipe.

Here's what went on...

I picked blackberries in a very nonchalant way (meaning I didn't wade through the bushes and hack away at them and bloody my hands and cry into my canner like last year) every few days and froze them until I had two gallon ziplock bags full.  I took all those berries and put them in a pot and just barely covered them with water and boiled for a while.

I then put them through a food mill and used the pulpy juice for some very outstanding, virtually seedless, blackberry jam (around 9 pints maybe?) and took the resulting pulpy seeds and threw them in a bowl with some plain old bread yeast and about 2 cups of water.

The recipe in the book says to a) ferment for 3 days, but also to b) make the syrup when fermentation stops.  Well, it's cold here and I was busy, so I let the fermentation go on for a week - and it was still bubbling when I strained it.  You need to stir it at least once a day to make sure no mold forms on the top.

I added 2 more cups of water and mushed it all around with my hand for a while to kinda loosen the pulpy stuff from the seeds.  I don't know if this is necessary since you do strain it - but it just seemed like the right thing to do.

Then you strain it.  I used a tea towel (you should use one you don't care about) in a spaghetti strainer.  It sat there most of the day, then i pulled up all the sides and twisted the top closed and squeezed and massaged and squeezed and massaged till I didn't feel like doing that anymore.  I wound up with 4 cups juice and I added a cup of water cause it was kinda thick (this is your call - you could probably add more if you want).  The whole time I was thinking "MAN this smells like wine" - cause you know what?  It was.  It will be kinda milky - that's the fermentation stuffs.

So then I put it all in a pot and added 5 cups of sugar, 2 cinnamon sticks, 10 cloves, 10 allspice berries, 10 cardamom pods and 2 limes, sliced.  I boiled it for maybe 15 minutes (I like my syrups for beverages thin - and I cook them longer if I'm gonna use it for pancakes or something) and put it in some clean jars that had been in the oven at 200 degrees.  I did not water bath can them, cause I don't do that with syrups or jellys or jams or preserves.  If you have any questions, do not ask the government.  Ask someone you trust, like me.  Heh.  But seriously, do the water bath canner thing if you want.  It's also your call.

Anywho...that's it.  It's really freaking good too.  It totally tastes like mulled wine and what I used made almost 4 pints.

Someday I will make the jelly, but for now this is perfect.

So, the moral to this recipe-tale is this....take all that pulpy berry crap that you're about to throw away and make it into syrup y'all!  You can do it with any berry.  I've made blackberry, marionberry, blueberry, and the cookbook I mentioned uses raspberries and hucklberries.  I'd like to try another fruit sometime - but berries really have a lot of pulpy waste that makes the self-sufficient, homesteady, waste-not-want-not, penny-pinching types cringe.   

Epic Horror Quilt Attempt

It's Halloweentime and even though I'm not really being super Halloweenie this year, I did start a gigantor Halloween themed project.  The jist of the project is it's a quilt that incorporates Halloween themed fabrics with embroidered squares.  I didn't take a photo of the fabrics cause I'm lazy - but they're all pretty contemporary patterns that I found at a vintage/used/resold crafty supply shop in Portland called Knittn' Kitten.  It's all got a pretty 90s vibe.  Nothing super special - but there is some funky metallic stuff and Halloween scenes and stuff.  I'll post a pic of it all later when I get more into this whole thing.

The specifics are...ok, see there's this site called Best Horror Movies and it has the usual reviews and lists and forums and whatnot - but they also have this questions page where you can ask one of those movie questions like..."what's the movie with the guy and the thing and they go to the place and the lady gets killed and then...." (kinda like Kindertrauma - please don't be jealous - I still love you with all my heart) and there are tons of pages of archives.  So, anyway, I get their feed in my reader and there are lots of people that post questions pretty much every day and after quite a while of seeing these headlines I realized how much I love them and look forward to them.  They are usually pretty funny cause the person who writes their question is usually trying to fit as much info as possible into the headline - so it's all truncated and abbreviated but with interesting details.  One of the more recent ones is "Pig Leg in Baby Stroller in 70s Film."  I mean how can your attention not be caught by that?  So for months I was reading them and laughing and checking to see if anyone had answered the questions, but I also kept thinking that I wanted to DO something with these funny titles.  So after a lot of laying around and staring at the dusty cobwebs on the ceiling I came up with this idea of choosing titles that I really like and embroidering exactly what I was reading into a square and putting it together in a quilt.  I toyed with the idea of adding the text but eventually thought it would be more fun to just have it be images.   So.....here is the very first square.  I chose something easy and I think it turned out pretty good.

Do you know what it is?  Do you want me to tell you?  Ok - but if you don't want to know then cover your eyes for a sec.

The title is "Hissing Zombie in Rocking Chair."

I have no idea what movie they are even referring to - but who cares!

I did another square that isn't actually one of the Best Horror Movie headlines - it's was sort of a practice one and I didn't finish it all the way yet - but I like it.  

I'm pretty psyched about this whole endeavor.  I have really been wanting to work on my menacing embroidery skillz ever since I did the Robert Blake dish towel for my friend (skip down past the pork pie part) which came out alright - but not as menacing as I had hoped.  

Home Sweet Home...Dementia 13

Ok, so yes, I've been laggin big time.  But that's nothing too terribly new.  I mean, if you are a rabid follower of this blog then you know by now that I play fast and loose with your emotions by being slow and withholding with my posts.  By my calculations that makes for a very edgy, needy reader.  And that the way I likes 'em.

Also, I kinda feel like I've been laggin w/ Halloween in general this year.  I mean, I've been watching plenty of horror movies - but other than that it's kinda been lo pro.  I have no decorations up - other than some pumpkins on my stone wall outside and a box of pumpkin/cat head shaped halloween peeps strategically placed on a windowsill above my kitchen sink - so I have a little Halloween something to look at while I wash dishes.  We have had a Halloween party for a couple years now - and we're not doing that this cause cause we're in the middle of a gargantuan move - or at least it kinda seems gargantuan.  Or at the very least kinda hectic.   So not much in the way of Halloween paraphernalia and hype around here.

So, anyway, you may already be aware that my wee This House Possessed tribute has been posted over at Made for TV Mayhem - so go read that, as well as everything else on Amanda's amazing blog.  I seriously consider myself extremely lucky to have access to her encyclopedia-like knowledge of TV-dome.   And you should too, my edgy, needy reader.

Now on with some very nice views of a very nice home, sweet home and a small token of a Halloween celebration - with the castle in Dementia 13.

I had originally planned to do a whole post-spectacular on various horror movie castles because, not only are they virtually ubiquitous in horror movies, but also because they kinda all look alike.  Not in a bad way at all - I mean, I could stare at castles in horror movies forever - but after a while the screen grabs all start to look alike.  Then the other night I watched Dementia 13 for the first time - which is kinda odd cause I have known the name of this movie for ever.   But for some reason never watched it.  It's got some good atmosphere and some nifty goings on - PLUS it takes place in an Irish castle - which is a-ok by me.  I'll prob still do a "best of" type of post with lots of castles anyway.  Just so you don't get too sad or anxious at the thought of missing out.

As you can see it's a pretty standard castle.  The one thing I would probably change is all the crosses all over the place.  Who needs that.

It's a little too churchy for me.  I'd probably need to hire someone to do some reconstructive action - unless I could just take that one cross on the very top and stick it in the cross shaped hole in the wall there.  I think it could work.

Along with the traditional castle exterior, we can see that the inside is pretty traditional as well - with ornate carved wood chairs, fancy arched doorways and molding, plus pillars and candelabras...etc.

Not to downplay the coolness of the basic castle accouterment - but we've seen it all before, so where I really want to focus is on some of the more interesting features of this particular castle.   The teeny doors.

The first one is a sort of a interior window/door that goes into the bedroom of a dead child.  I don't quite understand the logistics of the whole thing.  Why is there a window going from a room into the hallway.  Who knows.  Who cares.  It's freaking cool.

My copy of this movie is pretty mediocre - and some of the grabs are very murky - even though I did my best to lighten them up.

Another teeny door is one that goes into, what appears to be, or what is used as, an artists studio.

Apparently Frances Ford Coppolla thought it wouldn't be as interesting to see men crawling through teeny doorways.   I kinda agree.

Here is a shot of the studio - which would be such a freaking cool crafty space.  Damn.  I need one of these!

Another amazing component to this castle - but then again it could probably be in just about any castle, but it's damn cool - is this corridor.  It kinda looks like it would be in a cellar or something - but since probably 50 percent of this castle could be considered a cellar - it doesn't really matter where it is.

Damn.  I love that.

Ok  - so now for some cool features around the grounds...

A stone barn

A stone wall with a door

A pond

A garden/cemetery right in the courtyard.

I know that usually I try to focus on (obsessed over) the kitchen in my horror homes - but these folks have a lot of help in the way of servants that take care of all that cooking drudgery - so the only scene even remotely tied to any kind of kitchen oriented action is this one with a servant lady near the table where people are eating and a guy is holding a knife.

I'm sure the facilities are more than adequate - but it would have been nice to at least catch a glimpse of some crocks or a big wood burning stove or something.

There's some other stuff hanging around that castle that makes for some nice atmosphere.  Like this weird-ass axe wielding monkey toy.

And a lounging doll that gives off the vibe that says  - get it on!  At least to these folks.

So to sum up....

1. IRISH CASTLE - this feature alone ads like a bajillion points.
2. Massive amounts of cellar action
3. Pond
4. Stone features as far as the eye can see
5. Possibly some servants hanging around to help out
6. Teeny mother-freaking doorways

So we can see that this, as well as pretty much any other castle, ranks pretty damn high in Craftypants Carol's world.  Then why, you may ask, doesn't she already live in a castle?

Good freaking question.  

This House Possessed Month at Made For TV Mayhem!

I just want to let you all know that, until the end of this month, Amanda over at Made for TV Mayhem is chronicling her - and a lot of other people's - love of a certain fabulous made for TV movie called This House Possessed.  

She is going to be posting a variety of different folk's mini memories of this movie till Halloween - so be sure and drop by and check it out!!  And yes, Craftypants Carol has contributed to the mix.   (yay!)

And if you never saw it in your days of youth and feel super left out, you can watch the whole freaking thing here:




Now GO!

October!