The ravioli fight

I'm not much of a cook, and today, after my first workday in the new year was over, I definitely had neither the patience nor the motivation to cook. Usually that means a cheese sandwich, I even had fresh potato walnut bread delivered with the groceries, but I wanted something warm, so I went for one of my "emergency foods", in this case a can of vegan ravioli. I rarely buy them and hadn't had them for a while, also they were on sale, I couldn't resist.

Nothing could go wrong, could it? Open the can, heat the ravioli, a piece of bread for the sauce, full belly, done. Maybe a nice nap with kitty snuggling afterwards, taking down some Christmas decorations, hanging up laundry, then a nice evening with a bit of TV and getting ready for the next day.
OR you could prove to be too stupid to open the can and delay that whole plan.
I'm not kidding. I stood there like an idiot, turning and turning the handle of my can opener. The can went round and round and round and round, but nothing got cut and the lid didn't come off.
Now I didn't buy that can opener, it was my ex, and I very much blame him for leaving me with it, so I wouldn't have to get a new one, but curse every time I use it.
Ok, I don't really blame him, I blame myself for hardly ever using it and therefore never bothering to buy a replacement.
(Spoiler: Eventually the miracle happened and the can got so tired of my efforts that it decided to give up.)

That took me back another fight with a ravioli can more than 40 years ago. My boyfriend at the time had a room above a restaurant. One day he had to go work  - "only for a bit" - and I stayed behind with a book. Unfortunately, he took the key with him by accident, and I didn't feel good about leaving with the room being unlocked (I mean, what if someone would have stolen his valuable cassette tapes? No, honestly, I have absolutely no idea why I felt thieves were just waiting to raid this particular room, my only excuse is that I was still quite young, but already an accomplished overthinker).
Then I got hungry because "only for a bit" turned into hours. No problem, I had a can of ravioli and a hot plate. And a tiny US Army P-38 can opener which I had never seen before in my life.

Public domain via Wikipedia

The next hour or so (including a lot of breaks to curse the can - in English, I curse a lot better in English - and the opener, my boyfriend and the key), I tried to get that *insert curse word here* can opened. I'm going to spare you all the methods I used although I knew they wouldn't work. One included a screwdriver without a hammer.
That I didn't cut a finger off with the P-38 was simply a miracle. I can be a terrible klutz sometimes and this thing just screamed Klutzkiller.
Well, other than this time I didn't succeed back then and got so hangry that someone got a big earful when he came back, I can tell you that. Him laughing about my struggle with the P-38 didn't help. Him inviting me for dinner at the restaurant downstairs helped a little. I think the kitchen had run out of food when I was done 😉

Another memory from that time is an old grater that I still own and use today. It's nothing special and there is a small melted spot from the hot plate, but it works and that's all that counts.
Some time ago, my sister and I talked about vintage kitchen utensils and she took a picture for me of her small "collection" from the old days, including a can opener like the one my grandmother also had (which I wasn't very good with, either) and my grandmother's own masher with a very vintage handle pattern. Talk about flashbacks! Who knows, maybe I'm going to tell you the story sometime of how my grandmother and I didn't talk anymore for two weeks when I was a kid - because of green beans! 😂

Do you still have old kitchen utensils that you bought yourself or inherited?

P.S. The nap didn't happen, by the way. Well, not for me, but of course the cats. They really need to get a job or at least start cleaning around here.

The cat

Happy New Year!
This is not a bad day for showing something fresh off the hoop.

The other day I was hanging out on my bed like so often - it's big and the perfect space for the cats and me, tools and supply boxes, books and remote controls.
Der Dekan is one clingy cat, so I usually have some kind of blanket on my legs, thin or thick, summer or winter, so the master can choose to sleep on my legs or on my feet or under the blanket snuggled up against my legs (which can be rather nice if it's cold because he's a veritable little hot-water bottle, just filled with kibbles instead of water, if it's too hot, he luckily stays next to me instead).
In this case, he was on the blanket sleeping like only he can, meaning his weight mysteriously tripled from one second to the next, so I was completely paralyzed. Yes, I know he's a spoilt brat, but I don't make the rules, I just work here.
I have never been a girl scout, but my motto for such situations is "Be prepared" which means that my embroidery box was next to me. I hadn't planned anything in particular, but seeing his cute little face, I grabbed my smallest embroidery hoop, one of my water-soluble pens, and whipped up a quick sketch, as well as I could, I'm not an artist.

That didn't mean I planned to make my kitty look like der Dekan, I'm definitely not there yet with my embroidery skills and don't know if I ever will be, but that doesn't really matter as I just enjoy the process.
Also I'm completely overwhelmed by all the colors cats have even if they are "just" black or tabby cats. Sometimes I find myself staring at my cats in wonder trying to determine which colors I'm seeing at the moment, depending on the light. Der Dekan mostly doesn't mind me poking each color I can see in his fur, going "boop, boop, boop" (if you think that is silly, be glad you don't know more).
I still don't know what base color he is exactly. Sometimes he looks brown, sometimes it's more of a grey.

One of the things I like to do when I start on something without a clear plan is to pick a bunch of colors from what I have around at that moment.
That doesn't mean my whole stash, but what I find in my current project box which is just a nice way to speak of the box I throw beads into because I'm too lazy to put them back right away. To justify that, I take it as a challenge to create with what I have.
Now my embroidery box is organized, but only because I don't have enough stash yet to start a second box, and that means I have a limited amount of colors, more brown than grey which settled the color of my cat.

Whenever der Dekan was sleeping on me again, I took a good look at him for inspiration and went to work on the piece on and off over a week.
As usual I see the flaws and shortcuts very clearly, but this is a journey of which I don't know where it's going to take me to, and at the moment I still embrace my flaws and allow myself shortcuts consciously. My experience is that if I want too much too quickly and fail with that, it can lead to WIPs (works in process) turning into forever UFOs (unfinished objects) - that's my definition - and I didn't want this one to become one of those.
Der Dekan, however, wants you to know that he has a much cuter nose, and I have to agree on that.

What really annoyed me that one spot of the yellow pen stubbornly refused to come out. The last time I used it, I had covered it completely and there was no need to wash it out, but not this time.
The only idea I could come up with was to add a bit of sparkle to the background which I had wanted to do anyway, only not in that particular spot. Don't tell anyone ;-)

I had ordered a few round frames, wooden ones - I used one for my "Guardian of the Woods" - and vintage brass ones. They have a little hole and hook at the bottom which confused me at first, but of course they are meant to be hung up in a row, with family pictures for example. That took me back in time 45 years, to my violin teacher's living room. I can't remember every detail of it, but I remember it feeling cozy and comfortable - even if I had never practiced enough - and a bit old-fashioned and plushy, with elegant wallpaper and miniature portraits. I always wondered if they were ancestors of hers, but never dared to ask.

I don't know if I will make something eventually that will work with the tabby for such a row of portraits.
For now I will have to think of something to make that hole a bit less noticeable. One idea is to paint the linen golden in that spot or glue on a bead or to put a hook in - the original one or a smaller one - and hang a charm on it, not that I would know at the moment what kind of charm could work. What do you think?

Merry Christmas!

As you probably know, we start celebrating Christmas on Christmas Eve here in Germany.

So I'm going to take off for a bit, but we - Gundel, der Dekan, and I - want to wish you a very Merry and Peaceful Christmas.

A Christmas Story

"You'll shoot out one of your eyes."
You either know that quote, start laughing and come right back with a quote of your own, maybe the triple dog dare or the yellow eyes of Scut Farkus, or you don't know it which means you have never seen "A Christmas Story".

Ralphie and his desperate Christmas wish for "an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle" have been part of my life for years and years, first brought to me by German TV, then after they stopped showing the movie for reasons unknown, on English DVD.
The season would not be the same without this movie, without Ralphie in his bunny suit, a gift from Aunt Clara who suffers from the delusion that he is a perpetually four year old girl, without The Old Man obsessing over his prize for a puzzle competition, a lamp in the shape of a lady's leg, and accusing his wife of destroying it on purpose, without Ralphie trying to drop (not always so) subtle hints about the Red Ryder everywhere, and of course without the neighbors' dogs stealing the turkey.
Oh, and if you want to know if Ralphie gets his BB gun, you should watch the movie.

Did you know that the stories in the movie are part of a collection called "In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash" by Jean Shepherd?

1st edition 1966, picture fair use
via Wikipedia

Jean Shepherd was an American humorist who performed on radio. Eventually he was convinced to write his radio stories down, fictional stories mixed with facts from his own childhood.
He was a writer for the movie, by the way, and narrated it himself brilliantly (after all he was a radio performer).
So the book would be good as well, right? Nyah (this is supposed to be a sound of not being sure) .... I got the book, struggled with it on too many of my commute rides, barely made it through and never touched it again.
Don't get me wrong, there were parts when I snickered, giggled or laughed, but there were many, many words, many, many descriptions, and the frame - a grown-up Ralphie returning home and telling of his memories in his old friend Flick's bar - didn't really work for me, either.
As always, not everyone has the same opinion from the reviews I read, but some feel exactly the way I do.
I guess I'll just stick to the movie, thank you very much.

P.S. I hadn't been aware of the sequels and will skip the summer one, but I'm waiting for the second sequel at the moment, so I may add a short review for that to this post once it's here.
And here we go now - A Christmas Story Christmas from 2022.
It's 1973. Ralphie has grown up and has a family of his own now. He's taken a time out from work to write a Science Fiction novel, but his epic work of 2,000 pages is rejected by every publisher.
Shortly before Christmas, his mother calls to tell him that his father has died, so the family heads home to spend Christmas with her.
Thinking of his father, Ralph wants to make this the best Christmas ever, but things don't quite work out that way (as expected ;-)).

Actually, I was a bit surprised - wary about sequels as I am - that I really enjoyed the movie.
Of course it's a different mother (Melinda Dillon was already 82 at the time and had stopped acting years ago), but there are a few familiar characters from the first movie which added a lot to the fun, I think. Will it become cult like the first one? I doubt it because the parents were such an important part, but I was not disappointed.

Getting ready for Christmas - Part 3

I'll make this short.
In part 2 I showed you my decorations in the house hallway. Then I noticed that one of the Steiff mice was missing. A few days later I noticed that one of the teddies had been hiding in the same cabinet.
If someone has seen my brain, please tell it to come back. I'm not doing that well without it, it seems ...

Also I still wasn't happy with my improvised hooks, so I got some garlands which would hide them.
Basically that works well, but now I have the problem that the railings are quite smooth and the ornaments quite heavy which means the garlands keep sliding. I could stop one of them with the hooks on the railing which don't run that smoothly and therefore keep the ends in place, but the other railing doesn't have those hooks, so I will have to come up with an idea. Not this year, though. Maybe my brain will be back again next year ;-)

Nine red bullfinches

In my last post I mentioned an anthology of Christmas stories I got as a child. You can tell I loved the book, it looks very used.
Barbara Bartos-Höppner had the idea for the book. She was a German writer and asked other writers she knew to write Christmas stories. She was surprised that some writers said you can't write stories about Christmas in our time anymore, our time being 1971 when the first edition was published (I was six years old). The only condition was that the stories had to be set between the first advent and Epiphany.
In the end she had 16 very different stories by 15 authors from several European countries.
Its title is "Weihnachtsgeschichten unserer Zeit - Bekannte Schriftsteller erzählen vom Weihnachtswunder" which translates to "Christmas stories of our time - Well-known authors tell of the Christmas miracle".
If you think it's all joy and sparkling lights, you are wrong. The stories are
- heartwarming when a kid gang goes carolling to make some money under the pretense of collecting for sick kids and then one of them spontaneously - and surprisingly to himself - donates the money for a school for deaf children in the last house they go to
- sad when the story is about a nurse in the war who is asked to accompany a group of girls from a children's home and one of the girls dies from appendicitis; the last sentence always made me cry as a child "I never found Helga's parents, though".
- realistic in the story about a separated couple who try to make Christmas nice for their two children despite their differences
- joyful in the story about the homesick boy in Brazil missing snow on Christmas and the girl who makes "snow" for him
- magical in my favorite story.

That story is by Katherine Allfrey, a German-British writer, it is called "White Christmas".

A few days before Christmas, a Christmas elf is born in the yew forest above the Five-Lords-Ground, a rare event that means a White Christmas.
The elf is born because drops of clear silver, a tiny pond from rain or dew, accumulate in the stump of the oldest tree in the forest and are found by a light of ray.
A sparkle awakes in the dark hole and the ray pulls the silver up into the open letting it sink to the ground where it grows and grows until the elf is born, slender like a flame, clear like ice, and bright as a gem. (Isn't that absolutely beautiful?)

Now the elf has three tasks to do for Christmas to become white.
He has to find nine red bullfinches (I love the German word "Gimpel" for them) on a twig, he has to ring the bells of the abandoned church in the Five-Lords-Ground, and he has to bring Jack Frost back from the North.
He doesn't know how to do it, but out of the light snow comes a guide, the last unicorn.
Firstly, the unicorn tells the elf what bullfinches are, but the elf can only find two of them until he stumbles on a paper that has been blown out of a car - and shows nine red bullfinches on a twig. If they are real, he doesn't know, but they are alive.

Male Eurasian bullfinch, Lancashire, UK
© Francis C. Franklin / CC-BY-SA-3.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

Next are the bells in the church, but the old church's walls are crumbling, the door is rotten, the roof has half collapsed - and there are no bells in the tower.
The elf decides to go look for Jack Frost first, a long, dark, and difficult flight for a bright being like him. On the highest of mountains he finds the giant Jack who has turned hard, but he follows the elf, bringing hail and storm with him.
The bullfinches are waiting in the church, but there are still no bells.
On a ledge, however, is a tuft of grasses, fully encased in ice, and when the elf walks by and grazes them, he can hear a little tinkle. Only the hands of an elf can ring those tiny bells with their ethereal chime. The unicorn almost dances with joy, and hearing the bells, Jack Frost turns from a grim giant into a mild king, and the dead, black forest into a shimmering white winter forest.

At midnight, the elf rings the bells again, the rotten door opens. Christmas angels fill the church, the unicorn lays down in front of the old altar, and the bullfinches sit to the left and right like little choristers and whisper.
And they celebrate the Holy Night together until the sun of Christmas morning rises above the white world.

Why a child like me, who never loved snow, loved that story so much, I have no idea. I think it's the peace I am feeling in it, and it's so beautifully written.

I would love to embroider those nine little bullfinches on their twig, hardly until Christmas, but I don't have to hurry it. It will come to me when I'm ready.

Guarding the woods

When I first saw this picture, I imagined myself going out of the house early in the morning to make my way to the train station, still half asleep.

There's a small street and a square between a school and its gymnasium I had to walk across every workday. They have about ten streetlights and those lights were on the blink sometimes, quite literally, they would start blinking, mostly just one or two which was okay, but once they went one after the other day by day until they were all blinking in some kind of silent code. Honestly, at 5 a.m. I'm getting weird ideas easily and it really was a weird sensation. That day, however, I finally remembered to report it online and the next day they were fixed.
Of course it hadn't helped that the little park next to it produced some even stranger shadows than usual thanks to it. I was lucky the lady, who took her Great Dane there without a leash for a while, wasn't there at the time. Can you say Hound of the Baskervilles? It really made me jump the first time I saw that dog coming out of the dark.

And now imagine what coming across something like this creepy "creature" unexpectedly could have done to my tired brain. I can see myself screaming and running for the hills, only I can't run and there are no hills there.

Nevertheless, I love that picture and think it's sad that, according to the web, this streetlamp in Warsaw has since lost its hair as the company on whose property it is standing deemed it as dangerous for pedestrians.

The picture has been on the web for a while and keeps turning up. The last time a friend of mine shared it, I thought that I would really like to capture it in some way. In the past, I would have tried to bead loom it, but I would probably not have been able to do the vines the way I wanted to. Bead embroidery was another possibility, but in the end hand embroidery felt like the best choice to me.

At the beginning, the plan was to more or less copy part of the picture on a rather small frame as a sample to see how long it would take and if a bigger version made sense. I did the outlines first and then the flowing vines around the body and the head, and that's when I felt the need to put at least a bit of my own touch on it. Making more hair turned it into a different kind of creature to me.
From there on it should have been pretty clear that this would not stay a sample because next were hours of filling up the outlines with loads of small stitches going in all directions for some texture.

I had left the face until last. Obviously I didn't want to change anything about the glow, after all this makes for the amazing effect. Again I contemplated different options, silver-lined beads, other beads, even sequins cut in shape, all because I wasn't confident I would be able to achieve the glowing effect with embroidery as I haven't practiced shading a lot yet.
In the end the playchild inside me that likes to try out things convinced me to give it a go after all. I picked six colors from my floss, winged it and was happier with it than expected.

Somehow the creature started to change in my mind and the post on the left looked wrong to me, instead I began seeing trees. My favorite trees have always been birches, we had some in the neighborhood when I was a child and they were so pretty.
I couldn't stop myself and added one tree after the other, and then I really didn't have an excuse not to fill up what little was left of the background. Well, and then the scene called for snowfall.

When I showed my friend the first bad picture of the finished piece, she said she loved "her" with a question mark next to "her". I replied I wasn't even sure myself about "she" or "he" yet and that I felt there was a story in this that unfortunately I'm not good enough to write.
Small details of other stories I knew kept going through my head when I was working on this, for example my favorite Christmas story from an anthology I got as a child. It plays in the woods and I love it so much that one year I actually typed it up to copy it (typewriter, that gives you an idea how long ago that was) and give it to my friends.
Those bits didn't add up to a story for my guardian yet - because that's the only thing I'm sure of, that this is a Guardian of the Woods from ancient times and a spiritual world.
I'm not going to push it, maybe she or he will tell me their story eventually even if I won't be able to put it in words, but just see it before my mind's eye. Maybe I'll see something in one of my crazy dreams.

Anyway, I'm really happy with my new friend.
There's not going to be a bigger one, not only because it would probably take me forever, but also because the story can't be repeated.
I ordered a simple frame for it now and can't wait to get to get it on my wall (as far away from dem Dekan as possible!).
I couldn't resist showing it to you already, though.