Blair Stocker, Author at Wise Craft Handmade

November 24, 2009

Woodland Centerpieces for Thanksgiving

I won’t be spending Thanksgiving with my friend C and her family this year, and I will miss her and well, truth be told, I’ll also miss her flowers. I have shown you her amazing floral arrangements before. Always gorgeous and modern. So, as I’m prepping for Thanksgiving here at our house with friends this year, I’m remember a few little tricks that C has taught me (and that I’ve just kind of picked up along the way). I thought it would be fun to share.

November 23, 2009

Vintage Book, The Cookie Book

Found my very faded, dog-eared copy of one of my all time favorite childhood books, The Cookie Book. I guess you could call it a vintage book now. It contains 12 recipes, a cookie for every month of the year. I ordered it from the Scholastic brochures that come home from school (and I smile at the idea of how little the whole Scholastic thing has changed over ht years). I loved the hand drawn illustrations. And I love that I marked my favorite cookies.
Ian has asked to make Mississippi Mud Pie from this book for Thanksgiving. It made me think of this little one, which is still in with my cookbooks.

November 16, 2009

Emma's Birthday Cake

(Thanks for all the kind words about Ian’s quilt!)
The birthday cake that was requested for Emma’s party, Angel Food. My first time making it. Whenever I make a classic, something like this, for the very first time, I almost always go to The Best Recipe. That cookbook is one every budding cook should have in my opinion. Its not as sexy as most of the cookbooks coming out these days (although they recently reissued this cookbook with a bit more sex appeal, but mine is the original version, with no photographs, lots of pencil drawings, very much like its magazine origin, Cooks Illustrated). But this book will make a cook out of you. If you have a piece of meat, a squash, want to make the perfect chocolate chip cookie, anything, this cookbook will tell you the basic science behind what the ingredients do (for example, I never really knew why they used ingredients like lard in biscuits when I was growing up, I just figured it was what the cook had around, or maybe just tradition).
Anyway, a dozen egg whites and a lot of whipping later, the cake came out beautifully crusty on the outside (the recipe told me I was going for an almost macaroon-like texture on the surface and I watched it like a hawk during the last bit of baking time), and light as a feather on the inside. Whew! This photo was taken just before the strawberry halves were added.
Which brings me to my next question. Its time for me to take the bazillion hundred photos currently on my computer off before I tempt fate more than I feel I already have. How do you guys catalog your photos when you take them off the computer? In the past, I move them onto disks, and store them in a box, but this feel inefficient to me. I’m hoping there’s a better way to preserve them. And quicker. Last time I did this little exercise it took me the better part of a day. So please, what’s the secret? Is there a secret? Can we create a secret? Help!

November 15, 2009

The Finished Quilt for Ian

The Modern Quilt Workshop
To explain why, in spite of all the scurry that fills our days right now, I would stop to obsessively finish this quilt off, is to just call me a little bit of crazy. The half excitement and half crazy parts of sewing can make me really productive, and I wanted to see this finished real bad. I brought it home from The Quilting Loft last week.
READ MORE

November 12, 2009

In Between

When I began this blog, back in 2005, a lot of what I wrote about centered around daily life with my kids. We three spent a lot of our days together back then, and found creative ways to fill our time. I truly treasure the snippets of time that I documented on wise craft, writing about those days on this blog felt like it gave it all so much more life than just taking one photograph.READ MORE

November 9, 2009

Color Your Cloth by Malka Dubrawsky

I have a confession…
I’ve never liked batiks. Of any kind. I couldn’t really explain it except to say I saw no inspiration in them. I knew I gravitated toward clearer colors in general, so maybe that was the reason.
But whatever the reason, I did not like them. Until I saw Malka’s work that is.READ MORE

October 29, 2009

The Polymer Clay Cookbook

So, Emma, myself, and, pretty much every girl that comes into contact with it is freaking out over The Polymer Clay Cookbook. It is so crazy cute. We’ve had it for a couple of weeks and its been by Emma’s bed for nightly reading ever since (she has a so much homework these days, that’s when she gets her leisure reading in, poor girl). The allure of baking clay here at our house is strong. Emma has been playing with it since she was able to hold it in her hands, and over the years, her creations just get more elaborate and detailed. And now this book is taking it all to a whole new level.
We were looking for an easy craft activity for our Girl Scout meeting this week and I was totally inspired by this book. The girls are coming to us straight from classroom Halloween parties and will probably be pretty sugared up, but I am hoping they will love this. We’ll be setting up three tables (there will be about 10 girls). At each table, there will be supplies, directions, and a parent to guide them in making a piece of jewelry. The projects I chose were the candy corn earrings (or rings), a tiny cinnamon bun (scented with cinnamon and a mixture of school glue and white paint to create the icing), and a pink cupcake, both of which can be hung from a thin cord necklace I’ll have for each girl.
And because it is the responsibility of a good Girl Scout leader to be fully prepared, I felt the need to spend an afternoon testing out each craft and making samples before I let the girls try them.

chocolate cupcake with raspberry frosting and a cherry

my cinnamon roll with a head pin that’s ready to be twisted into a loop. And it smells like cinnamon.
Cute????!!!!!
I thought about keeping this book locked away until Emma’s birthday, then giving it to her with all new clay and supplies, but I just couldn’t wait. (I decided to give her this book instead, with a stack of felt and notions.)
I thought I would post more this week but it just didn’t happen that way. I will see you here on Monday though. Till then, happy weekend!

September 27, 2009

Marquee quilt from The Modern Quilt Workshop

Giving myself a deadline to have this at the quilter was all I needed. Once I started the process of putting this quilt top together, I knew I’d get into it and just keep going. It is really coming together well. This is the Marquee pattern from the book The Modern Quilt Workshop. I’ve had it in my mind that I would make this quilt since that book first arrive on my doorstep, years ago. I love improvisational piecing of any kind (which I also call just making it up as I go along).READ MORE

September 21, 2009

Gaining Momentum

I’m so happy that Ian’s quilt is coming together, these projects sit on my worktable for far too long these days. All I needed was a reasonable deadline. Not a crazy one, a doable one. I was thinking of this when I was watching Project Runway with Emma today. I mean, how the heck do those designers really know they’ll get it done in time? How much of those garments are actually glued together I wonder?READ MORE

September 9, 2009

Lego City

Last day of summer vacation was spent building a Lego city from the ground up. They started in the morning, and did not stop until I made them get in the car to go meet their teachers and find their lockers. When we got home, they gulped down some dinner, then headed upstairs to keep building.READ MORE

Follow Wise Craft Handmade