Ladybugs and Sunflowers

(with my lovely little cousin)

A Tale of Two Cities ~ a project

With my newfound fixation for book-binding, I guess I've gotten a bit over-zealous. I figured out the coptic stitch, with the help of this lovely tutorial, I made myself a travel journal; I guess I figured I could do just about anything. So, I rebound my copy of A Tale of Two Cities.

It took me forever (I'd say about forty hours of work total, seriously), but I did it. I didn't want to have to take the time to copy all my notes into a new copy, see? And I've got a BUNCH of notes; from the first time I read the book, for school, throughout the whole thing; and about a third of the way through from my second, closer inspection of it. And it was my dad's before me, and it was utterly falling apart, so I decided to rebind it.
After I'd ripped out the covers completely and peeled off the canvas that was holding the glue-bound pages to the flyleaf, I started by taking a small cup of vinegar, some Q-tips, a pot of boiling water, a knife, some nail polish remover, and a very bright light to work by and dissolving the glue from the spine. Silly me, I figured the pages would've been in signatures (like a composition notebook, the paper folded over and connected in the back) to begin with. But no. As the glue dissolved, the pages fell out into single sheets. Roadblock the first.
So I found some red thread and I arranged the papers into sheets of sixteen and I hand-stitched each page to it's opposite (using a healthy dab of glue to hold the final knot down). Then I used a screw driver to bore some holes in the original covers, an ice-pick to pop the holes in the papers, used the lovely stitch from the tutorial to bind it all together, and viola! It is reborn.

Now I'm just really, really glad it's over.

Something Unexpected (But Beautiful)

Shortly before Christmas, I sort of got lassoed into baking several recipes of cookies. Old European recipes for different sorts of traditional Christmas cookies. Grandma remembered my fetish with foreign cookies earlier this year and asked me to bake a few recipes of different things for her various holiday parties and visits.
So a couple of days before Christmas, I spent the whole day in the kitchen making Danish pebbernodder and Dutch Jan Hagels and Irish lace cookies. My emotions were a little mixed: a whole day of Christmas baking with Christmas smells and Christmas music is just my idea of fun, trying out three new recipes for different sorts of foreign cookies on somebody else's money is really kind of perfect, but I was doing it all by someone else's request, not my own desire, so I was slightly lacking in motivation.
Then this morning, I learned something.
Mom, Grandma, and I were going through tins and bins of leftover Christmas cookies and deciding what to do with them all. Grandma was talking about how much she'd enjoyed the pebbernodder, Mom was scraping broken window cookies into the garbage can, and I decided to ask Grandma which type of cooking (for my own future reference) had been the most popular at her parties.
And she says, "Oh, I would say the lace cookies,"
She goes on to tell me how one guest, an elderly distant cousin, had taken one bite out of the cookie, and her whole face had lit up.
"Oh, I remember these," she said, "My grandmother used to make these!"

And for me, that sums up why I bake, why I like finding old foreign recipes. Why baking is important to me, why I hate the frozen vats of cheap chocolate chip cookie dough and little refrigerator cut-outs with seasonal pictures on them. Even why I, as much as I personally enjoy them, would rather not make normal cookies. Why I get bored of chocolate chip and peanut-butter and oatmeal-raisin. Everybody makes those. But these recipes that have history, you never know they're gonna mean something to somebody.