Well, after a summer spent practicing my wifely skill of cooking, with an occasional motherly side of patching up wounded crewboys, I have spent practically no time doing anything wifely in over a month. I can't cook or sew here. Heck, I don't even talk to boys here (and I figure talking to boys, or at least one boy is a necessary wifely skill). Oh well, it's kind of nice to have a break, especially from cooking. Though I do miss it too. I'm sure someday I'll have to do more, so I'll enjoy this for now.

Aprons!

And here at camp it's apron making season. So far only two crew boys have begun work on their aprons (and only one is complete). Of course, most of them had one from last year. The cooks and crew girls still need to begin work on theirs. I also helped the Nelson girls make bandannas. Good times.

Finished Product

I posted a couple times in my other blog about a T-shirt quilt I've been work on. Well, it's finally finished! Or at least finished enough to use. :) I probably should do a bit more actual "quilting" but for now it's good. :)


FRONT:
BACK:

Play costumes

The play went well. Since I posted work on a skirt and a jacket I had done for that, I thought I would post a couple pictures of them actually in use. :)

If you ever need to look like a British soldier....

I'm your woman. :) For this play we do have a British soldier, so I took a woman's red wool coat that I got at a second hand store and modified it so that it looks vaguely like a uniform... Yeah, it's not great, but it'll do. I like it. :)

Costume Skirt

So, we've been working on this play, and right now I'm trying to finalize costumes (among other things). For one of the girls we have this skirt that matched her shirt fairly well, but was the wrong length and style, so tonight I worked on trying to fix that. Here's what I've come up with:

Hopefully it will work! :)

Poppy Seed Cake

Once upon a time, when I was at camp, we decided we needed to make some Poppy Seed Bread for a staff dessert. So, we did some research and came up with something that looked like a decent recipe. We tried it out, and it turned out fairly well, all things considered. In other words, it tasted good, but there were a number of other problems:

1. We had enough bread pans for staff, but probably not enough for a whole camp, thus making it rather impractical.
2. I always have problems with quick breads. They always seem to fall and never come out of the pans properly. Same problem here. Tasted good, looked terrible.
3. The recipe didn't have enough poppy seeds to really be considered poppy seed bread.

Thus, the next time we tried it, we put the batter into a large sheet pan (or two) and made more of a cake/bar dessert. We also added more poppy seeds. :) It turned out really well and was very popular with the staff and campers.

I made it the other day for my students, and they seemed to enjoy it. I'll include the recipe here. Yeah, not terribly healthy, but yummy. :)

Poppy Seed Cake (Bread)

3 c. flour

1 ½ tsp salt

2 ½ c. sugar

1 ½ tsp vanilla

1 ½ c milk

1 ½ c. oil

½ c. poppy seeds (or more or less to taste)

3 eggs

1 ½ tsp almond extract

Glaze:

¾ c. powdered sugar

¼ c. Orange or Lemon Juice

½ tsp vanilla

½ tsp almond

Mix all ingredients together. Originally this was a bread recipe:

Bake in 2 loaf pans (oiled and floured) at 350 for 1 ½ hours.

Remove loaves from pans and glaze.

However, we found that it works well as a cake. The above amount could be baked in a sheet pan or a 9”x13” pan at the same temperature for a much shorter time (I think about 20-30 min) – until a toothpick comes out clean (probably won't be brown yet). Then glaze.

You probably could also make muffins.

Allow me to explain

Admittedly, this blog has an odd name. For a while now some of my friends and I have had sort of a running joke about all our amazing "wifely skills," a joke made all the more amusing because most of us are decidedly unmarried.

At any rate, I've decided to start this blog to keep track of some of my varied pursuits in crafts, cooking, etc. This will keep my other blog focused more on "intellectual" pursuits. There you have it. :)