apple mint salad

Fresh green salad with pistachios and apples with a lemon, mint & gin dressing — this is really good with leftover turkey. The original recipe calls for turkey, but this is a good green salad on its own and would be refreshing in the summer. I think next time I will try it with pink lady apples instead of granny smith.

joulun sisustus

Christmas decor from Marimekko. Perfect colours for this time of year — even more when it's rainy and grey rather than white. They have a sweet Christmas stocking there, too.

felt & glass

Pretty felt ornament tutorial from the purl bee via pinterest. — we've had a few false starts making these for the tree. We begin, and then become distracted (by trucks and getting dinner ready respectively). However, we are very enthusiastic in our intentions... I think half of crafting is just the pleasure of imagining doing something anyway.

Update: we did make a couple and ^ this lovely one is by my niece, age 6.

This is the first year we've had glass ornaments on the tree for awhile. I like my son's tree decorating style — fit as many on each branch as you can. He likes to put them in pairs according to colour.

holiday stockings

Last year I made these oversize holiday stockings from the purl bee. The heels are turned as they are on a regular sock, but it is knit flat with bulky yarn. It's a very good project to try out sock knitting. I did one in the round, but I wouldn't recommend it. The seaming up the back gives the stocking extra structure and it looks better seamed.

baby pine trees

We got our tree last night. I don't really want to decorate it at all, it looks nice just plain in our living room. That's obviously not going to fly with the 3-year old set, though.  I have only just figured out why our trees weren't smelling like anything the last few years — we were picking small trees. I like small trees, but they don't have enough sap to smell like a tree, so we've switched back to the bigger ones.

auggie mini cards & tags

bright snowflakes

I put up a simple tutorial for paper snowflakes up on windy today. We had a lot of fun making these yesterday, as school was cancelled and we were footloose and fancy free.

breakfast chocolate

I've put up two recipes for hot chocolate on the windy blog today — one with solid chocolate & cinnamon and one with cocoa and vanilla. We like the Snowy Cocoa for breakfast sometimes. It's good with leftover gingerbread.

Mukluks

Wool mukluks, much beloved by Augs. Made by a lady in Minnesota (ebay).

Overnight French Toast with Panettone (or without)

Last year, I put in Snowy & Chinook's recipe for pancakes, from Snowy & Chinook.

This year, I'll give you my favourite breakfast recipe. This is my version of Overnight French Toast: French toast you make the night before and then bake in the oven in the morning. This is a very kid-friendly recipe, both preparing and eating.

We love this with panettone, but if you're making this for a big group it might be better to use plain bread. I find every gathering has at least 1 anti-raisin member.

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Gingerbread helicopters

We used the recipe from my America's Test Kitchen cookbook (which was given to me by a friend who is a chef, and it turns out to be really good) for plain gingerbread and this recipe for royal icing. Then we did all sorts: fruits stars, big circles and helicopters for the tree.

A Gift from the Lonely Doll

Dare Wright was a model and later a photographer for magazines, including Good Housekeeping and Vogue. She was raised by her mother, who was quite a successful portrait painter.

In the late 50s she released her first children's book The Lonely Doll, about a doll who is adopted by a family of bears and the adventures they have together. The series were very successful, appearing on the New York Times bestseller list. However, they later faded away and for a long time they were out of print. Over the past few years her books have been reissued (you can see her official web site for more information, linked at the end of this post).

In total, Dare Wright released 18 children's books, not all about the Lonely Doll. Sometimes she used herself as a model, and these images of her are a bit reminiscent of Cindy Sherman's earlier work (although this was before Cindy Sherman's career had begun). Her shots are elaborate and carefully staged.

The Lonely Doll books are illustrated with photographic tableaux, which was a very unusual style at the time and seemed to make a very strong impression on the children who read them. Adult fans who grew up with her are quite fierce in their devotion. Seeing images of a world where dolls were alive, and seeing the realized work of an adult who enjoyed playing with dolls, too, made a very strong impression on them.






Neither of us had Dare Wright books as children. However, it's really interesting for us to see the pioneering work of someone who photo-illustrates, as we do.

A Gift from the Lonely Doll was actually a gift to us from our publisher, Dimiter Savoff. It is set at Christmas. Edith, the doll, wants to surprise Mr. Bear with a muffler. She knits it in secret, always keeping it mostly hidden in her knitting basket. As a result she cannot see how long the muffler is growing....


Recently, a biography about the life of Dare Wright was released, so there is quite a bit of information online about her now. Unfortunately, her life was quite troubled and it would be a good idea for parents to accompany their children on google while finding out more about her. Her official web site seems fairly child-friendly as of this posting. If you would like to see more of her books back in print, you can join her estate's campaign. Dare Wright also has a facebook page, which has some really great images and illustrations from the books.

This is slightly off-topic, but one interesting thing about Dare Wright: her brother invented a very successful fishing lure and retired on an island at a young age. Later, he felt badly for all the fish that had been caught with his lure, so he took out an advertisement against his lure, the "Phoebe". (Unfortunately, this only increased sales.)

The most recent release, Make Me Real, from the 1970s, seems appealing. Maybe we will hunt it and give a follow-up review.