Deep Down Good Carrot Pie

Happy Holidays!
I fucking LOVE the holidays. Thanksgiving and Christmas. Its the best time of the year. Now that I am married and Mr. Maker and I have our own house I can go all out. So I predict a plethora of holiday cooking/crafting related posted until the new year.

And here is a gift. 
Years and years ago my great aunt Betty passed away and my father flew to Florida to settle her business. She was poor lived modestly and had never married or had children so there wasn't anyone else to go through her personal things. She was active in her church and dad donated most of her belongings to them. I remember distinctly the night he returned he had an old cardboard box and he said told me that she hadn't had much of worth but when he saw these he thought of me. It was a box of hundreds and hundreds of hand written recipes!

I haven't made them all but this is my favorite. Deep Down Good Carrot Pie
Rumor has it one year they didn't have any sweet potatoes so Betty invented this delicacy. It's now a family tradition. I like it better than sweet potato pie.

Use it, print it, share it...but obey these rules:
Always call it Deep Down Good Carrot Pie (cuz that's it's name)
and
Under no circumstances are you to profit monetarily from this recipe (if you so much as sell a piece a hundred angels of justice and karma will haunt you for the rest of your days).

Whew, with that here it is a picture of the original recipe handwritten before I was born and made a million (or so) times. Enjoy.

And this year I topped mine with candied ginger and carrots.
Basically I sliced carrots as thick as I could in 1/4 cup water and 1/4 cup sugar. I added slices of ginger to flavor them.

I took them one by one and dusted them in more sugar and laid them flat to dry.

And I rolled them into rosettes and topped the pie.
It was so good. They added a gingery crunch to the pie and everyone raved!

I forgive myself for my short attention span

I'm officially addicted to knitting. My sewing machine calls to me from the craft room, but I don't listen. I'm too busy knitting on the couch watching a movie.

The pretty blue piece I was working on- I got as far as making it a square and got bored so it's now a pot holder.

And I think I have found my barrier to the knitting. Its the repitition. When I'm sewing every step is a different thing. In knitting every step is the same thing over (and over and over and over and over and over and over). I need to work on something more dynamic.

I was on the Lion website and I found this pattern. The coolest part is that I acually understood the pattern. Here it is.

Cast on 30 sts.
Row 1: Knit.
Row 2: K24, turn, leave rem 6 sts unworked.
Row 3: K24.
Row 4: K18, turn, leave rem 12 sts unworked.
Row 5: K18.
Row 6: K12, turn, leave rem 18 sts unworked.
Row 7: K12.
Row 8: K6, turn, leave rem 24 sts unworked.
Row 9: K6.
Row 10: K across all 30 sts.
Repeat Rows 1-10 until nearly all yarn has been used, end with a Row 10.
Bind off.

Easy peasy leamon squeezy. I can do this one!
Every row is different. And I used yarn that changes color which seems to help.

This is the first 10 rows:

Hopefully it will end up looking something like this:

Look I'm Knitting!

Through a sorted set of circumstances I find myself in possession of more yarn than I could have imagined.

My Nana taught me to knit when I was a little girl, and one summer in college I worked with a girl who reminded me. But I’m not very good at it, and kitting patterns look like Greek to me. But I have a friend who has been knitting for like 20 years and in and unofficial exchange for some skeins (I think that’s what they are called) she gave me a private lesson. Look what I can do!!!!!

And I find knitting  is a great exercise for me in patience, slow progress, and creation without purpose.

If I keep working on this thing I might have a scarf in 2-3 years. But I enjoy doing it and that is enough. Pre blog Ruth would get frustrated that all this work would not result in a perfect scarf, so why bother. 

But I really am enjoying this. So I’m just going to keep going. We’ll see what happens. Maybe I’ll make a scarf. Maybe a trivet. Who cares I’m having fun.

Earthworm Cupcakes

So I set up the new blog with lofty intentions of being creative daily and posting about it. And what have I done? Jack Shit. Until today. My nephews birthday party is tomorrow and my sister asked my to make the dessert. 

I like cupcakes. They are like little self contained single serving happiness. But boys are hard to make cup cakes for. I asked my nephew what flavor cake he wanted and he said strawberry. Well I went to the store to buy cake mix and I physically couldn't pick up the box of strawberry. It looked disgusting and clearly had nothing to do with strawberries, so I got funfetti cake. Some vanilla icing and generic Oreos and a bag of gummy worms later...earthworm cupcakes. They smell amazing! 

Status: pleased with myself 

Did you miss me?

Because I missed you. So I'm back.

Have you ever read the Orson Scott Card books about Alvin Maker? They are some of my favorite fantasy books (partly because they don't involve dragons or fourth level mages). Basically the books are about a boy Alvin who is the Seventh Son (name of the first book) of a seventh son which means that he has the power of putting things together.  Making.

And The Maker has an enemy The Unmaker. The Unmaker isn't a person, but the energy of dis-creation.

My Unmaker is depression. I have found that my level of unhappiness and dis-satisfaction has a negative correlation with my output of creativity.

This is my medicine.

Welcome.

What is your unmaker?