Totoro

Well somehow we got it in our collective heads at our house that we needed a giant bean bag chair.  But not just any giant bean bag chair.  A giant Totoro bean bag chair.  This seemed crazily unfeasible (bean bag filling is expensive!) until I found 3 large used (i.e., gross, nasty, covered in who knows what) bean bags for free on Freecycle.  Well that's the filling then, isn't it?

In searching the internet for examples of a giant Totoro bean bag chair, I came up with almost nothing.  But designing a giant Totoro myself seemed crazy.  And then I happened upon this guy, who made himself one, only his is a giant pillow (stuffed with pillow stuffing, not bean bag chair beans).  And he sells the pattern!  Now, the "pattern" is only a one-sheet PDF with all the pertinent Totoro parts measured in inches.  I will take it!  This saved me hours of work.  In fact if I hadn't had a pattern, I might not have tried it.  If you want to see his pattern, you can give him a dollar and he'll e-mail it to you. 

$50 worth of fabric later, and I was sewing.  I modified his pattern somewhat.  Gave Totoro a big smile instead of a tiny mouth, sewed his whiskers flat on his face, left off his tail, and put his arms at his sides.  I also had to go crazy on the bottom.  I needed to put in two layers of zippers since we were going to fill it with extremely messy styrofoam beans.  And I managed to do it!  I'm pretty proud of myself, actually.  I got skills.

[Cutting out the body]

["Consummate v's! Consummate!"]

[Parts and pattern]

[More parts]

[Laying him out to pin] 

 

[My sewing machine chugged right through this genuine leather like it was butter, but less messy. Old school Berninas, y'all. Seriously.]

[I finished sewing him and Norman decided he had to wear him. Creeptastic!]

[After Norman put in about 2/3 of the stuffing. Comfy, but not quite right.]

[Then I obtained another giant bean bag, and... Full!]

[Such a happy sort]

 

[And we've decided he's best right here.  Lucy can jump onto him without running into anything hard or pointy, and we can lounge on him and watch TV!]

Oh my goodness -- he is so comfortable.  You mush in and it all just molds around you.  Aaaahhh....

All told I spent about $75 on materials (including buying two used bean bags for their filling), and I-don't-even-want-to-know number of hours of work, not to mention the time Norman spent taking the filling out of the bean bags and putting it in Totoro.  This is certainly the biggest and craziest project I've ever undertaken.  I'm quite proud.  And comfy.

PS - If you come visit us, you are welcome to use Totoro as your guest bed. He is totally big and comfortable enough. But then you might not want to leave.

Playing with my New Dehydrator

I went crazy and bought this giant food dehydrator.  I'd been eyeing it for a while, plus the trays in my old round garage sale one just kept breaking more each time I used it.  I know I'll be using it to make big batches of crispy nuts and nut granola, but I also wanted to experiment some.  It came with this giant book of recipes.  Did you know you can dehydrate flavored yogurt and make something like fruit leather only, well, yogurt leather?? According to this book, you can.

But I thought I'd start slow.

Chickpeas (soaked overnight, then mixed with salt and garlic powder)
Rutabaga
Zucchini
Apple
Banana

I tried to slice them all thin and even without breaking out the mandoline.  I salted the zucchini just a bit.  At the suggestion of the Giant Dehydrator Book I blanched the rutabaga slices in boiling water for a couple minutes.  And I dipped the apple slices in a water and lemon juice mixture to keep them from turning brown.

Then I loaded them all into the Beast.  (Actually I think I might start calling it that...)

Because the only place in the house to put it is on my desk, and it doesn't even really fit there.

Results:

Apple chips -- Tasty, but not as crispy as Bare Fruit's apple chips, which are the best things ever and I just want to eat them until I die

Banana chips -- Meh. Tasty but chewy.

Zucchini chips -- Om nom!  Just enough salt, and crispy!  They'd be great with some sort of sour-cream-based dip.

Rutabaga chips -- Completely inedible.  I mean like doggie rawhide chew toy inedible.  Either I didn't blanch them long enough, or the Giant Dehydrator Book just flat out lied.

Soaked Chickpeas w/ garlic -- Umm.... These were really tasty all throughout the drying process.  I kept checking them to see if they were done.  And then they were done, and guess what!  They're hard as rocks!  I was trying to make them crispy like crispy nuts, but all I did was revert them back to dried chickpeas.  Duh.  Sooo... I think I'd make them again, but maybe leave them chewy and keep them in the fridge.

I'll definitely make the zucchini chips again.  The next time I use the dehydrator it will be crispy nut makin' time.  But I'm also excited to try some fruit leathers!  The great thing about this dehydrator is that the trays are square, and you can buy non-stick mats that fit the trays for making nice, even, square fruit leather pieces.  Woo hoo!

Quilt Stocking Logistics

So, you all know (probably) that I make Christmas stockings. And sometimes I make them out of old quilts. These quilts are the ones that have been used to death and have popping seams and worn-through patches and fraying edges. 

[They look approximately like this.]

[The stockings, not the quilts.]

Well I just got some new (old) quilts, and I thought I might as well start cutting them up into stocking shapes, because I sold a lot of stockings this last Christmas season, and I figured I couldn't start making more too early.

With most quilts, it doesn't really matter which way the pattern is facing on the stocking, so cutting out stocking shapes is kind of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle -- I'm just trying to get the most stocking pieces out of the quilt, while avoiding the badly damaged parts.  However, one of my new (old) quilts has these lovely embroidered flower baskets all over it.  And those kind of need to be facing the right direction, don't they? (Yes, yes they do.)

So I had to bust out some paper and draw up a diagram of the quilt to make sure everything was going to work before I started marking and cutting.

Phew!  I think I got it.

Bread Loaf Pan Kludge -- Results!

Yesterday I showed you the not-enough-bread-loaf-pans solution, pre-baking.  Wellll.....

Here is the loaf of bread from the one normal loaf pan:

 [Mmm... Loafy...]

And here are the other three loaves:

They're shaped exactly like loaves of bread!  Hooray!  But as you may or may not be able to see, the sides were not so much actually done.  Still doughy, in fact.  (On all of them, even the one in its own pan.)

So I separated them and put them back in the oven.  They seem to have turned out fine (although we haven't actually sliced into one of these loaves yet). 

The lesson for next time is to bake the kludgy ones just long enough for them to set, then separate the pans.  I think that will help them cook a lot more evenly.  Recommended!