Jessie Lyman's Journals, Part 10

I previously introduced you to my great-great grandmother, Jessie Lyman Eckert.  You can read the first post here, and subsequent post are filed under

Jessie Lyman was born January 2, 1877.  She graduated from Westport High School (Westport, MO, now part of Kansas City) in 1897 at the head of her class.  From what I have read of her diaries so far, it appears she went on to teach school for a couple years in Columbia, MO.  She married Herman Eckert in June of 1899.  On July 26, 1900, she died giving birth to twins Conrad and Cornelia at the age of 22.  Conrad is my mother's mother's father.

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Sat, Nov. 27 [1897]


This was payday. I gave Forest $10. I got a feather boa to brighten up my cloak.


Sun, Nov. 28


Clarence took me to church this morning. It was a beautiful day. My boa looks nice, but the dye rubs off on my neck.


Mon, Nov 29


Clarence and Aunt Florence went to Via School to an entertainment but Francis and I stayed at home. I hemstitched all evening.


Tues, Nov 30


Francis, Aunt Florence and I spent the evening at Mr. Eugene Scott's. Francis and I ran a race coming back.


Wed (Nov) Dec 1


Francis and I went to see "Alabama". We stopped to see Forest and surprised him. The play was very good in some places -- others were weak in the presentation.


Thurs, Dec 2


We went to see the "Bowery Girl". It was just fine. We took Forest and Mr. H[??]. They intend to come out Sunday.
Mr. Emmett wants me to go skating with him Saturday.


Fri, Dec 3


It has been sleeting and raining and freezing all day. It was very slippery walking this morning. This spoils my skate.
I got a letter from Ella today. The home news doesn't tell half enough.


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At first I thought it said "to brighten up my look" instead of "my cloak".  Hahaha...

Rapunzel Hair for Dress Up

Background: Several weeks ago, Lucy pulled a really long piece of toilet paper off the living room nose-blowing toilet paper roll (doesn't everyone have one of these?).  Then she was holding one end of the piece up to the back of her head and running around.  Upon questioning, it was revealed that she was pretending to be Rapunzel. (Tangled is a big deal in our house right now.)  I helped her by securing the toilet paper to her head with a hair tie, but of course it didn't last long.  She kept stepping on it and getting it caught places, and pretty soon all the pieces were too short to be any fun.

And then it occurred to me that with a few bucks worth of yarn and an hour of my time, she could have a Rapunzel braid that would actually stand up to the rigors of toddler dress up play.  So I bought one pound of yellow yarn and waited for Lucy to be asleep.

I'll show you how I did it (meh), and then I'll give you the link to the blog of a lady who totally did it up right.  (I did zero internet research before making Lucy's. Oops.)

 

I figured I'd want the hair to end up about 9 or 10 feet long.  It needed to be nice and crazy for dragging around and wrapping around things.  Fingertip to fingertip for me is about 5 feet, so I pulled a length of yarn two wingspans.  Then I held the 10-foot mark and pulled two more, and folded it in half at the 10-foot mark and cut the end.  So I had 20 feet of yarn, folded in half so that it was 10 feet doubled.

I did that first step a lot.  As I did each length I laid it across the coffee table.  I did this until I had what seemed like a thick enough bunch of hair.

Then (and this is where I really could have done this more efficiently) I found all the middle fold points of each length and looped each one over my finger so that I could hold them all together and get them to hang straight and unbunched.  That probably needs a photo, but I was alone at the time.

I cut a short length of yarn and stuck it through all the loops to tie it all together.  So I had a whole bunch of 20-foot lengths of yarn, tied together and folded in half in the middle.  I took this 10-foot bundle and tied it to one leg of my coffee table by the piece of yarn I had tied around the middle.  Then I separated it into three bunches, and tried again to get it all straight and even and not bunched up.

But I didn't try too hard.  Doesn't have to be perfect, y'all!

Then I just braided.  Of course with something this long you have to braid the top and unbraid the bottom as you go along.  It was some work!

Then I tied it really tight at the end with another piece of yarn, and trimmed it so the ends were all kind of even.  I also found a piece of blue ribbon in my craft room to tie around the bottom in a bow.

At this point I realized that I had no idea how I was going to attach it to Lucy's head.  (See?  I really should have asked the internet before I did this.)  I tried to attach it to my own head with bobby pins and that failed miserably.  Then I decided to thread a plain hair tie through the folded-in-half part at the top.  I looped it through itself and pulled it tight.  To put it in Lucy's hair, I use the hair tie to make a pony tail, and the yarn hair just kind of hangs down from there. 

 I left it on her rocking chair for her to discover the next morning. :-)

 All of her "I'm posing for a camera!" smiles look like this.

That's better.

To date she has not tripped or injured herself with it at all.  So there's that.

The lady who actually thought this through and knew what she was doing is here.  Definitely go take a look.

 Bonus frying pan shot!

Recipe: California Breakfast, OU Cafeteria Style!

When I was a freshman at the University of Oklahoma, I ate breakfast in the cafeteria two or three times a week.  I found that I really enjoyed taking my time, reading the paper, and eating a nice big breakfast before my 10:30am class.  And my favorite thing to eat for breakfast at the OU cafeteria was something called "California Breakfast".  It was a casserole made out of hash brown potatoes, strips of bacon, really runny fried eggs, and cheese.  Sooooo good.

Well, nearly 10 years later, I finally decided to try to make my own version of this.  I searched the OU Housing Services website to see if the ingredients were actually as simple as I remembered.  Well... yes and no.

Ugh.  (Insert montage of me lamenting the years and years of my life spent eating crap, clueless about its effects on my body and emotions.)  But essentially, yes.  Hash brown (shredded, fried) potatoes, bacon, fried egg, and shredded cheese.

So I followed Laura's hash brown instructions.  (You must let them cool in the fridge overnight.  I tried this once without letting the potatoes cool completely, and it was a miserable failure.)

I preheated my oven to 350 degrees (or somewhere around there).  I fried up a bunch of shredded potatoes and put them in the bottom of a greased casserole dish.  Then I fried strips of bacon and put them on top of the hash browns.  Then I fried some eggs until the whites were barely done and put them on top of the bacon.  (Undercook the eggs so that the yolks will run down into the hash browns.  That's the best part!)  Then I shredded some cheese on top and put it all in the oven just long enough to melt the cheese. 

It turned out awesome!  Just as I remembered it, but, of course, better.  And I forgot to take a photo until it was mostly gone.  That's how good it was.  (Reheat leftovers in a toaster oven, not a microwave. Soggy potatoes and rubbery eggs are really not what you're going for here.)

Valentine's Day 2012

Whoa, is it like way too late for a Valentine's Day post?  Well, too bad.  I still want to talk about it.  And by "talk about it", I mean post photos.

I talked last year about how I will and have mended my Valentine's Day-hating ways for the sake of my daughter.  The tradition continues!

I got the idea of using cookie cutters as paint stamps from this blog.  She has a lot of really great ideas for crafts and activities for babies and toddlers. 

 

It was Lucy's idea to get out the scissors and make fringe.

 

But then when we were done painting, she decided she wanted to use the table-protecting paper to wrap the cookie cutters up like packages for the post office.  (She sees me prepare and ship packages all the time.)

 

So we went with it!  It really is so much fun to let kids guide the activities.  Her ideas are always better than mine!

And then homemade heart-shaped pizza for dinner!

With bacon, red onion, red bell pepper, and... wait for it...artichoke hearts!  :-)

And Norman brought me some dark chocolate-covered shortbread cookies, even though I always tell him (honestly) that I don't want or need anything for Valentine's Day.  What a guy.

Jessie Lyman's Journals, Part 9

I previously introduced you to my great-great grandmother, Jessie Lyman Eckert.  You can read the first post here, and subsequent post are filed under

Jessie Lyman was born January 2, 1877.  She graduated from Westport High School (Westport, MO, now part of Kansas City) in 1897 at the head of her class.  From what I have read of her diaries so far, it appears she went on to teach school for a couple years in Columbia, MO.  She married Herman Eckert in June of 1899.  On July 26, 1900, she died giving birth to twins Conrad and Cornelia at the age of 22.  Conrad is my mother's mother's father.

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Fri, Nov 19 [1897]

I went to a spelling match at Vawter School this evening. We had a very pleasant time. Mr. Emmett Scott was there.

Sat, Nov. 20

I worked on my dress this afternoon. This morning I went to town by myself for the first time. I got some elocution books for my school. I didn't quite finish my skirt.

Sun, Nov. 21

This was a beautiful day. Aunt Florence and I went to church. I enjoyed the sermon very much. I saw Forest and read a letter he had just received from Mamma. This afternoon Mr. Emmett came over and took me driving. We had a lovely drive. He is going to teach me to ride.

Mon, Nov. 22

The same old program was followed.
I began practicing the children on "Mrs. Jarley's Wax Works". They seem very much pleased.

Tues, Nov 23

I kept several children in this afternoon for tardiness.
I wrote to Mr. Phillips for permission to give Friday as well as Thurs. as a holiday.

Wed, Nov 24

I got permission for my holiday.

Thurs, Nov 25

I wore my new dress for the first time today. The boys like it very much. I had the sore throat so I didn't go to church as I had expected. I spent the day in writing, practicing and hemstitching a handkerchief.

Friday, Nov 26

I went to town today to bring Forest out but found him too busy to accept my invitation. While waiting for him I wrote a letter to Emma it is her birthday.  After finishing my letter I tucked up my skirt, put a (collar) handkerchief over my collar and went to work to hoe out that room. It was a job too. I was almost through dusting when Forest came in. He seemed surprised to see me in that shape. I went down to dinner with him.
I sent Emma a couple handkerchiefs for her birthday.

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Interesting, right?  She spent Thanksgiving day.... stitching handkerchiefs.  Not cooking a bunch of food or eating with the family.  The holiday was made an official national one in 1863, but 34 years later, it was apparently celebrated with just a church service?

"Mrs. Jarley's Wax Works" is "a humorous play published in 1873", according to this website.  If you want to read the text of the play, you can do so here.

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.

Calculator Paper as Toddler or Preschooler Toy

We were at the thrift store today (a common Friday activity), and the particular one we were at is having a 50% off everything sale.  Now when everything is on sale, it makes me look a little closer at everything to see if anything has hidden potential.  I'm pretty sure the rolls of calculator paper have been there since I've been here; that is, since August.  Regularly $5.50 for a pack of 8 rolls, now $2.75.  Well I thought that was a pretty decent price for how much fun Lucy would probably get out of it.  Home they came.

But then when we got here, I realized that I really didn't want the entire roll to unroll in a big spiral all at once.  So I came up with this hack as a way of keeping a roll of calculator paper in check.  And then I took photos so I could write this tutorial for y'all.

You'll need:
a cheap plastic pen
a hair tie, rubber band, or piece of thin elastic

Take the pen apart.  I chose my pen based on the length of the middle plastic tube-y part.  (Long enough to span across the roll of paper, but not too long.)

Cut your hair tie.

Thread the hair tie through the pen tube.

Thread the other end of the hair tie through the middle of the roll of paper.

Pull tight 

and tie a knot.

 

Slip the knot around into the inside of the roll.

Now you can hold the tube by the middle and pull on the paper.  It will also stop the roll from unrolling before you want it to.

Ta da!

I gave Lucy the run of one roll today.  At first she just tore little pieces off to write on (shopping lists, I think).  Then she figured out that it would be fun to have me hold the roll while she pulled the paper across the entire room.  She pulled the whole roll off in very long pieces, then put them in a pile and spent at least half an hour picking the pile up and throwing it in the air like autumn leaves and generally reveling in the mess.  At the moment she's taking several shorter pieces and bundling them together to make a bouquet of flowers. 

Unfortunately I do not have a hack for cleaning up the mess.

New Crafting Space

And by "new", of course, I mean that I've lived here and had the room put together for 5 months but I'm just now getting around to posting photos.

 

[Car. Driveway.]

My fabulous husband insists that I have a crafting room*.  A family of three should normally be able to get along just fine in a two-bedroom, but not us!  We picked this house because it has a nice double living room (all the way).  The converted garage is off the main living room.  The high ceilings and big window make it pretty much perfect for holding all my crafting stuff without it looking like a cave.  And since it's right next to the living room, Lucy doesn't seem to mind as much when I work while she's playing or watching TV. 

We did, however, have to get a little creative with the toddler-proofing...

[Toy Shelf + Baby Gate + Filing Cabinet]

[The curtains are to keep our warm gas heater air out of the rafters at night.]

Before we moved, I got rid of my sewing table, one small bookshelf, and a set of plastic drawers.  And when we got here, we put the Britney shelf in the storage/mud room -- that room needed it more than I did.  To compensate for some lost storage space, I made what is possibly the tallest stack of under-the-bed Rubbermaid containers in the world, or at least in Humboldt County.

All full of different types of fabric. I think my corduroy collection is taking up three of those...

I can't really complain about the layout -- I have enough space, and I can see all my supplies pretty well.  My only problem is lighting (the room has no built-in lighting), which I could fix if I weren't such a cheapskate.  I think I need one of these.

 

[Squeee! Yes, those are old, giant, pull-down classroom maps standing up in the corner! Updates when I finally make the project I have in mind for them. (Thanks, Dad!)]

Sometimes I have visions of rigging up a pulley system to hoist my lightbox up into the high ceiling and out of my way. Probly not gonna happen.

[George!]

If you absolutely must have more photos of this and my other crafting spaces, I have a Flickr album of them here.  And if you want to see tons of other photos of other people's awesome craft rooms, you should search "craft room" on Flickr.




*His reasons are three fourfold:
1.) I have a calling to craft (and I enjoy it, and I'm good at it).
2.) I have a tendency to... acquire, which is curbed by having to keep it all in one room.
3.) He doesn't want to put up with my projects being scattered all over the house.
4.) (Added by him before press time, and I quote:) "I like the moneys!"
So as you can see, it's a mixture of encouragement, tough love, and selfishness.  I'll take it!

Jessie Lyman's Journals, Part 8

I previously introduced you to my great-great grandmother, Jessie Lyman Eckert.  You can read the first post here, and subsequent post are filed under

Jessie Lyman was born January 2, 1877.  She graduated from Westport High School (Westport, MO, now part of Kansas City) in 1897 at the head of her class.  From what I have read of her diaries so far, it appears she went on to teach school for a couple years in Columbia, MO.  She married Herman Eckert in June of 1899.  On July 26, 1900, she died giving birth to twins Conrad and Cornelia at the age of 22.  Conrad is my mother's mother's father.

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Mon, Nov. 8th [1897]

The rain continued almost all day. I had only twelve pupils. Jasper Jacobs broke his leg today. Celia is better, but I think she will never be well.

Tues, Nov. 9th

Aunt Florence and I called on Miss Lena Wilson this evening. We had a very pleasant time. Miss Lena's paintings are beautiful.

Wed, Nov. 10th

I sent for a new dress skirt today. It is very pretty. I will begin work on it as soon as possible.
I am learning a new song with the guitar.
I must get to bed and rest for tomorrow's work. The time goes fast, yet slowly also.

Thurs, Nov 11

I did not get a pattern, so was not able to begin on my dress today. I am teaching several of the older girls a song for Xmas.

Friday, Nov. 12

I spent about half an hour training the children today. Three of the little boys are doing finely.
Mr. Scott and Imogene came to bring me a pattern today, and spent the evening. He is so funny. It does me good to have him come.

Sat, Nov. 13

I began work on my dress today, and got along very well. I could only spend half the day on it, as I wanted to call on Lillie Phillips in the afternoon. I had a pleasant call, and found Mrs. Phillips very nice. We stopped to see how Celia Jacobs was as we came home. She is worse. Jasper is doing as well as could be expected.
John Wilson called this evening. He is very sociable.

Sunday, Nov. 14

It threatened rain today so I couldn't go to church this morning. I wanted to see Forest, so Clarence took me this evening. I spent most of the day in writing. I have all my letters answered now.

Mon. (Oct.) Nov. 15

This has been a rainy day. Francis took me to school in the road cart. Rollie scared at a hog and broke the shaft.
I walked home this evening.

Tues, Nov. 16

Nothing of importance happened today. I am working on my new dress skirt.

Wed, Nov 17

Still at my sewing. I think it will be very pretty.

Thurs, Nov 18

All my days seem alike -- rise at 6 o'clock, start for school at 7:30, ring the bell at 8:30, and spend the rest of the day in trying to instil into the verdant minds of the Strawn School, the principles of "Readin' 'Ritin' and 'Rithmetic."

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Isn't that the way?  I hate it when I get in ruts and feel like that.

There is a Strawn Road in Columbia, Mo.

Cookie Dinner!

A couple months ago, Lucy kept talking about eating cookies for dinner.  I suspect it had something to do with watching Sesame Street every day.  But it got me thinking -- wouldn't that be fun? To have cookies for dinner?  So I asked my Facebook friends what kind of well-rounded foods could be made to look like cookies, and I got some great responses.  And I filed them away (in my brain).

Well, this week I pulled them out.  I knew Lucy and I would need some fun while Norman is away at a conference.  So, I present to you, Cookie Dinner!

[Lucy took this one of me. She's getting pretty good!]

[Actually saying "Cheeeeese!"]

First, in the afternoon, we made a project of making these healthy chocolate chip cookies.  They turned out really good!  The amazing thing about these cookies is that they don't take any sugar.  The bananas act as sugar and (I suspect) as egg, as well.  (They're also gluten free if you use GF oats.)

[Gives her a hobby...]

We ran into a little trouble when I decided to use frozen bananas.  Everything was going fine!  I remembered to take them out of the freezer to thaw while we ran errands, and frozen bananas that have been thawed are practically already mashed, so that was nice.  But the recipe calls for slightly warmed coconut oil, so that it's a liquid.  Wellll.... coconut oil solidifies at 76 degrees F, so when it hit those semi-frozen bananas, it just chunked back up.  I kind of mashed up some of the oil pieces, and microwaved it a little, but in the end I had to add a little extra olive oil to get it wet enough to stick together.  But the cookies turned out great!  They kind of remind me of those little bite-sized cookies from Paradise Bakery, except that they kind of taste like banana.

So in addition to actual cookies, we also had...

Roasted potato slices with ketchup frosting

 

and sour cream frosting and bacon sprinkles

And slices of havarti cheese, cut out with cookie cutters, topped with pear slices.

It was all pretty tasty!  I highly recommend the potatoes with sour cream frosting and bacon sprinkles.  I just sliced up a couple potatoes and roasted them in the oven with olive oil and a little salt and garlic powder.  Yum!

Lucy seems to have had fun.  I mean, she ate some of everything!  And it was a nice creative outlet for me.  So I'd say Cookie Dinner gets a B+.  (Points off for my lack of presentation. It's just who I am.)