Butter!

With "Pioneer Week" we dyed muslin with vegetables (note: if you're ever stricken with the desire to dye like they did in olden days, stay away from beets. The water is a gorgeous color, but it rinses right out! Now, blueberries are a different story. . .) and we made butter! The sample you see above was made by simply shaking heavy cream in a jar for about 7 minutes. It would have been a much more enjoyable project had the Girl helped shake, or even been able to tear her eyes from whatever episode of "Wow Wow Wubbsy" was on, but I thought it was keen. I packed the butter and bonus buttermilk away in the fridge, and am scared to ingest either one of them. This is because I am, as you know, well--me. But I'll tell you, it made me feel like Ma Ingalls on steroids.Here you see my labor-intensive yet low-yielding veggie factory, as well as the muslin squares that we washed in the "stream" just like pioneers. ("Stream" = a bowl of soapy water and the squirty attachment on the hose.) We were taking advantage of the sun, which in Texas sits about 20 feet above the treetops, to dry them. The first three batches burst into flames. The plan is to make a quilt out of them, but I don't know if that's going to happen. We have three left to dye, and I've run out of options for natural colorants. We used onion skins for an orange color, blueberries for a purplish color, and beets for a mottled pinkish effect. I suppose we could tea-dye the final three, but I was hoping for a more exciting color than brown. We tried spinach for green, and that washed right out, as did the orange beets, too. Maybe I should just open a vein.

So Pioneer week didn't go much of anywhere, so I'm going to try an Ancient Egypt thing next, in keeping with the Girl's decision to be Cleopatra for Halloween this year. Given that I fully expect to overdo it again, I've begun looking for instructions to make a collar necklace out of safety pins and beads all over the interweb, and seriously, I think it's gone wherever things like missing socks and Jimmy Hoffa go. In fact, I suspect Jim's wearing one right now. I have no real plans for this Egypt thing, although I'm guessing at some point, we'll make a mummy and sarcophagus, and maybe fool around with heiroglyphics. Ooh, and make some yummy Egyptian food!

Stay tuned. . . I have a metric buttload (yes, that IS a technical term) of incipient projects--watch them all come to fruition here. Or not.