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Black-capped Chickadee and Iris by A E Ruffing

Black-capped Chickadee and Iris by A E RuffingI painted this familiar bird looking alert and inquisitive, the way I often see him in the garden. He’s a striking little bird, and I think the soft mauves of the iris make him look all the more dramatic, with his sharply-contrasted blacks and whites and grays. I set him against a pale yellow sky, with a deep blue-shadowed tree and distant woods of golds, greens, mauves, and blues behind him.

Black-capped Chickadee and Iris by A E Ruffing“Black-capped Chickadee and Iris” is an original watercolor painting. I am making a limited number of reproductions of this image as a signed giclée print as well, which may be ordered by emailing us at [email protected]

This is what the 8 1/2 by 11 print might look like framed without a mat. (A mat and frame are not included.)

Black-capped Chickadee and Iris by A E Ruffing

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Stranded

I’ve been hitting some snags with the new doll pattern I’ve been designing, but I’ve had plenty of time to sort them out. My car overheated for the second time in a month or so, and I’ve been stranded here for days. On a positive note, it overheated around the corner from the place that usually tows it for me. I drove at a crawl to the nearest parking lot, not even sure where I was on the back roads, and that lot just happened to be the towing place. Pretty lucky. It turns out I’ve had a hole in my radiator that went unnoticed the last time. So, I am even more fortunate that I didn’t get stranded while coming home at night along one of those new and very convenient, but very much unpopulated, stretches of highway here in the past of couple weeks when it’s been 106 degrees to boot.

I’ve been lucky so far with the car problems. The only flat tire I’ve ever had happened this summer too…right across from a car dealership, with an attached tire repair shop. And then there were The Pliers From Heaven a couple of months ago. I was driving under an overpass on my way to coffee, and heard something very loud hit the car. My first thought was that someone had thrown a rock off the overpass, but I didn’t see anyone in my rear view mirror. I didn’t see any dents when I got out of the car either. Later, after coming out of the coffee shop, I saw my windshield wiper looked rusty. On closer inspection, I saw that wasn’t my wiper at all, but a pair of heavy pliers.

They are about a foot long, and they had landed maybe one inch below my windshield, on the driver’s side. I think they must have been stopped by the grate below the wipers because they didn’t even move. The ends curl downward, and they must have dipped into the grate. Not a scratch anywhere. And they didn’t kill me, which is the best part of all.

I reached for the nearest thing to place the pliers on so the rust wouldn’t get on anything. When I got home, I realized it was an old church program with the hymn “Blest Are They” on it.

Say what you will about Princess Maertha Louise, but you’ve got to wonder.

I also went back to blond.

A little sad.

Not so sad.

No, not sad, not really. Unless we look at these in reverse.

But it’s better this way, I think.

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Soft pretzels

While working on a new doll pattern today, I had a mad, desperate craving for soft pretzels, the kind you buy from street vendors in NYC. I was frantically looking for a recipe, going through my pile of cookbooks, until I finally found one in Beth Hensperger’s The Bread Lover’s Bread Machine Cookbook.

I loaded up my bread machine, forgetting to put the paddle in the pan so that it sounded like it was kneading the dough, when it was really doing nothing. I’ve been a bit spacey lately. Fortunately, I checked on the dough in time to reach in and insert the paddle.

After the dough finished the bread dough cycle in the machine, I shaped it into pretzels, left the pretzels to rise a second time, then boiled each one in a couple quarts of water with two tablespoons of baking soda for about a minute each. This is what makes them chewy.

I brushed them with an egg white beaten with a tablespoon of water, sprinkled them with Kosher salt, and put them in a 400 degree oven for about sixteen minutes until they were golden.

Then…carbohydrate relief. Sigh.

A similar recipe can be found here.

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“The Cow Jumped Over the Moon” One-of-a-kind Art Quilt

Over the weekend I took out a couple of projects that were in need of a small amount of work to be “finished”. I made this nursery quilt back in 2004, when we were having another hot August. It was entirely done by hand. I drew the illustration, traced it onto freezer paper, hand appliquéd the pieces on, and then hand stitched all the blocks and strips together. The one thing I stopped short of doing were the hand-embroidered eyes and nostrils on the cow, and my hand-embroidered signature. This is what I finished over the weekend. It is a glorious thing to behold really, so colorful and cheerful.