New Stilting Costume for 2015

It all started when Krista suggested I wear my black puffy shirt (now known as my pirate blouse) for my next stilting gig at a Skeleton Park Arts Festival-related event. Okay, but what's the costume? Within seconds were were mentally compiling a list of items we already had that could make up a pirate costume: lace-up shirt, striped tank top, head scarf, earring, waist sash, replica musket, red stilting pants that could be cinched up to reveal the bottom two-thirds of one stilt as a "peg leg."

But what I really needed was a sword.

I didn't even once consider buying a toy; I knew this would be a scratch-build assignment for Small Pond's Special Project Division.

My first step was to draw out the blade to make sure the sizing was good. That drawing on paper then became my template for one half of the blade.

Using a push-pin, I poked holes, tracing the drawing. There are other ways to transfer the drawing onto cardboard, but I felt this was the best way, if not the fastest.

The pin method worked perfectly and my blade was able to go from dot to dot easily.

I used the first cut-out to trace the other side of the blade (the "grain" (or ribbing) of one half going the opposite direction from the other...for strength). 

I did a mock-up of the hand guard with paper to get the sizing and placement of the slots right.

After refining the drawing I simply placed the paper onto the cardboard, traced the slots, then used the push-pin method to give me a dotted line to cut along.

The grain of the cardboard didn't match up to the direction I wanted it to bend, so I used a metal ruler to make hard, evenly-spaced creases. 

Test assembly.

I hot glued the two halves of the blade together after making sure everything fit together nicely and looked good. So far, everything is going as planned.

The next day I mixed up some flour and water in a pot over heat to make my paste and got to work with the papier-maché phase.

(image severely photoshopped for clarity)

It took about a day to fully dry, but I had time and din't want or need to rush anything.

The first coat of paint I applied was a gloss black. I thought this would help with the sheen of the metallic paints I would add later, but I'm not sure it had any real effect. Next time I'll use a dark primer instead of gloss.

I painted the blade first then, when it was dry, I masked it off and painted the hand guard and hilt. I was going to paint the hilt brown, but time was running out and the gold was fine –especially since I'd be holding it, covering it up.

When it was done, Krista and I took some photos of the costume while we worked out any problems that needed adjustment or correction.

Cheeky.

You can clearly see the streaks the silver paint made while drying, but it's not too horrific. I may repaint the blade and paint the hilt brown for my next gig later this summer.

Peg leg.

Ignoring the mirroring of many features (and the lack of a lidded stein), the final costume is quite close to my initial doodle:

It's like an outtake from a horribly over-saturated print of a 1970s Sinbad movie.

Barn Quilt

Barn quilt and bonus dog, Harvey.

Some time last winter I got an email from Pat Dubyk telling me that she was trying to start up a barn quilt trail in Prince Edward County. I had never heard of barn quilts before, but a quick image searched turned up hundreds of examples. A barn quilt is a large piece of wood that is painted to look like a quilt block and mounted on a barn or other building.

I ran into Pat this spring and during the course of our conversation I started thinking about a quilt that was made by my maternal great-grandmother, Luella May Dutton (Barker). I remember this quilt as a staple object from my childhood, my mother tells me it was given to us around 1973. 

Sitting on great-grandma's quilt, left to right:
Me, my cousins Aaron, Joelle and Christopher,
family friend Kristen(?),and my cousin Deanna.
I suspect this may have been at a birthday party.

After not having seen the quilt for a decade or more, it recently turned up in my life again. My youngest sister Caitlin gave it to me last year, as she was moving to Sweden and didn’t want to take it with her. The quilt is in pretty bad shape now, with almost all of the patches missing. My mother explains, “Some of the fabric was decades old, some of it belonging to my Great Grandmother, Lillian May Barker (Luno) which was why some of the fabric sections did not hold up well, and deteriorated rather quickly. It was customary in “those days”, to stock pile fabric, as there was always a quilt on the loom being worked on. Some fabric could sit for many years before being worked into a quilt.”

It turns out the pattern on the quilt is known as Grandmother’s Fan. I had a pattern. We have a barn. We clearly had to make a barn quilt!

Milé designed the pattern in Photoshop:

Although many barn quilts are only one block, we thought it would be more interesting to do a 4-block square due to the large amount of negative space in the design. I primed the 4’ x 4’ board with exterior paint, and Milé penciled the pattern in.

I used green painters' tape to mask off all the square lines. Although I’m pretty good painting freehand, I wanted the lines to be really crisp. We always have lots of latex paint on hand, so that’s what I used, doing several coats of each colour. Finally I sealed it with a spray sealant.

The finished quilt, installed on our barn.

This photo of my great-grandmother was taken by the garage of her home in Mt. Elgin, Ontario. I remember playing at her house as a small child. I loved banging away on her piano and sifting through her tin of buttons. Her house had such a distinct smell, and there were always interesting things to discover: wind-up toys, shelves of Reader's Digest magazines, a crocheted Barbie toilet paper cover, and a tin of date squares or cookies awaiting appreciative visitors.

My great-grandma passed away in 2001. Our barn quilt is dedicated to her.

We're quite happy with it, and I think my Great-Grandma would be proud.

Scalloped Potatoes & Pineapple Upside-Down Cake

My main goal of these food-based Special Projects is to learn how to bake –initially focusing on some of my favourite foods from my childhood– and, having now covered most of them, it was time to start learning some of Krista's faves. I'd made scalloped potatoes before, so most of my learning this time around was still cake-based.

Marriage.

The potato recipe I used last time was fairly basic (potatoes, cheese, seasonings, and a cream sauce), but something like this seems naked without onions...and mushrooms go very well with onions, especially when they cook down together over low heat.

Chips?

Back in the 90s I worked at The Shopping Channel and actually bought a few items that I still use today, including a mandoline. Every time I use this thing, I'm impressed with how fast, efficient, and easy it is.

Chip?

Look how thin this is! I sliced up about seven or eight potatoes faster and thinner than I ever could with a knife.

Handy! But sharp!

Make sure to use that safety cowboy hat thing or you might hurt yourself. I know from experience (and three stitches). Please note: that's not blood, that's oxidized potato juice.

First base, part one.

While the onions and mushrooms continued to cook down, I started the assembly.

Cheesy.

We had a little bit of zucchini in the fridge, so I added what was left before adding the first cheese layer.

Shiny!

On another layer of potatoes went the onions and mushrooms. Then, on yet another layer of potatoes, I added some cheese of the La vache qui rit variety. I believe it's hard to overdo the cheese on so many dishes and usually feel there isn't enough. There's also parmesan sprinkled throughout.

Bonus.

Here's the addition that Krista's mom made to customize this dish: breakfast sausages. I browned them after the onions were done, but probably should have put them on a lower layer for easier stacking. Maybe next time.

Ready to bake, part one.

One last layer of cheddar on top, sprinkled with some parmesan, bread crumbs, and oregano, and it was ready for the oven.

Golden.

Just over an hour at 350° later, it was ready, but there was no time to sit around, I had a cake to bake! As soon as the potatoes went in the oven, I started the cake process...

Return of The Specialist.

Until the day my hands give out and I can't sufficiently mix my cake ingredients with that tool, I'll have no need for a mechanical mixer.

First base, part two.

Slices of pineapple decorated with maraschino cherries atop melted butter and brown sugar is one of the easiest and most retro-looking bakery-based things I've ever done.

Let's take a closer look:

Retro.

It looks like something from a 1970s American cookbook. And I like it.

By hand.

I suppose I could whisk most of the stuff I use The Specialist for, but I like it too much and it gets the job done.

Ready to bake, part two.

Coincidentally, the cake also needed to bake at 350°, and it timed out perfectly after the prep and dish washing; the cake went in as the potatoes came out.

Golden.

As though baking itself wasn't challenging enough for me, there was a curveball here I had to successfully hit: flip the cake so that the pineapple is on top (something I might have seriously messed up when I was first experimenting with baking as an adolescent and failing horribly at it, which steered me away from the practice for decades).

Flipped!

The flipping worked! We don't yet have an appropriate serving plate for a cake this big, so I just used a cookie sheet to flip and serve. I don't think I'd ever had this before, so it was hard for me to judge its success –other than it was quite tasty– but Krista was happy (with both dishes), so that was good enough for me.

The recipe I used for the cake is from Sally's Baking Addiction. I might try others just for variety down the road.

Layer Cake with Lemon Filling

After recently having taught myself to make lokumi (AKA Turkish Delight) and maznik, I felt the next food-from-my-childhood I should take on via the Small Pond Arts Special Projects Division* was some form of lemon cake. I remember my mother baking very simple, but tasty, lemon cakes, sometimes even for my birthday (see the photos from 1974 below –or maybe 1973, sometimes my parents would add an extra candle for good luck) and, even though this type of cake wasn't as ubiquitous as lokum and maznik and graf (a lovely, rich bean soup I learned to make a few years ago), I felt that, having found the photos below, it was a significant enough part of my early childhood that I should give it a try.

Behind me, L-R: unknown lady, my cousin, his dad.

(my head's almost as big as that balloon)

When I was an adolescent, somewhere around 11-13 years old, I was learning how to make simple foods. My good friend, Chris, showed me how to make omelettes and I felt quite skilled, cracking the eggs, chopping the onions, and laying down the processed cheese slices, making a nice meal for myself. Eventually, over the years, my cooking repertoire grew, inspired by TV cooks Stephen Yan, Martin Yan (no relation), and Graham Kerr. Nothing sophisticated, but I liked the idea of playing with ingredients, experimenting, confident in the knowledge that it's kind of hard to mess up a pasta dish.

That's my dad, standing. Judging by the awesome framing, my mom must have been taking the pictures.

At some point, while still a young adolescent, I tried my hand at baking, not knowing that it was a precise science reliant on specific chemistry to do the work. I think I tried making a cake, but I'm not sure what I did wrong (maybe it was undercooked and/or I messed up the icing and/or a whole assortment of other possible failings). Anyway, after trying and failing at a few other baking projects, my confidence was shattered and I was more or less put off baking for a very long time (focusing more on –and getting better at– cooking other, non-bakery things). That's why these projects mean so much to me.

Behind me L-R: my cousin, her mom, my dad.

Having lemon cake on my mind (but not looking for the specific kind my mother made) I did a Google search and picked a lemon cake that looked delicious and challenging. I picked one from a blog by Shauna Sever where you can marvel at the amazing cake she made, as well as see the ingredients and instructions I used here.

Springy!

My first springform pan. I like it a lot.

Improvise!

The directions were to use a powered mixer, but we don't have one, so I used a tool normally used for making pie crusts. It worked perfectly for mixing my dry ingredients with the butter.

Still good...

I added the wet ingredients to the dry, still using the pie crust tool, still working perfectly.

Batter!

Yes, I sampled it, and yes, it tasted really good. Now to pour it all in the pan. The recipe called to split the batter in two and use two pans (making two cakes, which would give you four layers), but I only have this one big pan...for now.

Loaded!

So far, so good. Except for the improvised mixing tool and the not-splitting-the-batter part, and using all-purpose flour instead of cake flour, I haven't veered from the recipe or directions.

Curd!

I made this a couple of days earlier, but had to pause because I didn't have nearly enough eggs for the batter. Then something else interrupted me on the next day, but it kept very well in the fridge and it turned out nicely, too.

Baked!

Because I put it on one big pan, it took about twice as long to cook (Krista gave me guidance and kept me calm). Nearly an hour later, it wasn't jiggling and the knife came out of the cake clean.

Icing!

While the cake cooled for a couple of hours, I prepared some very simple icing using icing sugar, vanilla, milk, and butter. Surprisingly easy.

Cooled & cut.

Here we are, pre-assembly, everything still going well, so far. I knew early on that I'd have one big cake with two layers instead of a smaller one with four layers, but I was okay with that.
I spread the lemon curd on the bottom layer on the right and put the top on, making it ready to be iced.

Iced!

Sure, that icing was surprisingly simple, but I made a rookie mistake: my first (perfect) batch only covered the top, so I made a second batch for the sides...but added a touch too much milk and it got all runny (and I didn't have the presence of mind to just add more sugar to thicken it up). This was the kind of mistake that kept me from baking all these years.

Regardless, various shortcomings aside, I think it turned out okay. The cake itself had a nice sort of crust that concentrates the flavour so well and the inside was soft and...cakey. It was a bit of mess cutting it and plating it, but flavour-wise, it was a success.

Next up might be a chocolate cake...
Maybe pineapple upside-down cake...





*created to cover strange, unusual, dangerous, and potentially catastrophic assignments outside of normal Small Pond operations.