Saturday, December 18, 2010

Easy Gift Idea: Cloth Napkins or Dish Towels

While shopping at IKEA, I stumbled into their fabulous fabric selection and couldn't help myself with this one. It just reminded me so much of the kitchen.

I bought a yard of it, prewashed it of course, and cut it into 12 pieces. I measured one of the cloth napkins we regularly use against the size it would be and concluded it would be big enough.

Then I hemmed all four sides on each piece, and added a woven label to each. For the corners, I folded them over the other side instead of mitering.

If you are an avid reader of my blog, you will notice this same technique used for burp cloths (in flannel) and baby blankets (in fleece, flannel, or cotton). It is only the size of the material that differs. Yeah, and other posts on dish towels and cloth napkins.
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Sunday, December 12, 2010

Kids' Meal Idea: Salad Wraps

Early on, we leanred that making something into a "taco" was an almost-sure way to get our child to eat something. I haven't been resorting to tortillas lately, but found these rice paper wrappers in the pantry the other day.




They are hard-- then you dip them on a plate of hot water to soften, then put the good stuff inside, and roll it up. An easy (and tasty) way to make that food a hit.
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Friday, December 10, 2010

Book Review: Radical Homemakers by Shannon Hayes

I was recommended this book by a friend, who described it as a bunch of case studies of  moms who were staying at home but doing a lot of tasks themselves like sewing and cooking and raising chickens.  She said these women were changing the world by radically making their houses into homes.

I found it at the library, and didn't mind spending the time reading it, but didn't really learn anything worthy of note.

The first half of the book was an interesting history of women and men and their roles in keeping house and how the industrial revolution and then feminism changed people's ideas of these places.

The second half of the book was her take on what she learned by interviewing twenty families.  She analyzed her interviews and broke them into similarities and then illustrated each of her qualities with quotes from her interviews.

She gave longer summaries of each family as an appendix.

I found the first half too long and slightly repetitive (although interesting), and the second half did not go deep enough.  I found it hard to keep the families apart, and really wanted to get to know them better.  I read the appendix about the families, and didn't learn much more about them than the tidbits she had mentioned earlier in the book.  I felt like the whole book was a teaser for actually getting a view into the lives of these people.  Instead the reader got the author's analysis dotted with a few quotes.

I don't really recommend this book.  I love the concept, but the execution lacked depth. Pin It

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