Year: 2020

gift & crafting ideas for the holidays Wk. 48/49

Published by fairfaxhill

Thanksgiving week kept us pretty busy. We cooked a lot and did lots of dishes. How was your Thanksgiving? Do you celebrate this holiday? I also worked on my Tawny pullover, which is almost finished. This post was supposed to go up yesterday, so we’ll have to change the format a bit. This works, because now I have more time to prepare next week’s idea roundup. Here are some things that caught my eye this week: 1) I cannot get enough of Anthropologie’s holiday decor. The ornaments of a cute tiger skiing and a poodle wearing glasses jumped out at me as something to collect. I love, love things made of wool and these felted animals are SUPER CUTE! It’s making me want to get this book about felting to give it a try. How fun! 2) A holiday tradition I’ve always loved, but haven’t always practiced at home, is baking and decorating gingerbread houses. This year, however, it is one thing I really want to do with the kids. I found a great tutorial …

overhead shot of mashed potatoes, stuffing and cranberry sauce

Thanksgiving at Our House for the Very First Time

Published by fairfaxhill

I hadn’t realized I was stressed out about Thanksgiving dinner this year until around three in the morning on Thursday when thoughts of all the different recipes we would have to prepare to pull off the meal interrupted my sleep abruptly. In 20-plus years, Patrick and I had yet to cook a whole Thanksgiving feast on our own. Can you believe our kids (14 and 16) had never had Thanksgiving at home? This year was going to be “a first,” and I wanted it to be super special. I still had to go to the store in the morning to get the apples for the pie and the ingredients for the salad I would be making. (They wouldn’t run out of apples in the middle of autumn, would they?) I had followed Samin Nosrat’s recipe for her famous buttermilk turkey to a T and was crossing my fingers that we’d all love it. To get my mind off of dinner, I grabbed some yarn and needles. I decided to learn how to knit a miniature …

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november plans and ideas – wk.47

Published by fairfaxhill

I was thinking this morning, that on a typical week I find so many ideas for projects I want to try, that I have trouble keeping track of them all. I keep a paper journal where I save photos of things I’d like to make, names of websites I stumble upon and want to revisit, recipes I think we’ll love, gift ideas, etc. My paper journals are complemented with apps like Evernote and Pinterest, and quick snapshots saved on my phone. So, today I had an idea. What if I gave myself a recurring task to review my notes once a week, and select my favorite things to share with you? I got this idea from reading this article on creativity, which I revisit often and has inspired me to try other things like drawing and thinking up my own knitting patterns. I will comb through all my notes every weekend and share them on the blog on Sundays. This will a) motivate me to write more often, b) give all my favorite notes a …

muffin and coffee cup

quick strawberry muffins

Published by fairfaxhill

Today, my plan was to drive out to Pt. Reyes to get coffee and pastries at the Bovine Bakery, by far my favorite bakery in Marin. Before heading out, I did something I rarely do. I called to make sure they were open. No luck, closed. This is something I learned from Patrick. When we first moved to Marin, I would often come home after going out shopping and complain about all the different stores I had needed to drive to to finally find the thing I was looking for. To what he always replied, “Why didn’t you call the store before you left?” It had never occurred to me to call a store to ask if they had something I needed before leaving my house, but it really saves so much time. I think that this is something people don’t do in Costa Rica. Do they? It seems so simple. Do you have fresh halibut today? Do you sell turmeric? Easy, right? But, to be honest, I think that my impulse to call the …