Monday, October 17, 2011

Lalalalaaaaa!!

Here I am again, late, but better late than never, right?  You see, it's been another busy few weeks.  Last week some awesome people here in Halifax made a short film and I got to cook for the crew.  I've catered a few short films around town now, but this is the first one I got to do where I didn't use any meat!  Woohoo, vegetarian food.  Funnily enough, I am a carnivore myself, but as a cook I consider vegetarian food sort of my speciality.  


MC, the producer of the film is a good friend of mine and we went grocery shopping and got all kinds of goodies, and the next day, JP, another good friend of mine came over to my place and we drank two bottles of wine and did lots of prep and cooked two huge soups and a batch of chili.  We made a yellow lentil and roasted corn with chipotle soup, a butternut squash soup and of course a vegetarian chili.  (A few years back I was the chef a a little restaurant here in Halifax and I used to call the chili Helen's Super Magic Vegetarian Chili because we always found people were more intrigued by things with odd names and the addition of the word "magic" had them...well, eating it up.)  


Anyway, so far as I could tell, the food and the shoot were a success, so congrats to the cast and crew.  It was nice to be on set again as it's been a while, and it was really great working with JP, so I hope all the filmmaking veg-heads will brag about our soups and we'll get to do more cooking.  I wish I could say I had thought about taking pictures of the grub and the mess my kitchen was in after the our cooking spree, but you'll just have to take my word for it that it all went down as I say and that that is my excuse for not posting last week.  Excuses, excuses.  I know.


Soooo, this week I made a pillow!  






A while back I was strolling through a fairly typical store at a local mall when a t-shirt on the wall caught my eye.    It wasn't the style, for that was quite boring; it was the cool black and white photo of a bicycle that was printed on the shirt that intrigued me and, for some reason, had me immediately wanting to make a pillow with it.  Turned out the store was having a crazy end of season sale and I got the shirt for, like, $3.  Bonus!  


Soooo, I took the shirt home, cut the printed part off and there it sat until a couple days ago when I decided it was finally time.  I've had this lovely turquoise linen forever and made it into a scarf ages ago which never got worn, so I thought now was also the time to make use of that.  I went ahead and just folded the scarf and sewed around the edges to make it the correct size for the pillow form I was using, then all I did was center the photo and sew it on.  In hindsight I should have sewed the picture on first as it got a little tricky to keep things straight when I got so far inside the pillow, but it turned out alright.  I used the zig-zag stitch to create a border around the outside and I left the edges of the photo a little ragged and sewed outside the lines to maintain a sort of unpolished look.   I really like making pillows and will probably make more really soon as I have a bunch of funky ideas.


Ugh, it's such a glum day outside my window!  






I wish I didn't have to go out to work soon and I could just stay inside our cozy place and make pillows and listen to more Steve Bowers for the rest of the day.  Don't know him? Geeze, well get on that will ya??


http://www.myspace.com/stevenbowers

He's a local singer/song-writer extraordinaire who is coming out with a new album called Beothuk Words this month which is really exciting as his album Homing is pretty much my new favorite record in the world.  I find his songs inspiring so check him out!

Ok then, well off to the day job for me.  Till next time kids!  Behave yourselves...or not!