new year's traditions

the past three weeks marty and i spent in hawai'i with my family for the holidays. and while we were enjoying ourselves and even doing radical domestic stuff, i couldn't bring myself to sit in front of the computer to blog about it. but now we're home and so it's time to catch up on the vacay postings.

we'll start with mochi pounding.


mochitsuki, the pounding and making of mochi, is a japanese new year's tradition, and my family joins our closest friends on kaua'i each year before the new year to pound it out and roll it up.


the process starts the day before, soaking the mochi rice overnight. after soaking, the mochi rice is put into the seiro, a series wooden steaming frames, and steamed.

the hot cooked rice is then put into the usu, a big carved stone bowl, where it is pounded with a kine or wooden mallet. typically three mochi pounders go to work first smashing and then pounding the mochi in rhythm.


the job is then finished up by one pounder while one adept person with quick hands scrapes the sticky mochi from the sides of the bowl between pounds with the mallet.


when the mochi has reached optimum consistency it's delivered to a wax paper and katakuriko , potato starch - covered table where the mochi gets made. one person pinches off little balls of mochi and the others form, pinching and patting them in their hands into the proper mochi shape.

some mochi are made with an, adzuki bean paste, in the center. we've also branched out to non-traditional but oh-so-tasty varieties like chocolate-peanut buter filled mochi.

most of the mochi are made into standard palm-sized confections, with a few batches made into special sizes for new year's traditions, such the tiny mochi balls used for ozoni, a soup made with mochi. also, special mochi are made for the kagami mochi, a traditional new year's decoration and offering made with one smaller mochi atop a larger mochi, which is then topped with a mandarin orange with the leaf attached.


the kagami takes its place near the entrance to the home at new year's time along with the kadomatsu, an arrangement of bamboo, pine and flowers that sybolize good luck for the coming year.
my family spends new year's eve with our friends, eating traditional good luck foods, such as toshikoshi soba (yeah, buckwheat!) and lighting off fireworks. our established tradition in the past few years is to build what we call a "morning glory circle" around our fire pit in the front yard. this tradition started one year when we had a few boxes of those fireworks called morning glories, which resemble sparklers but have the added effect of popping off sparks and being a little more firey. bored with the typical use of holding and drawing shapes in the air with these sticks, we planted them in a circle and lit the whole thing on fire. this was great fun, and each year the amount of boxes of morning glories showing up at our house multiplied exponentially, such that the circle of planted morning glories is now feet deep and the fire produced at midnight when we light the circle resembles something nuclear. here are some images of this year's circle, which we built in the back since the front yard was too saturated from weeks of rain.

happy new year.

dragonfly quilt complete

the dragonfly quilt is finally finished!
i spent a fair amount of time the past week doing the finishing stitching - both by machine and by hand and i'm so pleased with how it turned out. allow me to share some pictures with you.
i decided to outline the paper pieced dragonfly squares to set them off a bit.


here's the initials piece in context:


marty and i designed a stitching pattern for the middle based on the thunderbolt design of payton's home and the colors of the four directions. i initially did this by machine, but took it out in favor of hand stitching.


here's some of the stippling stitching i did with the free-motion darning foot on my bernette - very fun, it makes the dragonflies pop out in a nice puffy way.


as per marty's suggestion, some of the dragonflies and other bugs got little bee-line trails stitched behind them.
other blocks got outlines inside them.


even the back looks exciting. you can really see the stitching that i did in darker colors to match the quilt top.


here's the bias binding, stitched by hand on the back side, of course.


i was convinced to sign this quilt, something i've never done in previous quilts, but it seemed like a nice idea.


i made two quilted potholders for payton's mama as well.


the quilt and potholders got packaged up and sent out today - hope they like them!

soup to nuts

or rather veggie waste to soup stock.
sele and i share a CSA (community supported agriculture) veggie box from the terra firma farm - check out their website for some cute farmin' bulldogs pictures. meaning we have a sort of veggie subscription to this local farm and they bring fresh vegetables into oakland once a week for us to enjoy.
our household has been greatly improved both by the CSA share and by the addition of our curbside recycling pail (thanks, oakland). and this week i'm excited to share my one step further in the direction of reducing waste and serving up deliciousness in the form of homemade vegetable stock.
i notice that with each meal i prepare there is a fair amount of vegetable matter that goes to waste - those stems and trimmings that are edible but i'm just not going to put in the effort to make them taste good. so i started a tupperware container in my fridge to keep the trimmings in until i have enough to make soup stock. i wasn't sure if they would accumulate fast enough to make soup, so i labeled the container "veggie stock or compost" - i'm a labeling maniac - and figured nothing lost if they started getting soggy before i had enough to make a decent pot of stock. i was surprized at how quickly that container filled up, and today i took advantage of the chill in the air to warm up and aromafy the house with some simmering stock.
over the course of this week i had accumulated: some beet stems (i ate the beets and the greens, but the stems were a little tough), red chard stems, broccoli stems, and cilantro stems, to which i added two small onions, about 6 whole cloves of garlic, some black peppercorns, two carrots (terra firma makes some darn good carrots), and a sprinkle of salt, thyme, and chili powder.

i left all those things simmering in a big pot of water for a couple of hours, and then turned off the heat and went for a walk. when i came back from my walk i was famished and stood over the pot slurping tastes of the stock - which was so good i decided to pour myself a bowl - of just veggie broth! and i thought it was so tasty because i was so hungry, but even after i ate my lunch and was belly full, i went back for more - this stuff is great!

here are some of the contents of our CSA box a few weeks ago - so exciting!

i'm looking forward to having a weekly ritual of veggie broth production and freezing with my vegetable scraps. there's nothing i like more than making something great out of something i would otherwise throw away.
a tip i read in a magazine this weekend but forgot to do myself: make sure your vegetables stay under the water surface level by placing a collapsable metal steamer on top of the veggies in the pot.
and if you've been wondering what the phrase "soup to nuts" means, like i have, here's wikipedia's explanation. my question is: who has nuts for desert?

the cult of domesticity

Charles Dana Gibson, No Time for Politics, 1910


Ulali- Mother
 
A note on the naming of this blog:
i chose the name “cultivating domesticity” as a play on “the cult of domesticity,” an ideology coined in the nineteenth century that said a woman’s place was in the home. also known as “the cult of true womanhood” this ideology laid out the cardinal values all [white middle/upperclass] women must display: piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. the woman’s biological imperative was to create a tranquil domestic sphere for her husband – as women were ill-equipped to do the things men do in the outside world. these ideas pervaded all forms of popular culture at the time, and were buttressed by a lot of pseudo-scientific evidence of female inferiority: we have smaller bodies and smaller brains, more delicate constitutions, and things like menstruation and masturbation make us insane.
i learned all about the cult of domesticity studying at smith college, where generations of (mostly white) women before me had come to buck the system and break out of the domestic sphere, proving their ability to challenge male domination in all aspects of the outside world. which is incredible, and necessary – because we’re obviously not over the belief that women are inferior and incapable of doing certain things men do (physical labor, politics, being decisive, etc), so while i take issue with the white privileged backbone of the feminist movement, i do think the sentiment is necessary and the fight is still relevant.
what i don’t like is the implicit devaluing of domestic work. in a sort of animal farm–ish move, feminism takes on the assumption that traditionally-male work is more valuable and desirable than roles traditionally done by women (and people of color). so i walked away from my feminist education thinking that i ought to get an impressive job and higher degrees to show the world that i can beat men at their own game. and while i do think i can beat men at their own game, i also think that cooking and washing and mending clothes and raising families are some of the most important and critical roles in a society. Unlike some of the best-paid jobs in this country, if someone isn’t making food and babies nobody’s going anywhere.
and i don't think these realms are mutually exclusive, in fact i think the realms are constructed to be separate (and unequal) in order to maintain a system of domination and destructive policy.
so what i’m saying with this blog is that i value those necessary roles as much as i do the flashy positions in male-dominated spheres, and i think it does us good as a movement, as a people, to pay tribute to and cultivate the art of caring for our family, friends and homes, and to bring that energy into our work in our communities and the world.

form meets function: quilt style

marty and i have been talking a lot about collaborating on artistic/craft projects lately. as is true of our relationship in general, we compliment each other well - our individual talents and qualities fill into each others' spaces nicely. we raise each other up as we stretch our own abilities in new ways together.
right now he's teaching me about aesthetics and form, something i don't have an intuitive sense about when it comes to creating things. and yesterday i taught him to sew on the bernette, and he has now taken on an identity as a "jeans repairman." (meaning he was able to fix the hole in his favorite pair of jeans and it was a great first sewing success). so he's helping me with concept and form; i'm helping him with function and execution.
this collaboration is coming to bear on the dragonfly quilt project, with the final inner square now completed. i made seven paper-pieced dragonflies, since seven is a significant number in baby payton's lakota culture, and we've been planning to fill in the eighth square in the constellation with his own initials, joining payton's presence in the circle on the eastern side. marty drew up the initials, stylizing his letters to mirror the dragonfly shape, and i worked with that pattern to applique the letters onto the quilt block. it's like graffiti style meets quilty craft.


you can see the pattern and its resulting quilt form here; we ended up dropping the "s" of "payton sky" and the heart from the design as it needed some decluttering. and the letters needed a little extra definition, so with marty's help i embroidered a shadow and some highlights into it as well. i'm pleased with how the block came out, and though it's a painstaking process to hand sew all those little angles and spaces between letters i take pride in putting those extra loving touches into my work.


and now the quilt top is complete and i'm ready to sandwich the quilt together with the batting (middle layer) and backing fabric (also dragonfly print) and start machine quilting it. i'm not sure yet what kind of stitching i'll be doing, something subtle i think since the whole quilt is so busy and i don't want to take away from the details already present in each of the dragonfly fabrics. updates on that coming soon.