In Progress

A wild winter wreath and notes from Sunday's Gather

It’s about trying. About having a vision in your mind, some things to work with, and giving it a go. You never really know how it’ll be in the end, and that’s okay. It may be wonderful! Better than you expected! Or it may be terrible. Lord A’mighty, a genuine mess. Don’t even be worried about this (if you are a creator, you will make terrible things, guaranteed). You’ve created. You’ve learned. You know what not to do. Just take it apart and start over. (Or just keep going. If you’ve created, you also know there’s a point where what you’re making looks terrible, but if you keep going, it finally emerges into a beautiful thing.)

On Saturday, my florist friend and I had a holiday creative date. We heaped all the wild things we could find into piles around us, and in the warm 57° sunshine by the creek, we made beautiful. That is, she made beautiful. I made a mess. A wild mess of grapevine, juniper, cattail, hops, cottonwood, beargrass, and tallow berries. It was supposed to be a wreath, but I don’t know. I stood back, looked at this laughable thing, cocked my head to the side, and decided it needed pinecones. It was teetering on the edge of scrap-it-and-start-over, but perhaps pinecones could help?

Today, I’ll pick up where I left off. The basket of pinecones that Maggie and I gathered in the woods yesterday is waiting on the porch for this afternoon’s session of “rescue the wreath.” We’ll see how it goes. Wish me luck?

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Loves! I so enjoyed our final Gather of the year with you last Sunday. I remembered to record it this time, so if you weren’t able to attend and you’d like to watch, here’s the link.

I also thought it might be helpful to provide links to some of the things we talked about.

• My food processor (I referenced an incorrect model number. The correct one is: DFP-14BCNY

• Mayo recipe

• Kitchen sponge

• Azure Standard dish soap

• The cookbook with the recipe for homemade brown sugar. (And I have to make a correction, here, too! I slowly pour the molasses in a thin stream directly into the sugar through the feed tube (not into and through the tiny hole in the plunger, like I said) while the machine is running. The hole in the plunger is waaaay to tiny for molasses!)

• Chai tea