Depression Cake recipe

(There was supposed to be a Get Psyched for Halloween, part 3, but then I ran out of time. And as Kate points out, it's not like I need an excuse to share my favorite ghost stories.)

Anyway, here is my grandmother's Depression cake recipe—"a poor man's cake," says my grandfather—which I mentioned in my essay for Cast On over the summer. I'm transcribing the recipe as-is, with the ingredients listed as you need them.

One 16-ounce box seedless raisins. Boil slowly for 20 minutes in 2 cups water. Add:

2 cups sugar
1/4 lb. oleo (or butter)
1 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. powdered cloves
1 tsp. nutmeg
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup cold water

Let cool.

Sift 4 cups flower and 1 tbsp. baking soda. Add flour and baking soda to mixture and mix well until smooth. Beat 1 egg lightly and add last to above. Grease tube pan and cook 1 hour 15 minutes at 375º.

(You can use any sort of pan—loaf, square, bundt, whatever. One of these days I'll get around to baking one, and I'll post a picture. Also, you might want to make a middle-class-man's version with some cream cheese frosting...as I recall, this isn't the moistest cake in the world. It is very good comfort food though!)

Make Do and Mend: Tarot Breakfast Tray

When I lived in Boerum Hill I had really cool roommates who were both crafty and thrifty—Rachel made a colorful quilt out of old t-shirts, and Rel found some great furniture and other random stuff on the street (curbside shopping, can't beat it for the price!) She came upon a lone tarot card (I think it was Death), and she cut a small rectangle in the center and used it as a switchplate cover. Rel also found an adorable (if rather banged-up) breakfast tray someone was tossing, but she ended up passing it along to me when she moved out. That was back in 2003, and the breakfast-tray-with-potential had been sitting in my basement waiting for its makeover ever since.

Before: cute but scratched and faded vinyl tray covering and white paint job that was probably never sealed—it was flaking and splintering.

The plan: pull off the vinyl, strip the paint (using an eco-friendly...eco-friendlier?...paint stripper), sand the bare wood, stain it, put on a new lining using the decoupage technique (with Mod Podge Hardcoat), and seal it all up.

After: TOTALLY AWESOME, no?

The eco-friendlier paint stripper worked pretty well, and I applied two coats of a dark stain. I knew the decoupage would be tricky, so I did the bottom of the tray first since most of the time it won't be visible. (Naturally, the reverse side turned out great, but there were a couple of tiny tears on the side everyone sees! Fortunately the pattern on the paper is busy enough that you'd never notice unless I pointed it out.)

I measured the paper, adding a fraction of an inch on all sides (to be removed with an exacto knife later), and applied the Mod Podge with a foam brush directly to the paper before positioning it on the wood. Then I smoothed out the air bubbles with an old credit card. Some decoupage tutorials suggest using wrapping paper, but I think that's a bad idea—I used relatively thick, high-quality paper, and still had a couple small problems with the paper tearing (too much glue and too much friction from the credit card). After the paper was in place, I waited for the glue to dry before trimming the edges. Repeated the process on the top surface, then painted on three thin coats of Mod Podge over the whole tray (over a period of a few days).

I panicked a little when the first topcoat went on though—an air bubble appeared out of nowhere, and it was impossible to smooth it out (as I'd been able to when I initially glued the paper on). I got frustrated—'why does every DIY project I attempt come out like CRAP?! ARGH!!!'—and then decided to watch Pride & Prejudice with my mom and try to forget about it. The topcoat had dried by the time I came up to bed, and lo and behold, the paper had tried perfectly flat and smooth! HOORAY!!!

To my dismay, the Mod Podge Hardcoat instructions say you've got to wait a whole month between the last coat and actually using the finished piece. It's perfectly dry now though, so I'm going ahead and taking pictures, and I'll eventually pick up a can of polyurethane. The Mod Podge people say you don't need an additional sealant, but I don't believe them.

Here's a close-up of the oh-so-appropriate new paper lining, purchased at a stationery shop in Florence in 2002 (and up to now, gathering dust in a roll under my bed). I'm such a sucker for pretty Italian papers.

This wasn't a cheap DIY project (the materials were about $25, and the paper couldn't have been more than a euro or two), but I can rationalize the expense somewhat because I'm planning to use the paint stripper (the priciest purchase) on another project. And it's quirky yet practical—just my style. Yay!

How's this for random nerdiness?

I found this fishbowl in my grandfather's crawlspace. I gave it a good cleaning and now it stores my oddballs. I'm so tickled with this, it's ridiculous.

Plum Truffle, finished at last!

I have WAY too many unfinished projects. Some I can only file away (like notes for stories I won't get around to writing for years yet), but others—the crafty stuff—I can certainly put to bed. So I've started a UFO ('unfinished object') smackdown. Remember this? I got midway through before I realized I wasn't going to have enough yarn, so I ordered another skein (to be delivered to NJ, though I was still in Galway at the time), and the project went into hibernation.

There was another problem: as I was knitting the body I had the nagging feeling that I had cast on too many stitches, and that if I proceeded as planned (even with plenty of back shaping) the body wouldn't be as form-fitting as I'd envisioned. So I thought maybe I could just make the button bands narrower, but eventually I got honest with myself—I wouldn't like how that would look. The button bands should be as wide as they are in Megan Rogers' original (or is that 'original knockoff'?) I very briefly contemplated frogging the whole body, but ouch! Rip out eleven inches of careful cabling? Not if I could possibly help it.

It seems letting a troublesome project hibernate for awhile can make all the difference, because I took it out after a few months of inactivity, 'tried it on,' and thought of a MacGyver-ish solution: bind off several stitches on each side on the very next row, and steek that too-wide bottom portion. I had never steeked before, and of course I see why it scares some knitters stiff, but I used my trusty sewing machine and it all came out right...just in time for the frigid gales of August!


Pattern: Truffle Cardigan Tutorial in three parts, from Dulle Griet
Yarn: Rowan Yorkshire Tweed Aran (discontinued) in plum, 8 balls
Needle: #7, and #6 for the button bands (binding off with a #9)
Buttons: eight of 'em (1 1/8"), salvaged from my grandparents' candy tin
Raveled here.

Apart from the slightly noticeable changes in dyelot (I tried to alternate balls, but apparently it didn't help much) and the dimples where the buttons are sewn to the button band (can it be helped? I'll re-sew them at some point), I'm so, so happy with this cardigan. I'm going to live in it this winter.

Make Do and Mend

How exciting is this: I've got an essay in this week's episode of Cast On, which is far and away my favorite podcast! The series theme is 'Make Do and Mend,' taking inspiration from WWII-era booklets on repurposing and economizing. I'm continually inspired by my grandparents' thrifty lifestyle (I've already told you about the candy tin o' buttons), so that's what my essay is about. I know a lot of you reading this aren't knitters, but Brenda's podcast is well worth a listen regardless.

I have so many items of clothing ready to be mended or repurposed—the challenge is actually getting down to making the alterations. There's the vintage 100% wool cardi I mention in the essay, which I think will become a button-down vest from A Stitch in Time (a huge, beautifully illustrated book of modernized vintage patterns, which is on my Christmas wish list). There's another purple sweater I got for Kate when I worked at Anthropologie back in college, which is half-felted; I might as well felt it all the way and make a throw pillow out of it. I have a mohair jumper my mom got me at Kilkenny Design when I graduated with my M.A.; it's forest green, a good color for me, but the design itself is none too flattering (why did it take me so long to realize that?!), and someday I want to frog it (mohair...yikes!) and reuse the yarn so it can still remind me of graduation and my mother's generosity. And I have a sweater I got in Dublin in 2001 that has a hole in the elbow; I still love it, it's purple and in perfect condition otherwise, so I need to pick up some matching sock yarn to knit a pair of elbow patches. I have a feeling I'm going to have to visit more than a few yarn shops before I find a color that's close enough.

And I have yet another project that's all about the buttons: my mother has a black cotton cardigan with beautiful sparkly ones that she never wears because the garment itself is faded. As it is, those buttons are going to waste. So for Christmas I’m knitting a classic cardigan that will showcase those lovely buttons (it was her idea), and that faded but still serviceable cotton cardi will get a plainer set of buttons (out of the tin) before it’s donated to Goodwill. Two sweaters out of one!

But add all these makeover sweaters to a huge pile of unfinished sewing and knitting projects, and it's really overwhelming. Right now I really only have one completed 'make do and mend' project to boast of, and it's five or six years old. My favorite jeans had huge holes in the seat, too big to patch, so I decided to make a yoga mat bag out of one of the legs. I cut out a circle for the bottom out of the other leg, used a sparkly purple shoelace for a drawstring, and a rainbow-striped belt for the strap. Now that I've got my mom going to yoga classes, I figure I can use some corduroy scraps to make her a mat bag too. I'll just have to add it to The List.

Next entry: vintage sweater #3!