April 2009 • Deep Fried Kudzu

April 29, 2009November 18, 2021

Cotton Baskets, Pea Hull Jelly, and Homemade Butter

Before we got to Oxford for the festival, we decided to go visit the Amish community close to Pontotoc again, especially since we were going right by there.

Just like last time, there were signs alongside their driveways so that people would know what they had for sale:

We stopped at the house with the signs above and got:

Dill pickles, sorghum molasses, chow chow, pickled beets, muscadine jelly, and pea hull jelly. Yes! Pea hull jelly! Don’t see that every day…

The house with a sign for baked goods is where we got cinnamon rolls and the apple pie:

Inside another workshop were all kinds of baskets and this time I purchased something like an old cotton basket – and the man said that’s what most people call it. I was thinking it might be nice to hold toys in, for Shug’s room.

We got homemade butter (actually I bought homemade butter at two different houses because I love the idea that someone out there is still milking a cow and churning butter).

Oh, and about a month ago, Av’s mom and dad went and picked up the two bentwood rockers that we ordered from the Amish gentleman from the community in Ethridge, Tennessee. Love these!:

April 17, 2009November 11, 2021

Mt. Nebo Faces

In Carlton, Alabama there’s Mount Nebo Church – it’s pretty much in the middle of the forest, and it’s not very easy to find. At the end of the road is a gate, so you’ll need to leave your car there to walk up to the cemetery and church.

The cemetery has some interesting monuments:

But the thing that makes this place so special is that some of the monuments have death masks. They were made by Isaac Nettles, Sr.

This monument is for his wife. I think her name was “Korean”. The faces that appear here are not of her but of their three daughters:

It’s a little hard to make out, but it says “Mother was born Jan 1894 (???) died July 6, 1933”. I may have not made that out completely correctly but I think that’s it.

There are a couple of monuments Mr. Nettles was supposed to have done that I could not find.

The way Isaac Nettles did these death masks is that he had the people – while they were still living – press their faces in a box of sand. From that impression he would pour concrete and use paper and wire to make the finished mask.

The monuments have been added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Last year, the county newspaper had an article about a man’s dog digging up a bust similar to the ones at Mt. Nebo. There may be more in other parts of the county that just aren’t well-documented…

April 7, 2009January 7, 2022

Swirled, Waxed, Glittered, and Painted

Besides naturally dyeing some eggs for the Easter baskets I’m making for kids at the homeless shelter, I decided to try a few different techniques just to see how they would come out.

If you take a crayon and draw any kind of design on the egg before you dye it, the design will appear on the finished egg, because the wax repels the dye, or the dye can’t hold on to the wax, I mean. I’m trying to do some eggs that aren’t all girly for boys to enjoy – so this one I was just seeing what a jumbled-up zig zag design would look like:

I’ll probably let that one soak a while longer to get even darker. For the next ones, maybe some uniform white stripes, or checks…

Oh, and wiping white vinegar all over the eggs before putting them in any kind of dye has helped the dye ‘take’, I think.

The next batch went into regular food coloring for a few minutes, then into another bowl with a complementary color food dye along with a couple of splashes of olive oil. The oil makes the dye swirl and make spots. Rolling the egg around in that solution didn’t do too much, but holding the egg in a paper towel and gently dripping the oil/dye solution onto the egg from a few inches above, off the tines of a fork, worked really well so they had this swirled/marbelized look:

I was trying to come up with some way to make a special egg so that when the kids go hunting, they can bring it back for some big prize (maybe I’ll include something like a much bigger chocolate bunny when the baskets are delivered for this part). This egg got Mod-Podged with a sponge brush, then glittered with gold all over. Love this one. Might even do a set of different colored glitter eggs for one basket.

This egg got painted – just regular acrylic paint in a raspberry shade, put on with a sponge brush. I used two coats of paint for that egg, then on a paper plate I made puddle of pretty lime green acrylic paint that the end of the sponge brush handle got dipped in:

This one may be my new favorite!

April 6, 2009January 7, 2022

Natural Dyed Eggs

This year I’m making a couple of Easter baskets for a homeless shelter here in town. I can’t wait to get started, so I’ve already begun experimenting with dyeing eggs (I’ll make fresh ones closer to Sunday). I hard boiled them, rubbed them with white vinegar using a paper towel, which is supposed to help the dye adhere to the shell, then a few of the eggs went into a pot of water with regular yellow onion skins. The eggs boiled with the onion skins for thirty minutes, and came out this pretty brown/terracotta color:

Next, a batch with red cabbage. I pulled the leaves off of the cabbage hoping that more surface area would make the dye even stronger. The cabbage boiled for an hour, and when I pulled the leaves out, it looked like so much of the color had drained out of them (& into the water! yay!). Without any heat, I lowered the eggs into the red cabbage water and three hours later they were this *gorgeous* blue color:

The last experiment was with beets – chopped up into big pieces, boiled for thirty minutes, then lowered the eggs in and let them sit in the water without any heat for a little over an hour. They turned a dusty pink color. They all turned out really pretty, but I think the blue ones (from red cabbage) are my favorite:

I posted about this last year, but my friend Amy from North Mississippi celebrates Easter, and she makes *the* most gorgeous eggs.

These are some that Amy does with red cabbage, except she leaves the eggs in the water overnight and gets this pretty, deep blue color:

So pretty, and she loves to use her McCarty pottery to show them off! Nice!

April 6, 2009January 7, 2022

Making Horseradish For Seder

This year for our seders, Av and I decided to make our own horseradish rather than go with the usual bottle of Gold’s. We bought two “stalks” of horseradish at Whole Foods.
I used a knife to peel it and cut it into chunks, then it went into the Cuisinart.

Okay…here’s the warning. The smaller the horseradish bits get, the ***hotter*** it gets. Once the Cuisinart was going I could smell it more & more, then when I had it pulsed to teeny-tiny pieces and was ready, I took the lid off and HOO-WEE!!! I knew it was going to be bad, but not *that* bad! I had to go outside just to stop crying – it was terrible! Anyway, I – best as I could see through all those tears – emptied it into a bowl:

…added regular white vinegar to make it the right consistency (the amount will vary as to how wet you like your horseradish), sealed it up in a Mason jar:

*Wow* I feel bad already for the people at each seder who bite into this thinking they are getting the usual grocery store horseradish! Maybe we should warn them that this stuff breaks Geneva conventions…

April 3, 2009November 11, 2021

Passover Craft #1: Manischewitz And Streit’s Letters!

I’m starting to make and put up decorations for Passover now. I wanted to do some kind of banner but make it different, so I just decided to print out giant letters and let them stand on the fireplace mantle rather than string them together.

You can’t go through Passover without buying and boxes of this and that from Manischewitz and Streit’s, so I used those boxes to cut the letters out of.

If you celebrate Easter and want to spell out “E-A-S-T-E-R” maybe you might want to think about Paas egg dye kit boxes or chocolate bunny boxes. As long as it is really obvious what it is, it will make sense. You know what else would be cute? To cut those letters out of chipboard (or the back (brown) side of any kind of thin box like these), and decoupage onto them Cadbury creme egg wrappers!!

These are 3.9″ wide x 5.9″ tall so they fit perfectly on the boxes I used.

Anyway, cut the front and back out of the boxes so you can get two letters out of each box, then print out the letters

Now, just put the printed letters on top of the box front or back, and cut along the edges. If you have a letter with an open space like this ‘P’ does, use an Exacto there.

I tried to make sure that the logos were visible in each of the letters just to make it super-obvious that these all came from boxes/products that were familiar. Love the way this turned out! Now I just have to get going on the rest of the decorations to go along with it!