A Day in Paris with Salad and Chocolate

Remember when I explained to you the incredible tuna and melon salad I had at my favorite restaurant? It had feta, tuna, grilled vegetables and cantelope. Well if I thought cantelope was a surprise, I was completely unprepared for watermelon:


I shouldn't have been surprised, it was delicious. I finally decided I've been going to the restaurant often enough they know I'm not a tourist. So I whipped out the camera and got a pic for you. Doesn't that look yummy? Well, if you like tuna.

During my walk, I caught sight of someone moving into their apartment, so I leapt into action with my trusty camera. The lifter thing is attached to the back of the little truck.

Do they have these lifter trucks in other big cities? I'd never seen one before, but the big apartment buildings I've lived in in the states have had regular sized elevators, if not freight elevators (not to mention the windows don't open up big enough to let much in). Elevators here are usually retrofitted in somewhere small. The one in our building can take two people who are friendly, and that's it.

La rentree (rhymes with entree) was on Tuesday, the start of the new year. Or should I say the restart? Every one is back from their holidays. Our street has certainly gotten much busier and the honking is back. Almost all the shops are open too, most especially our favorite bakery.

Jadis et Gourmande Chocolats had this marvelous display of chocolate calculators, fountain pens, and MP3 players:

Chocolate rulers and crayons:

The shop smelled sooo amazing. I succumbed to a half log of Dark Chocolate with Orange. I'm not going to show you a picture because it's not very attractive and kinda looks like something else, but boy did it taste good. And of course I gobbled the whole thing down as soon as I got home, although I did try to rewrap it and put it away. I managed to walk into the living room and then I had to go back and eat the rest of it. I am a glutton, a gourmande in the french sense of the word.

I tried out the first disc of Dexter, a Showtime series about a serial killer who only kills serial killers. Kind of a stupid choice for someone who refuses to read the bits in books from the killer or victim point of view and only reads the detectives' parts. But I'd heard good things about it, so thought it was worth a try. Mmm, had it's intriguing bits, but not sure I need to see any more.

I did quilt while I was watching, so it was good for that. I'm busily outlining each of the flowers and stems in Blooming Horrors with regular quilting thread.

Creature Comforts Reprised.

There are a lot fewer obnoxious phone calls here in France than there are in the States. Every couple of weeks we get a phone call at 6:30pm. Bonjour madame, french french french fenetre. Ah, that word I know. They're trying to sell us double-glazing for the windows. At least that's what we assume.

I did more border auditions today with Creature Comforts. I'm out of the lizard print and I can see that the quilt does need a fabric with a lot of black in it for the bottom border. Who was the crazy person who suggested I do a lot of piecing? Are you out of your mind? Lazy, remember, lazy.

This is a dinosaur-like monster fabric that I do have enough of:

But I think I like this better. Don't have enough of either the dots or the squares to go all the way across but I like this:

And who is that little creature wanting comfort? Pokey once again showing her belly, squirming back and forth begging for rubs. You'd think she was neglected or something.

A gorgeous sign in a tiny park. I'm trying to figure out the best way of translating it. That's not "Dogs must wear leashes." It is prohibited to be careless with dogs in the park?

A different park, with a statue and a typical apartment building in the background.

The first signs of fall.

The Halloween link today is for the Whimsical Whittler. Vaughn and Stephanie Rawson do incredible hand carved folk art. This is the Halloween gallery, but they also have fantastic Christmas pieces. I love this Wizard of Oz Santa. The Americana section is a hoot, with Uncle Sam puppeteering a donkey and elephant.

I finished the book Magic Bites by Ilona Andrews today. It's a dark urban fantasy, set in future Atlanta. I love the world where waves of magic hit, rendering technology incapable of working. The heroine, Kate Daniels, is a smart mouth mage hunting whoever (whatever?) killed her guardian. We've got vampires and werewolves and yes, there are many parallels with Laurell K Hamilton (except that half the book isn't comprised of descriptions of clothes, sex, states of arousal...). I just hope this series doesn't get lame like Hamilton's did. But I'm definitely looking forward to the next one which is due next spring. You can read an excerpt at the author's website.

Creature Comforts

Hmmm, what's this?





Yes, these pics would all look better if I'd ironed first, but then I wouldn't be me.

While playing with scraps today I found a bit of black fabric with wavy black lines. I remember this fabric. Why don't I have more of it? Ah, yes, it all went into Creature Comforts, that UFO I've never quite been happy with and never finished. I really like some of the individual blocks, but the overall thing doesn't work for me. I sewed the top in the spring of 2003, after I'd been on my alien kick with Alien Invasion and Space 4 Rent. This is monsters rather than aliens, but used the same colors.

I love how Gwen Marston uses dissimilar borders and I keep playing around with it, but never quite get it right. Maybe some of that bug fabric across the top? No, too overpowering, but Lily and Habibi want to play too.

Better with bug border on the bottom:

Or I kinda like this, very narrow wavy stripes at the bottom:

I would love to hear suggestions for how to improve this beast.

My allergies are still causing problems. Just playing with fabric is making me nuts. This is my Darth Vader-like girly dust mask:

Gotta keep you guys guessing about what I'm going to post next. I think it's time for some more scenes of Paris. Those always seem to be buildings or architectural details though, don't they. I guess that doesn't take much guesswork. Hmmm, I am rather predictable.

Oh shoooot. I'm an idiot. It's 3:30 in the afternoon and I just remembered that today was the first Sunday of the month and some museums are free. Generally not the ones I most want to see, but still.

I took these pictures on my walk to the park on 26 August. I can't believe this is a Morgan Stanley office building, but that is what the plaque in front says.

I've started taking a closer look at the massive doors on a lot of the buildings around here. Some of them are the real old oak doors, like I think these are, but others are painted and one appeared to have veneer peeling off. This set of doors was in gorgeous shape.

I LOVE the carved lion above the address number. Or cat, or some kind of critter.

This is a detail from a different building, close to Parc Monceau in the 8th arrondisement. I would say this is a big cat of some kind. Lynx?

And on a completely different note, the only poop your scoop sign I've seen in Paris. And the park is a free wi-fi zone too.

I've been surfing the internet looking for cool Halloween sites. I like decorating objects for grown-ups, not kiddy marshmellow ghost "crafts". I discovered that one of my favorite artists, Debra Schoch aka HopHopJingleBoo, now has a blog as well as a website. Debra makes the best papier mache jack-o-lantern people, black cats, witches, etc. Take a look at this grouping here and there are some more here. Debra also does great Christmas and easter/spring critters too. She's been showing her Halloween decorating recently in her blog and it is an absolute hoot. I'm envious.

I actually bought a book on papier mache, some paperclay and fake papier mache (just add water), and Halloween colored acrylics with the plan of one day trying my hand at this. Hmm, been carrying that from one place to another for awhile. My excuse in Cairo was that I didn't have a good place to do it. Here I've got my own work table, but still have the cats to worry about. yes, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

ROZ, glad you tried the Stuart MacBride book. The next one in the series, Dying Light, is good as well. Have you read Ian Rankin too? Also excellent although his protagonist, Rebus, is quite a bit more disfunctional than Logan MacRae is.

It's Officially Time to Start Halloween

I have decided to officially start Halloween. My grinch of a husband won't let me decorate the apartment until October, so I'm going to blog my heart out. You might say, but Tonya, you've already been showing us a Halloween quilt for ages. That's true, but I haven't started on my stockpile of quilts and decorations.

In the fall of 2003, my husband and I were in a temporary apartment waiting for our move to Cairo. That was in our life before cats. I had hardly any of my quilt and craft supplies and I was going nuts. So what to do? Go buy more. I bought this fun Alexander Henry fabric and decided to use it as the basis of a crusty.

Buuuut... I just wanted to focus on three jack-o-lanterns and not have the background cluttered with more. Just wanted black with hints of purple. What to do... I embroidered over it in my typical thready fashion. And it turns out if you're going to do all that background, you better do the foreground too.

So I threadied the whole thing. And then covered most of it with buttons so you can't even see all that work I did. This is 3 Jacks:

It was a lot of work. I might just be insane. Unsurprisingly, this is the wobbliest piece I've made. It's not very big. The center jack measured 6" across before I started work on him. [this piece is in a box somewhere and I have no idea how big the whole piece actually measures.]

By the way, I was photographing the fabric and the picture of 3 Jacks was on the computer monitor and my husband realized that I'd used the fabric for the base of the work. His comment? "So it's basically paint-by-numbers." Yup, just that easy. sigh.

Editorial note: if you want to know more about crusties and threadies, use the labels in my sidebar to read previous posts.

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