Food and New Faces

      When school was ending my work-family and I said that we definitely needed to get together over the summer. That didn't happen until last week. There have been some pretty cool trips that people were taking that made the delay necessary, plus several of us were working the summer program, but we did finally manage to get together. I made a variety of things for our get together, but I am pretty proud of my little charcuterie spread. Making art with food amuses me. And getting to see my friends was great. We had plenty of laughter during the school year, but without kids to worry about it was even better!

      I have been continuing to be productive with my doll making. At the end of last week I started painting some new faces. I have been pretty much exclusively making pale white dolls lately, because I have a very large amount of doll bodies in that shade. This week I wanted to change up my faces. I have a variety of different dolls planned for this week, who are not pale white ladies. So far I have a casual English doll finished and a casual western doll finished. 

     The casual western lady even has a lovely French braid! I didn't think that was something I could do in 1:9 scale, and I know it likely wouldn't work all the time, but it worked out this time. 

     The western lady comes with a removable hat and the English rider comes with a removable helmet (yes, they do come off, you just have to be careful.) They are both currently available, $220 each plus shipping. If you are interested please email me at fieldofdolls@gmail.com

     Sunday I decided I wanted to make an effort with my cooking. I don't actually like cooking so I often make a lot of the same things and they usually require very little work to put together. I had a pork tenderloin and I wanted to do something a bit different. I don't cook pork tenderloin all the time, so that in itself was a bit different, but I looked up different recipes and found one with a really nice mushroom gravy. And then I forgot to buy chicken broth so I altered the gravy/sauce anyway. It came out really well! The mashed "potatoes" are of course not potatoes. I discovered that Palmini makes this stuff. Palmini is "pasta", and apparently "potatoes", made from palm root. So it is keto. This doesn't taste like potatoes, you are not fooling anyone with this, but it does make a nice side dish. I don't usually take pictures of my food but the amount of effort I put into this new meal was worth getting a photo of it. 

     Last week I finally got out to do some hiking again. It was not super buggy in the woods, which was amazing. Maybe I can get back into some more regular hiking again. The woods really are my happy place. School starts next week so I will have to figure out when I can fit a bunch of hiking into my weeks. I need to keep on making the dolls and taking care of all the other usual things, but I also really need to get outside more. I am going to miss the amount of "extra" time that comes with summer vacation!