earth machine compost bin

House decorating/beautifying is still taking place, as well as yardwork. I've been doing yardwork! The most yardwork I've ever done is maintaining a tiny flower garden when I was in college, and now I'm mowing! I'm creating flower beds! Everything is a process; pictures will come soon (or, more realistically, when the projects finish--so maybe not super soon).

In the meantime, my greatest domestic triumph is that we've started composting! When we first moved to Waltham (the Boston suburb I now call home) and went to pick up our recycling bin from the city municipal building, the lady who works there told us that Waltham has teamed up with another nearby suburb to provide compost bins to residents at discounted rates. A lot of places do this, as it saves the municipality time, money, and space by not having to pick up so much garbage,  so if you're interested in getting a compost bin, look into whether your city or township has a composting program or subsidy.

from earthmachine.com

The city gives you a choice of compost bins, and I went with the Earth Machine, since it seemed like the easiest. It retails for around $60, but with the city subsidy, I paid half that. The only trick was that I had to go to the municipal center of the next town over and pick i up--then drive it home. We have a tiny car, but fortunately the composter comes in parts that you assemble at home:

Getting it into the car was tricky, getting it back out was much tricker.

I had already plotted out the place it would go in our back yard: close to the house, but not so close that it would be a problem in case it attracted critters or began to smell (I know compost is not supposed to do either thing if you do it right, but I was afraid I might mess it up).

You have to put it somewhere flat or the convenient bottom panel won't sit properly. I put it by that rock because the rock is already hard to mow around, so I figured adding a hard-to-mow-around compost bin wouldn't change much.

My first step was the attach the bottom panel to the bottom half of the bin.

It clicks in, but it doesn't actually secure with anything, which might be frustrating for if I ever want to move the compost bin. So I'll just aim not to have to move it ever.

Putting on the top half of the bin was trickier than I imagined.

The dude at the municipal center told me I'd have to get someone to help me with it, but I had thought he meant because I was a girl and it might be too hard for me. Nope. It's really just more of a two person job--it's hard to click all the tabs into place at once if you're by yourself. I finagled it by stepping inside the bin and sitting on one edge while I pushed on the other.

Next was sliding on the door to the compost bin,

...which was no big deal.

It comes with convenient pegs to secure the whole thing to the ground. Again, there's nothing to secure that bottom screen to it if you remove these pegs, but these are still handy in case I get really vigorous with my compost turning.

They were also easy to drive into the ground.

And voila! I have a compost bin!

I've had it less than a month, so it's much too early to know how it's doing, compost-wise, but the results are pretty dramatic in terms of waste reduction. In composting our food scraps, we have reduced our garbage by 1/3 to 1/2. And I'll get some great compost to apply to the gardens I'm hoping to have ready next spring... A pretty good deal! And even if it doesn't work out, it's an interesting experiment.

My biggest complaint, however, is that I got the first manicure of my life a week before setting up the compost bin, and the set-up process chipped my nail:
 

...so I guess they were not meant to be installed by ladies with pretty nails. I normally don't have pretty nails, though, so I guess I don't mind.

I've been so busy with the house that I haven't been cooking that much in the way of new and exciting recipes yet, but I'll try to get back in the swing of food blogging for September. I'm definitely planning to do daily Vegan Month of Food blogging this October, though, so that should put me back on the front lines of blogging. See you soon!

house tour

Soooooo one of the reasons I haven't been posting much lately is that the husband and I have been in the process of first searching for, then buying a house! We're buying a house! We close (and move) in less than two weeks, which is exciting and awesome and overwhelming.

As we get closer and closer to moving, I'm starting to miss our current place already. It's a tiny condo that the husband bought a few years before he met me, and we're really happy to move onto a bigger, better place... but over the past 3 years, we've really turned his condo into our home. It'll be sad to leave it behind. So! I thought I'd give you a little tour before we left for good.

Our place is a converted attic, the third floor of a building. So after one flight of stairs outside our unit, you get to our front door--which opens to another set of stairs. If you were coming into our place, you'd enter at that door at the bottom of the stairs. Come on up!

Now, when you get to the top of the stairs, you can turn left to see our dining/office area:

On the far left there's a big window, which was hard for me to get a picture of because of all the light.

Now, turn to your right.

Our living-room area! Please ignore the stupid-looking cat tree. You may recognize the t-shirt pillow shams from this how-to entry!

Now we'll go through the living-room area to the hallway on the left!

So many doors! The closed white door to the far left is a bathroom, the next door is the kitchen, then the bedroom, and the closed white door to the far right is a closet.

Let's go into the kitchen first!

The kitchen is the one room where I didn't get to pick the paint colors. The husband had renovated it back before he met me. I like it, though! You can almost see my container garden on the fire escape out the window. And on the wall is my beloved yard-sale-acquired vintage kitchen clock. I've had it in every kitchen of every place I've lived since 2006!

Here's the view of the kitchen if you're standing by my beloved clock. This room is the room where the slanted ceilings bother me the most. The husband and I are both 5'8, and we each bump our heads at least once a week. It's perfect for someone under 5'5, though; hopefully the person who's buying our place is short!

Okay, continuing the tour. Back into the hallway, where you can see...

The husband's gecko tanks! Some people think lizards are creepy, so we'll move along... Let's peek into the bathroom!

Is it weird that I'm showing you pictures of our bathroom? I don't care, because I freaking LOVE our bathroom. The colors make me really happy, from that gorgeous blue to the beautiful tiles...

TO THE BRIGHT GREEN SHELVES. Like I said before, I picked out the paint colors for all the rooms but the kitchen, and I love them.

Done in the bathroom? We're almost finished! The last room is our bedroom.

More bright green shelves! Something really interesting to cats must be happening outside the window.

Here's a view of the bedroom if you're standing by the window. You may recognize the shade on the skylight from my how-to entry on how I made light-blocking shades.

Okay, thanks for visiting my place! Let me walk you down the stairs...

What's that you say? You love my green-painted stairs? WELL, before you go, let me tell you about them! I've done a lot of home improvement and decorating type stuff around our place over the years, and the stairs are one of my favorite big changes.

They used to look like this:

The carpet here was old, grungy, hard to clean, and clawed by the cats. (You can see my paint chips on the left--I had a rough time narrowing down the colors!) So the husband and I ripped up the carpet.

...and discovered that the carpet hid the fact that the treads were too old and thin to walk on much longer. They needed to be replaced. So when my parents visited one weekend, my father (who is super DIY-savvy--he built the house I grew up in!) and the husband, in just one morning, replaced the treads with some inexpensive pine.

They put on the trim I THINK not just to look pretty, but because the risers weren't level? Anyway, it did look pretty. We then we primed everything:

It was tricky to paint and prime our stairs because we had to either paint ourselves in the house for the day, or out. So we had to plan accordingly! But after a couple weekends, the stairs were done!

Nice and green. I am so proud of these stairs! Annnnd that leads you out of our place. Fritz (the creepy cat at the top of the stairs) and I say goodbye... and thank you for coming on our house tour!

I'm going to miss this place. However, I'm excited to show you some before and after photos when we move into our new home!

how to dye a wedding dress

I really loved my wedding dress. It was pretty, it was simple, and it was formal enough to match the husband's tux without being a giant terrifying pile of icing. Getting it was incredibly simple: I'd looked at it for weeks online before my mother and I had a chance to get to a David's Bridal. We sat down with the saleslady there, and she asked "What kind of dress are you looking for?"

"Style number WG3313," I said.

Her jaw dropped. "You... know the number?"

So she went to find the dress, came back with the two sizes the store had in stock, and had me try one on. It fit absolutely perfectly, no alterations needed. And Bam! I had a wedding dress!

It was comfortable, pretty, and easy to dance in. Everything I wanted!

But after the wedding was over, the dress no longer had a purpose. I was a little bummed that I only got to wear this awesome dress for one day, so decided to DYE MY WEDDING DRESS. I was inspired by Sherry over at the Young House Love blog, who dyed her wedding dress an awesome gunmetal gray color. I was also aware of the fact that she'd wanted to dye it black; I was prepared before I even began for things not to turn out as I'd expected.

Here is the extent of my experience with dyeing prior to this: once, when I was Prop Master of a play in high school, I dyed a pair of white cotton gloves yellow. Which is to say, I have almost no experience dyeing things. I was originally planning to use Rit dye, just because that was the only brand I knew, but our local art store didn't carry it. I ended up going with iDye, which had the advantage of having colors for both natural and manmade fibers. (Rit is only for natural fibers.) The top layer of my dress is 52% polyester and 48% rayon. Almost all of the other layers were 100% polyester. Rit was probably not going to work. iDye recommends that for blended fabric, one should combine the normal dye with a complementary color of their "poly" dyes. I got Crimson and Red.

Let me point out right now that these are powders. As soon as I opened a packet, tiiiiny invisible particles of red dye disseminated throughout the bathroom, landing in weird places and not showing up until after our next couple showers, when the steam condensed into little tiny drops of PINK all over the surfaces of our bathroom, even the ones I had covered with a layer of catalogue pages for safety.

For polyester, you're supposed to boil the clothes in the dye for 30-60 minutes. My dress was much too big for even our largest stock pot, so instead I boiled loads of water over the stove and poured it into a storage container in our bath tub. I then added the dye, and THEN THE DRESS.

My dress is in there! Eek! Note the gloves (otherwise I'd've had blotchy red hands) and the paint stirrers: You're supposed to agitate (stir) the dress the whole time! I leaned over the bathtub and listened to an episode of This American Life. After 45 minutes, I couldn't take it anymore, so next came the final, and for me, the hardest step: rinsing the dress. You rinse the dress over and over in cold water until the water runs clear. This. Took. FOREVER. That dress held a lot of dye, let me tell you. Then I put the dress on the fire escape to dry.

While it dried I scrubbed and scrubbed the bathtub, because it had turned hideously pink.

But then, by dinner time, it was dry. AND LOOK:

The light looks dim in this one, but the color of the dress is very close to what it is in real life.

I love it! Mind you, I had expected a crimson/red dress, and this is sorta mauve with cherry red accents. And the dress was "Dry Clean Only," which all sources say not to dye... and definitely not to soak in boiling water. As a result, the heat shrunk the cloth on either side of the zipper, so the bodice shrunk by about about 1/2 an inch... which sounds negligible, except the dress had fit me PERFECTLY before. I had to wear it around the house for a couple hours breathing really deeply to stretch it back out. But it fits fine now, and above all, I think it looks great!

The color looks a little washed out from the flash in this one, but you can see the sash better. And if you look at the bottom right hem, you can see that the layer of crinoline turned cherry red!

Now I just need an occasion to wear a puffy pink dress.

simple mason jar centerpieces and decor

Centerpieces and table settings are things I never really thought about before planning our wedding. (Other things I'd never really thought about: wedding dresses, how kegs work, how far caterers will travel, how many weddings take place in Cooperstown in mid October, and maple syrup shots.) I mean, I know how to set tables and I have put vases of flowers, candles, or fruit bowls on a table to make it prettier. But I'd never before had to think about how to make tables for 70 people look not just pretty, but cohesive. The more I thought about it, the more I found wedding decorations as a whole to be quite daunting.

Enter my new BFF, THE HUMBLE MASON JAR. (The cage thing in the middle is for cards. We had a no-gifts wedding, but my sister got us this because she said we'd get cards anyway. She was right!) Ball mason jars are inexpensive, made in the USA, and available at all hardware (and probably most grocery) stores. They're also perfect for reuse: they are all presently in my kitchen, full of food, right now.

I bought two colors of ribbon (they matched the invitations!) and tied them around the mouths of the mason jars, then put matching (I'm so [color] coordinated!) candles in each one. We had 24 jars all together.

I'm also pretty proud of my camera idea in that picture. While we had two photographers (a professional one, and our friend Michael from the Dazed and Infused blog), I wanted candids. I put a tag on my personal camera saying "Sarah's Camera/Please take lots of photos with this," set it by the "guestbook," and ended up with almost 300 pictures of my friends and family. They were all silly and fun candids--just what I wanted!

Our professionals also took pictures of people taking pictures with it--so meta.

Our table settings looked like this:

Simple, clean, and pretty. The plates were Leafware's palm leaf plates. Disposables, I know, but they're made from fallen palm leaves and are totally biodegradeable, so we still get some green points, right?

Our favors were small bottles of local maple syrup. The husband and I spent a couple hours tying little ribbons onto them.

By the end of the night, the candles burned out completely. Removing the wax so I could reuse the jars was easy: I put the jars in the freezer for about 30 minutes, and the wax tumbled right out. I think I read about that little trick on Martha Stewart's website? You will note the maple syrup bottles in this photo have been opened. That's because a few intrepid wedding guests decided to challenge each other to shots of maple syrup.

Other than a few pumpkins and hay bales outside the venue (thanks, Dad!), the mason jars were our only decorations, but they went far in giving the already pretty venue some extra warmth. (visually, not physically. We had a fireplace for that).

Putting them everywhere drew the place together visually and made it seem like we had a plan. And the plan was mason jars. (Well, and getting married.)

easy DIY wedding invites and time capsule guestbook

January is "sarah wants to write about her wedding" month! Last week I wrote about our awesome homemade vegan wedding food, and today I'll be showing you our homemade invitations and our time capsule guestbook!

Kevin (the husband) and I clean up pretty well (hee!), but we're pretty informal people. We got married on the porch (it was going to be the lawn, but it was really rainy) of a camp by the lake in my hometown, and had the reception inside right afterwards. With such an informal wedding, traditional wedding invitations, with their million inserts, envelopes within envelopes, and flowery language, didn't seem fitting. Since so much of our wedding was DIY, we opted to make our own invitations as well.

I began with a trip to Paper Source!

We were shooting for a guest list of 70-80 people, so we got enough materials to make 100 invitations, since 1.) we were sure there'd be a few mess-ups during the making, and 2.) we wanted extra invitations so we could invite more people as others said they couldn't make it.

We printed almost everything at home... except the RSVP cards. Our printer HATED the dark green cardstock we were hoping to use for them and spat it out all wrinkled and streaky, so we had to go with a beige-color at FedEx/Kinko's last minute. But that was pretty cheap, and we had to go there anyway to do all our cutting. (I would've just used scissors, but Kevin pointed out that I can't cut straight lines, and I think he had fun using the paper cutter there anyway.) Home to stamp everything, and voila!

Invitations! It's hard to tell in this light, but the birch trees on the invite are stamped in a metallic copper ink. I think it's so pretty!

And here's the inside of the invite. (Our wedding was at a private location, so I blurred out the name/s.)

One advantage to DIY invitations is certainly that you'll save money. The whole endeavor, even including our printing mishap that led us to FedEx/Kinko's, cost less than $120. But I would do the same thing even if it weren't more cost effective. We had a lot of fun putting together our invitations, and we were really happy with the way they looked. These weren't just store-ordered invites where we plugged in our names and dates. Making our own invitations really made them ours. They were as much "us" as the ceremony on the porch--pretty, simple, and informal.

AND I had enough leftover paper to do another project, the wedding DIY project I am still excited about: our TIME CAPSULE GUESTBOOK.

I got the idea from this Offbeat Bride guestbook alternatives post. They write about a Japanese product that lets guests write messages to put in a vial, then the couple burns a candle to seal the vial, then ten years later they burn the candle again to unseal it, and they can read the messages. I figured this would be an easy thing to DIY.

I cut up and stamped some of the paper left over from our invitations, and set them out with some nice pens next to an old mason jar. (We used mason jars as centerpieces, so this fit with our overall look.) I included a note next to it so guests would know what to do:

You can click to enlarge the image, but it says: "In lieu of a normal guestbook, we're collecting messages from our guests that we'll seal in the jar to be opened on our 10th anniversary. Please take a moment to record something (well-wishes, a memory, a message, a drawing, even just your name) to help Sarah and Kevin of 2021 remember that you were with us on our special day!"

People really seemed to enjoy writing messages, and I think this is a more fun alternative for me and Kevin... Because while I can't imagine us taking out and looking at a more traditional guestbook 10 years later, we're already excited to do that with this one.

The only catch: you have to have willpower. A bunch of people at the wedding said things like "you're not really going to wait 10 years, are you?" or "are you going to peek first?" No, you guys, that's the whole point! I don't want to open it until our 10th anniversary, it would spoil the fun! But if you can't trust yourself not to peek, you could seal it up with wax.

I am PSYCHED for October 2021.

a nightshade-free weekend in NYC

Like I said in my last post, the reason I didn't post about vegan pizza this weekend was because I was in New York City. A friend of mine has a dance company and was putting on her first big show, so the boyfriend and I went to see it. We were only in NYC for 24 hours, from Saturday afternoon to Sunday afternoon, and I forgot to take ANY pictures the whole time I was there. But it was a great time, and we ate a lot of good food! NYC is full of great vegan eats, but many have small menus, and finding nightshade-free things to eat can be rough. I had fantastic meals at all three restaurants at which we ate this weekend!

One thing I recommend to everyone with unusual food allergies or intolerances is to carry a well-written, clear list of what you can't eat. Servers often have so much to remember and to write down that they may miss something; it's easier to hand them a piece of paper and ask them to check what you've ordered. I started doing this about a year ago, and it has drastically improved 1.) the quality of my meals at restaurants and 2.) my stress levels; I get so stressed out at restaurants because I'm afraid I/the server forgot to ask about some sub ingredient).

Here is my list:

I took this with my phone; sorry it's fuzzy. But it gives you an idea of what I work with. I usually give it to the server as I make my order; I tell him/her what I would like to have, then hand them the list and ask if they'd check to make sure I can have that. Sometimes servers will just look over the list and tell me themselves, but more often (and more comforting for me), they take it back to the kitchen and give it to the chef. Sometimes they return the list, sometimes they don't, but it's easy to write out another list. I usually have 2 or 3 tucked into my wallet at all times, just in case.

So! A quick rundown of our weekend of nightshade-free vegan food in New York City!

Caravan of Dreams features organic vegan quisine. We had lunch when we first arrived in the city on Saturday afternoon. The boyfriend and I split the live almond hummus as our appetizer, and we both had applewood smoked tofu sandwiches. Our waitress was pretty sure both things were nightshade free anyway, but she checked with the chef to be sure. The desserts looked delicious, but we were too full.

The boyfriend and I miss Grezzo, an organic, vegan raw food place that was in Boston's North End for a while before it closed, so naturally a visit to Pure Food and Wine was in order. Pure Food and Wine is really pricy, but their food is super gourmet in its tastes and its presentation. ALSO, they are the ultimate allergy-friendly restaurant: when I started to show my list to our waiter, he said "Oh, we have a nightshade free menu, let me go get it for you." Guys! A nightshade-free menu! When I raved to the waiter about how he made my day, he said "We have a bunch of different menus behind the counter, for all sorts of food intolerances, allergies, and avoidances." It was so great not only to know what I could have, but to have a whole menu of my own to look at! The boyfriend and I split the hazelnut crostini appetizer, and my entree was the porcini ravioli. The salted caramel tart for dessert was the highlight of my weekend, food-wise, and considering how much I ate, those are some high praises. My only complaint with Pure Food and Wine is that the portions are small for those prices, and I'm a big eater. I left feeling satisfied, but not full.

Counter does local, sustainable, organic vegetarian and vegan food. We went there with friends for brunch on Sunday, and our waiter was really helpful with finding nightshade free brunch options! Four of us split the pastry basket; the mini muffins contain egg replacer (= potato starch = nightshade), but I could have the delicious blueberry bread, the awesome chocolate pastries, and the homemade vegan nutella and soy berry butter on top. The waiter also told me I could have any of the sweet brunch things (pancakes, french toast), but after those pastries I was in the mood for savory. I ended up with the tofu scramble, which was delicious. There's a rumor on the PPK that Counter is closing at the end of February, so if you have the opportunity to go there before it closes, do it!

Eating big meals out in NYC left my wallet considerably lighter (and me heavier, I bet!), but it was worth it to have so many good worry- and nightshade-free meals.

how to remove fruit stains from clothes (thanks, Mom!)

Did any of you ever read Blueberries for Sal when you were kids?

It's about a little girl and her mother who go blueberry-picking, get separated, and end up face-to-face a mother bear and her cub. I loved this book (and I still love it, actually), for multiple reasons: first, as my mother informed me when I was young, Sal is a nickname for Sarah, so of course I associated myself with the little girl. Second, bears!

Third, the whole book is about picking and eating blueberries. Who doesn't love blueberries?! They are so awesome. Pies, crisps, muffics, coffee cakes, eating by the handful; they are good for so many things!

Blueberry crisp and a blueberry-soy-yogurt popsicle

The thing I don't like about blueberries, and about berries in general, is that they stain clothing with even a tiny bit of contact. Most of my clothes are dark, so it doesn't matter, but recently I was wearing a yellow shirt while making blueberry pancakes, and bam! purple spatter all over my stomach and chest. And unless you use some kind of miracle detergent, running fruit stains through the wash usually just sets the stains instead of eliminating them.

My mother was visiting at the time, and told me the so-simple-it's-amazing way of removing fruit stains from clothes. This works on more than just berry stains; it can remove any strong vegetable/fruit juice, even beets. The trick is that you have to do this before the clothing makes it into a washing machine, because once the stain goes through the machine, there's no helping you.

Fill a kettle or a pot with lots of water. You're going to want at least a few cups, more for bigger and/or stubborn stains. Drape the stained article of clothing around a bowl, or in your sink. I've draped my shirt around a large bowl in the next few pictures.

Once the water has boiled, pour it very slowly, in a small stream, over the stain.

You can already see some of the stains coming out. (I circled them for you!) There were more, and larger, stains on my shirt, but I didn't think to take a picture until I was already getting rid of them.

This should wash smaller and lighter stains right out; for stubborn or big stains, just keep drizzling the water until they go away. The whole process takes about 1-2 minutes. Ready?

Before:

After:

Stain-free shirt! NOW it's back to normal! And you can put it in the wash. AND you can eat all the blueberries you want.