Jill’s Jumble

Terribly out of season, I know!  Pumpkin can make up for the lack of eggs in baked goods so I try to have it on hand year round.   I’ve had problems with gluten and egg-free pancake and waffle recipes that stick terribly.  This recipe from Karina tastes good and doesn’t stick!  Some of the later waffles split a bit so maybe it’s best not to let the batter sit around to much.  We were so anxious to eat them that we let the batter sit before cooking the next ones!

One of the most exciting lessons I learned while making them is that I can make oat flour using our rocket blender and quick oats.  Gluten-free baking seems to involve many different flours and they take up quite a bit of space!  I’m excited to make this trick work for me so that I’ve got one thing less I need to store!

I am changing the focus of this blog.  It will no longer focus on just one topic.  It will become a place for all those things that I think about.  I enjoy a variety of topics and would rather have one place for all rather then try to maintain a place for each.  So the few posts on the quilting blog I started will migrate at some point.  Future posts will cover topics such as personal finance, craft projects, or my involvement in the Society for Creative Anachronism.

1. This story really just needs to be told but it was prompted by this post on a personal finance blog I read regularly.

We had our wedding on the lawn at my parent’s home in rural Vermont to take advantage of their view of Mount Mansfield. The night of the rehearsal, we all gathered by the arch to begin. Someone commented that the ground was moving. Upon further inspection, it was discovered that there were ants crawling all over the lawn in concentrated patches. Flying ants! Swarming flying ants! We got on with it and the rest of the evening went just fine.

In order to save money, I made my own wedding dress and underpinnings. Well, mostly, my mom did attach the lace to the sleeves for me the morning of the wedding. I was helping my matron of honor finish her bridesmaid dress. As you can imagine, things ran a little bit later then intended but I don’t think it was so late as to cause a problem. We just had more witnesses to the pre-wedding pictures then we expected!

I do regret not knowing exactly how dry the grass had gotten since that morning’s rain. I ended up walking up the aisle barefoot so as not to ruin my beautiful shoes. The local military range did choose that day to test their big guns though. We are so used to them here that we didn’t think to tell my cousin, the minister, that they weren’t thunder. So we had some lovely punctuated moments during the ceremony.

Just after I said my vows and the minister had turned to Justin with the intention of having him say his vows, we all heard a loud crack. My cousin Taylor had fainted and hit his head on the house! So between our vows there was a brief intermission to make sure that Taylor would be okay. Shortly after the completion of the ceremony, the ambulance arrived for him.

Soon after the ambulance left with Taylor and his mother, we started the reception. However, the reception was also interrupted. We experienced a multi-town power outage. Luckily the owner of the DJ company lived nearby so my brother ran his truck over there to get a generator to finish the reception with. While waiting for the music, we filled in with the cake cutting. I specifically waited to get tested for food allergies until after I’d gotten to eat some of that cake! That’s right, it was filled with gluten, dairy, and eggs.

Remember the shoes I mentioned not having worn during the ceremony. Well, I’d forgotten to put them on for the reception. Until, that is, I was reminded by a little three-year-old girl who asked her grandmother why the “princess” wasn’t wearing shoes. I told the little girl that I’d forgotten them. Then I pulled them out from under the table where they’d been stashed so that I could put them on for her.

The reception continued once the generator arrived. About an hour before the DJ expected, I decided it was time to wrap things up. I got my now-husband to pull the car around and we had our last dance. Hop into the car and away we went. Only to stop once to pull the trailing balloons and such dragging behind the car, and a second time because the drops of rain starting to come down were big! Sure enough, we finished our drive to the other side of Mt. Mansfield in a deluge. We only had to avoid two branches that fell into the road just in front of us!

Upon our arrival at the bed & breakfast, we got the best customer service I have ever received. They let us pull into their garage so I wouldn’t have to run in my silk wedding gown through the rain into the B&B! All is well that ends well, right?

Well, the rest of our honeymoon didn’t go perfectly either. Our only checked bag got lost somewhere between NYC and Brussels. We did get it a couple of weeks after our return to the States.

1. While the purpose of this blog isn’t frugality, I do have a few tips based on my own experience:

-If you are confident in your sewing skills, sew your own dress. I also sewed one of my bridesmaid’s dresses in addition to helping with my matron of honor’s.

-That leads me to this: when transporting a sewing machine from your house to you mother’s make sure it’s not going to tip over in the car. I was without that sewing machine for three months while it was in the shop being repaired (waiting for a part). Not only will you have to pay the cost of having it serviced, but you won’t be able to do any other machine sewing to save money in the meanwhile!

-Reuse! My veil was the same one my mother used when she married my father.

-Comparison shopping is key, but you might want to pay attention to the details. The company we went through to rent the tent, linens, and tea cups (not a particularly frugal way to go, in general) had the most expensive rental prices on napkins that I’d seen despite everything else being cheaper or the same price. I opted to have pretty paper plates and clear plastic silverware from Costco along with personalized paper napkins. As a matter a fact, I might have gone overboard with the personalized stuff we had. The centerpieces were created from votive holders that were personalized. The favors we gave out were also personalized.

-By holding the wedding amongst my mother’s flower gardens, I opted not to purchase flowers from a florist. Before the rehearsal, my bridesmaids and I created boutonnières from the flowers in the garden. Mom also created a couple of bouquets for the buffet tables. For ladies in the wedding party I opted to have simple bouquets of dried lavender stems. The flower girl’s basket was one that I’d had forever, newly lined with the same fabric as the bridesmaids dresses and filled with loose lavender flowers.

-Take advantage of friends of the family. Both our photographer and our DJ qualified there!

-Consider staying with relatives for part of your honeymoon. My family in Belgium loved having the opportunity to see us as part of our “voyage de noce”. The ones who had come over for our wedding were particularly amused to see us again a week later in another country!