News From The Nest, August 10

A Few Fun Finds

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• Multiple Apple device charging station…currently on sale (37% off)! My Apple mom swears by hers for travel.
• Great gift for college students or new apartment owners. Currently 27% savings.
• Functional Aesthetics…Looks good while doing a great job! This attractive retractable clothesline looks good and serves its function perfectly.
• If you have a Roomba or other robot vacuum and it gets stuck places it shouldn’t go, this is your answer!

From the Knit + Crochet Studio

Farmers market season is in full swing, which makes this crochet market bag awfully well timed. Worked in cotton, it’s sturdy, washable and comes in two sizes, and the open mesh body holds far more than it looks like it should. The stitches are the basic ones, so it’s a friendly project whether you’ve been crocheting for years or are still finding your rhythm.

If you know how to knit and how to purl, you can make the Quiet Plaid Baby Blanket. That’s the whole skill list. The soft tone-on-tone plaid comes entirely from where the knits and purls fall, and because the pattern is reversible, there’s no wrong side to fret over. A reader came up with the name, playing on the quiet plaid and the hopefully quiet baby underneath it.

The seed stitch is one of those small skills that quietly pays off everywhere. It lies flat, looks identical on both sides, and asks nothing more than knits and purls trading places. This beginner’s guide to the seed stitch walks through it stitch by stitch, including how to keep your place when you lose the thread of it and how to bind off in pattern. I use it on the edges of nearly every blanket I design, so think of it as a foundation piece.

From the Kitchen

If you haven’t yet made the acquaintance of the Hugo Spritz, hot and steamy August is the ideal month for an introduction. Elderflower liqueur, gently muddled mint, a few thin slices of lime and a good dry Prosecco add up to something floral and fizzy without being the least bit syrupy. There’s a pitcher version in the printable, which comes in handy when the porch fills up.

We grill a good deal of chicken year-round, and there’s only so much teriyaki one household can absorb. This curry chicken marinade is a welcome change of direction, and it can be stirred together at lunchtime for dinner that same night. Longer isn’t better when it comes to marinating, so no advance planning required. I usually double it and freeze half with the chicken already tucked in, which turns a weeknight dinner into a non-event.

Blackberries are at their peak, and heating up the oven in August is nobody’s idea of a good time. The No-Bake Blackberry Tart neatly solves both, with a chocolate crumb crust and a creamy blackberry filling that sets up in the freezer while you go about your day. It looks considerably fancier than the effort involved, and there are gluten-free and dairy-free swaps laid out if you need them.

Every family has its running jokes, and ours is that if my mom offers to make dessert, it will be a crumble, a crisp, a buckle or a cobbler. This Strawberry Crisp is the one I keep coming back to, with berries that go jammy in their own syrup under a crunchy oat streusel and only about fifteen minutes of actual work on your part. Frozen berries work just as well as fresh, and any other fruit can stand in if strawberries aren’t what you’ve got. Readers have given it more than a dozen ratings, so I’m clearly not alone in my affection for the humble crisp.

If the carrots are stacking up faster than you can eat them, pickled carrots are a tangy way to keep them from going soft in the crisper drawer. The recipe works both ways: quick refrigerator pickles for right now, or water bath canned for the pantry shelf. The spices are entirely up to you. Skip the mustard seed, add a slice of ginger and swap in rice vinegar, and suddenly you’ve got a Vietnamese-style pickle instead.

Speaking of putting things up, this is prime jam season, and Jelly and Jam Making Basics 101 is the post to read before the fruit hits the pan. It sorts out what actually separates a jelly from a jam from a conserve, explains why sugar and acid aren’t the places to economize, and covers which fruits bring enough pectin to gel on their own. The frozen plate test alone has saved me from more than one runny batch.

From the Arts + Crafts Studio

I’ll never go back to a traditional bed skirt after making this one. This bed skirt with box pleats is made of separate panels that attach with Velcro tape, so it stays exactly where you put it. Better still, if one side gets dirty, you can wash just that section instead of hauling the whole mattress off the bed. If you can sew a mostly straight line and read a yardstick, you’re well equipped for this one.

My love of table linens is entirely genetic; grandma and mom were both linen lovers, and I grew up eating at a table set with napkins she’d sewn herself. These easy-to-make napkins have mitered corners and a delicate crochet edge, and the crochet asks only two stitches of you. They make lovely gifts, though I’d wager most of them end up in your own napkin drawer.

In the Garden

Years ago, our family spotted a wooden insect house at a garden show in Austria, and I snapped a picture with every intention of building one at home. This insect hotel gives solitary bees, ladybugs, lacewings, and ground beetles a place to shelter, and they repay the favor by handling aphids and doing pollination duty. Part pest control, part lawn art, and the post includes how we built ours.

Once the hotel is up, you’ll want guests. This look at beneficial insects in the garden sorts the good bugs into predators, pollinators and parasitoids, and spells out which pests each one takes care of. A single adult ladybug can put away a startling number of aphids in a day, and her larvae do considerably more damage than that. There’s a free printable chart of the plants that draw them in, which is worth tacking up in the potting shed.

In the House + Home

When my brother handed over a stack of cashmere sweaters riddled with moth holes, I said yes before I’d ever actually mended one. This post on how to mend moth holes shows the technique that makes the repair very nearly invisible: work from the back, stay on the loops, and weave a small mesh across the gap. It’s oddly satisfying work, and it rescues a good sweater from the donation pile.

Some weeks the to-do list simply wins. These 49 household tasks that take 15 minutes or less are the antidote: small, finishable jobs you can knock out while dinner cooks or while you’re waiting on the repairman who said he’d be there between nine and noon. Wiping out the utensil drawer isn’t glamorous, but crossing a few of these off does wonders for your sense of being on top of things.