As a testament to the fact that my craft projects are taking so long that I almost forget having started them, the seemingly simple task of making a few lavender bags is a pretty reliable barometer. Time from first whiff of fresh lavender in the aisle of my local grocery store to having a small stack of shabby chic bags to pepper about my closet and lingerie drawers...about 6 weeks. In which time I could probably have grown the lavender, not just dried and packaged it.

On the upside, I now have a legitimate reason to hoard fabric scraps...my previous claims that they would "be useful some day" falling on deaf ears...

You know that you're a city girl...with a country background...when the sight of bunches of lavender for sale in your local grocery store causes you to stand squealing with glee in aisle seven. For, as every CG with a CB knows, fresh lavender means that (after a little prep work) her closet can be showered with fabric sachets of dried lavender (a much more pleasing scent than any man-made variety).

Step one...getting grubby little hands on fresh lavender

Step two...removing lavender from stems and laying out to dry (a much more fiddly, time-consuming task than it sounds)

Step three...finding the fabric (and time) to make the "bags"...

The next best thing to skull art...at least to my mind...is marginally disturbing clown art. At first, the mind is uncontrollably drawn towards thoughts of the paintings on velvet that you find at flea markets...more in-depth consideration leads one to the jaded, yet slightly bon vivant, traveler in Sean Landers' "Around the World Alone"...

I never thought I'd side with Mrs. Louis XVI on this one but...who needs birthday cake...when homemade birthday fudgsicles are resting in the freezer? Not I...home long enough to make (and consume a couple of) said fudgsicles before boarding another plane...

Recipe for "Happy Birthday to Me Icy-Fudgey-Slabs-of-Goodness"...

2x3 oz packages chocolate pudding mix (this recipe uses the kind of pudding mix that is cooked on the stove-top, not instant)
3 1/2 cups milk
1/4 cup granulated sugar

Combine ingredients in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Remove from stove and allow to cool for 15-20 minutes.

Pour mixture into plastic cups or popsicle molds (like the ones I got from Crate & Barrel) and freeze until solid.

Note: If the sugar is not added, the fudgsicles will have large ice crystals and won't be smooth.

What, it has to be asked, would a week of nest-feathering posts be without the odd skull? The answer...a mere travesty (at least in my humble opinion). Which is why I'm adding this filigree porcelain money box to the mix...though, truth be told, it's much too beautiful to be crammed full of mere dimes and quarters...doomed to suffer a crack on the cranium.

Anyone fortunate enough to have gone strawberry picking will have probably come away with three valuable lessons...

1. A strawberry...straight from the plant to your mouth...is infinitely more flavorful than one found in any supermarket
2. The amount of back-breaking bending that is needed to pick even the most meager amount of berries is truly depressing (and rather painful)
3. The cardboard containers which house your fruit are practical...pleasingly functional...yet destined to be stained by berry juice and thrown in the trash as soon as you get home

The first two lessons cannot be amended...freshly picked fruit will always be the most delicious...and an hour or two of toe-touching will generally cause anguish...lesson three, however, can be circumvented if one uses china farmer's baskets. Impractical in the field, perhaps...yet infinitely pleasing in the kitchen.

"There’s certainly too much pepper in that soup!" Alice said to herself, as well as she could for sneezing.

There was certainly too much of it in the air. Even the Duchess sneezed occasionally; and as for the baby, it was sneezing and howling alternately without a moment’s pause. The only two creatures in the kitchen, that did not sneeze, were the cook, and a large cat, which was lying on the hearth and grinning from ear to ear.

- Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

Of course...to avoid over-peppering (of soup, cook, or cat)...a classic French wooden pepper mill would probably help matters...

The colder months, at least in my tiny little mind, are the time when one settles down for a little nest feathering...contemplating the delights of cushion cover A...the aroma of candle B...or the slumber inducing qualities of cashmere throw C (aka, the creature comfort computations). Perversely, this year, my body clock is running fast...and I find myself alternately longing for the air conditioner and trips to look at household fripperies.

Cue interior decor porn...and proof that even the smallest space can be a home (as opposed to a austere "space"). A "house"...in Paris...whose footprint is a hard to believe 19' wide by 6.5' deep (insert chat swinging joke here). An article on the house...its inhabitor/designer...and more photographs...can be found here...

In the summer of my dreams™...a carefree place...where it's possible to cycle in a skirt without flashing the local populace...remain sweat, I mean perspiration, free on even the hottest days...and take your time over an ice cream cone, undisturbed by paranoia over where its drippy residue will end up...the most perfect days usually include a lavish little picnic, packed into a "proper" wicker basket.

Then reality...and reminiscences...intrude. The picnics of my teens...at which my mother felt that outdoor dining could not be fully enjoyed unless most of the kitchen and dining room had been crammed into a suitcase-sized basket...and lugged half way across a field by her off-spring (i.e., yours truly). Try as I might to enjoy the fireworks...classical music...or jugglers...that were at the end of such rambles it was difficult to remain aloof to the fact that the *$%*@# basket had to be carried back to the car at the end of it (lightened by food, it's true, but still containing enough pointless impedimenta to tax the muscles).

Perhaps a better idea would be to pay homage to the concept of the SomD™...by dint of the indoor picnic. Air conditioning...easy access to fridge and pantry for chilled white wine or the odds and sods that invariably get left behind when one ventures into the wilderness...an homage to the pic-k-er-nic basket courtesy of wicker lampshades...heck, if I had a bigger apartment I'd be tempted to try indoor cycling.

There are the necessary things in life...the whimsically unnecessary...and the complete and utter wastes of money that will be used once or twice and then relegated to the cupboard under the sink. I leave you to decide which category a waffle cone maker falls under...

Finally...someone has realized that something needed to be done about the "klutz vs cut crystal vase" issue. Up until this point those of us with less than stellar coordination have been forced to give a wide berth to anything faceted and fragile. Now, thanks to a mixture of ingenuity, polyseter, polymide, and polyethylene, we have a solution to the "crash, bang, don't move or you'll cut your foot" conundrum...vinyl vases...

Sometimes, it is better to admit defeat early on...to realize that you will never be a modern-day Gertrude Jekyll...that the warning signs were there the day your echinopsis spachiana slowly started to lose color from top to base...and that the best thing would be to stop the mindless seed slaughter and buy some porcelain plants instead.

...it's also where the Scrabble set can be found in it's native habitat...of course, if you're like me...you now take your Scrabble everywhere you go, courtesy of the Words With Friends app on your iPhone (it's like nerdy crack, I tell you).

Home, however, is where you can wrack your brains over what to do with the Z, Q, and R in person...be relatively sure that you're adversary isn't looking their words up online...and recline against a set of these thematically correct HOME cushions...

It wasn't exactly a battle of the ages...but in the skirmish of Hebden versus step-stool I can happy report that Hebden won. It was a close call...mainly due to someone (naming no names) not reading the instructions due to the erroneous impression that screwing eight pieces of wood together couldn't be that hard.

Even better than being able to chalk up a win...being able to reach...and therefore get actual day-to-day use out of (for something other than storage)...the uppermost reaches of my closet.

Now all I need is a spare hour-or-so to apply the Hermès-esque paint that I bought to accompany it.

I have been tempted by other tchotchke-ish kitchen accessories before...naming no names...but I'm looking at you pig cooking lid...and, I quote, "this multipurpose lid can be placed directly over ingredients in a pot to help them cook evenly, releasing steam through the pig's snout".

With these bone china milk bottle measuring cups, however, I may have found a viable melding of practicality and whimsy...

Friends, you are looking at a woman who has had a little bit of an epiphany. For years, I've rarely been able to muster more than marginal interest for the seasonal event commonly referred to as spring cleaning. It was a chore...it had to be done...but it wasn't something that I looked forward to.

This year however, an exploration into the deepest, darkest recesses of a particularly hard to reach kitchen cabinet yielded a couple of (drum roll, please)...

Vintage Italian lemon squeezers...perfectly designed little utensils that I fondly remember my mother adding to the general assemblage of knives, forks, and picks whenever we cracked a crab or did unseemly things to a lobster. I haven't seen any single slice juicers since...and imagined, as is usually the case, that these had been mislaid at some point...never to be heard from again.

And so, I'm a convert to the religion of the seasonal clean. One small step for Hebden-kind...one worrying development for all seafood...