Kitchen Duty - May 26, 2026

Yesterday, I spent the whole day either cooking or washing up from cooking.  The refrigerator is now stocked with enough breakfasts-to-go to last the rest of the week and a pork loin for tonight's supper.  And there's a pan of brownies on the counter.  

The kitchen is closed for a few days.

While I was puttering in the kitchen, I decided to fix the #(!*@ screen door between the kitchen and the porch.  The screen in this door has been flapping for a couple of years, ever since Dusty the cat tried to escape the vacuum cleaner.  I don't know what compelled me to take on the job during the middle of the cook-fest, but I did it.  Sent The Husband to the shed for the roll of screen left over from the building of the porch, gathered up my crafting tools, dragged out the stepladder, and got 'er done.  

Not much happened in the craft room yesterday, but between oven buzzers, I watched some craft tutorials and lined up some projects for the coming week.  Some of the projects called for stuff I don't have:  a "steel soap" and a texture sheet with irregular bumps resembling pebbles.  I put a steel soap in my online shopping cart but didn't buy it right away.  (I did not know that steel soaps are an actual thing for handwashing; I thought it was just a craft tool for shaping clay.)  Instead, I decided to try to make my own stuff.

I made the "soap" by rolling out a sheet of clay on the thickest pasta machine setting (2.5 mm on my machine), cutting out a 3" circle, and shaping it over a tennis ball (covered with plastic wrap to keep the clay from sticking to it) to create a domed shape.  Happily, the dome did not collapse while baking, and I used it this morning as a form for shaping a domed pendant.  The raw clay did not stick to the form during baking.

The pebble texture sheet was easy.  I just used some ball tools (various sizes) to press indentions in raw clay, overlapping the indentions.  Of course, using the ball tools made the "pebbles" perfectly round (until overlapped).  The baked form, pressed into raw clay, made a texture that looks more like pearls than pebbles, but this is what I was going for.  If I'd wanted it to look like irregular pebbles, I could've just pressed real pebbles into raw clay.

Now that I've made all this stuff, I have to figure out how to turn it into jewelry.  I need inspiration!