Sonya Cheney

Writer. Witch. Creatrix.

in a hole in a ground there lived a hobbit.

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All right—if I’m honest, I don’t want to live in a hole in the ground, though I’ve heard it can be very efficient in terms of heating and cooling. But I have been realizing more and more lately that a new dream of mine is to, essentially, live like a hobbit.

Now, in what I have to admit is a bit of irony, I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time watching YouTube videoes about slow, sustainable living, and following that up with a lot of daydreams, Pinterest vision boards, and baby steps. It feels like any day now we’ll be moving, and so much of my mental capacity these days is spent thinking about how to make our next house into a home, especially for Finn, regardless of what that house even turns out to be. It’s taken a long time—it’s something I’ve been thinking about for years if I’m honest—but I finally narrowed in on how to describe my dream home aesthetic: cottage-like.

I’ve fallen in love with a lot of home styles over the years: Scandinavian, “goth farmhouse,” mid-century modern. But I think, more accurately, those are just styles I admire (or in the case of the “goth farmhouse,” find amusing). Traditional farmhouse styling (think Fixer Upper) is one I’ve been focusing on a bit more lately, but even that hasn’t been quite right when I thought about it—appealing, but not fitting mem like a missing piece. The more videos I watched, though, the more I was attracted to this romantic, rustic style, and I only realized what it was when the word “cottage” finally popped up in the title of one of the videos.

A few years ago we had a small brood of chickens, and I really loved it. We raised them from chicks, and I loved how they were so sweet and friendly with me, not to mention the absolute abundance of eggs they provided. That plus a little garden experiment that we had at this house were my first forays into that slow, sustainable lifestyle that I’m becoming ever more drawn to as I get older. I’ve been a big proponent of baby steps lately—it’s how I’ve been getting writing projects done; just 500 words a day—and those two things felt like baby steps towards figuring out what I want. I’ll admit I wasn’t the best at the more laborious parts of those endeavors, like weeding the garden or changing the shavings in the chicken coop, but I’d like to believe that I’ll be better at them a second time around. Having a baby has, in my own opinion, made me more efficient and focused (see that 500 words note again), and I think adding those lifestyle changes would be more successful with my current personality.

Okay, I just really want chickens again, you guys.

I’ve mentioned my dive into bread baking this year, and that’s another effort that I think helped me figure out the journey I’m actually on in creating our home. I don’t want to say perfecting our home because that’s not really possible (unless we go with the cliché “perfectly imperfect” concept), but making it something that works for us and works for me and truly makes us feel at home is my goal. Bread feels like the ultimate symbol of slow and sustainable living right now, emphasis on slow: you spend so much time waiting for bread to rise, to proof, to bake; you spend time kneading it and connecting with it; and with the right ingredients, it can be vastly more sustainable than the loaves in the grocery stores. (I realize, of course, that sometimes it is just not feasible for everyone to bake their loaves of bread, so no shade.)

In diving into this world of bread baking—and it really is a world unto itself with some serious inhabitants—I’ve come closer to focusing on and creating the life that I’m looking for. In a way I feel like I’ve come full circle from those first chickens and that small garden effort back around to the self-sufficiency of bread baking and who knows what else I end up adding to my plate (literally and figuratively) as we find our new home and I mold it into my own little hobbit haven.

bread baking | eight-hour no-knead bread

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Months ago, I started following Jenna Fischer on Instagram only to discover that she is obsessed with baking bread. I’m not sure how I didn’t know that beforehand, but whatever. My status of being behind the times is not the point of this post. The point is to share the fact that Jenna’s obsession quickly turned into my obsession, and maybe a week or two after following and binge watching all of her bread-related Instagram highlights, I ordered a few supplies for myself and got to baking.

Sort of.

I ordered Bonnie Ohara’s Bread Baking for Beginners in late November, and since then I’ve made exactly three (3) loaves of bread–and two of them were the same recipe. Yes, having a small child in the house who often demands my undivided attention is a pretty good excuse, but still–I want to bake all the bread, dammit! Even if he can’t quite eat it yet, Dan and I sure as hell can, and when I do get around to baking a loaf, boy do we. One of our favorite dinners lately has been a good loaf of bread, fig jam, and goat cheese. That’s it, unless we decide to go really wild and add some olives and salami. But just those three keep me perfectly content.

Anyway, I recently finally had the chance to try my second recipe in the book, the eight-hour fermentation no-knead bread. What I love about the book is not only how much I learn, but how much it focuses on precision to get your loaf just right. I’ve made a pretty good amount of bread over the years, but I’ve only recently really committed to not only weighing my ingredients but also checking the temperature of them. Doing this in the winter in a somewhat drafty house can make it a little challenging at times, but it’s still amazing the difference it makes and the results that I’ve gotten so far.

Dan suggested after the first loaf that I should make a scrapbook for the breads I bake throughout the book–especially since I’m just baking my way through in a linear fashion, building foundation skills to add to as I go–and I definitely think I’ll be doing just that. I’ve become so enamored of travelers notebooks lately, and along with that, one of my goals this year is to get back to using my dSLR camera again, so I think it’s a great way to combine all of these loves.

I’ve got this funny little dream of a very rustic life, being a writer with a farmhouse and a good-sized garden to feed us. Baking bread is a big part of that dream; it’s simple, but it’s wholesome. It is, in fact, very hygge. Basically, I just want to be a hobbit.

a quilted christmas gift.

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About a year and a half ago now I started learning how to quilt thanks to my friend Lydia, and for this past Christmas I made my third completed quilt as a gift for my friend Katie.

One thing I love about quilting is the creative opportunity that it presents. Each quilt that I’ve completed so far has started with the same general idea, the half-square triangle, and each one has turned out completely different in the end. Learning that approach alone creates so much possibility for design, and half the fun for me is in sitting down with a handful of HSTs and moving them about like a puzzle to create a design that really jumps out at me for the current project. It’s just so cool! And it’s beyond satisfying when I find something I like and stick with it.

I actually haven’t used a pattern to make any of my quilts yet, and on the one hand that is so much fun because I get to put my creative muscles to use–but I’m also looking forward to the day that I find a pattern I love (or that I think someone else will love) and trying my hand at something more than winging it. The funny thing is that I’ve been knitting for years and have never made a pattern of my own from scratch. I’ve never really had the patience or the desire for it. But with quilting, I haven’t much bothered with patterns, besides the occasional bit of browsing, because it’s an entirely different kind of satisfaction when I’m quilting without that kind of guidance or restraint.

So much of this quilt came together as I was working on it: the square patterns, the addition of the black space, the quilting pattern. I even chose the quilting thread in the middle of the project, debating between black or purple for the top. When I went to Joann Fabrics to browse thread colors, ultimately deciding I’d be choosing a purple, not only did I get a purple but I got a variegated thread with beautiful shades. It added such a cool dimension to the quilting design that I never would have thought of if I hadn’t given myself the freedom to just browse thread colors halfway through the project. (And, no surprise, I am now more than a little obsessed with variegated thread.)

I see so many more quilts in my future–I’m pretty sure we’re going to be buried under throw blankets in our next house. If at some point you no longer hear from me, just know that I went in one of the best ways possible: comfortably wrapped in an endless blanket burrito.