Flour prices in the US more than doubled in the past month. This means that all types of baked goods—from cupcakes to pizza—are going to cost you more per bite.

Heard this all on CNN yesterday and was quite dismayed by the news. This impacts home bakers like me who will find pricier flour on grocery shelves.

This is all because of rising wheat prices in the US, owing partly to the increased demand for ethanol. (Ethanol is a substance derived from corn that has a myriad of uses, but mostly as a fuel.) Farmers are now planting more corn than wheat. And with the dollar’s poor showing in recent months, foreigners are turning to the US for their wheat needs. I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard that 59% of wheat produced in the US is EXPORTED, dwindling the supply here and puffing up prices like a properly made soufflé!

Globally, poor weather conditions didn’t help the growth of wheat crops around the world either. There was a winter freeze in the US and droughts in Australia and France.

A 50-pound bag of flour is now $37, up from $16 just four weeks ago. CNN tells the story of how such a jump in prices is affecting Manhattan pizzeria owner Joe Vicari, who feels bad for charging his “working people” customers $5 for two slices. I understand how Joe feels. If baking was where I got my dough (oh, the puns just keep coming), I would feel bad as well for making customers pay more for a cupcake or two. Someone who’s in the business of making money from baking/cooking has to love it fiercely. If their life’s purpose becomes less affordable for patrons to enjoy, then it just becomes, well, less purposeful.

I’m due for my next bag of flour and plan to monitor the prices over the next few weeks. Hunker down, bakers, we’ll pull through somehow!

When flour prices turn ridiculous, I’m just going to vent all this frustration into sewing projects. I have a lot cloth to work with from years of collecting a yard or two here and there. Oh, and some pretty Japanese paper! And yarn too! Ok, getting ahead of myself. Pulling back now. Haha.

For the CNN article on the flour fiasco, click HERE.

By the way, the poster above was an ad for Gold Medal brand flour in 1941 (I just love retro food packaging, don’t you?), the year when the company started enriching their flour, upping the thiamine content and adding calcium and iron to it. This was because studies at that time showed that millions of Americans were suffering from inadequate diets. Flour is such an integral part of nutrition and, on a deeper level, our palate’s memories the world over. I hope this whole thing blows over soon.

The crafting and cooking life is a crazy life if you don’t have an outlet for it. Ideas crowd your brain like the mosh pit at a Pearl Jam concert. The more obvious thing to do is to MAKE all of these ideas but there are only 24 hours in a day, and you only have two hands.

So you bide your time. You let the ideas pile up into big mounds of colored silk in your brain. You get by. But then you find yourself awake at 2 am in a foreign city (not good, because you don’t even know where you ARE when it happens.) What was that, you ask in the dark. The answer is an idea for a skirt, appearing to you from the ether, floating through the wispy levels of your sleep. On the way back home, you start seeing quilt patterns on the bathroom tiles in the airport. Finally, when you find yourself studying Japanese fabric patterns online at 6:30 am before you head off to work the day after your flight gets in, you realize you’re turning into a freak. A crafts freak.

So you decide to do something about it. Buy a notebook, write down all your ideas, flesh them out one by one. Sketch them out, even if you could never draw to save your life. And write about them, as much as you can.

You stop fighting your craftster self. You realize that you are, after all, the granddaughter of two amazing craftsters: one who could whip Swiss meringue into airy peaks by hand, and another who lived until she was 102 years old, quilting on a manual sewing machine up until she was 98.

So hello there, my craftster self. And hello to you.