elsie marley

On Friday all my kids’ friends came over for a valentines making party–yes all! have you ever had a party where every person you invited could come and then think holy crap! everyone is coming?  At the last minute a few kids couldn’t make it, so it wasn’t quite as chaotic as I thought it would be, but we are still picking glitter out of our hair (four days later).  The kids are still pretty young, so there weren’t any projects proper, it was a how many different things can you glue to one card sort of deal. My son’s inner glitter lover came out and he used up most of what we had.  Actually after the party was over my kids worked on their valentines almost until dinner time. They would get up from the table every once and a while and help themselves to the leftovers at the buffet. It was a rare day in motherhood where I was aloud to sit back, cuddle with the baby, and crochet as I please.

I got kinda themey with the food. It was supposed to be all heart shaped and red, but ended up rather brown and carby.  I made tomato focaccia from my bakery days and it was pretty good, at least the two dogs who finished it off thought so. These financiers were a total bust: they didn’t taste very good–and financiers are usually super delicious–and the heart effect was fussy as hell and didn’t work in the end.  Everything else was pretty run of the mill: heart shaped pb&js, red vegetables, trail mix. Martha’s raisin heart pockets were my favorite and I squirreled a few away to have with tea later.  I know valentines day is all about chocolateness, but these were nice and wintery, not too sweet and perfect with tea. I used golden raisins in the filling, but I think dried apricots with a little cardamom would be even better.  So go set up a little buffet for your kiddo’s lunch and open the glitter and savor some quiet time, or make some valentines yourself.  Next year we might skip the christmas cards all together and just send out valentines.

1. gingham dress, 2. stripey dining room, 3. hat, 4. warren, 5. adele, 6. leaf crown, 7. one quilt: march, 8. summer girl, 9. corduroy coat, 10. earrings, 11. pointy hat, 12. patch on

We welcomed the new year with a big pot of fondue, the everyone promptly got the flu (not from the fondue). So I sort of missed  the first few days of this new year. I’m happy it’s here though, flu and all. Last year was a little rough (me and pregnancy don’t really like each other much) still a few things got made and some good ones at that. I put my favorites up there–that baby being the best thing I made by far. I hope to rework this little blog in the new year and maybe even get going on some patterns I’ve been meaning to work on. We’ll see. This little baby just learned to roll over and crawling comes quickly to my boys, so I’m guessing all sewing time will soon be gone.  I have ambitions though, three days in to 2010 and my list is already long.

Happy New Year to you and yours!

I am super excited to tell you about this project. After much help from my computer genius of a husband, you can now buy (for the super cheap price of $2.50) and download my Advent Calendar Coloring Book.  Then check “make advent calendar” off your list.  Done and done. All the pictures were drawn by yours truly and I had a fine time doing it. We all should draw more often. And color more often too! Because of course after making a coloring book, I had to break out the crayons and pencils and color!

My daughter, who is my little tester, has colored three whole books already and advent hasn’t even begun. And really, you could print out a coloring book a day for advent, instead of coloring one picture a day.  My kids are coloring fiends, so that much coloring wouldn’t be unheard of. And of course you don’t have to use it as an advent calendar, but just color all the christmasiness to get in a happy holiday mood.

And as a special treat, I am going to have a page to print out and color everyday for advent on my blog. So be sure to stop by tomorrow for the first one!

I wasn’t kidding when I said I wanted to make every project in the Kid’s Crochet book. And here are 2 more. This little pointy number is pretty fantastic. The super cuteness doesn’t really come across in the photos, not that I didn’t try–my children will. not. be. still! As with all the projects in the book, this hat went very fast and I didn’t have one bit of trouble with it (here are the specs). My daughter picked out the variegated yarn (she called it rainbow yarn) from Joann’s and I wanted to try to get another hat out of it, so I added some stripes.

To mark the back of the hat, I embroidered her name on some wool felt and stitched it in. She picked out the orange thread and damn if that child doesn’t just have some amazing, if sometimes crazy, color sense. What four year old picks out taupe yarn anyway? But she did and it’s beautiful. While we were at the store we got some yarn for a cardigan I want to crochet for her. Stupidly I didn’t bring the pattern and we ended up buying the wrong size yarn, but she chose three gorgeous colors: a purpley raspberry, a magenta and a taupe-y brown. I never would have thought that’s what she would pick.

The skull cap (a variation of the same pattern) went even faster than the first hat. I did run out of yarn, so I added larger stripes of the yarn leftover from his scarf, but the wool at the bottom is curling. I haven’t blocked it, but how do you block a hat? On your head?

Well after that last post I went for a little walk to gather leaves. There was one lonely tree left with leaves on it, but they were huge and yellow and perfect. The boy and I snipped off their stems and folded them a bit, then I sewed them together one by one with a simple whip stitch. He picked yellow thread to match the leaves, so you can’t see it. But I have plans to stitch something on them in blue! This was such a simple and beautiful project. I think making these will be part of our fall for years to come.

I’ve been meaning to write about this little project for a while now.  It wasn’t much work, practically none at all really, but it has been awesome. I got the idea from an old issue of Cookie magazine (well they are all old now– damn you, tanking magazine industry!).  I just slapped some chalkcloth–oil cloth that works like a chalk board–that I got on etsy, cut it to fit, and because I couldn’t be bothered to take it off again I just mitered the corners with some glue.  Done and done.  Now it’s someone’s job to draw the place settings for dinner (sometimes mine) which makes those 15 minutes before dinner enjoyable rather than the low blood sugar hell they usually are.

If you have kids and don’t know about kids craft weekly, well you should.  I’ve subscribed to their newsletter for quite some time, but I’m embarrassed to say this is the first project we’ve ever done from it.  When we do art my kids are pretty happy with the process and not too interested in the result, but recently that’s changed.  These two projects are both from the 5 minute craft issue. And really with a 2.5 and 4 year old all crafts should be 5 minute crafts. The owls were a great for learning to cut more precisely (for the 4 year old) and to work on getting better with the scissors (for the 2.5 year old). The bean project was awesome (draw something with glue and have the kids put beans on the glue–easy peasy) and my daughter has requested we do it everyday since. They started off just doing letters, but wanted to pictures as well: pumpkins and beans (ha!) and smile faces (as they call them).

I think that is actually my owl. If you want to see the boy’s owl (grandma) it’s here.

The boy is doing such a good job with potty training (this week at least) that I thought I’d make him some special undies. Before the new baby this project would have taken an hour, now it takes a week. You forget just how dramatically the pace changes when you have a tiny baby. But they did get done, amazingly enough, and he likes them–and so do I, but it is hard to watch your work get peed on.

Yay to everyone participating in color week! Don’t worry, you don’t have to take pictures of changing leaves. There aren’t really that many here and we’re way up in Wisconsin. I just thought it would get everyone excited for fall–and hurry it up a bit. For all those in the southern hemisphere: you are of course welcome, even though it’s all pinks and greens in your springtime world now.

No baby yet (two days overdue and counting) but this is pretty damn exciting. I’m in a calendar! and I’m not naked in it! This is a pretty fantastic calendar, one I might even pick up if I wasn’t in it–and I’m pretty cheap, I mean I draw my own calendars monthly. There are so many fantastic projects in here:  two each week. It’s just the right amount because you could actually do two little sewing projects each week.  And there are so many fantastic bloggers in here like Ellen from the long thread, Alicia from the Mayfly, Dawn from UK lass in the US, and the listed of talent just goes on and on.  I’ve got 2 projects in the calendar: the tin can cover (hey look it’s on the cover!) and the post office bag, oh wait I found another in there, the half eaten gingerbread man (all my tutorials are here, if you are interested). I can’t believe I’m thinking about Christmas yet, but I am, and this would make a great gift for a lot of people on my list. I have no idea if it’s in stores yet, or what stores it will be in, but if I see it in one I will surely freak out and tell everyone I know.

There might not be much sewing going on in these parts, but there are little home fix-it things happening every day. Nothing like having a baby to make you fix the damn doorknob already (thank you, dear).  This little, vaguely eames, coat rack is in our bathroom–making it a towel rack really, but whatever. The idea is all Martha and it came from her book “Simple Home Solutions,” which I’m sure your local library has and you should check it out. I canceled my subscription to Living a few years ago because it seemed they just started recycling ideas over and over again. Turns out they picked the good ones and put them in this book and a few more might just show up here.

There were quite a few steps to make these simple looking hooks. When I bought the hooks at my awesomely helpful Ace hardware I asked them to hack off the tips of both the hooks (if you have a hacksaw you could do this yourself). Then I spray painted them white, because I didn’t know I wanted them white until after I got them home (they sell white ones, so I could have saved myself some inhaled fumes).  My husband helped me drill a hole in each wood ball–Martha doesn’t tell you how big the hole should be, but when you jam the ball on the end of the hook it should just fit. Then I painted and shellacked all the balls, fretted about the arrangement, and hung the suckers up. I have two more lower down for the kids that aren’t quite done yet, but they will get done unless I have this baby sometime soon. Yup, still pregnant over here even though I’m due today (hear that baby?!). Grannyma took the kids for a couple days, so all we are doing here is waiting. Quietly waiting.

Speaking of kids and Martha Stewart. This is project I wanted to do, but I don’t live near a place with lots of beautiful flat rocks and my local craft store didn’t really have that great of a selection. We actually bought our daughter dominoes for that “the new baby is here” present. Dominoes are a fantastic toy for preschoolers and I thought I’d share this project with all of you who live near a rocky shore, unlike us land locked Midwesterners.