Valentine's Day

Yesterday was the best kind of day.  When I woke up I was given this card by My Favourite Boy:

The big heart was coloured with scented ink.  But the best part was the bottom of the card: here, have a closer look:

That's love!

We had heart shaped pancakes for breakfast:

We got a new craft book at the Scholastic Book Fair:

I say "we", but really I mean me, because the kids don't know yet that I bought it:)

I was able to get some sewing time in the afternoon and made a few pretty things for my purse:

It was a great day.

February Things

Our spring teaser weather has disappeared, leaving us in the cold and gray today.  I am supposed to be making doll dresses for Easter but it is hard to find the inspiration.

I am slowly getting ready for Valentine's Day; that is to say I have been playing around with my decorations.  I frou-froued with the mantle a fair bit yesterday.  I had a super early wake-up yesterday morning so puttering was really all I was good for. (Pictures are click-able to get a better view)

The decoration to the far right is new:  I made it yesterday after seeing something similar on a blog.  The internet is just full of crafty inspiration!  

Once I had my button arrangement I had to carefully take each one off and add the tiniest drop of glue before putting it back ex-ac-tly where it was before.  Once the glue dried I stitched each button on with red thread.  

The frame is a garage sale find from a few summers ago.  I got two for 25 cents each and spray painted them white.  They are actually made of wood and not resin so I think they were a really good deal. 

My blanket is growing: this thing is going to be a monster at almost 8 feet long!  I don't know how that happened, but it's too late to make changes now.  On the plus side, it will be big enough to cover two people on each end of the couch so there will be no blanket tug-of-war.

While we're looking at stripes, guess what else is new?

My Favourite Girl is learning how to knit!  There are some amazing lunch clubs at her school, and one of them is the Wooly Wednesday Knitting Club. This is her second piece, which is apparently destined to become a rug in the doll house.  The other finish has become a cape for a stuffed animal.  I keep dropping hints that if she keeps going and makes them larger she will have made a dishcloth for a gift.  She's got big plans for future makes, so I hope she keeps with it.

Thanks for visiting: soon there will be some changes to my blog so stay tuned!

Jenn

Addicted

I can't seem to stop the following:



Watching season two of 'Downton Abbey'.  We just found out you can rent season two instead of having to wait until every Sunday at nine o'clock.  We finished it last night and are now in a sort of 'Downton post-partum'.  I guess I'll have to go back to the beginning of season 1.

Crocheting these little flowers.  They are for washing your face with, so I made one for each day of the week.  It never occurred to me you could use something so pretty to wash and give a gentle exfoliation with.  They are made with cotton yarn, so are washable.

Crocheting my new blanket.  I'm using an easy pattern of double crochet in different colours.  I bought this yarn to make a granny square blanket but decided I wanted to use different colours.  I told myself I could not start another big project until I used up this stash of yarn first, so here I am.  I am having fun with it: it's going quickly and I like choosing my next colour at the end of each row.  It will be bright and colourful and will make its home in the basement.

All this movie watching and crocheting is tough on my eyes.  They have been sore for days, but a good kind of sore.  Still, I have to rest them up for a while before I get back to it.  Today I'll clean the house and make some granola for Mr. Crafty.  The sun has gone away so it's a good time to just get to work.
Have a great day!

January Molasses

I used to have a piano teacher that liked to use the expression: "slow like molasses in January".  Sitting here at the end of January, I am thinking that that is how I felt all month: slow like molasses.  I don't feel like I have done anything but go where I needed to or just ooze around the house on the days I didn't need to be anywhere.  Times like this I'm so glad I take pictures of all the mundane things: cookbooks I have tried recipes from; the fabric I have been playing around with; snowflakes outside. These pictures are proof to me that I did complete some things and I wasn't so slow in January.  I did, after all, finish that blanket.
I also introduced the kids to late night garbage retrieval when I had them help me bring home this chair:

I am hoping to play around with it this summer and give it a makeover.  If it doesn't work out it can go out the curb (again) for the next person to find.

I bought these cute (giant) ceramic buttons on sale at the fabric store and plan on tweaking their looks as well:

They will look nice on the wall of my sewing space.

I made a project from a kit I bought for my birthday last year:

I stitched a snowman:

I finished the one on the left last year as a stitch-a-long with another blogger.  Next year I am hoping to stitch the last snowman in the series.  Then I'll decide if I am going to frame them or finish them another way.

I have obviously had hearts on my mind because I have been hooking and stitching up lots of things with hearts on them.  This doesn't even include the two cross stitch projects I am now working on.

I finished this today.  I wanted something very Valentine-ish: to me that means pinks, flowers and hearts.  I crocheted the flowers and hearts and had tons of fun picking the buttons and beads to finish it off.

I crocheted lots of petite pink hearts for my 'tree'.

These are the same branches I spray painted last spring and have since hung Easter decorations and glittery snowflakes.

I attempted some free motion sewing machine stitching on this Valentine pot holder.  I learned that free motion quilting does not work on my machine very well!

I found a cute little crochet pattern that I just had to make, and make it right now darn it!  An evening flurry of crochet and I had this:

No, it's not a wash cloth; it's a soap cozy!

Mr Crafty World is very excited because he likes scrubbie things to use in the shower.  Now that I have taken pictures he can have it .  I discovered while making it that the yarn is scented.  Kind of neat, but kind of weird too.  How do they get the scent into it?  How much of it does my skin absorb while working with it?  How many washes 'till the scent is gone?

I have also had two job interviews; seen both my babies perform in public and had a retro baking day that made everyone happy.

Now I see for sure that January wasn't slow at all.  It was another month of me doing all the things I love to do.  (Well, with the exception of the job interview part!) It felt slow, but after the rush of December I see that it was a nice break.  Oh my how I love the way the universe works: always with my best interests at the heart of it.

Here's hoping for a 'slow' February :)

This Morning

I know it's been a while.  I have been doing stuff, though I'm not up to anything spectacular at the moment. We all had a bout of illness this week so there has been a lot of sleeping and wearing our pyjamas all day.  Thankfully everyone seems better and is off to their regular routines this morning.
My Favourite Boy got his yellow belt in karate last night.  There were five white belts due to graduate to their yellow belts.  They took four of them and they had to follow the instructor in the moves they have learned thus far to show their new skills.  Lots of parents were watching.  For whatever reason they had My Favourite Boy do his turn by himself with the instructor so all eyes were on him.  He did amazing!  The whole time I was weepy.  He saw too, but that's OK because he has seen me be weepy at things My Favourite Girl has done.  I had a smile on my face for hours afterward;  I am so proud of him.  I heard someone say once that parenthood is the most blissful heart-ache and it's so true.

Now onto this morning, as the post title says.  We started with rain; then icy rain; then light snow; and now heavy snow.  I played with my camera a bit on the macro setting to take some pictures.

Have a blissful day.

First Finish

While the lead-up to Christmas ended up being more stressful than I had planned on, the after part has been wonderful.  The kids are off school until Monday, so it has been a full two weeks of time at home just hanging around. I think My Favourite Boy has logged more days in his pyjamas than not.   I didn't take the decorations down for the longest time, in part because it just felt wrong to do it while the kids were still home; but also because I was really enjoying the extended holiday season.  I have had a few occasions to play around with my sewing machine; I started a few little things and even got a quilt top pieced together that has been sitting in the closet for a few months.  I can't estimate a finishing time on it yet because I have to buy backing fabric for it.
A project that I did get done is the Big Project.  Yes, Amy will get her wedding gift before her first anniversary!  I have worked like gang busters on it the past few days and all of a sudden I had a completed blanket on my hands.  I am really proud of this one, so you will have to look at a lot of pictures!  This is my very first blanket:

Full Frontal Blanketness

Up close with all those open fan shapes

Doesn't it look nice on my couch?

Doesn't it look nice in my basket on the hearth next to the stone surround?  A perfect combination I would say!

It even goes well with the blue couch in the living room :)

This is going to be very hard to let go of, but at least I know it's going somewhere nice. 

 What's a wedding if you don't get a crocheted afghan?  No one can laugh later at the colour combination either - ecru stands the test of time, just like white appliances :)  

I am happy to be finished; most notably because it's 6 months over-due, but also because I want to get to work on something else.  What, I'm not exactly sure, but perhaps something with lots of colour.  I have a stash of yarn in the cupboard just waiting to be used.  The biggest challenge is finding the right fit between stash and idea!

J'ai Fini

Although a few days ago I could have easily said, "Je suis fini", which still means "I am finished", only it means the ultimate finish!  Yes, I am done preparing for Christmas.  By the skin of my teeth, but I am done shopping, and making.  On Wednesday I had to admit I committed Christmas hubris, where once again I did too much; made too much; bought too much, etc.  Anyway, here is what we have been up to:

 Dipping dried fruit in chocolate for My Favourite Boy's "something to eat" gift.

Dipping licorice sticks in chocolate and sprinkles for gifts, as well as making countless candies!

The kids dipped many, many pretzels in white chocolate and sprinkled them with coloured sugar for teacher gifts.

I found these cute bags at the dollar store and they worked just perfectly for the pretzels.

I stitched up a bag for a Secret Santa gift at a networking group I belong to:

I also made chocolate sugar cookie snowflake cookies for each member and a little tea envelope:

Of course I got the china cabinet varnished and everything put inside it :)

And I foolishly decided that every child in each of the two classes needed to have a felt and candy cane mouse so I made 48.  Yes, that was very, very foolish.

Today I have to deliver some Avon orders and clean the house.  I can't believe in a few days it's all over. I seriously think we need to celebrate Christmas over the 12 days so we can enjoy ourselves a little longer; unwind a little longer.  However, I have a suspicion that I would think of sewing and craft projects that just had to be made as gifts somewhere in those 12 days!

I hope you all have a great Christmas and a wonderful 2012.  As you no doubt noticed by now the one thing I did not do was write up my Christmas cards!  I didn't even get them out of the box this year.  In fact I don't even know if I have any.  Maybe you will get a Valentine card, but then again, who knows?!

Merry Christmas!!!