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December 1st, 2010
We had a lovely Thanksgiving/Christmas/birthday celebration trip this past weekend full of fun and laughter (and a lot of driving). Now we’re ready for a new round of holiday festivities and today is starting off with a seasonally appropriate light dusting of snow and the sounds of the Glee Christmas Album.
Once again this year I’m working on documenting our holiday season as it happens. At this point it’s looking like it’s going to be some sort of blending of Shimelle Laine’s Journal Your Christmas (see image above) and Tiffany Tillman’s 25 Days of Templates with inspiration from Ali Edwards, whose December Daily sort of started the whole thing.
August 23rd, 2010
This one was lots of fun! I love the fabric I bought for this bag. It’s designed by Heidi Grace who I had heard of because she designs scrapbooking supplies, but I hadn’t realized she was also designing fabric. In any case, she has lots of cute stuff available and I was excited to pick some up for this bag. Dora apparently loves it also, she immediately claimed ownership even before the bag was complete. When it was finished she ran around for the next few hours wearing it.
 
Making the bag was pretty easy and didn’t require anything but fabric and thread. It took just four pieces of fabric and the big thing that I learned was how to join the handles to the bag in a way that’s nice and strong. I wish I had known about this back when I was making the bag for my backgammon board (the handle for that came off after not very long). I can see more of these in my future, though I think I might wait to learn how to line them before I do another.
August 21st, 2010
Our second class lesson is a drawstring gift bag. I’ve heard people talk about switching to these for various gift exchanges and thought it was a great idea. Lots of people in my family use cloth grocery bags and while it has become a Christmas tradition to pick through all of the wrapping and tissue paper to check for stray gifts before taking the garbage bag out, I think it’s a tradition my dad might be willing to give up (or have simplified). So I’m planning on using the bag from this lesson, as well as some others in a variety of sizes using the same general instructions to start my own collection of reusable Christmas wrapping bags.
This is the first one. It uses fabric left-over from a Christmas project done a couple of years ago. I love this pattern, it was so easy, quick, and very cute! Plus I’ve got cute fabric old and new to play with. What could be better?
August 18th, 2010
When Emily Falconbridge posted about an upcoming online sewing class I was intrigued. I took the obligatory seventh-grade year of Home Ec, 1/3 of which was devoted to sewing and much of what I know about sewing came from that class. (Thanks Mrs. Lamb!) Since then between reading online tutorials and asking questions of my sewing knowledgable relatives I’ve managed to make various Halloween costumes, curtains, a skirt for my daughter, and a few other odds and ends. Now I’m ready to expand my sewing skills to create things I’m willing to use more often or give to others, so I went ahead and signed up for the class at Freckled Nest.
 
The first project was two different kinds of napkins, single layer and double layer with ricrac. I had used ricrac once before and it hadn’t gone so well, so I was hopeful I’d learn some trick to working with it that made it easier. Sadly, that was not the case and what some people in class were calling Stegosaurus bumps for me turned out more like Loch Ness Monster bumps, as they slithered above and below the surface of the water : )
Fabric for these napkins came from thrift store pillowcases. The single layer napkins should have been quite easy, nothing new in the way of techniques, but I hard a horrible time getting the thread tension right, or possibly there’s something else going on, it almost felt like the needle was constantly catching and pulling at the fabric. I any case the napkins are done and they don’t look half bad, useable even.
Next up: gift wrap bags
October 12th, 2009
For Muffin Tin Monday this week it was all about food on a stick. We didn’t go for anything as exotic as the deep fried twinkie though, we stuck pretty much with the basics. We had combinations of apple pieces, grapes, cheese and chicken. I had meant to put on some squares of bread, but forgot. There was also the small problem of seeds in the grapes. Some how this is the first time Dora has encountered grapes with seeds and she was not a fan, especially since I didn’t realize they had seeds and couldn’t warn her. So, I ended up halving and seeding the grapes, oops. All in all another enjoyable muffin tin meal.
You can learn more about the concept and see other versions of this week’s meal at Muffin Tin Monday at Her Cup Overfloweth.
October 6th, 2009
All About Me was the theme for this week’s muffin tin meal. We had several of Dora’s favorite foods: macaroni & cheese, grapes, apples, bunny crackers and a couple of fruit bunnies. She also had an apple cat (grape ears, raisin eyes and food coloring for the mouth and whiskers) that she recognized right away and the whole thing went in Dora muffin cups. This went over well except for the cat which she liked but didn’t want to eat.
October 4th, 2009
(click for larger view)
This afternoon we got to visit our CSA farm and pick pumpkins and some of the other crops they have left over right now. The pumpkins were wonderful and we had a good time hunting for just the right ones. We met one of the farmers, saw the bee hives that they bring in and walked through quite a bit of the farm to get to the crops we could pick. We brought home lots of green beans, a watermelon, and some zucchini and summer squash. Then there was yummy, warm apple cider to drink. A perfect cap to a lovely fall afternoon.
September 21st, 2009
The theme this week at Muffin Tin Monday is Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and we had lots of fun with this one. The movie made based on the book came out this weekend and since Dora really enjoys the book we thought she might like the movie, so our family went to see it yesterday. This was her first trip to the theater where she actually going to watch a movie. She liked the experience and enjoyed most of the movie. She was scared near the end, but afterwards wanted to go back for more.
But back to the meal, last night we had spaghetti with giant meatballs for dinner and we used some of the leftovers for lunch today. She had her own little town of Chewandswallow. I printed some buildings from my digital scrap supplies and cut them out, then we had some apple and strawberry, spaghetti with meatballs, and a couple of little peanut butter sandwich boats with apple for sails.
September 19th, 2009
It’s been quiet here for a little while, in part we’ve been doing lots of activities that haven’t made it up yet and also things have been somewhat less organized than usual. Here are some of the things we’ve been doing lately:
Visit with Grammy and Papa: Dora spent the first weekend of the month with her grandparents staying here at the house while SG and I were helping to run a local event for a club we participate in. The event went fairly smoothly and Dora, Grammy and Papa had a fabulous time together.
Story time at the library, music and swim lessons have also mostly started up again and those activities have become part of several of our days each week. I checked out Make Your Own Playdough, Paint and Other Craft Materials by Patricia Caskey from the library and I think we’re going to have to purchase this one, there are several items from this book that we’ve already tried out that I’ll be mentioning individually.
One of the games we’ve started playing recently is the Hopscotch Game from this post on The Domestic Notebook. Dora is pretty good at recognizing her numbers from 0 – 10, but I like incorporating the movement as part of the whole exercise. We first tried this inside as shown in the post and then we took sidewalk chalk and drew the numbers in circles (at her insistence) on the driveway and she asks to do this quite frequently.
Ten Little Ladybugs has been one of Dora’s favorite books well, since she’s been able to express preferences. We were given a copy as a baby gift and are now on our second copy as the first was loved to pieces (literally). Lately any time we read it she counts the ladybugs on each page as we get to it. The pages with five or fewer she gets right pretty much all the time, 6 – 8 she gets a bunch of the time and nine and ten are pretty iffy still. It’s kind of amazing to me that we’ve been reading this book for more than two years now and have found so many different things to talk about and look at in it.
An activity we’ve done outside several times is a play laundry line. The idea came from Michelle at Her Cup Overfloweth documented in this post. Dora helped pick out fabric scraps to use and I cut two pieces of each with pinking shears, some in squares, some in rectangles. I couldn’t find any string so tied a piece of ribbon between two of the deck posts for our line. She started by pulling matching pieces out and putting them on the line next to each other. Her biggest challenge was working the clothespins which were small versions of the usual clips.
September 18th, 2009
I’m doing some tweaking and fiddling today, mostly to add some rss and subscription options. Hopefully this shouldn’t cause too much trouble for anyone out there.
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