Category: Celebrations

Cake, Silks & Pi(es)

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I feel like it was a really productive week, which is always nice. My little routine of writing these goals vs. outcomes weekly posts is helping me stay on-track with what I want to accomplish each week. I’m really glad I’ve reinstituted these. Not only are they keeping me focused, but I really enjoy writing them and re-reading them, like a journal. I rarely re-read my handwritten journals, so I don’t learn as much from my writing in those. Blog posts can actually be searched by keyword, for cryin’ out loud. Wonderful.

Top priorities this last week:

  1. Michael’s birthday
  2. Garden
  3. WREF Scholarship application
  4. Prom dresses
  5. Resurrecting music practice time

Celebrating

  • Michael’s birthday went well, there was an adorable “Among Us wedding cake” made by Renaissance, and each of the kids remembered to get him a gift this year. We did not have steak and potatoes for dinner, as I predicted; he requested fajitas.
  • The potentially brewing project died a sure death this past week. I’m bummed because it would have been a cool thing to do, but I’m also relieved because it was going to take a lot of time and effort to pull off. Many lessons were learned from this experience that I can apply in the future when such a situation inevitably pops up again.

Gardening

  • Trellises are in my house, as are some other gardening items.
  • All seeds needed through the month of April have been secured.
  • Rhubarb is still small.
  • I did sow the cabbages, some alyssum, but nothing else.
  • My sweet peas are just barely starting to sprout! You really have to look for them, but tiny little tendrils are pushing out of the soil!

Community

  • Renaissance did indeed submit her application for the WREF scholarship! Oh gosh, the arrhythmias…she submitted it yesterday at 2:15pm or so, and the pop-up that came up to confirm submission stated that it was due by 4pm that day. We had planned to work on it that evening, but something came up and we moved the time to earlier, THANK GOODNESS.
  • Band Parent meeting went well and many things have been scheduled for this last push of the school year. I still have a few office-y things to do for that.

Creativity

  • At Home:
    • Fat Quarter Shop upcoming quilt: Sneak peek video was posted on Friday on Instagram and I’m aware that my videography skills/software need an upgrade. I had planned to finish piecing the top on Saturday and even cleared my whole schedule for it, but some of my children decided to mutiny against their Saturday chores and much time was lost on this quilt because it went towards dialoguing and disciplining. I’m still confused as to why that day went so sideways. As it stands, I’m about 2/3 of the way done with assembling the blocks.
    • Prom Dresses: The fabric for Ren’s dress has arrived and I am so in love with it. It’s GORGEOUS. The contrast fabric isn’t as flowy as I would have liked, but we’ll just have to make do because it was the only kind of silk they had that came in the color we wanted. FYI, Shantung silk is not flowy. Tell your friends.
  • Van Crafting Sessions™: Designing wedding shawls: Newsflash: I’ve not done this before and I’m not good at it. Yet. (#growthmindset) Time was spent wrapping my head around how to actually do this.
  • Resurrecting music practice sessions: Did not happen because I’ve had them scheduled for the evenings, but now that it’s light outside again we’re actually outside during that time as a family. I’ll need to figure out a different time of day for this.

It was a really, really busy week with a concert on Thursday, which was also Pi Day, so Emily made three pies and because we had three pies chilling at our house I invited Ren’s band friends over after the concert and we all ate pie until 11:15pm. Ha ha. I’m generally an introvert who really appreciates a solid sleep schedule and bedtime, but sometimes you just gotta spend some time with friends. It was a good choice, despite how tired it made me the next day.

Fresh Start Monday/Tuesday

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Post may contain affiliate links. When you purchase something from a link in my post, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. I only recommend materials and tools that I have personally vetted.

Happy Monday/Tuesday, friend! I had planned to post this yesterday, but my Monday turned into a very long day with no time for blogging, so a Tuesday post it is!

What are your plans for this week?  How are you faring with the weather and the season?  I’m seeing a lot of evidence of the February blahs all around me here, so I hope you’re doing what you need to do in order to feel as well as you can during this time of year.

We were blessed with an unusual bout of mild weather last week and I made a point of going out into my garden and getting some sunshine.  I didn’t accomplish much out there; I mostly just looked at what sort of work was in store for me in a few weeks, but it felt good to connect with that space and allow myself to do some dreaming about what spring and summer holds in store.  The rhubarb is starting to grow, and I was excited to create my first recurring garden reminder of 2024 to check the garden for some homegrown produce in the weeks ahead.  I normally just make rhubarb crisp—do you have any great ideas or recipes for rhubarb?  This plant is prolific and I do not use as much of it as I could, which I’d like to improve upon this year.

We celebrated Emily’s 20th birthday over the weekend with too much food and, at her request, a big bunch of Dungeons & Dragons, so I didn’t make much progress on crafty things, which is totally fine: People are what matter more!  She created a quick-play campaign based on Greek mythology, and it was the first time I’d play the game since I was in elementary school, so I was agonizingly slow at understanding what was going on, but we were having a grand ol’ time by the finish. My character is Penelope O’Paca, a Tyrian purple llama centaur cleric who is a member of the weaving guild. I had a blast healing everyone, using my downtime to collect plants for dyes, and weaving magical garments for my party of warriors.

The Baa-ble Hat is coming along quickly.  It’s become my watching-TV knit, and it’s February, so there’s many moments to work on it, even with the unexpected milder weather.  I’ve mostly just been making socks in recent years, so it’s nice to zip ahead with such a small project.

I’m a little leery about whether or not it’s going to actually fit me, because 1) The circumference of my head is 2 inches larger than the average 21 inches that most adult hat patterns strive to fit, and 2) It’s stranded color work, which, even though it’s my favorite thing to knit, is usually less stretchy because of the carried strands.  In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever made myself a stranded colorwork hat that ever fit.  I’m trying to keep the floats loose, but…you know, it usually isn’t enough.  This is such an easy knit, however, that I would be willing to re-knit it on bigger needles if it doesn’t turn out the size I need it to be.

I’m not sure if I love how the white and blue yarn are creating a wispy cloud effect, or if I don’t like the lack of contrast between the sky and the clouds.

Looking at the week ahead, I’m hoping to:

  • Finish the Baa-ble Hat
  • Start or pick up another knitting project for on-the-go crafting—there’s a lot of dental check-ups this week, which means a lot of sitting around in waiting rooms. Knit Picks has a sale on their Swish yarn this month over at crochet.com, so I’m thinking about starting a project with that yarn because it’s machine washable and easy to care for.
  • Make a dent in the quilting of the Rainbow Coin Strip quilt, and maybe even finish the quilting—I think I only have the borders left to do, which is quite possibly my least favorite part of quilting a quilt, and I’m really stuck as to what I should quilt in the borders.
  • Put some time in on the Chatsworth Block of the Month.  The fabric is almost prepped, so it should be easy to pick up and start.
  • Start prepping fabric for Nathaniel’s birthday quilt.
  • Start working on a new pattern from Fat Quarter Shop.

There’s so much more I’d like to be able to say I’m going to do, but that list alone feels like too much, so I’ll stop there. 

I hope you’re able to find time this week to pursue some creativity and restore your spirits! We’re beyond the halfway point between the darkest day of the year and the Spring Equinox (when the days become longer than the nights), so we’re almost back into Sunshine Time. You can do it! February isn’t forever!

Quick Check-in on a Wednesday in August

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Hello lovelies!

Y’know, I like to think of myself as a well-organized person, but every now and then I realize that my well-organized persona thinks a little too much of itself and has once again bitten off more than it can chew. Which then stokes the fires of Organizational Ego, and I sharpen my gaze and get to work even harder than before. It’s what’s going on right now.

It’s time to get ready for back-to-school, which means paperwork, shopping, and driving kids to campus for registrations (all scheduled at different times on multiple days…argh). We’ve got an activity-packed year ahead of us!

We’re also prepping for a fun-filled evening later this week, complete with lots of this:

While also dealing with this new development, which is the main reason I’m behind on posting:

And, you know, when you’re a flute player and gearing up for your senior year and have grand hopes of it finally being the year you make it into the All-State Band, and you break your freakin’ arm right before it all, you deserve an epic birthday/Happy Senior Year party. There were birthday party plans before the fractured limb, but they got bigger once we found out her ability to audition is severely hampered by the timeline of when that splint/cast comes off. We are massively sad.

So, SHINY SQUIRREL! Carnival birthday time! Make lemon drops from lemons!

Understandably, I won’t be online a lot this week because I’m gearing up for Operation: Make Renaissance Smile.

An Organized House: Thoughts on the House & Holiday Plan

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Years upon years ago, I discovered the Houseworks Holiday Plan, which would later be renamed the House & Holiday Plan. It was originally published on the OrganizedChristmas website, which has since shut down. Since I’d printed out all of the schedules, checklists, and printables in 2011, I was still okay to continue with my tradition of following the plan each autumn, which I’ve attempted to do every year.

I’ve never completed the entire plan. I think I’ve been attempting to complete it since 2005 or 2006, and I’ve never made it all the way through because there was no way to complete those room-specific decluttering and cleaning tasks in the one week allotments when you’ve got four children and you’re dealing with back-to-school activities. I was thinking on this predicament during one of my planning periods during the last week of teaching school this year and realized I could just start the plan earlier and schedule extra time for decluttering the kids’ bedrooms. Don’t you just hate it when you have such a simple idea that really should have occurred to you, like, a DECADE ago?!?! Ugh.

The house is destroyed, which was the expectation after spending a year studying and student teaching, so at least things aren’t worse than originally planned. Regardless, there’s a lot of work to do to get things back in shape around here. I hit the “go” button on the House & Holiday Plan this last week and will use the extra time to get things reorganized over the summer. I’ve allocated two weeks to each kid bedroom, my bedroom, and the craft room for a total of ten weeks of decluttering, deep cleaning, organizing and, hopefully, a little redecorating and prettying up.

I started with Nathaniel’s and Emily’s shared bedroom this week because: 1) It’s got the most stuff in it, and 2) We never did a thorough clean out/declutter when Emily went off to college in the fall because she decided at the last minute to live on-campus and I actually packed up her stuff while she was at class before dropping it off that evening. Yeah, I packed up my kid in less than twenty-four hours. (Last summer was super stressful!!) I was too busy to deal with the leftovers and it’s been waiting for me for almost an entire year to get back to it. Well baby, I’M BACK FOR IT.

I like to completely gut a room when I’m doing a deep clean–take out every last thing, physically touch everything à la Marie Kondo and decide if it’s going to be kept, donated, or thrown away. This means that my living room is currently holding every physical possession of Nathaniel’s and Emily’s. So, another mess in order to deal with the original mess. *mirthless chuckle*

But, man, does it feel good to empty out an engorged room, rearrange the furniture, deep clean that sucker, and then judiciously bring things back in. *satisfied sigh*

So that’s what I’m up to right now, and I plan to come back next Friday/weekend and show you some pictures of something organized. I do much better when I have deadlines, so there it is–let’s get a bedroom put back together and prettified.

And then I got a Master’s Degree

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Hello Lovelies!

Yes, it’s been particularly quiet here on the blog for a long while.

Yes, there was a good reason:

There were a few days when I thought I would be able to handle completing the requirements of earning a Master’s Degree in Teaching on an accelerated schedule and still keep the blog running at the same time, but then I read through the syllabi of my first quarter’s classes and knew that something would have to give, and it would most definitely be the blog.

It was a good trade: I’m now one Master’s Degree smarter! Ha ha ha.

I’m hoping to come back to a regular schedule of blogging sometime this summer, but it might take until autumn if it turns out there’s a lot more messes in my house to clean up than originally thought. There were many trade-offs to make time for studying and student teaching, and we’re now a full year from when I had to give up on a steady housecleaning routine…there’s definitely some messes that need attending to that have been piling up since then. Once I get them all taken care of, I can unearth the craft room from its current designation as the landing spot for everything that didn’t have a place and get back to some good ol’ crafting!

But yeah, MASTER’S DEGREE, baby! Woo hoo! But not woo hoo for the outdoor commencement ceremony in SEATTLE that rained all over my parade. Graduation pictures will definitely NOT be this year’s Christmas card photo! *sigh* I try so hard, y’all, I really do!

Progress: Nereid Fingerless Gloves

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In my last post I pondered the idea of publicly sharing any handmade Christmas gifts that weren’t done yet, in a last-ditch effort to follow through on their completion because publicly talking about said unfinished gifts will keep them at the forefront of my crafty brain. And then…ugh, I made a really, really silly mistake on these mitts and every fiber in my being wants to throw them atop the hibernation pile and ignore them for another year, and NO THAT WILL NOT BE HAPPENING.

So here we are: I was hoping to finish up a pair of fingerless gloves for my bestie for Christmas this year, but I got sick for most of December and didn’t make the deadline and darn it, these are getting finished NOW. There will be weekly progress posts on these things until they are done because I started making them in August of 2012, people! It’s been almost TEN YEARS! They are beautiful and they deserve to be out in the world making my friend happy.

One mitt is done, and the silly mistake was that I didn’t start the thumb increases during the third repeat on the second mitt, so I have to unpick half a repeat and do it all over again and I was so close to being done but now I’m not and it was a very low moment for me. BUT…public pressure to continue on and persevere…hopefully I can show you much progress next Wednesday!

And, then…there’s another project that didn’t get finished for Christmas, and I’ll tell you all about it when these gloves are done! The anticipation builds!

Rainbow Ombre Mitts knit by Cara Brooke of That Crafty Cara

Rainbow Ombre Heart Mitts

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I made these for Rachel for Christmas. They were the first gift she opened on Christmas morning and she wore them immediately and left them on until she received a gift from Renaissance that had velcro on it, at which point she took off her new mitts so the velcro wouldn’t catch on the yarn. She was incredibly pleased with the mitts.

I bought the yarn for these almost three years ago at the Madrona Fiber Arts Festival. (Hmm, I’ll need to go look at scheduling time to go to it again this year–although it’s now operating under a different name: Red Alder Fiber Arts Retreat.) Rachel and I went to the festival together and she was entranced by the smorgasbord of yarny goodness at the market, so of course, I had to buy some rainbow yarns that she fell in love with. One of the rainbow yarn purchases was this mini skein set from Canon Hand Dyes, and there’s enough leftover to one day make the matching hat.

Details:

Pattern: My Rainbow Heart, by Stephanie Lotven

Size: Medium

Yarn: Canon Hand Dyes Charles Merino Fingering, Bright Fierce Color (link only takes you to their mini skeins page)

Needles: US 1 & US 3 (2.25 mm & 3.25mm)

Modifications: None

Not gonna lie, kind of wished I’d kept these bad boys for myself. They’re such happy mitts!

Click here to see this project’s Ravelry page.

Finished: Peacock Feathers Stole

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The first time I blogged about the Peacock Feathers Stole was September 9, 2009. Twelve years ago. That’s how long this project has been taking up real estate on my internal “works-in-progress” list. I’ve been carrying this project around in the back of mind for longer than my youngest child has been breathing oxygen in the real world. I kept restarting and abandoning it due to a million different reasons, and it was only after three failed attempts that this stole finally began to actually exist as an actual tangible creation, when I cast on for the fourth attempt in the summer of 2014. I finally finished it up over this past summer, and then, unbelievably, kept it a secret until giving it to my granny for Christmas this year. You guys, the maturity…apparently I have that now.

As much as I complain about how long this took me to make, it’s been great fun to go back and read through all the posts about this project throughout its creation because they took place at the most random times and managed to really capture some of the major milestones of my life in the past twelve years: Morning sickness while I was pregnant with Nathaniel, packing for Australia, being in Australia, back surgery, moving to Washington, stuck at home during the summer we thought the pandemic would be over…it hit a lot of the major notes.

And now it’s complete, blocked, and gifted. It sure feels good to check this one off the list.

I hope my granny gets good use out of it. Sure, there’s not a lot of opportunity to wear special clothes out and about these days, but hopefully those kinds of days and events are right around the corner and she gets to strut her stuff soon.

The Details:
Pattern: Peacock Feathers Stole, by Dorothy Siemens, formerly of Fiddlesticks Knitting. It looks like she’s retired from knitting design, so the original website is gone and you have to purchase the pattern through Ravelry.

Yarn: JaggerSpun Zephyr Wool-Silk 2/18, “Juniper” color, 2 cones

Needles: US 3 (3.25mm) 24-inch circulars. I want to say they’re Addi Lace Turbos. They’re gold-colored, and I’m assuming made from brass because they had that brassy “tang” of a smell to them whenever I’d start using them again after a hiatus. The sharper tips were very, very useful for all the stitch manipulation in this pattern.

Modifications: None.

Click here to view this project’s Ravelry page.

Finished: Patchwork Forest Quilt

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It is so weird to finish up this surge of Christmas quilts these past few weeks because it’s requiring me to go back and re-read the posts I wrote about them when I started them, and wow. So much has gone on, especially since I started working on the Patchwork Forest Quilt in the autumn of 2019. I randomly decided to jump on the quilt along bandwagon that Amy put on that year, and it was a great experience that I immensely enjoyed. It was a sweeter time: My niece had just been born, I was homeschooling Nathaniel, things had finally settled down after the move up here…it felt like we were really getting ready to live “happily ever after” during that autumn.

I keep talking about this quilt as “the one I made before COVID,” which is weird because there were a couple of other finishes before COVID really got its wheels turning, but this quilt feels like the last one I made before things started getting stressful with keeping an eye on the development of the COVID situation, so in my mind it’s just from “before.”

I had originally planned to big-stitch hand quilt it, but ended up hating the actual work of it and ripped out the hand quilting after a week’s progress. Then Christmas was over and I set it aside to bring back out when Christmas 2020 got closer so I could finish it then…

But I don’t think I had the desire at any point during 2020 to pick it back up to finish for Christmas. Last Christmas is just a fogged-up murmuring in my memory. When I had the thought to maybe try to finish it this year, I almost cried: The desire, ambition, drive in my heart was finally back. We got through Hell and came out on the other side and some things are still relatively the same. When my drive to finish projects dried up towards the end of last year, I knew I was stressed and anxious beyond my max and to leave the crafty side of things alone and just focus on surviving. I’ve been through that particular cycle enough times in my life to know that it’s a temporary adaptation to stressful situations, and I allow it to run its course, knowing that the fabric and the yarn will wait for me to come back. The fabric and the yarn don’t judge. Thank the stars for that.

This quilt is twin-sized (~72″ x 90″), and Renaissance has claimed it temporarily for her bed until I make her requested Christmas quilt. (The plan is to do that in 2022.)

Details:

Pattern: Patchwork Forest Quilt, Pine Hollow version, by Amy Smart of Diary of a Quilter.

Fabric: I used lots of well-loved Christmas scraps, random half-yard purchases, and forgotten Christmas fat quarter bundles for this quilt and had so much fun with the color palette. I absolutely love this quilt. A friend of mine called it the “Hipster Christmas Trees” quilt, and the name stuck; I actually have to go and look up my previous posts to remember what its real name is when I write about it.

Backing: A lovely, thick black and white plaid Mammoth flannel, #SRKF-16943-1 WHITE. This quilt is heavy. It’s amazing.

Quilting: I went beefy with the quilting thread, using Aurifil 12 wt in the top and Aurifil 40 wt in the bobbin, color 2021. I eyeballed straight lines about 2.5 inches apart, and I love the slightly wonky unevenness of the quilting because it matches the slight wonkiness of the tree blocks. I also used black Auriful 12 wt to quilt the black inner border, and then returned to the white Auriful 12 wt to quilt a few lines in the blue outer border. (Note to self: Straight line quilting only with this thread; the machine did NOT want to do a serpentine stitch AT ALL…)

Binding: I decided to do a scrappy binding because 1) I couldn’t decide which fabric to choose for the binding, 2) I don’t think I had enough of anything to do a full binding, and 3) The more wonkiness, the better on this quilt. It was an extension of the fun to randomly piece together the scraps into binding while I watched “A Christmas Story” earlier this week!

Dates: I pieced this in October and November of 2019, and quilted it in December of 2021.

We were busy making epic amounts of Christmas cookies on the day I took pictures of this, and I left it hanging on the couch afterwards. Renaissance was a cookie-making machine; she baked from 8am until 5pm and was absolutely exhausted come dinner. She decided to go to bed at 7:30, happened to see the quilt on the couch as she headed to her room, and wordlessly scooped it up before trudging up the stairs. When we checked on her later, she was out beneath her new quilt, hopefully dreaming sweet Christmas dreams.

Free Gift: Sewing Room Cleaning Checklist

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Hi friends! As a token of my appreciation for your camaraderie all these years, I decided to make my sewing room monthly cleaning checklist into a PDF that you can use in your own sewing rooms! I wish you a wonderful holiday season and hope that the new year coming will be filled with beautiful, creative moments!

2021_sewing_room_cleaning_checklist_arrowsDownload