The Month of May Churns Away

May 26, 2024Leave a comment

I cannot believe that it is still the month of May. So much has been going this month that is seems like it’s been two months in one. What a busy, fun time of year!

Top priorities this past week:

Get grad party invitations out
Get Christmas tree down
Garden
Cleaning
Laundry

Celebrate

Graduation party invitations are almost all mailed or delivered, yay!

The Christmas trees are officially dismantled and stored away until November. For future reference, Future Cara, it only took an hour to take down the giant Christmas tree, so stop dragging your feet about it in the future. And also, Future Cara, you are freakishly busy from January through May for the next four years, so take down the Christmas stuff before the New Year. Just do yourself that favor. Please.

Garden

It’s radish season! I need to spend some quality time with my mandoline slicer in the next weeks. We’ve not eaten a lot of radishes as a family, but boy howdy are my kids going to get some exposure in coming days! I purposely planted a purple variety in the hopes that it will make Rachel happier about eating them.

One of my big plans for the Memorial Day weekend is to get the garden and yard cleaned up and we spent a big chunk of yesterday doing that. There’s still so much work to do, but we got a lot of the worst of it done so I’m hoping that tomorrow’s work will see it through to the end of everything.

There are so many signs of potential in the garden right now from the little bits of work that we’ve been doing up until now. It’s so exciting to watch spring burst onto the scene. I really, really love seasons and how everything changes and has signs about new parts of life on the horizon. There’s so much excitement in nature!

Cleaning

Prom preparation messes have been cleaned up. I also ordered a storage box for fancy hair accessories so we can store them out of the way during most of the year and be able to find them easily when the next dance rolls around. Ren and Rachel have amassed a beautiful collection of formal hair accessories over the years, and it’d be a shame to lose them.

Prom dress construction has almost been cleaned up. I just need to clean up the leftover fabrics and I’m dreading opening the tote bins of apparel fabric and potentially finding out there’s no room for the prom dress scraps. I’m making myself write that down because it’s such a silly reason to be avoiding a task, and hopefully, by writing it out and acknowledging how ridiculous it is, I’ll be extra motivated to just bite the bullet and get this rather simple task done.

My back was hurting a lot this week from overdoing it in my Tuesday workout, so I didn’t get a lot more cleaning done. I traded off for getting a lot of office work and grad party planning done.

Clothing

I made a little bit of a dent in the looming folding pile. It’s nice to reclaim the space that’s been storing the laundry bins of clean clothes .

Highlights

Nathaniel had his last Cross Country meet this week. All season long he has consistently run his 2 miles in 15:55-16:05 minutes. All season long. After his last race he quickly logged on to the website that reports their times and a look of disbelief and then joyful surprise crossed his face: Somehow, even after having to take a week off of practices due to being sick all last week, he shaved off an entire minute and finished his race with a time of 14:55! He was a very happy boy for the rest of the evening.

Renaissance had her final band concert and it was such a great evening. She had a solo in jazz band, the entire concert was fun and upbeat and sincerely impressive with the music each group was playing, and then we had a reception afterwards with cake and treats and a tear-inducing slideshow of the seniors throughout their band years. I really, really love being a band mom and I’ve really enjoyed all these years of helping her make music with her friends. It is incredibly sad that this part of her life is over. I think the only thing that keeps me from being downright depressed about is seeing how excited she is to begin the next phase of her life and her pastry chef training.

Emily and I went out for lunch on Thursday and had a great conversation about her future plans. I don’t want to get my hopes up too much too early, but it feels like she’s starting to get to the end of working through some of the hang-ups that have been plaguing her for the past couple of years and is getting ready to surge forward into adulthood. Sometimes you just need a little extra time to sort stuff out, right? It’s scary to allow that time to take place, but we might be getting to the end of the tunnel. At any rate, she seems to be less anxious about things, which is such a relief. The high schoolers that were in the thick of it during COVID have really struggled with a lot of stuff ever since. Perhaps normalcy is starting to catch back up with them finally?

On Wednesday, when my back was twinging the worst, I gave myself permission to go down a research rabbit hole, partly because I was in too much pain to think logically and partly in the hopes that doing crafty research would help me relax and send the message to my muscles that they could also relax. I spent multiple hours tracking down as much information as I could about bead embroidery and beaded embellishments because I want to continue making formal dresses, but I’m finding that even if you make a gorgeous dress it often needs a little dose of embellishment to truly make it sing, and I think the skill of bead embroidery would be absolutely fantastic to fill that void. I’m thinking about dedicating time over the next year to learning the skill so I can apply it to next year’s prom dresses.

Lowlights

Wednesday’s back pain. Totally did it to myself because I was enjoying my workout on Tuesday and decided to go for far too long in it. Consistency and moderation win the race, not frenzied extremes. This is a battle I fight in my soul on a daily basis.
I hit a flock of baby birds with my van as I was driving to work on Friday. Not my best Disney Princess moment.

It was a really good week, despite the few setbacks. This really is a lovely time of year and I’m excited for what’s coming our way in the upcoming weeks! End of school year is exciting, exhausting, and fun.

Rhododendron Parade and Graduation Party Preparations

May 19, 20241 Comment

Top priorities this past week:

Summer School Registration
Garden
Laundry
Cleaning
Graduation party planning

Caring

Oh my goodness, summer school registration is cutthroat in our district. I arrived thirty minutes before the doors opened to the counseling center and the line was almost going out of the front door of the school. I was successful in securing Nathaniel a spot in the classes he’ll take over the summer to open up the rest of his schedule to accommodate four years of band in high school. Whew!

This week has felt like it’s been all about Nathaniel! He came down with something Monday night and has spent the entire week just hanging out with a 103-104˚F fever. I ended up taking him to the pediatrician on Wednesday because he was looking really awful, even for being sick, and they tested him for a ton of stuff. All the rapid tests came back negative, so we’re waiting on cultures. This has been a rough illness. I made Michael stay home from work on Friday so someone could be with the boy while I was at work because I was worried about him. Thankfully, his fever broke on Friday and he was feeling a lot better, so he could join the marching band in their last parade of the year on Saturday.

Gardening

I put in a huge day in the garden on Monday and cleared the weeds out of two big areas of the garden. This made my back extremely unhappy for a few days, but it was worth it. I also planted a few of my started seeds—zucchini, summer squash, slicing cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, cilantro and a lot of marigolds—and direct sowed some bush green beans, more cabbage than we’ll ever need, zinnias, cosmos and some more sunflowers that the slugs already ate. Clearing out weeds helped me find a number of slugs so I could send them to their eternal torment of an afterlife.

It’s so fun to see things coming up and blooming! The peas are doing well, the nasturtiums are definitely coming along, and the radishes and lettuces are starting to gain some steam. The carrots are slow starting and slugs keep getting my sunflower sprouts, so I’m keeping an eye on those crops.

Clothing

Some laundry has been done, but not the amount needed to truly make a difference. I did wash Rachel’s choir dress, so it’s ready for whenever she needs it.

Cleaning

I did a good job on getting the kitchen reset and the girls have been doing a pretty good job at maintaining it.

All my birthday stuff is cleaned up.

Celebrating

I took it a little easier on a few days this week just to make sure I fully recovered from the stress of the prom dress crunches.

I’ve addressed and mailed about half of Renaissance’s graduation party invitations. I really hope people remember to RSVP. It’s so nerve-wracking to depend on RSVPs. I once received zero RSVPs for one of my kids’ birthday parties, so I made plans to do something else so my child didn’t have to wait around at home for no one to show up. I left a note on our door that said we’d received zero RSVPs and so we had made other plans, and came home to wrapped gifts left on our doorstep. I know I was in the right with my actions, but I still feel terrible about it. It’s not hard to RSVP, DO IT. I even made it super simple and put a QR code on the invite. I am still terrified that I’ll get three RSVPs and then eighty people will show up. I think this will be a situation where I will definitely have to phone around two weeks before the party and nail down the RSVPs myself because food-wise I could be in a lot of trouble if I don’t have a definite head count. People just always make you feel so pushy and high-strung when you do that, but what else should they expect? Ugh, this is one of my soapbox topics. Just RSVP, people. The same day you get the invitation. We all have our calendars on our phones, so we already know whether we’re available or not. Yes or no, I don’t care; I just need to know how many people I need to feed. RSVPs save the sanity of the hostess. Be kind to the hostess.

I’ve almost got the menu planned out; I just need to check in Ren to see how involved she wants to be with food prep so I can decide on the desserts. When you have an aspiring pastry chef in your family, their involvement greatly influences what you offer for desserts at a gathering.

Decoration plans are good and supplies should be arriving soon. I need to come up with some activities as well, mostly to keep people’s younger children occupied. Space might be at a premium, though, so judicious planning is needed.

Community

I don’t like to publish where my kids are going to be ahead of time because that seems unsafe, so another thing we had on our plates this past week was the Rhododendron Parade. It’s quite the drive from where we are and we invite our middle school’s eighth graders to also participate so they can see what all the fun is about in the hopes that they’ll continue with band in high school, which meant, for the only time ever, Nathaniel marched in a parade in the same band as Renaissance.

In years past the eighth graders have also gotten to wear a high school marching band uniform, but the decision was made in the days leading up to parade that we were going to stop doing that this year, so my hopes of a picture of Nathaniel and Renaissance in matching uniforms together was dashed. Sigh. Our little school district is growing rapidly and it costs $22 to dry clean each used uniform at the end of the year, which hasn’t been that big of an expense in years past, but we had forty eighth graders this year, which would have added $880 to the bill and that’s a pretty big expense for such a small amount of wear.

Luckily, though, we decided to open up the “Band Gear” store to the eighth graders ahead of their freshman year so they can have band swag before the football games start in the autumn, and we were able to deliver their new band gear to them at the rehearsal prior to the parade, so many of them were wearing those items, my son included. Adorable.

I really enjoy being involved with our band program and am so thankful that the booster president approached me at tip-off two years ago to see if I’d be interested in helping out. It’s been a great way for our family to spend time together and serve together. It’s sad to see Renaissance’s band days come to an end, but we still have four more years of Nathaniel in band! And I’ll be dragging our family along for the ride the entire time because I was elected to be the band booster president this next school year. Get ready for even more band booster craziness, y’all!

We have a big end-of-the-school-year BBQ at a nearby park after the parade, and I was able to get some really photos of the kids and even one of Michael while we were there:

It was a good and busy week, thankfully, and I hope to keep pushing forward and getting everything put back together in the house. There’s so many good things coming up in the weeks ahead! What an exciting phase of life! See you next week!

On the Eve of Prom

April 26, 2024April 26, 20241 Comment

Hello dear ones, and welcome to the last day before prom and all of its craziness in the world of dressmaking! I feel like I have hardly left the craft room all week long, logging an average of eight hours per day working on Renaissance’s dress. (Keep in mind that from 2:30pm onwards, I generally have no say over how my day goes because it’s all chauffeuring and music lessons and dinner prep and cleanup.) I have had some very long days this week!

Top priorities this past week:

Finishing Renaissance’s prom dress
Starting Rachel’s church prom dress, if possible

Creativity

The weather has cooperated with me this week and was mostly rainy and gray, which makes me feel entirely NOT guilty for staying inside and sewing all day, ha ha ha. I got the skirt attached correctly to Renaissance’s dress and went about my merry way with attaching the lining to the bodice, sewing in the sleeves (which, if I may say, I did an excellent job on the sleeves!), and then hemming the skirts.

Marking the hem of this dress was a memory I’ll keep, and not for any particularly memorable reason. It was just nice to spend that time with Renaissance, amidst the flurry of a busy day, where she got to put on her dress for the first time and we were able to ooh and aah over it and let the excitement build. If you’re looking to strengthen the upper half of your posterior muscle chain, I highly recommend marking hems on skirts. I’m sure there’s an easier way to do it, but I had to lay on my stomach and keep my head and shoulders lifted for thirty minutes while I measured and marked the entirety of the hem. I was sore the next day!

I am hoping I can get in and redo the top skirt’s hem because it’s looking “homemade” in a bad way. After scrutinizing it I decided to change my approach on the bottom skirt’s hem and sew it by hand and I think it’s looking much better. It just takes forever. I’ve got about 12-14 inches left to hem, which will take 30-45 minutes. I still need to trim the top skirt because it’s dragging on the one side, so I’ll do that by hand tonight and then I’ll unpick and re-hem by hand portions of the top skirt until I either finish it or run out of time.

Thank goodness I found a backup dress for Rachel. I have had no time whatsoever to even begin working on her dress.

Gardening

In brief moments of time away from the prom dress, I cleaned out my countertop garden. It had reached 100 days of growing and most of the plants had died off, but the three basil plants were still going strong. It was the first time I’ve cleaned it out and discovered that you definitely want to remove any spent pods when they die because if you don’t, the roots will start rotting and molding underwater, which made for a lot of unpleasantness.

I harvested the last of my basil plants and made pesto for a soup I made during the week. Unfortunately, the basil plants had passed the point of maturity and the pesto ended up tasting exceptionally “green.” It’s such a delicate dance of allowing the basil leaves to get large enough, but not so large that their flavor starts to mimic lawn grass.

Caring

Nathaniel had his first home cross country meet this week, and it works out that it starts right after Renaissance’s oboe lesson ends, and her oboe lesson is at his school, so she just walked on over and we cheered him on. I’m so proud of him. Last summer he realized it would be easier to be healthy if he became a runner, so he decided to join track and cross country. He’s literally in it just for the exercise.

Well, I wish you a happy Friday and ensuing weekend and look forward to sharing prom photos with you next week. (I need to remember to charge my camera’s batteries!) Cross your fingers that I can finish up Ren’s dress to a “good homemade” level!

Well, That Was Unfortunate Timing

April 15, 2024April 15, 2024Leave a comment

Nathaniel was sick for the entirety of Spring Break, and on Saturday I woke up feeling…off. Michael took Ren to the school for Daffodil Parades so I could get my energy up and meet them at one of the later parades, but within a few hours it was very clear that I had caught Nathaniel’s bug and was out of the running for anything beyond laying on the couch and watching television through bleary eyes. And so it went for the remainder of last week. And this last weekend. And today. I am having a heck of a time with this illness.

I’m hoping the exhaustion and relentless coughing starts to fade this week because I was supposed to finish Ren’s prom dress last week and this was the week to start working on Rachel’s dress. Stress levels are high.

Cooking

This week’s meal plan:

Saturday: Chicken Shawarma
Sunday: Cheesy Ham and Potatoes for Nathaniel’s birthday
Monday: Dino Nuggets, French Fries, Mixed Vegetables
Tuesday: Crockpot Chili & Baked Potatoes
Wednesday: Cheeseburgers, Spiced Braised Rhubarb
Thursday: Crockpot Honey Chicken
Friday: Salad Bar

Clothing

Catching up after missing all of last week’s laundry.

Cleaning

Catch up, basic upkeep.

Caring

Renaissance passed her driver’s license test last week! There’s still a lot of paperwork to get her driving legally on her own, and it is a high priority this week. I am really looking forward to this development.
Rachel is taking her driver’s license knowledge test later this week, so helping her study for that.
Emily, possibly spurred on by the success of her younger sisters in the driver’s license department, has finally renewed her driving permit and is now legal to start practicing for her own driver’s license, so I imagine I need to start making time for her practicing, too.
Need to figure out a way to get the bridal shower and wedding gifts to the young woman who got married last week. I was too sick to go and she and her husband have headed back to school already.
We need to sit down with Renaissance and figure out her post-high school plans. She’s received news of the various scholarships she’s been awarded, the FAFSA is taking forever to process, and we just need to sit down and crunch numbers. Her high school is having their Decision Day soon where they celebrate kids’ post-high school plans, so it’d be good if she knew what she was doing by that date.

Creativity

Prom Dresses: I haven’t touched either of them since I got sick. So much work needs to be done this week. The extra yard of silk for Ren’s sleeves arrived safely last week, so we’re good to go there. I have two weeks’ less time to get Ren’s dress done because last night she got a text to look outside:

How cute is that?!?! Why weren’t Promposals a thing when we were young? He had good timing; we were just getting ready to have Nathaniel’s birthday cake, so he walked away from the incident with a prom date and birthday cake. On a frenzied prom dress-sewing note, though…the high school prom is two weeks before the church Spring Formal, so…I really need to sew faster.

Van Crafting Sessions™: I think I have a full schedule of music lessons this week and I have no idea what I’m going to do while I’m at them.

Gardening

The rhubarb is growing fast! Gotta start using it.
I didn’t do any planting last week, so I need to do both last week’s and this week’s planting and seed starting. We’re getting into the thick of planting season!

Celebrating

Nathaniel had his 14th birthday yesterday! I can’t believe my youngest child is starting high school next year. Where have the years gone?!?! Renaissance made him a Sherman Tank cake this year, in homage to his interest in World War 2.
Upcoming celebrations include:
- Mother’s Day, which I don’t have to do anything for
- My birthday, which I generally don’t have to do anything for
- Memorial Day, which just means grilling some hot dogs and doing yardwork
- Ren’s graduation, which is going to take a ton of work
- Father’s Day, which I will also have to do work for.

I’m going to wait a bit before I get going on anything so I can focus on prom dresses.

Community

Band Parent meeting this week, with all the requisite paperwork and follow-up that goes with it.
There’s a Ward Potluck on the calendar from the email that the bishop sent out at the beginning of the year, but I’ve not heard anything else about it since, so I’m thinking it never materialized.
There’s a Relief Society activity this week about simplifying our lives, but it’s happening at the same time as a music lesson, so I probably won’t go.
Band performance for the seniors.

Alright, a big week with a lot of catch-up and I’m not feeling that great to begin with. Wish me luck! And look at this great photo of Renaissance in the Daffodil Parade, taken by a friend of a friend:

A Case of the Februaries Demands More Knitting

February 11, 2022February 10, 20221 Comment

I do have a finished project post to show you, but I also keep procrastinating driving to the post office and actually mailing it off to its intended recipient, so…I could spin it to sound like the USPS is sucking at its job, but it would be an absolute lie because it’s really just me.

Although, the USPS is taking its sweet time getting a package of yarny goodness to me that was supposed to be delivered last Monday, but then it disappeared from their radar for a couple of days, and magically popped up at a regional distribution center yesterday. Hmph.

As predicted, February has cast a grayish pallor on everything in sight, and I’m feeling it, hard. I keep telling myself that it is a temporary feeling, that life really isn’t just cold and dreariness, and that spring will be here soon with sunshine and birds twittering and flowers, but then you have to stop thinking about spring and re-focus on what’s in front of you and…it’s February. Usually there’s some crazy weather going on to distract me, but not this year. Just cold and drizzly rain, and a lot of fog, which is just unsettling. There’s not supposed to be fog when you’re driving to the school to pick up your kids in the afternoon. It gives me the heebie jeebies.

We are having a couple of nice days right now, but I absolutely do not trust them at all and I refuse to allow them to get my optimism engaged, only to have it crushed and ground into the asphalt next week. No. This is fake spring. I’ll try to get outside and soak up some desperately needed sun, but I’m not going to let my heart get carried away. It would be a great time to do some clean-up in the garden, though…

I think the fabric and yarn companies have figured out this February sloggy feeling, because geez, the sales and deals coming out of ’em right now are incessant. It’s been bad, people. But oh so good. But I may need to set up a temporary email filter on any incoming messages from the crafty stores because this past week has shown that I have no known defenses against their February sales. Dear goodness. Cara, it doesn’t count for much if you’re trying to reduce your stash and UFOs, only to then gorge yourself and bring in more stash.

The Yarn Harlot wrote up a blog post in recent days that echoes my sentiments about February, and she admitted that she’s just giving in to every “start a new project” impulse that rises in her heart. And I kinda sorta love that idea, because I am in desperate need of dopamine hits at the moment and indulging in some Startitis to achieve the effect is far friendlier to my bank account than retail therapy.

So I’ve started making wild promises to my kids about knitting them things and I will probably regret it in a month’s time, but whatevs. Michael’s socks are finished, and I was looking through my Ravelry project page to figure out which family member has gone the longest without receiving a handknit from me, and it turns out I’ve not knit a thing for my boy since he was in the first grade. (That’s five years for those of you who are also experiencing the Februaries and don’t want to do the math.) I called him over and we perused the Ravelry pattern database, and he finally decided that what he wanted his dear ol’ mum to knit him was a pig hat. Because he’s sad that his monkey hat doesn’t fit anymore.

Guys, I knit that monkey hat for his first winter of his life. He’s worn it ever since, and would probably still be wearing it except that I outlawed it because it’s simply too small. I don’t care that he can technically stretch it over his noggin…it’s too small. The boy is knitworthy, to say the least…but only if it’s an animal hat, apparently, because I made him a fair isle hat in the first grade, and he dutifully wore it that year, but then reverted back to the monkey hat in the second grade and I don’t think I’ve seen the fair isle hat on his head ever since.

The pink yarn listed in the pattern for the pig hat? I ALREADY OWNED IT. Can the Universe be any more clear on what a great idea this project was?!?!

Except, when I went to go unearth it from the stash, I couldn’t find it. I scoured the stash from top to bottom three times, went through the knitting UFO bin twice, and then looked around in every other UFO bin just in case it randomly got put in them when we moved, but alas, none of the perfect pink yarn could be found. I think I got rid of it when we moved? It’d been sitting in a partially-knitted state for years because I bought it to make a vest for Nathaniel when he was little, but it turns out that he gets heat rashes from wearing vests, so I never finished it, and I was trying to cull crafty supplies and it wasn’t a shade of pink I particularly liked to begin with…so, I think I got rid of it. There’s no notes in my stash listing on Ravelry, but I can’t find the stuff, so I’ve now marked it as “given away.” But I honestly have no idea what I did with it.

Undaunted, I hunted down various shades of pink bulky-weight yarn, screenshotted them all and cropped them into a grid, then texted the image to Nathaniel and asked him to pick one, and he picked one of the most brightest shades of bubble gum pink and he is thrilled that it will be adorning his head in a few weeks’ time. I love it that he loves pink, it’s adorable.

Since I was paying for shipping anyways, I figured I’d throw in some more yarn to my order and looked up which family member was next due for a handknit, and it turned out it was Renaissance, who I last crafted for three years ago. She wasn’t terribly interested in anything, but then I had a bold flash of inspiration and reminded her that football season will be back all-too-soon, and wouldn’t a pair of fingerless gloves with fold-over tops just be amazing during the outdoors flute-playing season? She immediately agreed, and I added in some maroon superwash merino to my order. I did also add two more projects’ worth of yarn for things for myself, but then got rid of them because knitting season will inevitably wind down come spring and gardening and English paper piecing time, and most of my stash is comprised of these kinds of orders–the extra skeins I buy because I was paying for shipping anyway. If I’m still interested in the projects for myself come autumn, I’ll buy the yarn for them then.

Sooo…not exactly “knitting from the stash,” but I am excited about two new projects. And while I was rifling through the stash, trying to find the perfect pink yarn, I noticed that I had a lot of blue & green sock yarn leftovers in the yarn scrap bin, and I thought they’d probably go together fabulously in a linen stitch scarf. And since my yarny goodness package fell off the radar for half a week and I finished Michael’s socks and I think I may have knit them on the wrong size needles but won’t know until he finally tries them on but it’s a busy week and we’ve really only seen each other as we turn off the light to go to sleep, that hasn’t happened yet…and I don’t want to start another pair of socks for him from the stash because I don’t know what size needle to use anymore, but it’s February and darn it I need a project, so I cast on for a linen stitch scarf with those sock yarn scraps:

I think the scraps go together a little too well, actually, so it will lack that fun contrast that I like in this pattern when you use colorways that don’t match perfectly, but it’ll still be a pretty, analogous scarf. It took me a year to knit the last linen stitch scarf I made, so I’m not expecting a quick finish with this. I think it will be my couch knitting project.

And, just for fun, I’ll finish with another picture of the Monkey Hat of Yore:

Hopefully he’ll love his pig hat just as much, minus the yarn-chewing. Good luck surviving the rest of February, however you choose to do it.

The First Monday in January

January 3, 2022January 2, 20221 Comment

CW: Injured cat

I am perpetually in love with new beginnings, and January is the month of new beginnings. Whether you do resolutions or not, there is something motivating and optimistic about the first week of the new year. There’s usually something motivating and optimistic about Mondays as well: What will this new week hold for me? What projects will I make progress on this week? Will I improve this week? Monday is the great big beginning. So the first Monday of the year…very pregnant with possibility.

Em & Nathaniel decided to dye their hair on NYE.

My kids head back to school today, and I head back to normal crafty hours. There’s so much that is great about December and all the Christmas festivities, BUT…they deviate from the normal schedule, and man, have I missed my normal, quiet schedule. I’m really looking forward to getting back into the craft room uninterrupted.

I shared my plans for January in my last post, and today sees me jump into that plan with all my first-Monday-of-the-year enthusiasm. I’ll be dragging out Em’s Cat Lady quilt that I pieced for their sixteenth birthday and then never got around to quilting. My plan is to finish this up before their birthday at the beginning of February, but not give it as a present because you can’t give something as a birthday present twice. My kid is going to be a legal adult in a month. How did we get here? I’ll wax poetic about that closer to their birthday. Hopefully I can get this quilt completely done this week? That’d be great.

This week marks the re-introduction of Scrappy Thursdays into my routine, and I’m excited to finally start working on my #brickhousequilt blocks. I’m aiming to make up the first four of sixteen blocks. I’m really optimistic about my Scrappy Thursdays plan and this pattern; hopefully I can do some epic scrapbusting this year–the situation is getting dire!

As far as handstitching projects go, I’m still slogging away on past due Christmas gifts I didn’t finish up and still can’t show you. (Side note: I’m thinking that if one misses the Christmas deadline for making a gift, that perhaps one should post about said items because secret crafting gets old after a while, and if one posts about the items, there’s a little more peer pressure to finish…but that may just be my thinking…)

I did, however, get a lot of work done on my “car knitting” project because one of my cats, Marshmallow, went to stand up last week and I’m guessing he pinched a nerve in his hips or something, because his back legs suddenly slumped out from beneath him and he started yelling. It was a long day at the curbside emergency veterinarian, and I alternated holding his head in my hand so he’d stay calm, and knitting while he slept or was inside the vet’s office. He was given a diagnosis of severe arthritis, which is very common for the Scottish Fold breed, but I think I’m going to get a second opinion because I don’t think partially-paralyzed hind legs are something you just treat with anti-inflammatories. (I had a partially paralyzed leg for about a week before my back surgery–it’s horrifically painful.) He’s really struggling, and I think he’s going blind, too. He’s a grandpa of a cat, probably about fifteen years old or so, so it’s getting to be that time where we might need to make some sad plans for him.

Nathaniel is pretty upset, and has taken on the role of permanent cat whisperer; he carries Marsh around and helps reset his legs into a standing position so he doesn’t have to drag them behind him. Sigh. Loving another creature sure is painful when it gets near the end of their life. One would almost be tempted to not engage in the practice, were it not for all the funny little memories and cute moments we’ve had over the years.

Not the most uplifting end to a “motivating & optimistic” Monday post, but it’s what’s going on around here and I try to document the whole story. I’ve got a lot of work to do this week, and also try to find a vet that can squeeze Marsh in for a consult. Wish me luck! And I wish you luck with your week and your goals, and I hope all your pets are in splendid health.

Sew little time…

November 22, 2021Leave a comment

Em & Renaissance with Nathaniel after his band concert! (Rachel was at her own rehearsal and had to miss it.)

Last week was a doozy! Nathaniel had his first band concert and Rachel was in four showings of our school district’s drama production, complete with rehearsals from 4:00-7:30 pm on the days leading up to the shows, and then she had to be at the theatre from 5:30-10:00 pm Thursday and Friday for their first two shows, and from 12:30-10:00 pm on Saturday because they did a matinee and evening show. I drove back and forth from the school 3-5 times each day! But she had a blast and it was a great show, and hey, that’s parenting.

Which meant not a lot of crafty times, but I did finish the Fresh Cut Pines quilt, label and all. I don’t have pictures of it yet because it’s been really rainy and a disc in my upper back went out Saturday morning, which incapacitated me for the entire weekend. Sigh. I have plans to take the quilt’s beauty shots over Thanksgiving Break while I have helpers available during the day.

I pulled out the Yuletide Botanica orange peel quilt this morning to start working on it, and after having a bit of a lazy crafter hesitation, decided to go forward with attaching a border because it will look better with a border, even though I didn’t want to take the time to do it. (And yes, I’m glad I did…it really does look better with the border…) I also basted this bad boy and now have the aching back to prove it. I’m hoping to get going on the quilting tomorrow, as long as everything goes as it should during the day.

I am so ready for the Thanksgiving holiday. Hopefully I don’t have to go anywhere Friday and Saturday so I can just plough through all my wonderful Christmas prep activities! I just want to be at home, sewing all the Christmas things!

The 2021 Halloween Costume Chronicles: Nathaniel

October 26, 2021October 18, 2021Leave a comment

Me: “Nathaniel, what do you want to be for Halloween?”

Nathaniel: [flops onto ground and starts convulsing]

Me: [watches]

Nathaniel: [stops twitching]

Me: “An electrocuted dude?”

Nathaniel: [laughs] “Nope!”

Me: “…”

Nathaniel: [grins in anticipation]

Me: “…Kind of hard to guess off of what you’ve given me so far.”

Nathaniel: “A pig!”

Me: [stares blankly at the child that will carry on my husband’s family’s name] “Alright.”

Autumn Update

November 11, 2018November 11, 20182 Comments

Hello friends!

Because I’m quite sure you wouldn’t get all giddy over a post that chronicled which boxes I unpacked and where I put the stuff that was in them, I figured it was better to not update you until I had something creative to show you.

I’ve had no inclination to sew, knit, whatever, AT ALL, and I’ve been OK with it because the more I look back on the past twelve months, the more I realize that we went through A LOT of stressful stuff, and it takes energy to deal with all that stress, which came from my creative reserves. Happy moment, though: This last week I had a brilliant little moment where I wanted to make something. That feeling has been absent for months, so I’m grateful that things are calming down enough that my interest in crafting is starting to come back.

201811117370910250702226081 I did grit my teeth and make my youngest daughter a Little Red Riding Hood costume for Halloween because I did have time for it, and her little brother decided to be a wolf so he could match her, and I think they were adorable! Her costume was an exercise in frustration–I could not locate the pattern in her size ANYWHERE. And my best friend rode in for the rescue and bought the pattern* at her local JoAnn Store, not realizing that it came in adult OR child size, and sent me the adult size. (Oh gosh, we laughed…) So the costume ended up being the Adult Small skirt, minus five inches around the waist; a plain white t-shirt with aspects of the original costume appliqued onto the shirt; and I tracked down a different pattern** for the cape/hood. She was so pleased with it all, and totally didn’t care that it was a crazy hodge-podge costume. A woman stopped me at the school Halloween party to liberally compliment me on the costume, so I’m pretty pleased with the experiment. (And totally want to make more things edged with eyelet lace! Such a sweet look!)

20181103_145518-01 And right now I am eyeballs-deep in making linen napkins for my Thanksgiving table because I’ve always wanted linen napkins and I have no crafty deadlines on my plate at the moment. It’s been so. much. fun. researching hemstitching and heirloom sewing, and oh my goodness, do I love me some beautiful heirloom sewing. So much drooling.

BUT…I massively underestimated how long these napkins were going to take, mostly because I didn’t think ironing the hem allowances was going to take twenty minutes PER NAPKIN. Four more napkins to press before I actually get to meet needle to fabric! Ugh!

But look at this gorgeous view from my new craft room’s window…it’s so nice to have something besides a window well to look at!

The napkins are going to be lovely, with mitered corners and hemstitching. I’m seriously in love with them. That bit of brown fabric and thread in my craft-room-view photo is the start of one of them. It’s a gorgeous chocolate brown. So pleased!

And then it’s on to Christmas crafting, which I was really hoping to not do this year, but something went wonky with my bank transfers to my Christmas savings account when we moved, and there is much less in that account than there should be, so I’ma gonna have to get creative with supplies already on-hand. Boo/yay

I’ll probably start writing a bit more, now that things have started to settle. It was such a mistake to think I’d be able to paint everything upon moving in–I’ve come to the decision that I’m going to tackle the house room-by-room, because it’s driving me batty to not have a single “finished” room in this house. I’ve been working on my youngest daughter’s room, and it’s looking pretty cute. I’m excited to share that when we finally reach the finish line! (You can have a housewarming party five years after you move in, right?) 😉

But I am hosting Thanksgiving this year, and there could be as many as twenty people attending, so it’s all about the napkins and the cleaning and the cooking for the next two weeks. (And my dining room table that was supposed to be delivered in August? And then October? They changed the delivery date AGAIN…to December. Fan-freakin’-tastic. We’re eating Thanksgiving dinner on folding tables this year. So classy.)

I hope the onslaught of the holiday season is treating you all well! I look forward to seeing your posts and photos of what you’re working on in these next weeks!