Where We Are

Her new tank top

I love this photo of Esme' in her newly knitted tank top!! She looks so mischievous, yet beautiful. For any of you who are interested in knitting details, they can be found at Ravelry (have I said how much I LOVE Ravelry?!!).

Felt seed satchel

I just finished sewing (by hand... no sewing machine yet) this little seed satchel for Asher. I found the pattern at Sugar in My Bowl. He is smitten with it, which is always very rewarding for me (as is making something from materials we already have)! The neat thing about this bag is that there are three pockets built in. One can be for seeds packets and the other two can hold one garden glove each. I think I will use this pattern from My Craft Evolution to make their gloves.

Here is the beginning of Esme's satchel.

Egg carton flower wreath

 

Here is another great upcycling craft! I found a link through the Crafty Crow to this blog that is in Russian. The photos made the project fairly self explanatory. I did most of the cutting, since the egg cartons are quite tough to cut through and then the kids had a blast painting them. I painted some too! We cut our wreath base out of an old Cheerios box and we all painted it green together. I like how colorful the origianl one is, but we decided to stick with the colors that we can see in our yard right now. Yellow daffodils and purple and white peonies (I think that's what they are).

Homemade bubbles

A while back, we found these great Melissa and Doug bubbles with nice big handles for little hands. I had some credit at our local children's shop, so I got one for each kid. I knew that when the bubbles ran out, we would refill them with our own. I found this website the other day and we will probably try most of the recipes to find out which one is the best (for us). For our first batch, we tried the fifth recipe because we had everything on hand. We were all very happy to see that they work!!

Little things of Spring

With a back yard like this, it's easy to be excited about the small signs of growth. Even when things seem dark and dreary, life is everywhere.

Like in our strawberry bed. The chickens ate all the strawberry plants last year, so I wasn't sure any would grow back this year even though they're perennial plants. I am very pleasantly surprised to see that they are!

The lilac is growing very well this year. Maybe this will be its first year with flowers!

Soon our front yard will be covered with these little beauties.

And then there is the rose that can. This is a transplant from a rose bush that dates back to 1920 (maybe you know the date better, Mom?). It was originally a plant that my great-grandfather gave to my great-grandmother. I never met them so it is pretty special to be able to grow something that can remind me of them. We drove the cutting back from Wisconsin and it endured a stay in Chicago before it was placed in its home in the earth. I feel that this little rose plant, just beginning to bud, is a kindred spirit. I feel I am at a similar place in life: not at my full potential, trying so hard to grow... not giving up. I am new like this little baby plant and yet connected to something so much older.

Upcycled flower craft

I have been saving up our toilet paper tubes for months now, ever since I saw a neat craft at Twig and Toadstool. We haven't actually done that craft yet, but as soon as I saw this at Michele Made Me, I was smitten. While I sat down with the ruler, a pencil and scissors, Esme' cut her own style of flowers. She gave one to Asher to paint and she painted the other two.

Here are the ones I made. I imagine making a lot more of these flowers for a large installation piece in our dining room. I am not sure I like how they are arranged right now. I am hoping for something that looks more like a branch of blossoms- something delicate and subtle. I am surprised by how much I like the color of them (although she has some colorful ones that are equally pretty and that we will also try sometime). Somehow they remind me of the brown hues of late winter, right before things start to bud and blossom into spring. Our back yard is particularly brown right now, so this was a very fitting early spring project for us.

Mittens to match his hat

This post serves the double purpose of showing the mittens that I recently knit to match Asher's birthday hat and showing the (until now) unseen hat. The mittens were so easy to knit; in fact, I will probably knit him another, slightly bigger pair with the leftover yarn because they were that easy and fun (and it's always good to have a spare pair of mittens).

The hat, on the other hand, resembled something closer to painstaking tedium than it did to fun. I had to knit the darn thing three times before I ended up with a working hat. I suppose that if I had followed the pattern and actually used circular needles instead of double pointed needles, I wouldn't have been dropping sttches left and right. Sorry to my non-knitting readers for the knitting jargon. I am glad that this hat is so roomy (it even fits me!) because I don't want to knit him another one anytime in the near future.

I am a happy mama seeing him loving his hat!