Coloring Easter Eggs

We did color traditional Easter eggs but, of course, I can't find those photos. So here's the paper version, made to decorate Easter treat bags for my niece and nephew. Every once in a while, a little coloring book action is good for the soul.

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Easter

Here in our little corner of the world, Easter weather is a tricky thing. Some years it's balmy and mild with lots of blooming things, and other years it looks like...this. Good thing the Easter Bunny has a fur coat!

First Attempt At Seed Starting...

...was officially a failure. While the Miracle Grow made for some nice, healthy leaves, every one of the little buggers is growing horizontally due to too little direct light. Yanked 'em all out, recycled the seed starting mix and will have to try again. I still don't have grow lights but don't need to get the seeds started just yet, so I have time to figure something out.

First Signs of Spring

I attended a lecture on seed starting a few weeks ago and, in spite of the overwhelming amount of information about which seeds need to be soaked, which ones like to be covered, which ones don't like to be covered, what soil temperature is best, the dangers of overwatering and underwatering, and the dire predictions of failure without the right lights, I decided to give it a try. Last weekend the Little Guy and I planted lettuce, sage, parsley, cilantro, forget-me-nots and morning glories in peat discs, which are now taking up one entire end of my craft table. As of today, everything has sprouted except the morning glories. I've been using a desk lamp with a CFL bulb for a grow light, and I think I made the fatal light-too-far-from-the-seedlings mistake. All the sprouts are reeeeaaalllllly tall and floppy. Sigh. Oh well. I gave them a dose of Miracle Gro hoping that will toughen them up, and if not, we'll give it another try. Seeds are cheap and I think we started everything too early anyway, considering our last frost date here is late May.

Two Visits from the Tooth Fairy in Two Days

After weeks of bugging the Little Guy to keep wiggling his loose tooth so it would come out, he finally lost the first one yesterday. It was so loose it was leaning sideways and it just popped out without any drama at all. (Very few things happen without any drama with this child!) Since it was painless AND it got him a dollar from the Tooth Fairy, he yanked out its wiggly neighbor at kindergarten today and came home with his little bitty tooth in a ziploc bag.

Tonight when I put him to bed he stuck it in his tooth fairy pillow. He told me he was talking about the tooth fairy with his friends at kindergarten. They decided 1) tooth fairies are girls, 2) they're veeeery tiny, and 3) you don't want to mess with them, 'cause they may be little but they're really strong from lugging around bags full of teeth and gold dollar coins. Now I can't get the image of a mosquito-sized body builder in a tutu and wings lurching through the air with a sack full of loot out of my head!

It's done, it's done!

The "Mother and Child" necklace is finished with just a few days to spare. I'm really pleased with how it turned out, plus I tried a few new ideas on the straps and fringe that will carry over well to another project. Yay!





And the tooth fairy pillow is being called into action for the first time this evening. The Boy lost his first tooth! Big doin's at our house the past few days. :o)

Patches II

I've been beading away on the "Mother and Child" necklace for the past few weeks but completely forgot to take any photos, so...no posts. I'll make up for that soon!

In the meantime, I ran across this post on Darling Petunia's blog a while back and just fell in love with Patches. I bookmarked it with the intention of trying to recreate the pattern when I had a free day to sew and no projects planned. Well, the Big Guy is out of town and I took a few days off work to enjoy the peace and quiet of an empty house while the Little Guy is at school, and (of course!) to enjoy a little crafting with no interruptions. When I was going through my inspiration file looking for something to work on, I ran across the post and decided to give Patches a try. I printed out the photo of Patches for reference, pulled out my quilt scraps, did a few calculations, and started cutting.

Here's the end result:



I'm very happy with how he turned out. My cutting/accurate seam allowance/piecing skills need some honing and this was great practice. He has a few wonky seams where the legs and tail meet the body, but overall this is easily the best pieced project I've completed so far.

I love him, and so does the Little Guy. Patches II goes back and forth between hanging out in my sewing room as my crafting mascot by day and sleeping with the Little Guy at night.

Learning something new every day

Started playing around with offloom weaving this weekend based on instructions from the bead books I found at the library. I started with a little sample of flat peyote stitch. It came out a little uneven on the sides, partly because I used cheap beads that aren't a uniform size, but it turned out pretty well for my first attempt. It makes really drape-y bead fabric with a little stretch to it. I also tried odd-count peyote around a tube. That got frustrating REALLY fast because it kept slipping out of place. So then I tried it around an empty spool thinking the wider surface plus the rim at the top and bottom would make it easier to handle. That was better, but it still took several tries to get it started. I couldn't get the first row to stagger when I added the second row of beads. I finally ran another thread through every other bead in the first row and tied it around the spool, then pushed the alternating beads above the thread to hold them in the staggered pattern. That seemed to work pretty well. The instructions for the flat peyote mentioned you can do the same thing with a pin or fine wire, but I didn't have as much trouble with the flat stitch and didn't need to do it. I took a couple hours today to bead around the entire spool but it came out pretty nice. I'd need to do a lot more practicing to get the hang of patterns with different colors, but I at least have a feel for it now.

Bead book lust

We're having a midwinter thaw so I took advantage of the mild weather and walked to the library on my lunch hour to look for craft books. I found a couple things that looked interesting, and then I found the beadwork section...SCORE! There were so many I wanted to check out! I made myself stick to a limit of two, and both of them are books I'd love to buy at some point. The first one is Embeadery by Margaret Ball. It has over 100 pages just of bead embroidery stitches plus about a dozen projects. It would take months just to try all the stitches once. The other one is The New Beadweaving by Ann Benson. It has several bead embroidery projects and a lot of woven pieces, both loomed and off-loom. The loomed pieces are amazing. My loom isn't big enough to handle most of them and I'm itching to find a wider one so I can try out some of the projects. There are at least 6 projects I want to try out of this one. Time to start hitting the used book sites to see if I can find a copy!

Waiting for the Tooth Fairy

The Little Guy has his first loose tooth. Two loose teeth, in fact, so we're getting prepared for his first visit from the Tooth Fairy. In honor of the occasion, I made him a Tooth Fairy pillow. I looked at several ideas online and then made up my own pattern with "My Tooth Pillow" machine embroidered and a white felt tooth hand appliqued on the front and a little pocket on the back for his tooth and tooth fairy loot. And, of course, it had to be in his favorite color - red! Now I just need to remember to go to the bank for some gold dollar coins before the first tooth pops out.