“It’s a Craftier Time.”

January 10, 2012 By 1 Comment
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The other day as I was running errands with a screaming child in the backseat, when I got a phone call.  I was tempted to answer, but decided that with running my own business, it was not very professional to have such lovely background noise.  Good thing I didn’t.  Janna Farley from the Argus Leader, left a message about how she was writing an article for the newspaper on the resurgence of handmade/do-it-yourself kinds of things.  She wondered if she could get my thoughts.   It made me smile.  (even whilst that snotty nosed child in the backseat continued to serenade me.)  That afternoon during nap {{peace and quiet at last–Alleluia!}} I gave Janna a buzz back and we had a nice chat.  My kind of chat.  Here’s the article she put together.  ”It’s a Craftier Time.”  I thought the spin on the recession having an impact was interesting–it makes sense.  Anyways, I don’t care why people are interested in handmade, but I LOVE it!!  Thanks for writing this Janna!

 

Here’s the article again, if you missed it above.  “It’s a Craftier Time.”

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Home again, home again, jiggity jig.

January 3, 2012 By 1 Comment
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After a wonderful extended stay with our families for the holidays, we are BACK!  Good to go, but nice to be home too.  As I tell the boys when we pull into the driveway, “Home again, home again, Jiggity Jig!”  Here are some snapshots of our Christmas.  (I pulled pictures from cameras, Facebook, Instagram, iPhones…aka…sorry about the lack of formatting!)

 

Espen says “cheese” during our little family celebration.

 

 

We did a lot of this!

 

It was so worth it though to see this.

 

And to eat this.  Elias says “COOOOOKIE!!” and then devours it like Cookie Monster.  Thanks Sesame Street.

 

 

Elias also loved cranking the radio and giving the girls a ride.  Oh boy.  I hope this is not a sign of my future!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We did a little of this.  It was wonderful!  Something I’d like to do more of.

 

An eager learner and a proud papa.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s to the new year!   I’ll show you some of my handmade Christmas tomorrow.

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The Christmas Outing

December 15, 2011 By 1 Comment
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When I grew up, the annual cutting of the Christmas tree usually happened the first weekend after Thanksgiving.  Always a real tree even though my brother had allergy issues.  (Toughen up boy!  It’s Christmas!)    We are a couple weekends late, but we managed to finally get ours cut.  It was a wonderful excuse to try and find another “diamond in the rough” kind of tree farm.  That place was Riverview Christmas Tree Farm in Canton SD.  It was fabulous!  It was tucked on the edge of a riverbed, so there was some beautiful wooded land and a little bit of snow.  The owners were so sweet and helpful!   Here’s a quick little video.

Elias had a great time.  He kept tripping over tree stumps and saying “uh-oh.”  He also loved the snow!  (I can’t wait for a big snowstorm, so he can really see what snow is like.)

Elias is in the total mimic stage, so he had to crouch just like me and lay on the ground like dad to cut it.

So helpful!  (By the way, we have the greatest skill of being able to find bargain Christmas trees!  This one was like $20 cheaper than anything else we saw…and we didn’t even think it looked different from the rest!)

 

One of my favorite things to do each year–A wonderful family Christmas outing!

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Silly Girl.

October 31, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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I started a new crazy project.  I so don’t need this project!!  I should be working on new quilt patterns, or perhaps some Christmas gifts…like 8 weeks away Christmas!   That’s what I get for looking at other people’s blogs!  I was inspired by Lucy over at Attic 24 and decided to ripple along with her.  This is a crochet project and I am using a size G hook and Valley Supperwash DK from Webs.   Yes, that’s right, I’m crocheting a blanket.  Dumb.  But hopefully totally worth it!

The pattern is very easy and involves mostly a double crochet.  I consider myself a beginner at crochet and with Lucy’s in depth pattern/pictures, I picked it up very easily.

Lucy uses fantastically bright colors and I wanted to try and go outside my comfort zone with similar colors.  So far, my first 3 rows are very inside my comfort zone….  ha!  I guess I wanted to get the project off to a good start.  I have 15 different colors, so somewhere in there something will stretch me.  Blues/greens/gray/red/orange/cream/purples.

I actually started this project with different yarn, but after the first row decided that the yarn was too scratchy.  uggg.  I really wanted a soft squishy blanket to cuddle up with my boys under, so I decided to start over with something else.  They say if you don’t like it now, you aren’t going to like it in 10 rows.  So I quickly cast that itchy yarn aside.  Since I needed thirty 50g balls, wowza!, I had to pick carefully so I didn’t have to take out a loan.  Valley Superwash DK was the winner and I really like it.  Plus I got a discount!  I’m all for supporting your local yarn shops, but if they don’t have what you are looking for Webs is a great option!

If you would like to ripple along, the pattern is found here.  Thanks Lucy!

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Home.

September 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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We are back from a lovely holiday weekend in MN with my side of the family.  Elias had tons of fun hanging out with his 28 month old cousins Liana and Amaya.  It is a busy place when those 3 are running around!  Tony got away for a little bit of time on the water fishing.  I got some shopping in with my mom and sister-in-law, but really just having extra hands and eyes around to help with my boys is break enough for me.

 

We came home to more food ready for picking in the garden.  This means more work for us to get it ready for the freezer, but we will be glad we took the time come January.  I think I need to keep making tomato sauce, but salsa is sure sounding good…

 

I did get some sewing time in recently, so I will share those projects with you in the next couple days.

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