quilted advent calendar

i finished this--just in time!!

i heart this thing, for reals. can't wait to hang it up tomorrow all laden with cheap treats for my little men. :)

and isn't the fabric so cute and obnoxious? it's michael miller's "funky christmas" fabric, which seems largely unavailable in all the online fabric stores i frequent. i bought mine off etsy. yay for etsy!

a close up of one of the pockets. the embroidery was a pain in the butt, but it turned out pretty good.

my new (old) ukulele

for a long time i thought it would be cool to play a ukulele.

then i started listening to this talented swede. hmmm...love.

when i mentioned this to my friend jen, (what a great name, eh?) she said, "hey, i have a ukulele you can borrow." yay! said i. it was a baritone ukulele, so basically the bottom four strings of a classical guitar. which meant easy to play since i didn't have to learn any new tuning. i played and played. i even played at church last week. weeee!

THEN my dad told me that my grandma was sending him my great-grandfather's old ukulele's, and that he wanted me to have one of them. and look what the UPS guy brought me today. yay!

here's a blurry pic (taken by my six year old in admittedly bad light) of me messing with it. i say "messing" as opposed to "playing" because this is a soprano ukulele and thus all the chords are different. still.

it's in rough shape, but i sort of like that about it. when i hold it i imagine crusty sailors with tattooed chests singing "a whale of a tale" while hanging from a ships rigging. i know i should probably picture hawaiians or something, but i don't. just crusty sailors. oh, and this guy.

it's fun to play. and i'm excited i get a family heirloom. i never knew my great-grandfather, so i like to imagine him playing it and being happy it stayed in the family.

a much needed break

recently i've been attempting to whittle down my half-finished projects list but working on one thing every day. my self-imposed rule was that when i ran out of something (i.e. thread, quilt binding, etc.) i would set it aside and pick up something else. well i'm happy to say that when i ran out of thread for the advent calendar quilt i'm aggravatingly close to finishing, i decided i needed a break from sewing. so i started painting and drawing.

first i painted this for my room. it was fun. i love orange.

then i drew these. i picked up these hideous brown cheap frames from a yard sale a month or so ago, sprayed painted them a cheerful yellow, and then shelved them because i wasn't quite sure what to do with them. suddenly inspiration hit--why not draw some simple little portraits of my husband and i to hang above our separate sides of the bed? and...voila! silly ink drawings that look pretty much like us. though i think my face is WAY chubbier than this in real life.

then...drumroll please...after a YEAR AND A HALF of being annoyed with this monstrosity, i finally decided to just finish the dang thing already and move on. i have to say that as difficult and obnoxious as this was to paint (why oh WHY would i think that many colors on one huge canvas was a good idea??)i am pretty proud of it. and i have no idea where to put it. alas.

i feel pretty good getting back to doing art. i've spent the last year mainly sewing which is fun but i've been jonesing to wield a brush for months now.

pumpkin, you are not my friend

but i love you so...

so i have a horrible confession to make. yesterday i made pumpkin cookies, and tonight they are gone.

that's right folks, between me and my two older boys we managed to consume an entire plateful of pumpkiny delicious hateful cookies. i don't even have a picture to post of them looking all orange and tasty and beckoning because they are already gone.

seriously, i don't know what it is about pumpkin but nearly anything i make with it cannot be resisted or eaten in moderation. moderation eludes me when it comes to cucurbita pepo. it sings its succulent siren song to me and i am undone. as are my pants, because i can't fit into them anymore.

christmas cookies do nothing for me. cake i can bypass, and pies i detest. but, oh, a slice of pumpkin loaf fresh from the oven, studded with cranberries and orange zest...pumpkin pancakes with just a little honey drizzled on top...pumpkin scones...but worst of all those dang cookies.

at least now i've got it out of my system. i only make them once a year, and that's it. it's like a little deal i make with the devil-pumpkin. so now i can look forward to next years insane cookie glut-fest...while i work on getting rid of the pounds i probably gained in the last two days.

*sigh*

all i want for christmas

the last few weeks have been nice, if dull, and i've enjoyed them.

however, part of my joy has been spoiled by this: it's november, NOVEMBER, the month of thanksgiving, yet everywhere i go i see christmas decorations. i hear christmas music playing. i read blogs that are pressuring us to HURRY HURRY HURRY and get things done before christmas comes.

what, i ask you, ever happened to thanksgiving?

i'll tell you what. it was banished by marketing moguls and crappy capitalists who would like to skip the season where you're thankful for your blessings and go right to the season where you get (and therefore buy) stuff. and don't even get me started on where the POINT of christmas was banished to.




the sad thing is, we've bought it hook line and sinker. we are sad, impressionable sheep, people. instead of rejoicing in the fun of making or buying gifts for loved ones during the month of december, we start stressing out as soon as school starts that christmas is right around the corner. we wrack our brains trying to think of the perfect gift, we lust over that perfect wrapping paper, and create wishlists of the things we want. maybe, just maybe, on christmas morning we might give Christ's birth a nod by reading the christmas story, but then it's straight to the unwrapping frenzy, the worry that your presents weren't appreciated, and the big anticlimax of cleaning up the aftermath.



with all this going on, no wonder poor thanksgiving has taken a backseat. because being thankful isn't as frenetic and shiny and crazy as its holiday cousin, it becomes just some day when you eat a lot and watch marathons. just a day that comes before black friday and cyber monday.

well this year i decided i'm not going to take it. i'm going to avoid the mall and other stores and teach my kids to be thankful. i'm not going to let myself start to stress out about what i'm going to buy, and when i'm going to buy it, and how i'm going to wrap it. i will ignore jingle bells playing at the grocery store and encourage my family to think about the blessings they've had poured on them. to that end, this year we made a tree of thanks. every family member gets their own color leaves, and every day we think of something we're thankful for, write it on the leaf, and hang it on the tree. kind of like an advent calendar for thanksgiving i guess. so far it's looking good, and it is really cool to see the things the kids are thankful for.



and you know what else? while i've heard a whole lot of thanks, i haven't heard a single request for christmas presents.

yet. :)

prints by justin nelson

our friend justin has some prints for sale at an online shop called little paper planes, go check them out they're cool.


Shika by Justin Nelson

costume parade

this year i had fun with costumes. I didn't use patterns this time around, which made life interesting but also more...um...interesting. figuring out how to make things myself is something i do enjoy, although making me more prone to muttered expletives and throwing things. i don't know that i could say what i was most proud of making, although my niece's fleece valkyrie hat was definitely at the top of my list. and the acorn hat i knit for my littlest man. the gnome was pretty funny, too. okay, okay, i liked them all. and the kids had a blast wearing them.


the viking, the garden gnome, the baby acorn, and the valkyrie

i know my boys will be wearing these all year, so i tried to make them sturdy. so far so good. talk to me again in a few months.