Santa's Little Helper, Rainbow Brite

Carmen was my little helper during Keira's nap yesterday afternoon and we had so much fun crafting play silks and ribbon streamer wristbands for some of Carmen's little friends!

For the play silks, we started with:

12 silk scarves (36"x36")
12 packs of Koolaid (3 of each colour)
2L of white vinegar



Putting our big mixing bowl into our larger sink proved to contain the mess and prevent stained countertops!

Pour 2 cups of vinegar, 3 cups warm water and 3 Koolaid packs into a big bowl.



Stir, then add scarves.



Agitate for a few minutes (you might want to wear gloves!), then squeeze liquid out when you notice that all the dye has been soaked up. So weird how the water turns nearly colourless again!



Rinse and hang out to dry!



While we waited for them to dry in the winter sunshine, we started the ribbon streamer wristbands. Carmen had a great time helping measure, picking the colours, then cutting the ribbons. I had to tie them all on, but she was definitely a better product tester...





Then we 'wrapped' the gifts up, two wristbands and two matching scarves. Soon we will have a whole bunch of dancing butterflies, caped superheros, magical wizards and exquisite princesses!



I'm not sure, however, when the dye will come off my hands. The gross orangey-green makes me look like an Oompah-Loompah!

Santa Machine

I've morphed into Eco-Santa!

My Christmas theme this year is keeping it green, meaning at least the vast majority of the gifts I give are hand-made and that I am reusing materials or taking them from my crazy stash of quilting and knitting leftovers. It is SO MUCH FUN to see how far I can make everything stretch, and also great to see my stash clear out!

For starters, for the many teachers in our lives, I am making 8 Apple Cozies with my last year stocking project's bright red and green yarns. Here are the stockings that took me until 9:30pm on Christmas Eve 2008 to finish (with my tinier 30-yr-old stocking on the right):



And here is what the Apple Cozy is supposed to look like, pattern borrowed from 'I Think I'm Gonna Purl':




For a few of the women in my life, I went to the library and got a copy of Laura Irwin's 'Boutique Knits' to craft the lovely Side Slip Cloche (as seen on the cover). I already went to Baaad Anna's and let Keira play in their great kid's area while I petted and drooled over all their great yarns! I finally picked out some nice Angora, which was even on sale. This was a bit of rule-breaking, but I figured the book was from the library and the yarn was on sale...



Recently re-inspired by Vancouver's own Little Bird Designs, I created some larger felt/pencil/make-up brush/whatever holders with Japanese-patterned fabrics from three different quilts I've made. Using a similar design, I also decided to try making a knitting needle holder for the new knitter Michelle, using scraps from a Thai silk dress that I had tailored in Chiang Mai, since I decided to shorten the floor-length dress to knee-length.




I made a similar roll-up organizer for myself a few years ago and my mom has been bugging me to make one for her so this year she's also getting one for her long straight needles, and a matching one for her DPNs. After the third organizer, my pattern was perfected and as I complete each one, I keep thinking 'this is my favourite!' - very gratifying to use up all those teensy weensy pieces of gorgeous fabric! All together, I'll have made about 14 different bags, and right now I'm on number 9!



For some of the younger kiddos... a few months ago, a bunch of us from the Homespun Salon got together with some plain white silk scarves from Maiwa and used Koolaid to dye them a variety of shades. This year I'm putting together a few packages of play silks that I've dyed, along with cool streamer wrist-bands (inspired by Karen) made with different bright colours of ribbon. So much fun for encouraging imaginative play and dress-up! My daughters use theirs for superhero capes, princess skirts, baby blankets, butterfly wings, you name it!



A few years ago, when I was pregnant with Keira and battling with Carpal Tunnel (again), I started a sweater for Carmen... well two years later, I finished it and plan to give it to Keira and start a matching one for Carmen. Of course, I will have to make it in some shade of pink or purple to make sure she actually WEARS it! Sigh. I love these colours, and they seem to fit Keira better anyways:



I finally finished the socks I started for Jason THREE YEARS AGO. This is what happens when you start something (in a pregnancy-induced haze), put it down, and restart three years later...



Somehow one of the socks is wider than the other. Really I should frog the entire thing, but one of his feet is slightly bigger, and I hope this works to my advantage! Otherwise, there is always blocking and felting! Tee hee!

Right now the spare bedroom downstairs looks as though a bomb has gone off with thread and yarn everywhere - in the upcoming break I hope to convert the space into a sleepover-ready spare room/craft room... my mind is buzzing with possibilities!

Winter Nesting

I think we've skipped Fall and went straight into Winter. This could be based on the chill in the air today, or the feelings of nesting that I've been experiencing lately... It seems like the minute the rotting jack-o-lanterns are pulled from our front stoops, the Christmas lights come out - what about November???

A few weekends ago, my husband went away on a hunting trip to Valdes Island with some family friends. When he decided to take up hunting a while ago, I was skeptical but supportive, in the sense that I didn't bar the door or hide his Visa. After all, I am his wife and not his keeper - I adopted the same mindset when he decided to purchase a motorcycle a few years ago! Given the choice, I would rather that he had taken up basket-weaving or ballroom dance, but apparently my husband has a penchant for more dangerous hobbies. In his defense, his reasoning for taking up hunting was more philosophical than anything... in his words:

I read "The Omnivore's Dilemma" a couple of years later and Michael Pollon had a great chapter in the book about trying to put a meal on the table using a 'hunter - gatherer' technique. This meant that he was only going to use ingredients that he could either make or obtain for free - which included a wild pig that he shot in California. His dilemma seemed very close to mine. Since I can eat anything I want at any time - what is a good omnivore to do? I have tried the vegetarian lifestyle for short periods (maximum 2 months while travelling) and I have gone through peaks and valleys when it comes to the amount of meat that I eat in a week. But I couldn't help but feel that to make sense of what it is to eat meat I had to at least once go back, almost in time, to the basic idea of hunting and gathering. My plan was to shoot, clean, and butcher a deer which would then supplement my family's diet through the winter.

He returned from his first successful hunting trip, having shot a doe and a larger buck. A few days after his return, we all went to butcher, package and label the deer, which was a huge learning experience! Thankfully his family friends have been hunting for decades, and so I had ample cooking instructions for the many different cuts of venison. I actually wrote them all directly on the freezer paper, so will have to put them in a notebook somewhere...

I am very happy for Jason that he was able to navigate through his questions about the philosophy of meat-eating, and have to admit that a freezer stocked with close to 50lbs of organic, grassfed, free-range, happy-when-they-left-this-earth venison is quite pleasing! I thought that the meat would be quite gamey and hard to prepare, but it is actually very mild (more so than lamb) and delicious. I made a rump roast the other night that turned out fantastically, with the help of my Lee Valley digital thermometer - works perfect every time!

There is a big knitting post that I need to write, but right now Keira is asleep and Carmen is at preschool... maybe I should just go knit instead!

Two-Step Process

It seems that life these days is full of two-step processes.

For example, getting BOTH my kids to eat their greens! It's karmic (and my mother would agree) that my kids are kinda fussy eaters. It's also karmic that the thing that grows the best in our garden year-round, and the plant I know the fewest ways to prepare, is kale. There is always a giant bin of it waiting patiently in the fridge, curly, green and beautiful... so I happened upon the green smoothie idea this summer and have never turned back! Chard, spinach, lettuce, kale, mint, even cilantro have all made their way into our smoothies. Keira LOVES them, but Carmen - well she's just too smart for me to fool these days. She stands beside the blender and proclaims, "I don't like that KAY-YELLLL!" So I got a bit smarter too and, lo and behold, the green smoothie popsicle!



She hasn't figured it out yet.

This afternoon, after our popsicle and during Keira's nap, we decided to try cookie-painting, or painting with cookie cutters. These Ikea cookie cutters are getting a lot of mileage! I started with a cookie sheet of her paints...



I always add water to make the paint stretch farther (cuz I'm cheap like that), and have figured out the perfect order to mix water into my paint colours so that I don't have to wash the paintbrush in between: yellow, green, blue, purple, red, orange. That way, the colours are not all brown by the time I finish! Also, if you're putting them on a cookie sheet this way, if they run into each other then they still look relatively close to their original colours.



The painting was totally fun, and it was interesting to see that Carmen and I could look at the same shape and see a totally different animal... is it a whale, or a snail?



But then we got a bit bored and decided to take it to the floor for two-stepping!



While Carmen was painting her toes...



for the finale of my two-step processes today, I decided finish the last rows of my sweater and then block it. It took me almost two months exactly to finish knitting, but as you can see, the arms and bodice were sorely in need of some straightening out.



While I was knitting, I was a little worried about how the colours hand-dyed wool would pool differently in the arms vs. the bodice, since some was knit in the round, and some on normal straight needles. I think the variation is kinda neat!




And so, armed with garbage bags and straight-pins, I made my first attempt at wet-blocking a sweater. Apparently putting the sweater on bags rather than on a towel will help it dry faster, as the bags will not absorb any water (thank-you Knitty). Voila!



We'll see how it turns out.

Reunion

It's been a week since Jason and I had our couple's adventure and if I close my eyes, I can still get a sense of the contentment and relaxation we both felt being on 'vacation', even for such a small chunk of time, and for such a short distance away from our home...

Don't get me wrong - it's not like our marriage is in trouble by any stretch! And we are very lucky to have family nearby for date nights here and there. We both have hobbies supported by one another; Jason's Tuesday painting nights, my Saturday singing mornings. And our kids - they sleep! They behave in restaurants! They are pretty darned fun to be around!

But there's something about going to sleep after a blissfully exciting night out NOT worrying that one of your kids is going to have a bad night, or that you're going to be woken up at the crack of dawn, groggy and fuzzy from too much wine. Or going for a morning coffee stroll without having to juggle your mug, a dog on leash and a stroller full of squirmy kids. Not thinking about having enough snacks in the diaper bag to tide hungry mouths over until the breakfast order arrives. Not having to go to a restaurant that has booster seats and high chairs.

Last Saturday night Jason and I ventured out onto Commercial Drive in search of wining, dining and dancing. We were not disappointed! We stepped into the Latin Quarter at about 7pm, were deep into conversation over appies and cocktails by 7:30, salsa and cha-cha'ing our butts off by 9:30, and stumbling home weary and sated just after 1am! It was romantic and exciting and exactly what we both needed.

We spent the drizzly Sunday morning with coffees in hand, combing Commercial Drive for a breakfast joint that opened before 10am - NOT Little Nest!! We sank into our diner seats and continued our conversations from the night before, laughing over our boogie adventures and loosely mapping out the day ahead. We snuggled on the couch where we were staying, watching 'Silence of the Lambs' on cable - maybe not the most romantic movie, but we were too busy being blissed out by the silence of the house to notice!

But the best part was our trip to the Miraj Spa. Oh, so heavenly. Such attention to detail - you feel like you are the only couple there, and won't see another customer during your visit. Sumptuous in every way. Delicious, even. I encourage every couple to eek out the bucks (shared Christmas or anniversary gift? forgo JJ Bean for a few months?) to try it. You will NOT be disappointed - it is a relaxing, amazing, sexy (!?!) reunion with your partner.

That is, unless you don't like being naked around strangers. You ARE getting scrubbed down in the buff, but it is so professional and SO freakin' fantastic!

Now if only I could wrangle some freebie hammam passes in exchange for testimonials...

A girl can dream, can't she?