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.