The other day--watching Oscar steal yet another apple and crawl off with in held tightly in his teeth--I realized it was time to resurrect my long neglected blog Toddler Fixation.
It was such fun to look back on old photos and Biscuit was loving the videos of herself. I only remembered a handful of the things pictured which made me extra glad for that little piece of dusty, abandoned internet.
Now it's all Oscar content (as often as I remember to post).
I'm not what you would call a good housekeeper. I actually suck at it. But one of my birthday resolutions was to freshen up the house and do a photoshoot pretending that Design*Sponge was planning to feature my home ;).
Progress has been slow but I've cleaned out our coat/game/medicine/luggage/snow gear/outdated textbooks/shoe polish/tent (some might call it a junk) closet and that felt really good. Then I started moving around nightstands and making tiny bits of progress.
This is my current crowning glory of baby toy organization.
From walking in the front door to see this:
To this:
Mr. H built that shelf.
Oscar is primarily obsessed with the top shelf. Once he's conquered that.
It's off to check out big sister's room.
As you can see from the wide angle, still a good bit of work to do around here. But it'll come together. Someday.
P.S. Still time to enter to win a quilt--just tell me your favorite color on this post.
I think it's time for another It Takes Two quilt project! I finished the sample of this "Irresistable" quilt the other day and I'm pretty excited about it.
The details of this project can be found here.
To enter you need to:
This quilt will be smallish--probably a wallhanging size. I'm still making as it as it will be partially made to order for the winner.
All readers in the United States are encouraged to enter to win this quilt by leaving a comment below. Your comment must include your favorite color. Be specific! Not "blue" but "powder blue" or "navy blue" or "teal blue." I'll draw the winner this Friday night, May 18 so enter by 6 pm.
Good luck and thanks for playing along!
My sister's friend paid me to make 30 tiny jars of strawberry jam and package them up cute for engagement party favors. As I suspected making the jam was tons of fun. Packaging was sort of annoying.
There must be a better way but the best I came up with was to use a rubberband to temporarily hold the fabric "hats" on the jar while tying with string. Worked well enough.
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I'm pretty sure all internet posts today are supposed to be about Mother's Day. So here's a cute photo of my mom, the girl who made me a mom, and my sister getting ready to go to a bike race.
Nothing says Mother's Day like the Tour of California bike race. Am I right?
Gosh time is flying by! A few weeks ago I carried my camera around and tried to document a week of our life. It was a super busy week (as evidenced by the very few pictures of Mr. H--I barely saw him all week.)
On Monday I finally finished up the scrapbook.
My goal for this project is just to get it done. Simple. Cheap. Done.
I print photos at Costco, shove them in the little plastic things I found at the thrift store in 2010 and am still using, journal what I can remember, glue in receipts and detritus and close the book on another year.
I don't purchase any supplies other than the photos and the $1 for the woodgrain binder I always find at the thrift store. I use cardstock I have around and mostly do my journaling directly on the photo.
This year I wanted to do one new thing. Each day I took a photo of the sky (we were supposed to have varied weather that week including sun and storms). My original vision was to journal about the day directly over the sky but when the photos were printed I liked how they looked without being covered in pen so I used the sky pages to mark each new day.
I like how the bit of land/tree/building at the bottom is a little reminder of where I was that day.
The week included the huge 100th Birthday Event for the Girl Scouts in our region. Very cool thing to be a part of! And how awesome is that photo (bottom right of left hand page) of Biscuit rockin' out to Dynomite? Really awesome!
And that's it. 2012 done. This is about the only way I scrapbook anymore but I figure something is better than nothing and an annual glimpse will be fun for the kids to look back on someday.
If you like this project, check out Ali Edwards' blog. She's the gal that started it all. But try not to be intimidated by how awesome her stuff looks. After all, she's a professional :)
I'm so excited! The first quilt of my It Takes Two project came out even better than I could have expected. My mom won the drawing (which totally sounds like a set up but it wasn't). These are the directions I sent her.
She employed her class full of preschoolers to get the quilt wet.
Teams of kids hit it with the spray bottle.
This is what it looked like all wet (before the colors bled over night)
After letting it set a bit my mom rinsed, washed and dried the quilt. The colors faded to what you saw in the first image but still pretty vibrant. I'm amazed you can actually tell what I was trying to make! (mountains in case you can't actually tell :)
I need to finish up the next two projects which are already in progress. So excited!
Last week was a total blur. We were uncharacteristically busy with something every night of the week plus Saturday. Phew!
It just so happened it was also Ali's Week in the Life (WITL) project week. Timing wasn't great but it never is, right? So I decided to just go for it.
Last time I did this Oscar turned one month old in the middle of the week. Now look at him.
Our floor is totally hygenic. Promise ;)
Last year I didn't get a single picture of myself so I tried harder this year with pretty poor results :)
And once again I tried a "come as you are" family snapshot. Funny stuff.
My goal was to print the photos and start the album the day after the project ended (that would have been yesterday) but, as it does, life intervened. I've almost got the photos uploaded and hopefully I'll get the album done this week before I forget everything like how Biscuit described to her class going to my work for Take Our Daughters to Work Day.
Blah, blah, blah and then we went to a reception
Kid in class: What's a reception?
Biscuit: It's when you have to be on your very best behavior and you can't whine. But I usually whine.
True story, she spent an entire day at work. Mostly doing actual work. But we did a sideline tour of the campus wildlife museum which was very cool. Bluebirds on a stick anyone?
We're having a camping themed birthday party for Oscar (and Mr. H and my dad since all three birthdays are within a week and all the boys like to camp).
We're only inviting family but cute invitations are still important. Made of topo maps and complete with handprint campfires and t-shirt knit tents.
Less than a month and our little guy will be one. I'm feeling the perfect mix of happy/sad. It's going by so quick.
We had 10 entrants in the Picture Windows give away--the first in my It Takes Two textile experiment.
And the winner is......as selected from my handful of little slips of paper...Mark!
Who is actually my mom :) It was random, promise!
I'll get this in the mail and she and her preschool class will continue the experiment for us all. Can't wait to see the photos! And if you didn't win, stay tuned, a few more quilts coming and I think I like the next two better than the first....
Thanks for playing!
From the comments and conversations with friends it seems folks are a bit intimidated to enter the quilt giveaway. Don't be! It's really not hard and there's no such thing as screwing up an experiment. Whatever happens happens. Really. 24 hours left and I'll draw a name. Of course if this sounds totally lame to you, don't enter.
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Right now I'm heading out to the craft shack to sew up some more samples/practice for my quilt class TOMORROW. I should really be more organized. I'm teaching patchwork pillows at Beverly's. It should be a fun time! And I'm even MORE excited for my next class. Just as soon as I work out the details ;)
I need to make a bunch of muffins for an upcoming field trip for Biscuit's class (like 50-100 muffins). If you can point me to a tried and true muffin recipe I'd be very grateful and will, in return, post my mother-in-law's bran muffin recipe for you. I thought of Swistle's pumpkin muffins but pumpkin seems wrong for spring. Ideas?
