I find it very difficult to go out and buy a wreath when I have practically a billion trees in my yard. It seems silly to me to pay for someone else’s yard debris, you know?  This year I decided that I was going to make my own wreath. I bought a circle thingy and some wire for less than $4.00 at A.C. Moore, watched a You Tube video and set to work:

I can tell you what I did, but I can’t vouch for it until it makes it through its first snow storm without falling apart.  First I went out into the woods and cut off some pine and hemlock branches. I brought them all back to my breeze way and started securing them into little bundles with pieces of wire. I made 8 of those altogether because my base was divided into 8 sections.  I secured each of these bundles onto the base with more wire.  Then what happened was when I held the wreath vertically, all the branches really fluffed out so I secured them with even more wire.  I’m still not sure that I used enough though.

Earlier in the season, my aunt and uncle had dropped off some bayberry twigs.  I thought, why not stick those in the wreath too, so I bundled them up with some more pine twigs and secured those in there with even more wire.  When I bring out my holiday stuff for real, I think I may have a bow or 2 saved from last year that I can stick on there too for some more color.

I’ve been very intrigued lately by the idea of being a recessionista.  I know really the concept revolves more around fashion than homemaking, but I did find one article that showed ways to save  50 ways to money that were not all fashion related.  What have you seen out there – any good information?  If you get a chance, I’d love if you would share the link.

Holiday wreath for less than $4.00

The girls have been crafting up a storm this winter! Although they haven’t taken to knitting or crocheting, 2 of them have developed a fondness for latch hooking. Agent J learned at school during her free period. Her homeroom is with the modern equivalent of the home economics teacher. I not exactly sure what it is called now. I think that she (the teacher) started providing craft opportunities either during indoor recess or X block and Agent J decided to try latch hooking. I think this is great for her fine motor skills and concentration — a very nice thing for them to learn at school. There was one hitch, and of course, it occurred on a Friday afternoon (because all moms love to have sad children get off the bus for that what is supposed to be the easiest of 3 to 6’s for the week). J had been so enthusiastic about latch hooking that we bought her a hook for her very own that was a little nicer than the ones at school. She brought it to school to use, but when she tried to take it home, it was a no-go. Apparently, taking a latch hook home on the bus in one’s back pack is akin to carrying a concealed weapon. This is a very crazy world we live in, don’t you think? Anyway, let’s move on (quickly) to the finished project reports…

Agent J has so far finished 2 12 x 12 latch hook kits! She started with the smile face and then she chose a football for IHA’s office. We still have to figure out how to frame it. Suggestions definitely welcome!

J has also taught Agent B how to latch hook and she is attempting kits in smaller sizes. She has completed the ducky…

Which, I believe, is an 8 x 8. Agent J is currently working on a challenging horse, while B is hooking away on a soccer ball.

What is Agent K doing, you wonder? Well, we have been looking for a craft for her and we found one that she likes at Micheals on Monday. Quilling! She is getting pretty good at it!

Tomorrow we are supposed to have a pretty busy day. I have jury duty and we have tickets to see Grease at the Warner Theater. However, this is the symbol in our weather forecast: .  If you ask me, it doesn’t look too promising.  Did I mention that the tickets are for all 5 of us and they are non-refundable?  Also did I mention that I have jury duty?  I hope they don’t hold court in the snow.  Actually, I have to call at 5:30 to see if I even have to go. Please cross your fingers for me!  Also did I mention that if it doesn’t snow and I have to go to jury duty that I can’t knit there?  I was actually not all that terribly upset to get the letter in the mail as last time I had jury duty I sat and knit all day and practically finished half a sweater. This time I open the pamphlet to see this:

“ARE THERE ANY ITEMS I SHOULD NOT BRING TO COURT?

Jurors may not bring disruptive or potentially dangerous items into the courthouse.  a disruptive item includes, but is not limited to, the following: a radio, boom box, portable television, compact disc player/recorder, or cassette player/recorder.  Potentially dangerous items include, but are not limited to, pocket knives, and sharp objects such as tools or knitting needles.” from Your Guide to Jury Duty  An Obligation and an Honor by the State of Connecticut Judicial Branch. {bold emphasis added by me}

I wonder what happened in the last four or so years to warrant adding the lowly knitting needle to a list of banned items.  Anyday now, I’m expecting to see knitting needles and latch hooks on an episode of Deadliest Weapons.

So I’m only about 10 rows away from being done with Sleeve Island.  I think I have time for one last papaya daquari  — you know the kind with the cute little umbrella, and I will be setting sail for Yoke Shore.

Have a great 3 to 6 everyone!

“Under the best of circumstances, a handspinner’s hour is 48 minutes long. Under adverse conditions (sadly enough, the typical condition), the handspinner may achieve 20 minutes of spinning per hour. The other 40 minutes are consumed in locating things, winding yarn, preparing fiber, rethreading the wheel, finding the broken end, answering the telephone, going to the loo, and so forth.” — Alden Amos from the Big Book of Handspinning, page 147.

2.5 weeks ago, I checked this book out of the library, but I hadn’t had a chance to open it until yesterday. As I flipped through the pages, the one with the above quote caught my eye because of the nifty little pie charts accompanying the text. What a wake-up call. I’m sure accounting for one’s hour is second hand to people like IHA where the billable hour is king, but with moms/crafters, hours slip away very quickly, sometimes with not much actual product to show.

Thinking about my own “Spinner’s Hour” (or whatever craft/activity you are trying to do – for example, I know may of you reading this are thinking “Scrapbooker’s Hour), I don’t think it is very long (esp. when the Junior Agents are home!).

My typical “Hour” goes like this: 5 minutes deciding what craft I should be doing, 5 minutes locating supplies, 5 minutes making coffee/tea/snack, 10 minutes changing laundry, 8 minutes checking e-mail, 8 minutes taking blog photos and jotting down notes, and 7 minutes stalking my favorite Esty shops. So, how many minutes does that leave? 12??? Oh, wait and then the phone rings so it is good-bye to that hour! Sound familiar? How does your crafting hour go? I think I’m going to have to work a bit harder on time preservation! Any tips, IHA???

I noticed an incoming link on my Wordpress Dashboard this morning that led me to a blog called Pioneering on the Homefront where I discovered that Tracey had listed me as one of her “You Make my Day Award” recipients. Thanks Tracey! This award goes to blogs that provide “inspiration and happiness” and I now get to pass that along to some other blogs/sites that I read.

Ragan Knits (really, I just click there and immediately start laughing! Watch out for her Howler socks!) and The A.D.D. Knitter (she has already been awarded, but I just love her tween humor!). In the last couple of days, I’ve really spent much of my time (way too much probably) stalking a certain Etsy shop. Seriously – this has cut out much of my hour of doing anything let alone crafting. This Etsy shop rocks. I am so seriously addicted that I’m not really sure that I want to even share the name of the store as I get very upset when someone buys something while I’m still deciding what I want. I think I will wait until I get my first order and then write up a nice post about how wonderful it is. I guess though, if you really want to know, there are ways around waiting – you could probably go to my Etsy shop and peruse my favorites because she is there in a big way:) Or you could ask nicely and I’d probably tell you.

(ETA:  Egads, I forgot to mention Crops-a-lot!  Oh, I hope no one noticed…  Also, if you get a chance – click on over to her blog as she is  having a 100th post contest that closes the evening of 2/3.)

So now, as promised, a preview of my new Botanical Color Line! This is my first one and it is going to be called Sunflower. Actually I’m not sure yet if I’m going to use the common name or the latin name yet for this and future colorways. I guess I better decide soon if I want to get these listed today!

(These sunflowers are a bit of a nice contrast the winter out my front door today…)

Happy Saturday Everyone!

Friday, July 27 is my first Blogiversary!!! In that time, I have written 193 posts, received 1,189 comments, and Akismet has blocked 10,817 spam comments. Akismet works hard. He deserves a raise.

Hey, do you remember when my blog looked like this:

I loved that Chocolate Bar theme, but it wasn’t very robust. I’ve moved on to these wonderful sidebar widgets that I love so much and keep me from breaking my blog at 11:30 at night and completely freaking out! I have also learned so much html and even some xhtml and css in the past year. Actually, I think, quite a bit if you consider that I knew nothing when I started, not even how to hyperlink!

Anyway, I could wax on about my year in blogging all night, but this post is supposed to be about my

CONTEST!!!

Yes, there is a contest of course. What is a blogiversary without prizes?? And Cake!!! Of course there will be cake!!! Yum!

So the contest is easy! All you have to do is write a comment under this blog post. That’s it! Ok, well, that is almost it. I think it would be nice if you could tell me something that you may have learned in this last year that you didn’t know before or if you could just let me know about a post or photo you particularly liked. That’s it. That is not too hard, right? Of course, if you just want to leave a comment to say “hi,” that is ok too — you can still win.

What will you win??? Well, I don’t know yet. I think it will probably be specific to the winner. You know, if you knit then I’ll send yarn. If you spin, I’ll send fiber. If you scrap, I’ll send something croppy-ish. Of course there is always chocolate too! I think there will be even more than one winner. We will write down names and draw winners from a hat, or maybe I’ll put you into excel and generate random winners that way. I guess it all depends on how I feel that day. Oh yes, that reminds me, I think I’ll have the contest close at midnight on Saturday, July 28. How does that sound?

Guess what I did today?  I made this:

It is a lightbox so I can attempt to take better photos!

Here is another view:

I joined some groups on Ravelry (none of which I have had time to post on yet), one of which is the Etsy group.  While reading the forum posts last night, I came across a link to Strobist where I found the most excellent directions on how to make a light box to photograph objects with a white background.This means I can now take very artsy roving photos like this:

Anyway, making the box was really easy and I had plenty of time to make it before leaving for my new job this morning.  (Yes, I have new job!!! But I’ll write more about that in a future post..) (What? Don’t you think a blog should have a bit of intrigue???)And one more thing before I’m off to bed, and I leave you this post so you can comment your hearts out.  I just wanted to share a link to an interesting Norse Mythology “legendary saga.”   I was researching a colorway name for a roving and I came across this story of Kara and Helgi.  Etsy doesn’t let you do hyperlinks and I just wanted to share.

Thanks for reading!!!  I’m off to read HP7 now!

Sunday is the golden clasp that binds together the volume of the week.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It is such a gorgeous day here so far! I’m trying to blog outside, though the sun is pretty bright making it difficult to see the screen. This was a great week for solar dyeing and I have some new natural dye colors to show you. I did manage to get some very light green color with Hayscented and Bracken Ferns. (For anyone new to my blog, I use alum as a mordant in all my natural dyeing.) The Bracken Fern broth was a golden brown so I was very surprised to end up with a light green color. The Marigold blossoms with their pink broth gave me a nice yellow color.

This week, I am brewing up some Coreopsis and Daylily blossoms (pictures during the week, I hope).

I finally took my the apron class at Gone Quilting that I wrote about quite a while ago. It turned out to be quite different than what I had anticipated. For some reason I had expected it to be a very large class with a lot of hustle and bustle and it actually turned out to be a semi-private class. Also, the other student was a very nice lady I know from the LYS who reads my blog! (Hi M! How far did you get on yours?) I was hoping to complete the apron in one evening and I probably could have if I hadn’t been so tired. The instructor, Diane, was very friendly, pleasant, and knowledgeable. I don’t really have the time right now, but I hope to take more classes there in the future.

This is what I have so far:

Knittingwise, I have not been very productive lately. I did start Fifi and so far I am problem free. I have noted that a few people have written on the Sexy Knitting blog that armhole area has not been large enough and this could be a problem for me as I usually have to do extra increases there. I am, however, nowhere near to the trying-it-on stage yet.

Project: Fifi by French Girl Knits

Yarn: Rowan Calmer in color 490 – Vintage (This is a light lavender.)

Thoughts thusly far: The yarn is soft. The pattern is well written. I just need some more time in the day!

In other news, I sold my first handdyed rovings on Etsy last night! Yay and Whoo hoo!!! Now I get to find out how the rest of it works. So far it seems pretty easy as my buyer has paid with Paypal… So, I guess I’ll just be off the post office tomorrow! I still have more things to add. I have dyed all the roving/top that I currently own and I’m waiting for a new shipment. I still have to explore different vendors to find out the best places that are out there.

Here are a couple of things that I have learned this week about dyeing. First, if you use foam brushes to paint your wool/yarn, do not put them in your main dye jar if you intend to save it for future use. I really think that the foam brushes harbor mold spores and are not to be trusted! Second, it is ok to put superwash roving through the spin cycle, but not Blue Faced Leicester! Felt-a-rama! I don’t know what I was thinking!

So to finish up, I have a cute Agent J riding a John Deere photo:

We may be off to watch Harry Potter this evening. We can’t wait! Hope everyone has a great day!

It is finally the end of a very long week. Very. Long. Did I say that it was a long week yet? It just seemed like IHA worked a bajillion and a half hours this week and the agents had a bajillion and a half hours of homework and that they were up late every night and that the week was never going to end. But is is Friday now (Whoo Hooo!) and IHA is reading to the girls to calm them down so perhaps they get to sleep before 9 tonight… The only problem with getting him to read to the girls, is that I then have to get him to STOP reading to them too! Sometimes he just forgets to check the time!

I had a very lovely trip to the quilt store today. It is called Gone Quilting and it is in Canton. It is actually about 3.2 minutes up the street from New England Scrapbook Company; I think we must move to Canton! They have the Amy Butler fabric and patterns that you see everyone using/making all over the internet and they are quite lovely and also from Westminster Fibers (and I thought they only did yarn!) they have Kaffee Fassett fabric and did you know there are also Rowan fabrics (though I can’t find them on their website or perhaps it is the designers like Amy Butler who design for Rowan and are then distributed by Westminster)?

So you can probably see where I am going with this. I bought a bit more than I intended to. Here is a photo of *some* of my treasures:

I bought a kit called Screen Play I and I think I’m going to use the red fabric and the flowered fabric in the upper right corner of the photo for that one. I think it will make a lovely knitting bag! They had a lot of store samples of that bag in different fabrics and I think it is really going to be nice for a take-along knitting bag as the screen really hold its shape. With some of the other fat quarters I’m going to make these project bags from Yarnmonster (thank you to Sarah for knowing what I was talking about!) and there was also a free pattern leaflet at the store for a little bag/tissue paper cover that used just one fat quarter!

I can’t believe that I am saying I’m going to make all these things because all I’ve sewn in the last couple of years are basic curtains… I hope I remember how or I’m going to have to find some remedial sewing classes! I actually did sign up for a class too! The had an absolutely stunning apron on display (I know, can you believe that an apron can be stunning???). Well, I signed up for that class (anyone what to take it with me?)! I wanted to take a class, but I’m not really ready to get back into quilting right now. I can’t wait to go back to choose my fabric. It could take a VERY long time to decide!

Anyway, the lady at the quilt store was so nice and then I went to the scrapbook store to get ribbons to match the fabrics and the lady working there was so nice (and they have so much new stuff in!). After that I went to Shaw’s in Canton for some groceries and the ladies in the deli were super nice as was the lady in the fish department. Everyone was all so easy going and chatty today. It must be spring in the air!

I can’t wait to get started with all this stuff! I’m better get all these fat quarters washed so that they are ready in case a sewing opportunity arises! I don’t think it will be tomorrow though as Agent B wants to try out Junior Audubon which meets at White Memorial in the morning and then we have The Great Park Pursuit in the afternoon. Maybe I’ll have a little spare time on Mother’s day? Hmmm?

March has not been a banner blogging month for me. I don’t know what is going on. Actually, it is more likely a lack of things going on (to use my new vocab word, I’ve been rather troglodytic lately) which makes this only my sixth post for the month. (Just for the record though, there are a number of you out there in the cave with me and not really posting this month and you know who you are, right? *hint, hint* to: Knitty, Stitchy, and Croppy…)

Anyway, I must stop scolding my fellow bloggers and get on to the fiber part of this post. One of my top-hit-generating posts of all time is this one on Recommended Daily Fiber Intake. I can tell that there must be bajillions of people out there searching for info on fiber as I’m sure it is only small percent of those who click on my blog. At least I link to a real dietary fiber web page so I don’t feel too guilty. It was just in my early blogging days so I must have had some kind of subliminal blogging foresight to know that so many people want to read about dietary fiber! (Which, by the way, is very good for you.)

This weekend we processed fiber in an entirely different way. We didn’t eat it. We didn’t spin it. We didn’t knit or crochet or felt it. We blended it, strained it, pressed it, and dried it. At the Girl Scout Scrapbooking event this weekend, we had a new volunteer (and a new friend for me!) to teach a paper making class. Linda is a graphic designer by profession, but she loves to partake in all kinds of crafts. This activity was much more of a process than product craft and through her excitement for learning and experimenting we had a chance to be creative and get a little messy too!

Here is Linda and Agent B processing the paper pulp in the blender. Linda brought a base mixture which contained some plain paper pulp, egg cartons and other fibery goodies. Brenna chose some different colored paper scraps to add her own personal touch. Linda had a vast array of materials that we could add to our paper like glitter, flower petals, sequins, and even scented oils like lavender and wintergreen.

This photo shows Linda and B straining the pulp through a screen. The screen has an edge around it called a deckle that helps to define the edge of the paper once it is removed. To remove more of the water, Linda taught us to place a piece of felt over the pulp and to use a roller to squeeze out as much excess water as possible.

This photos shows Agent K checking to see if our sheets of handmade paper are drying. You can see a sheet that K made at the bottom of the photo where she included all kinds of sparkly things plus feathers, yarn fibers, and the whole kitchen sink.

Here are our finished papers after drying. You can see that K, B, and I are all rather fond of purple:) I stuck some of my recycled denim fibers into my sheet and you can kind of see that K’s piece located at about 1 o’clock has the imprint of a hemlock branch in it.

What will we do with these? I think I’m going to use mine to make some Happy Spring cards, maybe with a little distress ink and some stamping? I don’t know what the girls will do yet…probably depends on how messy I want to get. I hope a little of Linda’s sense of craft adventure and the willingness to get really involved in something regardless of the mess rubs off on me!