latest creation

A Few Gifts

With a joint baby shower and a birthday party on Saturday, I was able to get back into our tradition of making gifts. I felt a baby book would be nice to give the expectant moms and I saw this memory game here.
Another birthday this coming Saturday. No ideas. A boy turning 8… hum. Can I find anything beyond the plastic yuck in the stores? We’ll see.

Exterior of each. One for a boy, one for a girl. I know, both are a bit feminine. What can ya do?


One of the interior pages. I finally bought one of those stamps that are like the librarian date stamps. This has the entire alphabet and I think about 15 letters across. Awesome.


I have so much paper that I knew this would be a great project.


The card India made for the birthday girl who was turning 3. A picture of the girl and her big brother… who is appropriately small for her special day.

Terrarium

  • by

India was invited to a birthday party for a boy. What to make him came up in conversation. I wasn’t quite sure, but I thought a terrarium might work. Just so long as we didn’t mention putting an animal inside this tank, for the parents’ sake.
I must say this gift was the largest and heaviest at the party. Have you ever given the largest present. It is sort of a strange feeling. Almost like we were trumping the grandparents… which I hope we didn’t. I think their gifts came on his actual birthday.
Once he pulled off the wrapping all the kids crowded around it. They ooooo-d and ahhhh-d (i’m making up how that is spelled. It’s allowed, I read it in a bookmaking book… for kids. hmmmm) for quite awhile.
Then India dropped the bomb. She let him know that he could put a fish in there. I had to remind her that we weren’t going to bring up that idea.
Whenever we give a homemade gift I always wonder if it is played with. I wonder if he will dig through this dirt like he does in his backyard. Maybe in the winter months. Who knows.

India’s filling it up with little dinosaurs and we hung a fly, butterfly and dragonfly from the ceiling of the tank. Yes, that is a real tree… hopefully it lives long enough. We also put in a little Hot Wheels car. If only to give him an idea of what to do with this mammoth of a gift.

I felt like this gift needed to come with instructions. I hope it is faring well and that it will have a long a prosperous life.

Headband Redux

  • by

So India and I saw the cutest headbands in J.Crew.  Of course they were $15 and I couldn’t see spending that much on a headband.  Go figure.  I figured Indi and I could make them ourselves.  So we did… I did.  We took the flowers apart together but I had to sew the flowers to the band.

Happy Earth Day

  • by

This week has been filled with all sorts of outdoor activities, just what would be expected for Earth Day week. Yesterday we visited the Botanic Garden and saw all the new growth, daffodils, tulips and even a gardener tagging the plants in the kitchen garden. I had a little chat with him and he gave me some good ideas of what to plant in my garden. He said to take green onions, just the root part, and plant them in the soil. Within a week we should have new growth. Sounds like this would be worth trying.
Monday afternoon a friend came to play. While the kids played outside I began pruning our crab-apple tree. While I was high in the branches the girls began to sort the fallen limbs into usable, blossom, and fix-it piles. Each pile getting ready for the fort they wanted to build. Here is what they came up with… with only a little help from me:

If you look carefully you can see our bent apple tree under the tepee, right between the girls. This is what is holding up the branches.

Ezra got into the action too. All the kids tried and tried to knock it down. The wind was blowing strongly too. I even tried to blow it down, as the big bad wolf of course. It isn’t going anywhere.

Where’s my Curved Needle!?

Luckily I can still bind without it. But my gosh! I think I just had the thing a few weeks ago… or was that in Baltimore? Too many moves. No more!

small.jpg