Holiday Recipe Cards

Have you noticed a lack of holiday cards out there? Similar to my lack of blog posts, yes.

I made up some cards for the holiday for my aunts to sell in at a local Christmas Tree farm back in Wisconsin. I printed them out on colored stock paper and cut them out. Would be nice for a cookie recipe exchange or for holiday recipes.

Feel free to save them and print them off for your own personal use. Rights reserved ;-)

Happy Holidays!

Santa

Mrs Claus

Reindeer

Summer Sealife

I try to decorate some with the seasons, but I was feeling a little weak for Summer. I had some nautical themed things, some antique ocean babbles and shells, but not enough to center a room one.
Flipping through an old magazine for Pottery Barn, I saw some of their Sealife pillows. They were stiched in beige and really pretty with Seahorses, an Octopus, and other fish. I thought they would also look nice as hand painted items.

I got together some art paints, a color scheme, some samples and started. First I sewed the pillow together from some cheap fabric remnants. Learned a good lesson about zippers, always get a larger size, you can make it shorter, but you can't extend it.

After that I sketched the octopus out onto the linen and began to paint the base color with acrylics.

I did some highlighting and shading after the base dried. Finished it off with a sealant spray. I found some matching pillows in the same oranges and corals on sale at Pottery Barn and finally have my summer sea room.

Knitting

I jumped on the knitting track again (after about 10 years) this Christmas to make my sister some fingerless gloves and a scarf.

I made two pairs of gloves as a intro back into knitting, watching a lot of videos from KnittingHelp.com

I came up with a pattern based on cording and dropped stiches to make it look a little looser and more crochet-like.

I really like the color of green of this yarn. Hopefully it goes well with a lot of her things!

I followed Posie's advice on water blocking to stretch the scarf out. For a ironing board and saftey pins, it worked about as well as it could have! :) I can really see where a dedicated board would work nicely.

Not sure I could get the best pictures of it, some of the cording is lost in this photo, but you can see in the blocking how the pattern looks :)

Memories

I went through some old photos last year to make Christmas presents for my family. I used MyPublisher.com to make a photo book from pictures on both sides of my parents, going back 2 generations and up till their wedding.

Some of the photos came from my parents, some from my late grandmother, and others from my paternal grandma's mother's (my great grandma) photo albums. Those photos were so old and falling apart that you had to scan each page individually, since the pictures were glued to the pages.

The books turned out really nice, the site is so easy to use and I would highly recommend it for your next project.

Here are some of the photos of me, which I did not include in the gifts, but I loved and had to scan anyway. I have no idea what me and my mom are making in the above photo. Any guesses? What ever it is, there is a lot of it!

Here's my dad and I working on something. Again, not really sure what it was. Maybe a bird house or a crayon box... He's so fashionable in his pearls, don't you think?

This last photo is from Northern Wisconsin where I grew up. This was my first attempt at a business. We lived too far out for a Lemonade stand to be productive, so instead my mom helped me grow Status flowers and other dryable items. We would bunch them together or weave them into flower crowns and sell them at a local town on weekends.
My sister, brother, and I were all homeschooled for parts of our childhood. I learned so much during that time. A lot of lessons I could only know through personal growth and inner retrospection.

Poem on the Poster: From my Garden, Soft and Bright, I picked these Flowers for your Delight, In the Sun that the Flowers Love, I hope you like these flowers of fun.

Apparently poetry was not my strong suit…. Sorry mom.

Recycling Hearts

This past weekend we took a great weekend trip to visit my sister in Murfreesboro, TN. And although it snowed 3 inches, shutting down most of the southern, well everything… we were still able to go a nice bit of antiquing.



Among the new items were a cast iron frying pan, two German steins, Christmas tree skirt, and a hand-stitched quilt.

Unfortunately it doesn’t match anything in our house. So I decided to make up a new Valentine’s Day decoration to bring in some of the orangey yellows and bright blues.

I recycled a cheap drycleaner clothes hanger and some old fabric scrapes from hemming I had done earlier in the year. By cutting up the fabric into long strips and tying them onto the wire heart shape, a new pattern of colors emerged. The knotting mirrored the quilting and the colors are starting to warm up the house already.

Any left over fabric pieces could be used like this, in any color combinations. A little love for the earth, as Valentine’s Day gets closer.

Baby Blogger

My generation is in a baby boom. I have so many friends who are planning on or have just had kids, it's amazing! Congrats to them all!

Mr. Mike and I were asked to be godparents for one such amazing family this spring. I've been meaning to post on that for awhile now.

We are so thankful to them for their friendship and wonderful support for us over the years. I don't know what I'd do without you Halls!

For almost the entire time I've known B she's been preggers. Two wonderful boys and one beautiful girl... it's seems like a lifetime ago when we moved up here to the cities and she carted us around trying to find the 'perfect' house. Thanks for all your patience!!! I don't know how you stand us sometimes!

Now the hubbies play regular golf, the girls have nights out, and we've gotten to experience a multitude of first childhood memories with their family. I can't wait till birthday #4 when I'll be attempting to make a Thomas the Train cake.... thanks again for your faith and support B!

These little guys were watercolor drawings I put together for no particular reason, I just thought the kiddos might like them since they love that zoo so much. Enoy!

Weekenders

For Memorial Day weekend we headed up to my parents cabin in northern Wisconsin for a long weekend full of boating, fishing, biking, hicking, golfing, grilling, and everything else we could fit in.

We'd spent the previous week building a new 'Bags' set for the cabin. We tried to follow ACA standards and build the boards to a specific hight and weight the bags to an exact weight. While the boards worked out great, the bags done on my little house wife sewing machine burst after a few throws and I spent the rest of the weekend hand stiching the squares up before all the beans came flying out.

I will be ordering an industrial proof set this week.

We went on many walks with Maddie around the cabin and of course had to drive into Spooner and stop at the Bakery Shop and swing by the Natural Spring to fill up or water bottles before our bike trip. We had to search around for a place to ride but finally found a trail going behind some fields and into a woods that was peaceful and exciting to ride on.

Many of the spring flowers are opening up there. The woods are covered in white spots of Trillium flowers and there are some other little hidden flowers like wild violets and these forget-me-nots we fould on our walks...

It takes so little to amuse the puppers though. One floating log was all she cared about during our fishing trips (and about the only thing 'swimming' we saw)

It's A Softie Christmas

Peek-a-boo! It's a Christmas Basket full of softies! And it’s getting crowded!

Each year my aunts hustle and bustle, cut and glue, snip and stretch tables full of items to stock a little log house on a Christmas tree cutting farm. The farm is owned by a family which has been a long time friend to ours. Each year we trample through the snowy rows of trees (if we are lucky), searching for the very very best Christmas tree ever. After you’ve tagged your tree you can warm up in the cabin with some hot chocolate… and… there just happens to be cute things for sale!

I was inspired by the softies that Allsorts creates, so I tried to do some little versions myself. I came up with a modified Penguin and Puppy, Squirrels, Owls, and Acorn Elves. You can see the elves above, hiding in a forest of my Grandfather's carved wooden pine trees.

I used a variety of felt fabric, with the exception of the Owls who had cotton material. Each squirrel has a hand-picked sparkly acorn; the Owls are sporting felt holy bunches; and the Elves have small unique items.

The Owls started as a patch-work quilt-like project. Each little blue-ish white square was cut out and then sewed together. I attached a felt backing and added more stitching across the pattern.

I cut the front of the owl pattern out and then sewed the rest of the felt body together on by hand. The eyes and nose are from remnants pieces. The holly bunch just made them more festive!

I tried experimenting with different stitch patterns on the penguins, each more tedious than the last. I finally settled on just plain birds with the same cute little nose that the owls have.

A couple ‘special’ squirrels have embroidered holiday icons (Christmas tree, holy bunch) but this too got quickly intensive and was given up. Since I was trying to punch out a variety of different options I didn’t want to spend too much time on something that may not go over well. We’ll see how they sell!

Merry-pre-Christmas from the basket of animals!