These are most of the hats I made.  The ones shown were done for my nephews, sons, and brother.  I also made one for my grandpa and one for my father-in-law.

The snake  scarves were made to go with all of the boys stocking caps (thought not for grandpa or Steve).

Not the best photo but I was wrapping after dark and the iron was not out.  Anyhoo, I made two of these sets, one for each of Jim’s nieces.  The dress is from a vintage pattern my grandma gave me and the booties were from the pattern I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I just altered the size a bit.

These scarf and hat sets were made for my niece and my sister.

I made these for Jim’s sister and sister-in-law.  They were my first socks and really were not as hard as I had anticipated socks would be.  I actually really enjoyed it.  I much prefer patterns where I am doing something interesting to patterns where I knit the same thing over and over (like afghans….bleh!)

I have a couple more things that Jim and I made the boys but I can’t find where Jim posted the pictures so those will have to wait for a later date…..if that date comes.  I am in the middle of doing a MAJOR house overhaul trying to get everything organized and get rid of things we don’t use or need.  I’ve realized that with #3 on the way, I am going to go crazy if things aren’t a great deal more in order around here.  Things are progressing but veeeerrrry slowly with interruptions from the kids and just life in general but I hope to get there before the baby comes, especially since we are planning a home birth this time around.

Until next time, I leave you with a couple of pics of the boys.

First Henry painting the airplane he got for Christmas from Auntie Elisha and Uncle Dan.  Notice the concentration always shown with the tongue!

And Jack, our little camera lover who is actually wearing his Christmas Eve pajama pants which I made for each of the boys.  He love to stack things or put things inside of containers (the toy cow in the cup)

I haven’t been absent from the crafting dept however. I grab moments in whatever spare time that I have.I have completed several small crocheted animals and a baby hat for baby shower gifts (would the women in my church stop having babies already so I can get caught up on my gifts!) Both the hedgehog and the bunny were from this book which I love but I also made the hippo from this book and love it as well. The projects are so simple and quick. Amigurumi is one of my new favorite things. That and nutmeg in my mochas and cappaccinos.

I made a pair of baby shoes from this pattern. I loved how easy these were to sew and they came out so doggone cute! I just used fabric scraps that I had from other projects and the corderoy soles were from an old pair of pants. I’m going to try to enlarge the pattern so I can make some for Jack since one of his loves are things on his feet.

And speaking of Jack, the little guy had a birthday on Friday. I can’t believe he is a year old already. In the last month he has gone from baby to little boy in leaps and bounds. We made him a truck cake for his birthday.

It’s not perhaps the prettiest cake by far but I had my reasons for not going all out as this was its demise.

Happy Birthday Baby Jack!

I’ve had my coffee and the fire is crackling away. Now on to that Christmas to-do list!

Remember the pea planting from a couple of posts ago? Our peas have come on in full force so Henry and I were out picking today.

Henry uses his tongue to concentrate

Henry's kitten, Freddy was "helping" (i.e., playfully scratching at Henry's feet)

Here is a close up of Freddy Puma.

Freddy Puma waiting to pounce on the next pea vine he sees moving.

We asked Henry for about 4 days what he was going to name his kitten and it started with the answer “I don know” and then we started giving him ideas with him giving us the answer “noooooo” with a laugh every time. Then he started giving names and saying no and finally we went from Freddy to Michael to Freddy Puma Pina to Freddy Michael and back to just Freddy Puma. It’s goofy but cute since Henry named him himself.

You find the most interesting bugs in the summer. I went to let Zoey (our dog) out and came across this moth on the kitchen wall and had to take pictures. They aren’t great and I knew they wouldn’t be but I have never seen a moth like this before. I wonder if it’s one of those bugs that changes to the color of whatever it’s resting on since it was sitting on our green wall.

I realize this post is all over the place but my head is kind of all over the place tonight so….ya. Here is another random picture, this one of the gorgeous sunset we had tonight. Cows live in this field and sometimes the skyline will be dotted with silhouettes of cows but tonight it was just field. Picture is a bit fuzzy but it was so pretty, I had to take a picture. I really need to get a better camera one of these days!

And last but not least, only because I don’t want to leave the boy out, here is what Jack does while Henry and I are outside in the mornings.

We always try to give some people homemade cookies and other goodies for which I picked up the tins but I might have to keep the one on the left for myself.

We were looking for some plain shiny red balls in the after Christmas sales this year but all we could find were the frosted ones. For a buck, I picked up a box of 12, 3 of which are pictured on the Christmas plate to add to my collection of Christmas dishes.

Another dish, this one for my teacup collection. This I think was my favorite find of the day. I love the colors and the picture on it.

We also picked up the mini-loaf pan for 50 cents. It makes 6 small loaves and I thought Henry would have fun making little loaves of zucchini or banana bread. I made the “mistake” of letting him help me make pumpkin pie (which he called crust pie) last week and now any time he hears me make a noise in the kitchen, he comes running to “help”. Cute when it’s wanted but when I’m just feeding the dog and he doesn’t believe me or I’m trying to make dinner fast, it can come with a bit of a fit from the boy.

And last but not least, we found an older gentleman who was selling these wooden toys that he made. (Pardon the crappy pictures). These are by far not the best that he had, however they are the operable ones that we could let Henry play with and not worry about him breaking off any of the detailing. He had some really cool trains all detailed out with “logs” on the trailers and detailed semi-trucks and old style cars. He also had a seal that you would pull and when he moved a ball set on a peg that went down into his nose would bounce up and down.

A guy a couple of doors down also had some woodwork out however his was a bit more detailed and not stuff you would buy for your kids. Amazing tractors and cranes with working parts but the prices were huge (understandably with the amount of time that had to go into them) and they were things that you would buy to set up on a shelf, not to play with.

Afterwards we came home and Jack slept while I finished putting in my garden and Jim and Henry went back into town to watch the soap box derby. All in all, it was a very good Saturday!

So here is another thing I did back in March. I had orginally bought this craft box at Michael’s to be a box to hold paper dolls for my niece, Gentry for Christmas. The dolls were WAY smaller than I had anticipated so I had to get a smaller box for them, thus I was left with this one to hold for that project that just needed a wooden box. That came about 3 months later when I decided to make a Barbie bed for Gentry’s birthday. I used fabric I had bought at a second-hand store for seventy-nine cents to make a quilt and matching pillows. Well, once I got going I couldn’t stop and before you knew it I had bolster pillows made from some of my quilting scraps, a sheet made from some fabric samples the interior design firm in Jim’s office had given me, mattress made from those same samples and I decided to pull out the box to use as a bed frame. I roped Jim into cutting out a couple of magazine pictures to glue into the lid so it looks like pictures hanging on the wall and walla…..a bed in a box.

A 1 hour project turned into 2 1/2 hours but it was fun.  Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t have any girls….

On another note I have new favorite laundry detergent……that I made myself. I have been trying to save money and at the same time do things more naturally/organically and I found this recipe on the internet. I must admit, I was skeptical but it was so cheap to make I figured I should give it a try. I splurged a bit and bought a $2 bar of 99% natural rosemary mint soap instead of using the 33 cent bar of Ivory that the recipe called for. I have used it this week to wash our laundry and it works great. My clothes feel and smell clean.  It has kind of a weird consistancy….my sister was over yesterday and she just kept sticking her fingers in it. I was trying to figure out what she was doing and then I realized she was trying to figure out what it felt like and I told her it was frog eggs and she agreed. (We used to go out and catch frogs in our pond and take their eggs and put them in buckets of water so we could see the tadpoles when they hatched.) Don’t let that turn you off of it…..it just feels like them doesn’t look like them. It works great and I have 110-ish loads of laundry detergent for three or four dollars as opposed to the twelve something I usually spend to do the same amount.

I cut a triangle out of cardstock, folded it into a diaper shape and snipped the corners off for the leg holes. Then I punched two holes in one fold of the diaper and inserted a diaper pin. The invitation is printed on paper and glued to the inside. They were super easy and I really like the way they turned out.

We have been doing a bit of gardening around here too. Henry and I planted peas a month or so ago (only 4 plants made an appearance so I think the birds liked them. I have since replanted.)

I had another baby shower to attend in May for my sister-in-law and I actually finished this gift in time. The booties are the Classic Cashmere Booties (not made in cashmere) and the hat is the Baby’s Beanie Hat both from my standby baby gift book, Simple Knits for Cherished Babies by Erika Knight. The butterfly is from a hand sewing pattern purchased from Hilary at Wee Wonderfuls (they changed wordpress and I can’t figure out how to add a link but she’s one of the blogs on my sidebar).

Today is nasty and rainy and my son is stir crazy so in between loads of laundry, he and I did a bit of crafting. He is really into David when we read him his Bible so we made masks for him to be a lion, the sheep that the lion is going to eat, and David when he fights of the lion.

He wanted to make and ark and Noah but I didn’t have it in me so we improvised. We had some stickers that Henry got for Christmas from his cousins in France so we made and ark and I let him put the animal stickers all over it. He is super fascinated with animals right now and loves the Planet Earth series, which I don’t feel quite so bad letting him watch since it’s educational. He was going to get glue everywhere if he tried to play with the masks so I deterred him with an “animal movie”. He clutched his Noah picture and took it with him to the couch.

His request was the episode where the lions kill the elephant. Should I be worried that my son is morbid? I guess he’s just a boy! I gotta go fold clothes. Boys go through so many clothes and I know this is only the beginning. I remember the mud caked jeans that my brothers used to bring in……uggh!

A monkey for Henry’s birthday. I made one like this for Henry’s cousin, William, for Christmas and both of them have been huge hits. William’s came with a cape since he is very into super heroes right now. This pattern came from a book I checked out at the library called Knitted Toys by Fiona McTague.

A hat and bear for the baby of a friend of Jim’s from college. Jeremy loves orange and their wedding was actually orange and hot pink since his wife likes pink. It sounds awful but it actually worked out really well. So anyhoo, since they had a boy, we thought we would send them something orange. Both patterns are from Simple Knits for Cherished Baby by Erika. Knight

And these are some desperately needed kitchen towels that I embroidered. All of our towels but two we have had since our wedding (3 1/2 yrs ago) and between everyday use and our dog deciding they were chew toys, our supply had either hit the rag bag or needed to. I freehanded the embroidery on these and decided to go with a theme….as you can see rather than all the same thing.

We celebrated Henry’s 2nd Birthday on Sunday with pizza and cake.  He liked when we sang “Happy Birthday” and even joined in with Jim & I.  Jim made him a monkey cake but I am not going to show it because the cookie sheet he made it on is one of those cookie sheets my aunt likes to call “the one you’ve had too long to part with even though you know you should”.  It’s nasty looking and embarrassing.  But here is Henry enjoying the cake:

You can kind of see the corner of the cookie sheet there…..pretend you don’t.    He was sick on his birthday so we kept it pretty low key but he loved it anyhow.  It doesn’t take much when they are this age.  We really didn’t get him much for his birthday since we just had Christmas and all but the hit was definitely “Mr Brown Can Moo Can You?” by Dr Suess.

And so he doesn’t feel left out,  here is a picture of my other son being indecent.  I hope he doesn’t make a habit of this behavior in later years.

Aren’t they precious?  Which reminds me, I need to order those now.  The Costco website was too slow last night and wouldn’t let us order them.   I better get going!