Wrist Warmers

I love free patterns. If you are getting in the mood to make Christmas presents, now that it is mid-November, you should get on it. These cute wrist warmers would make a lovely little present. I can imagine wearing them in my office where my hands sometimes gets cold. I made some fingerless mittens which go halfway up my arms and I just couldn't figure out where I would wear them or what I would wear them with. They were super cute, but I'm just not sure I own anything funky enough to wear with them. Anyway, Creative Yarn has a free pattern for wrist warmers that are small and cute and would probably come together in a couple of evenings.

I thought of spoiling my daughter's pre-school teacher with a pair, though that might be a tad ambitious with the other gifts I am making this year.

Crayon Caddy

A friend asked me if I had any of these for sale. My etsy shop and my Artfire shop are sadly empty. I haven't had much luck selling stuff on Etsy, mostly because I haven't spent the time to stock it with my favorite things and market it properly. There are a lot of great Etsy shops and it's pretty easy to get lost in there. If I'm ever going to have any credibility, I should probably start having a stocked shop.

Anyway, this is a re-post from my personal blog of the Crayon Caddy that I made for my nephew last year. I made some for my children, too.

I'm quite proud of this because I designed it myself, up-cycled an old pair of pants and a shirt (the green striped fabric is new) and made it for next to nothing. And hello? Super. cute. And handy; do you see that pocket on the left? It's for finished works of art.

I used magnet clasp things for closure... so classy.

I didn't even know you could just buy them and
there they were sitting around in the fabric store,
waiting for me to buy them.

That pocket is from a shirt my husband was giving away. It wasn't a pocket originally though, it was just part of the shirt. It's totally a bonus pocket, for the crayon you found on the floor on the way out of the restaurant, you could even pop a matchbox car in there.

Oh, and just so you don't go thinking that I'm so super-"all that" sewer (is seamstress the right word here? because every time I read "sewer" I'm thinking of nasty toilet water pipes and I'm certainly not that), this is my third attempt. The first one was trying out my "pattern," the second one is still good enough to give away, but this one I'm starting to get good.

Crocheted Stockings

So, there was no plane crash, and I made it to and from Abbotsford to visit my friend and take a weekend away. I had a really great time. We shopped on Saturday for longer than I have shopped since I bought maternity clothes when I was pregnant with Z. So... just about 5 years ago. I bought myself some new clothes and I was even kind enough to remember to pick up small gifts for the kids and D. And now I'm back at regular life. Absence does really make the heart grow fonder and it was nice to get a bit of a breather from everyone to remind myself how much I really do love them all. And if was fabulous to spend so much good time with C.

I have not started my Sew Something in November pants or anything else for that matter. I am still working on the Racetrack Rug for my son. It was really slow going, as far as seeing any progress, even though I kept making single crochet after single crochet and seeming to get nowhere. But now I am at the end of my black yarn, so I decided that's the end of the road (haha, pun intended) and I'll be switching to the green to finish the outside edge. I may even be able to finish it tonight.

I had a friend ask me if I made stockings, so I took a picture of the one I made for S. I meant to have them finished by Christmas last year, but alas, it did not come to pass. I finally got it finished a month or so ago. Here it is. The one I made for Z is similar, but with different colours.

Of course, I had to take the picture after the sun had gone down and so the lighting is atrocious, but you sort of get the idea. I used different weights of yarn for a homely look, I thought it would be cute if we all had homely, non-traditional Christmas colour stockings to differentiate them from one another.

Here is a picture my sister sent me of the stockings I made for her family. They're all stuffed here.

They're nice and stretchy for stuffing with whatever your heart desires.

I'm hoping this post will help me get back into the swing of things and you will see me in this place more regularly again.

Sew Something In November

Well, I'm joining Creative Little Daisy in her Sew Something in November challenge. I would like to get  pair of pants made for myself, that I bought the supplies for last year. I can't believe I have procrastinated this long. So, hopefully after my little weekend away this weekend, I'll get to work on making some pants for myself. And probably I'll repair a hole in my husband's jeans.

If you want to join, head on over to Creative Little Daisy and if you have a blog, grab her button and put it on your blog as a commitment to yourself to sew something this month. I mean, how basic is that? Sew something. That's not so bad is it? It's not even saying you have to pull out your machine... just pick up a needle and thread and sew a button back on. I think that counts.

What I'm Working On

Well, hello dear readers. I was doing so well for the last week or so, wasn't I? And then I kind of fell off the wagon for a couple days.

I didn't post anything about actual Halloween here, though most of you are probably my friends on Facebook, so you saw the pictures I posted there of my kids in their costumes. I tried my best to make one of these as my costume.

It was on meekssandygirl's flickr stream. It wasn't a pattern or anything, so I just did my best by looking at it. It wasn't that complicated, but I didn't have a deeper shade of red or purple, so I just ended up going with one red. It looks ok, but not good enough to bother taking a picture of mine and posting it for you to compare with this lovely one, that probably (hopefully?) took a lot longer than mine. I wore it to our little Halloween get together until one of my friends noticed me constantly fussing with it (it was a little on the tight side) and told me to take it off.

I am also working on this project for S. It is going well, except that every round takes longer than the one before because the pattern increases every round. So, now that I am into the black road part, it is very slow going.

The loopy grass part was time-consuming, but fun to do because it was neat to see it come together.

I have also been trying to stay off the computer in the afternoons this week, trying to give more of myself to my children while they are awake and saving computer time for after they go to bed. I have been busy getting ready for a trip (ALONE!) this weekend, preparing the house, so that the laundry is done and the clutter is under control before I leave. I have thought of cleaning out my purse at least 5 times since thinking of preparing for the trip. I really need to do that since I know for a fact that there is a pumpkin carving kit in there that I'd like to keep and I'm sure won't make it through security.

I still can't decide whether I should try to knit or crochet on the plane. I've heard of people losing their supplies and I don't know if I want to make my husband park and wait for me to see if I get through security with my knitting needles or just send me off. It's not THAT long of a flight. I'm sure I can entertain myself with podcasts and books for an hour or so. If you have any experience with knitting or crocheting on a flight and getting successfully through security with your stuff, I'd love to hear what you did (bamboo needles/hooks?) just in case I change my mind.

How to freeze cookie dough

I'm sure many of you domestic divas already know this fabulous trick of the trade, but I promise no one told me about it and I just figured it all out myself. So let me tell you about my Low Mess Cookies...

First of all, I love cookies. Oatmeal Chocolate Chip are my favorite, but I'm not that picky (just omit the raisins, please). I have a serious problem with cookies. Like, if they're in my house, then it's not long before they're in my belly and then once in my belly, my thighs beg for them, and the belly always gives in. Cookie cravings usually come to me on cold-ish to cold days (many days in Edmonton) in the evening. And I have always thought that it is somewhat pointless to haul out the flour and sugar and all the other ingredients to make just a dozen or so cookies. But it is a bad idea to give my thighs that many cookies at once. And even if I manage to forget about them for a couple of days, the rate of flavour-deterioration in homemade cookies is incredibly fast, that the few-day-old cookies are something of a calorie-full disappointment.

So to solve these problems (ever the problem-solver, I am), I thought I would freeze the cookie dough, just like Pilsbury does, you know, in a roll that I could cut nice little round cookies and bake them at a later date. This was quite disappointing. Although I have never purchased Pilsbury cookie dough, I would hope that they cut up better and don't flatten at the bottom end. And I still had the work of cutting them up, which I didn't like so much.

So, I tried again. This time, I prepared the cookie dough, baked a dozen cookies and then (using my Pampered Chef small scoop), I scooped the cookie dough onto the pan just like I was going to bake more, except for I placed them right beside each other, instead of giving them the usual 1-2 inches of baking room. I got the rest of the dough on one pan and, instead of the oven, I popped them in the freezer. I let them freeze (an hour or so) and then popped them into a resealable freezer bag.

Now, whenever I want cookies, I preheat the oven, put a dozen frozen cookie balls on a baking tray and by the time the oven is hot enough, the dough has thawed a little.

I pop 'em in the oven for 10 minutes and eat warm, melty-chocolate, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. Mmmmm....

Although they do retain their frozen cookie scoop shape, they're just as yummy as if they were flat. If you have a toaster oven, you can easily just make 2 or 6, just what you need for the evening and always serve delicious, fresh baked cookies to unexpected guests or the kids as an after school snack.

I made this: Owl Toque

I made this toque (winter hat for non-Canadians) last winter from some leftover yarn I had. I was going to make S's knit pants with stripes along the side, but I made a pair like that and I wasn't especially happy with them and they took a LONG time to make and were generally frustrating. So, this was going to be the stripe colour. And now it's a hat.

It took me a while to get those buttons. I had a hard time finding just what I wanted. You know when you get something in your head that has to be just right and you figure it's simple enough so it shouldn't be too difficult to find? That's what happened to those. I thought that orange irridescent buttons would be perfect, but they were not easy to come by. I eventually ordered them off Etsy for a pretty good price. Using the motif from this sweater, I figured out how many owls I would need to go around my head, made sure the stitches needed for that many owls was divisible by 4 (for 2x2 ribbing... I may have had to decrease a few stitches and increase after the ribbing) and cast on. It was actually a pretty easy pattern to create out of the sweater pattern. The ravelry pattern download is available here.

If I were to make it again, I think I would make a ribbing that would better suit the owls, so that the knit stitches matched up perfectly with the owls' feet. And I would do something different about the way I finished it because it has a pointy-ish top that I don't like so much. All in all, not so bad.

Halloween Cookies

Last week, Z and I bought some Halloween cookie cutters. A bat, a pumpkin and a ghost. Today we made sugar cookies and icing and decorated some cookies. I was really happy with this recipe that I found on All Recipes. I once read a critique of All Recipes, which stated that the recipes used a lot of processed foods. Perhaps it is also full of casseroles with mushroom soup in them, but I find a lot of great recipes there, and this one is no exception. As the reviews all state, it makes an icing that will dry nice and shiny like a bakery cookie. That's totally what I was looking for: a nice smooth icing. My bats up there don't look all that smooth, but they would have looked a lot different with a buttercream icing. I didn't fuss a lot with the icing. I put some of the black icing in a ziploc bag and cut a tiny hole in the corner for the details, but that is it. Nothing fancy.

I managed to be fairly relaxed while making these with Z. I let her make a lot of her "moons" (circles) and so she and S decorated those with their icing. S (he's 2) got the white icing to prevent him from colouring our carpet orange or black. Basically, Z slathered 2.5 cookies with pink icing (she insisted I make pink) and ate the rest of her icing right out of the container. S iced and ate all at once.

If you're looking for a good sugar cookie dough recipe, I think the next time I make sugar cookies, I'm going to give this recipe a try. The recipe I have is good, but today I used non-hydrogenated margarine in place of the butter (I was out of butter) and I don't know, maybe I measured wrong or something, but the dough was WAY too soft and I ended up adding probably another 1/2 cup or more flour to make it manageable.

Happy Halloween!

Heffalump Cake

Last year, when it was my son's first birthday, I made him this cake. S has a stuffed Ty elephant that Z affectionately named "Lumpy" (after the Heffalump from Winnie the Pooh), so while I thought at first that I would model the cake after S's stuffed toy, it was infinitely easier to use the Heffalump from Winnie the Pooh. Here was my inspiration:

I printed this picture off the Internet and took a picture of it.

Then I traced the cake pan, and sketched the picture onto the paper. I had some help because I copied and pasted the picture from the Internet into my Paint program and drew a rectangle around the main part of the body, so I knew about how much to sketch onto the main part and how to make the leftovers work for the rest of the pieces.

The taped-on pieces are "leftovers" from the rest of the shape being cut out. I placed this image on the cake and cut the cake around it.

I decided to use the rounded top of the cake (that I had cut off to level the cake) to shape a 3D nose for Lumpy because the cake just didn't seem challenging enough (ha ha ha). Here is a picture with all the pieces pasted together before icing. Just about every edge was raw (a cake decorator's nightmare).

Then, I iced the cake. I used a buttercream icing flavoured with peppermint extract instead of vanilla (mint chocolate cake...mmmmm...) and coloured it light blue (like S's stuffie instead of light purple like the Heffalump).

Not too bad. It's hard to get a smooth finish on a "Lumpy" surface (pun intended).

After putting the main coat of icing on, it was time for finishing.

So, here he is all drawn on and outlined.

And here we are posing with the cake, before or after singing to S at the park.
That's my sister holding S.

In which I fail at knitting mittens

So, I was going to knit Z some mittens to match her new hat, which conveniently matches her coat. I'm new to knitting mittens. I knit myself a pair and they're falling apart because I just tried to get away with tying the yarns together and cutting them instead of weaving in all the ends. That was dumb.

Anyway, this is a brand new fail. I tried to knit these mittens on 2 needles and just seam up the sides. I can totally do this in crochet, but I like knit mittens because they use less yarn and they're not as holey as crochet mittens, so they can be a little warmer. Look how nasty the seam on the side is. Yuck. And they don't have a nice cute shape or anything. Now that I have one mitten, I have no desire to make the other one equally as ugly.

Incidentally, I used this basic mitten pattern formula. I do not think it's the fault of the pattern formula at all. Perhaps it was just the combination of yarn and size of mitten and my newbie mitten knitting skills and not knitting it in the round...

(sigh) What do I do now? Crochet a pair?