WIP Wednesday - Joining the crew

OK - so in attempts to revive my blog, I'm going to try what i've seen around called WIP Wednesday. Here's the blurb about it from Musings From the Fishbowl : W.I.P. (Work In Progress) Wednesday is a fun and stress-free opportunity for you to share whatever your crafty little self is working on with the rest of the blogging community. You are invited to showcase a project you’re beginning, working on, or maybe even finished with. There is no skill or talent-level requirement and you can share anything in any medium!

So here is my current WIPs.

This is the doll cardigan pattern that was featured in the winter issue of Living Crafts, by Waldorf Mama. I'm making this for my youngest daughter for her birthday this month (plus a new doll outfit, and fixing her doll's face - the mouth has come undone).

And here is the Jack Skellington I started for my husband as a Father's Day present. He loves the movie The Nightmare Before Christmas so this was a perfect item for him. I also found a pattern to make Zero, Jack's "dog" to go along with Jack. I did make a few changes from the original pattern, and I think for the most part, it's coming out great!

The patterns for these are both on Ravelry for those who are interested.

CSA... for sheep?

Now my title might through you off a bit. But alas - if you have never heard of a CSA - let me start there. CSA (which is short for Consumer Supported Agriculture) is general a farm or such that you buy shares of, that you then receive shares of in terms of produce. This is usually done on a weekly basis, and is a great way to support your local farms and farmers.

Well, now something new i've only recently heard of, that other fribe loving people might enjoy - a CSA where your share is helping to buy/care for sheep, and in return, getting back wool yarn or roving.

If you'd love to read more about 1 such CSA, you can check out THIS BLOG about the Serenity Sheep Farm, located in Montana, USA.

If you are interested in buying a share, or other fiber related items, they also have a Etsy shop.

Apparently I need to find more time to read...

The Big Read reckons that "the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

A little something sweet

Is just what we made today! Andrew and I (well, he watched and ate left over mint chips) made brownie cups today. We saw this on another blog, with a link to the recipe, and today we tried it out. We did leave out the nuts, and used mint chocolate chips in place to semi-sweet. We also baked them in the mini-muffin sized tin, for about 20 minutes. Very yummy indeed! And a nice way to spend a rainy afternoon...
And here is the link to the recipe: Brownie Cups

Autumn...

So, i'm posting this about a week late - so shot me.

We've started to get into Autumn around the house, starting with setting up our (first ever!) nature table. I think this will be a work in progress, as everything starts to shift more and more. We still have many warm days, but the nights are starting to cool.

So, for our first ever Autumn nature table, we have here some foam made crafts (the kids made these at home, we just had to add them in!), our collection of leaves, chestnuts, mama dyed silks, twigs, a crocheted apple and some wooden animal figures!!



Look for more posts as we welcome in the change to Autumn!!

Menu Planning Monday!!

Well, I've always planned my menus, to help streamline shopping, cut costs... but keeping organized - well there's a new idea! So in jumping on the bandwagon, here is my first official blog post for Menu Planning Monday (MPM). If you want more info on this - check out this link! http://orgjunkie.com/menu-plan-monday

Monday - Chicken and rice, stove-top version

Tuesday - Heading out to eat! What a treat!!

Wednesday - Pasta night... 1 dish vegetarian pasta with broccoli, olives tosses with garlic infused olive oil and topped with parmesan cheese

Thursday - Breakfast for dinner (french toast, eggs, breakfast "meat", juice or tea)

Friday - Daddy's Choice... shopping day

For the first time, in a long time...

A new finished object!! I found a crayon roll tutorial in another blog, and decided to make 1 up. I think all my nieces and nephews will be getting these for Christmas!! 1 down - like 12 to go!

Here's the link to the tutorial - for anyone else wanting to try this!

Crayon Roll

Andrew's Waldorf Doll....

So i finally finished Andrew's doll this week, by finally making him some clothing. I originally blogged about making his doll in my Myspace blog... which you can find here:

My First Christmas Project

A Long Overdue Update

So, here is the doll, in all his glory, as well as a picture i took of Elizabeth's nearly finished doll... she needs just hair now.

Slow Cooker Play Silks

Well, i'm doing it - testing my playsilk dying in the crockpot!! I started out this am with putting the new blanks from Dharma in the washer to make sure there was no fingerprints, oils, etc. I had 6 of the 35" square and 12 of the 11" square blanks. I'm testing with 2 of the 11" squares (since i have more to "spare"!)

So i washed (didn't dry them though - since i was just going to put them in more water!) and stuck them in the crockpot with some water and set it on HIGH.




So i let that heat up almost 1 hour. Just before the hour was up, i boiled some water and added some Wilton's red-red icing dye (a couple of "knife" tips full of dye) and mixed in a cup of boiling water . The added it to the pot



Waited another near hour and checked. It wasn't getting a nice deep red, so using the suggestions i've seen for wool yarn dying, i decided to use 2 cheery and 1 black cherry packet. 30 minutes later (so 90 minutes from original dye added), i toss in the kool-aid (pre-mixed with boiling water in a mug).




It's SOOOOO much darker! 15 minutes after adding the kool-aid, i added in 1/4 cup vinegar. I then set a timer for 1 hour past adding the vinegar to check how much of the dye was absorbed.

ok - all finished dying. Here it is after i rinsed it in the sink!



and an outside pic - shows it's true color better then the inside one



And FINISHED!
I love how the color came out - it is still really nice and RED, not pink and the color is uniform. But somehow there is a HUGE difference in size now on only 1 of the silks (2 inch difference from side to side, and up/down). Also, one of the seams in the large silk started coming undone... i believe from the dryer. Next time, i'll hang to dry.

Where to begin

So i started this blog, nearly 2 months ago now i think, to "post" my crochet to the world. Why - goodness only knows. So, here is my most recent work.... Patterns were a mix of freebies and a couple bought from Etsy.


Strawberries


Cookies


Fruit and veggies


Toast



Eggs

Sandwich with strawberries and baby carrots