Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.
—Leo Buscaglia
Joining Ginny at small things once again this week—
On the needles…
I needed a little break from all the endless stockinette in the round of Julia’s spring dress, so I pulled out an older project this week, from the bottom of my basket—these pants. I couldn’t remember when I started them, so I had to go through my old ‘yarn along’ entries to see where I first mentioned them; it was way back in September. I can’t believe I left them for so long…
What kept me from finishing them, I think, was that before I could start on the second leg I had to use Kitchener stich to graft the crotch gusset…and I was terrified of Kitchener stitch. I’ve seen patterns that tout the lack of Kitchener stitch as a huge selling point, and I looked—briefly—at the written instructions for it…and panicked. Set aside these lovely little pants I’ve been wanting for Julia forever. Let them languish there in the bottom of my basket, perhaps never to be finished…
So it was a little pisserating—as my mother would say—to discover, when I sat down & tried it, that Kitchener stitch is easy as pie. Seriously. I don’t know why I was so afraid of it.
And away we go…I am almost two inches into the second leg. I can’t figure out why the start of this leg is visible—that is, my first row knitting into the stitches held on waste yarn while I did the other leg is a little wonky. I’m hoping it will straighten out when I block the pants; if not…it’s way far up where the leg meets the bottom, so it’s not like anyone will ever see it.
In other news—the buttons for Asher’s sweater finally arrived & they were absolutely worth the wait. He loves his new sweater and wants to wear it every day.
Here he is modeling it right after I finished sewing on the buttons—
On the nightstand…
I’m still reading, in turns, both Everyday Blessings and Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World; I was able to buy a secondhand copy of Everyday Blessings for just a few dollars online, so I can take a little more time & care in reading that, now, rather than rushing through it so I can return it to the library on time.
This morning I am looking through two new books that arrived yesterday from my homeschool supplies co-op: Winter Nature Activities for Children and Summer Nature Activities for Children. They are wonderful books, with many lovely photographs of children and adults working and playing together, and lots of ideas for outdoor activities that get children involved with nature. I am told it’s still winter here—although the thermometer in my kitchen window would beg to differ—but I am nonetheless reading the summer one first because I don’t know that there is very much time left for winter activities this year.
Then again, I live in New England. It wouldn’t surprise me if it snowed next weekend and stayed snowy for a month…
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What are you knitting and reading this week?
My father turned sixty last week, and we all (except my brother Jamie, who couldn’t come out from Buffalo for just lunch…) surprised him on Saturday by showing up at my grandmother’s house unannounced and taking him out for lunch.
The actual milestone passed quietly; I almost forgot to call him because I knew—and he didn’t—that I would be seeing him over the weekend. Julia and Asher were so excited all week long, talking about seeing Pop-pop, and Julia is just old enough now to understand surprise and thought it was great fun that Pop-pop didn’t know he was going to see us until we arrived.
We had a good meal and an even better (ice cream!) cake, and everyone stayed up far too late visiting. (We paid for this on Sunday, dearly, with two incredibly cranky babies, but it was a fair tradeoff, I think, for how much they enjoyed playing with their cousin and seeing their aunt and their uncles. And, of course, Grammie and Pop-pop…) It was too much fun not to share, and to use this space to wish my papa—belatedly—many happy returns.
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Inspired by my wonderful friend Rachel of house full of jays…
“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more.
It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a
meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes
sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow.”
~Melody Beattie
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Today I am grateful…
that it’s only nail polish
{and that they didn’t spill any on the carpet…}
What are you grateful for today?
A spin-off of the Sewing Bee at Happiness Comes, which I’ll be rejoining if and when it ever starts up again. Ever in need of accountability, I’ll post my sewing projects (and projects-to-be) here every Thursday most Thursdays now and then, when I have something to share. And I invite anyone who wants to join me to post a link in the comments.
On the dining room sewing table…
I haven’t written about any sewing in so long—since before Christmas, I think—and for very good reason: I haven’t really done all that much sewing. Sometime in the middle of January I realized that my sewing machine had been—uncharacteristically—idle since I turned it off on the morning of Christmas eve.
I do have a few new projects in the pipeline, though. A hot cup jacket I promised my friend’s daughter back in December is long overdue, and my contribution to the spring craft swap needs to be in the mail next week, and Julia needs a dress to wear for Easter. Oh, and I finally got my hands on a copy of Sewing for Boys, and am quickly generating a long list of things Asher needs for the coming season.
In the meantime, I did get a little bit of sewing done during the last few weeks.
At the top of my list was a new pair of mittens for Asher, whose tiny little two-year-old hand doesn’t quite fit properly in any pair of knitted or crocheted mittens we own, even the ones that fit his sister perfectly last year.
I remembered seeing a mitten pattern that looked pretty easy in Oliver + S Little Things to Sew, and I’d found some wool sweaters during my massive craft room cleanup that had been sitting underneath piles of heaven knows what since I brought them home from the thrift store sometime last year; they would be perfect, I thought, to make a pair of mittens.
Or, as it turns out, two pair. Because Julia naturally wanted her own when she saw the ones I made for Asher.
They were super easy to make—it took me just an afternoon to make two pair—and the fit is perfect for a toddler. The size of the mitten itself is just about the same as the too-big crocheted pair he’d been wearing all winter, but the placement of the thumb somehow makes them fit better. Asher regularly wears his mittens around the house, mostly when he is pretending to take his doll for a walk to the store…
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When I finished the mittens, I had four sleeves and two waistbands (plus some extra scraps from the blue sweater I used for Asher’s mittens) left over. I’ve long wanted to try to make woolies out of sweater sleeves, but never before have I found myself with extra sweater sleeves laying around. So this seemed like the perfect opportunity, and I started with a pair for Julia out of the blue sweater.
I am sure there are patterns out there, or instructions, or tutorials that make the process clear, but I just sort of plowed ahead on my own with these. To measure the leg length, I turned up the cuff at the bottom of the sleeve—to add extra length so Julia could grow into them (which turned out later on to have been a very good idea)—and pulled the sleeve onto her leg with the cuff around her ankle. At the top of her leg, I turned down the sleeve until the inseam was a little longer than I wanted it. After carefully pulling the sleeve off her leg, I turned the top of the other sleeve down until the two were the same length; then I cut the sleeves open at the seam from the very top until the fold.
I pinned the cut-open seams together, lining up the rest of the (intact) seam at the middle, and sewed the sleeves together to create the crotch of the pants, with the intact seam running down the inside of each leg.
For the front and back panels of the pants, I used leftover scraps from the front and back of the sweater. I didn’t measure very well to figure out what size the pants would turn out to be; I just laid them out on top of the sweater, traced the shape I needed to fill in, then cut, pinned, and sewed them on. I used the ribbing at the bottom of the sweater as a waistband, cutting it to the right length & then sewing it on to the top of the pants.
The resulting ‘Frankenpants’ are ridiculously huge on Julia. If I have time I am going to add a casing to the inside of the waistband & run some elastic through it to make the waist small enough for her.
Or, since it doesn’t seem like the cold weather is going to hang around very much longer here in New England, I might just fold them away until they fit, next year or the year after…
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What’s on your sewing table this week?
Joining Ginny at small things once again this week—
On the needles…
Not much has changed since last week. We had a busy few days, and we’re all still recovering from this lingering illness (and George was hit with it again over the weekend), so I’ve gotten very little done in the way of either knitting or reading. I haven’t knitted a stitch on Julia’s pullover; I have about two and a half inches (of the 17 inches it will be when it is finished) done on the skirt of her dress. I expect the dress to be slow going; it always is when I have miles and miles of stockinette to knit. I’ve recently got a copy of Melisa Nielsen’s 108 Days on iTunes & have been listening to that while I knit a round or two here and there, and of course I can also listen to hockey games while I’m knitting, but the Sabres have been, in turns, annoying me and putting me to sleep these days, so that is not very good knitting-listening at the moment.
On the nightstand…
I am taking a break from Everyday Blessings; I’ve been loving it, but I feel like my cold-addled brain isn’t absorbing it all as well as I’d like. And just the other day I found a secondhand copy, so I don’t feel the same urgency to finish it before it is due back at the library. Yesterday I started Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World—also something of a heavy read, but I’m starting to be able to sleep a bit so my mind feels up to the challenge.
You might notice I’ve been focusing heavily on mindfulness lately, in my reading. I’ve been practicing mindfulness meditation for years and have found it very helpful—more or less, depending on how disciplined I am at any given time. I seem to have lost focus somewhere along the way (hello, toddlers!) & am working now to reapply it to my life in a broader way. To that end, I have a stack of books I requested from the library that I’ll probably never get around to reading—which, I suppose, speaks to a lack of focus in itself! I’m thinking of it as a little spiritual/psychical spring cleaning, since (despite what the thermometer says) it really is too early for a physical spring housecleaning…
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What are you knitting and reading this week?
If this picture looks familiar, that’s because it’s a repeat from yesterday. It is the best, most recent photo I have of all three of the loves of my life.
Valentine’s Day has never been one of my favourite holidays. (In fact, Bflopapa and I had our very first date sixteen years ago tomorrow because if we ended up dating for a long time, we both disliked the idea of our anniversary falling on the day itself.) But all the hearts and cupids and general mushiness in the air at this time of year do provide a nice reminder of how blessed I am, to be surrounded by so much love.
I hope you find yourself surrounded by much love, too, today and every day…
Sometimes, when the weather is nice, on a Friday we three walk to the corner, climb aboard the Papa-bus (so called because it takes Papa away to work in the morning), and ride downtown to the big building where Papa works. Sometimes we go to lunch; other days—when the weather is very nice—we might walk along the river or play in the park.
I am never entirely sure what is the bigger treat for the children: getting to see Papa in the middle of the day, or riding on the bus all the way downtown.
Last Friday was doubly exciting, because not only did we get to have lunch in the cafeteria with Papa, but a very special friend was waiting for us when we arrived. (I’ll have more to say about Julia’s BFF Pucky later on this week…) Asher was unsure how he felt about the big green whale, but after filling his belly with yogurt and Sun Chips he got a little braver and gave a few high-fives.
It takes a half hour to get downtown on the bus, and another half hour to get back home again, and then another hour eating lunch and playing with Pucky…well, let’s just say it was a long morning for two little ones (and for a mama still recovering from a weeks-long illness), so even though our trip downtown was so much fun, we were still glad to get home again and have a nap. Not necessarily in that order.
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A few of my favorite things…
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There’s Hope for Mayberry Yet! from Lenore at Free-Range Kids • because it’s heartening to see people getting it…
- Manifesting Lessons, from Rachel at Clean. • because positive thinking is a powerful thing, indeed…
- If We Don’t Let Our Children Play, Who Will Be the Next Steve Jobs? from Darrell Hammond at HuffPost • because we really do need to remember that play is the work of childhood…
- Design Your Own Master’s, from Jamie at Simple Homeschool • because I did not have my PhD by the time I was 30 (the way I always said I would…), and this makes me feel a bit better about that…
- All work and no play… from Joanne Laucius in the Ottawa Citizen • because…well, that play-as-work-of-childhood thing again…
Happy Saturday!
