Goodness knows we need the rain—it was such a dry winter, and early spring didn’t bring much change—so I really shouldn’t complain, but the last few weeks have been ridiculously wet.

Julia and Asher haven’t been overly thrilled with all this wetness keeping us inside most days, but I’ve been happy to have the time to catch up on my sewing. I was so productive just two short months ago, and then we were on the road for the better part of two weeks, and the weather was so beautiful and warm for so long, and all my plans sort of fell by the wayside. I still had piles of fabric to cut and patterns to trace, but little time and even less motivation to do them.

So. In these last two weeks I’ve been methodically—more or less—going through my pile. A dress here. A pair of shorts there. (And a fair bit of “this fabric can be packed away because I won’t have time to make what I wanted before it’s needed” on the side.) I have just one more pair of shorts to finish for Asher—”little pants,” he calls them—with big pockets. I’ve been using my two favorite patterns from Sewing for Boys: the treasure pocket pants and the kickin’ back sweats, but shortened the length for the summer. All together he has four pair, two in each size.

Julia got just one more dress, another simple Bella Dress. I’d planned to also make Dana’s Summer Vacation Dress for her this year, but with everything we have coming down the pipe in the next few weeks, if I get to it it will be after our summer vacation. Maybe next year…

Just a few more projects left, now, before I pack everything away until July. July. I’m not sure how I’ll survive not being able to sew anything for that long, but all the packing and cleaning should be enough to keep me occupied.

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What’s on your sewing table this week?

On the needles…
Time is slipping away from me these days; I have time to knit only a row or two here and there. It’s like that, with small children, and nice weather—and packing. (Yes, we’re moving. I’ll be writing more about this as events unfold…)

This week I did another repeat of the lace wrap I started a few weeks ago. For so many tiny stitches in such fine yarn, it’s actually coming along quickly. The pattern calls for ten repeats, so I have eight to go before gift-giving season is upon us. I’m planning to finish it over the summer; I think the light-weight yarn will be better to work with than anything else I have in my queue during the warm months.

On the nightstand…
A few months ago I lent my Enki Foundation Guides to my friend Lindsay. I’d spent months going back and forth between the Foundation Guides and the Early Childhood Guide, never really settling into either and retaining very little of anything I was reading, so I thought getting one of them—either one, really—out of my house entirely would free me from having to decide which to read and allow me to focus my energy on the one I had at hand.

If you’ve been reading here over the last few months you already know that none of my Enki books has appeared in this space lately. Clearly this didn’t go quite as planned.

But I am anxious to get reading, so I dove in earlier this week and am reading through the Early Childhood Guide when I have a few quiet moments each day. Here’s hoping I have it finished by the time my other guides come back to me…

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What are you knitting and reading this week?

George’s aunt gave me a copy of One-Yard Wonders for Easter—not a gift for Easter as much as that simply happened to be the first time she saw me after she bought the book—with a few pages flagged. After all, since she gave me the book (which I’d been wanting to get my hands on for ages but hadn’t had the chance to buy), it wasn’t too much to ask that I make her a couple of things, right?

First on her list was a really cute clothespin apron that I am going to make for myself as well, one of these days. Asher helped me pick out the fabric—a cheery red with little birds (or maybe they’re chickens?) all over it, which seemed just right for the spring—on our most recent trip to Jo-Ann. I altered the pattern a bit—it appears to have been written for women who wear a size 2—and I was able to add four inches to the width and still use just a yard of fabric.

The other apron, which I’m showing only a little bit of because it hasn’t yet been delivered to its intended recipient and I don’t want to completely spoil the surprise, is based on Jona Giammalva’s Apron in an Hour. (I made this one a bit bigger, too; what is it with these aprons designed for women with 0 percent body fat??) I loved making this apron—it is super-easy and the result is just incredible. If you are on gift-giving terms with me and like to cook, you just might find one like this in your Christmas stocking this year…

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What’s on your sewing table this week?

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• “Being Adopted Can Be Hard” Is a Complete Sentence, from Amanda at The Declassified Adoptee • because I really can’t stand it that adult adoptees have to justify, clarify, and otherwise defend everything they say about adoption that isn’t sunshine & bunnies…
• the most magical age yet (I think), from Gina at The Daily B • because it all really is magical, if we can get out of our own way and let ourselves enjoy it…
• How Too Much Choice Affects Our Kids, from Kara at Simple Kids • because if it’s overwhelming for us, of course it has the same (or worse!) affect on our kids…
• Homeschooling in the City: Buffalo, from Liz, guest-posting at City Kids Homeschooling • because Liz and her family live in my old (and soon-to-be-again) neighborhood, and reading this makes me wish we could move back yesterday…
• Discipline That Works, from Carrie at The Parenting Passageway • because it’s a difficult approach, and pieces like this help me refocus my efforts…
• I don’t have to be the Parent to be your Mom, from Racilous at Adoption in the City • because there is so much truth here…

Happy Saturday!

I’ve been meaning to add Smyth’s Trinity Farm to my list (which I think isn’t going to reach thirty-two items before we leave, alas…) for…well, ever.

Smyth’s Trinity Farm is a family-run dairy farm in Enfield, about a half-hour away from where we live. They sell their milk at a handful of farmers markets in the area, and in a number of local grocery stores as well as in the little store right on the farm. Their milk is fantastic, and they are just about the nicest folks you’ll ever meet.

I drove up to visit one day shortly after we moved here and was greeted by Anne, who gave me a quick overview of the farm store’s offerings. We quickly became regular customers, driving up twice a month to see the cows—and Anne’s little boy, who is around the same age as Asher & is much loved by my children—and pick up a two-week supply of milk and the occasional treat of coffee milk.

If you’ve never had milk straight from a dairy farm, I highly recommend it. Factory milk—the sort you find in the supermarket—comes from many different farms and is processed in a big plant and then shipped out to the markets. At a dairy farm that processes its own milk—like this one—the bottle you buy today likely came out of the cow yesterday. It doesn’t get any fresher—or tastier—than that.

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On Monday our playgarden took an almost-spontaneous field trip to the farm, and Anne was kind enough to accommodate us at the last minute with a little tour. She explained to the children the process of producing milk from growing the grass the cows eat all the way to bottling the milk. We were able to look at the cows in the fields and visit them in the barn, and we got a close-up look at all the equipment used to produce and bottle the finished products.

Then we went into the farm store and bought a few pints of heavy cream, which the children shook and shook until it turned into butter.

Wouldn’t that have been nice! In reality, the children mostly tired of the enterprise after a few minutes and the mamas (and Susie’s older son, Kieran, who did most of the work on our little jar of cream) shook and shook the the cream until it turned into butter, while the children played with the water pump and ran around under the trees.

After we finished making the butter—and our arms were tired from all that shaking—we ate it with fresh rolls as part of our picnic lunch. It was wonderful!

On the needles…
The weather is still cool these days—or at least it is this week; who knows what next week will bring—so I’ve been working on my Peaks Island Hood. I was actually pretty far into it, almost all the way to the hood increase, but it was feeling a bit loose and when I measured it I found it was more than an inch wider than it should have been. All along I had been ignoring the feeling that my gauge should be tighter—mostly because I couldn’t knit any more tightly and still slide the stitches over the needles—and I suppose I should think about not ignoring those gut feelings in the future.

So…on Saturday I cast on a second hood, two needle sizes smaller, and this one is turning out the way it should. Only several hours’ more work & I will be where I was with the old one…

On the nightstand…
One of the things I love about yarning-along is that when I don’t have time or energy to read, the knowledge that I will want to have something to write here on Wednesdays makes me do it anyway!

I found a pile of books that I’d forgotten about the other day—I bought them secondhand many months ago & put them up for later—and pulled Raising a Family off the shelf. I’ve quite literally just started reading it, so I don’t have anything to say about it yet. But if you’ve read it, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

And I’m still open to suggestions about what to read next…

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What are you knitting and reading this week?

I don’t mean to always leave things until the last minute—really, I don’t.

It just always seems to end up that way. No matter how far in advance I begin, I always find myself sewing on buttons in the car on the way to the baby shower or birthday party or Christmas dinner.

This baby gift started out—in my mind—as the second of two identical in threes. I’d planned to start knitting it on the way to Maine—I packed yarn and needles—but then I discovered that these days, all I can manage to do in the very back of the van on a long drive without getting sick to my stomach…is sleep.

Last weekend I cast on a second Peaks Island Hood on smaller needles, after realizing that slightly-too-big gauge of the one I’ve been working on is making it way too big. And George asked: When are you going to start that baby sweater?

Right.

I tore the house apart looking for the needles I brought with me to Maine, and I cannot find them anywhere. I’m sure they’re somewhere, and they’ll turn up eventually—but in the meantime, I needed a gift for George’s friend’s new baby.

They’re going to be a bit big for a new baby—the smallest size I have in any pattern is 6–9 months—but as I was sewing I was amazed at how tiny they are. I almost can’t remember when Julia was that small, and really, it wasn’t all that long ago…

I used two mamastellato patterns: the peasant dress is Bella, which I could probably make in my sleep (I do think I need to expand my repertoire a bit…), and the strappy one is the Amelia top, which I turned into a dress by altering the body piece to add length and a bit of an A-line shape. (The button, of course, came from Grandma Julia’s button jar. I swear the perfect buttons for everything can be found in there…)

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What’s on your sewing table this week?

Life has a way of backing up on you sometimes, doesn’t it?

These last several days I took some much-needed time to get my house in order, metaphorically speaking (although I did do a little bit of tidying up here as well…). I’ll be back tomorrow with the usual ramblings about our life.

Until then, have a lovely Monday! 

On the needles…
I didn’t quite know what to do with myself, with Julia’s spring dress finally off the needles. (In case you missed it, you can see my sweet girl in her new dress here. She posed for those pictures on Sunday afternoon & also was able to wear her dress out to the park on Monday, and she’s pretty pleased with how it turned out. So am I.) We decided to leave off the pockets; I told Julia on Thursday that I could wash and block the dress that night & it would be ready by the end of the weekend, or I could make the pockets and it would take another week. She opted to go pocket-less in favor of having her new dress sooner.

I have a few other things on needles all over the house, but I thought I’d give myself a little reward and cast on something new. The pattern is ‘Upstairs‘ and it is the first thing I’ve ever knit in lace-weight yarn. I actually cast it on a few months ago & almost immediately panicked about working with such fine yarn, and agonized over the idea of knitting 320 rows of teeny-tiny little lace stitches and thought I’d never finish it, anyway, so I pulled it all out and set it aside. Amazingly, the dress-that-wouldn’t-end makes everything else seem to go much more quickly; I finished the first 32-row repeat on Monday and now I only have nine more to do! I’m hoping to finish this in time for Christmas, as it’s intended to be a gift; I learned my lesson last year about leaving too many things to be finished in November and December, so this year I’m giving myself plenty of time to procrastinate…

On the nightstand…
I have to confess that the book in this week’s photograph is something of a cheat; I was looking at a couple of soap recipes in The Soapmaker’s Companion and listing out ingredients to check against what I have on my shelves and figure out what I need to order. I’m desperate for something new to read; I feel like I’m thumbing through the same old things over and over and not breaking any new ground. Any suggestions?

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What are you knitting and reading this week?