What You've Missed

Whenever I see something wonderful in this world, I often think that it's a huge bummer that my mom (who passed away 14 years ago) isn't around to enjoy it.


(Yep, that's her in the middle with her head thrown back laughing. She looked like that a lot.)


(And those are my little brothers on her lap.)

It would be ridiculous to list everything she's missed. There's just too much. However, I can think of a few things she would have especially loved.

These are for you, mom.

- Thanks to the internet, it is super easy to share all kinds of wonderful ideas. You can find hilarious and inspiring stuff. Like Flash Mobs. Mom, you'd totally love these. Sometimes I wonder if that's how you imagined the world to be, full of people suddenly bursting into song and dance with you. I think this one would have been your favorite.



And then there's this poem. Thank you for never implying that I would somehow be better if I were prettier.

Really.

Thank you.



- Oh and guess what, Jenny and I made babies and then pushed them right out into the world. Can you believe it? I whined a bit when I had Joey, but not overly so. And Jenny was pretty badass when she had Kam. Neither of our labors came anywhere close to your record setters of less than two hours each when you had us, but we managed just the same.



- Not only did Tommy finally come out of the closet (yes I know you probably knew he was gay even though he never said it out loud), but he marched in the Pride Parade. We were all there to cheer for him.



If given the chance, I'm sure you would have been marching along with these people.



-I know you never really got to see any of the four of us as adults. But I think we're doing a pretty good job.



We miss you, though.

Happy Mother's Day.

Kittie Proof Vases

I've found another trick in the war against kitties who like to knock things over. Simply keep everything up on the wall and out of their reach.



I used 22 gauge floral wire, two eye hooks (attached at studs) and various containers with pronounced lips on them (to loop the wire under before you twist it tightly close in the back).

One important note- the wire is one use only. I suggest that you don't go untwisting and retwisting it. I promise you. It will break. Or you could use a thicker gauge wire (which strangely has a smaller number), but even with that, I think there's a limited number of times you could do it before it looses all tensile strength.

Spring Planting in Raised Beds

Last year at this time I was publishing post after post of Easter egg tutorials. (click here, here, here and especially here to see what it looks like when I'm on my holiday crafting A-game.)

This year I have other things* going. Things which don't involve writing for this blog, apparently. Luckily, I was able to scrounge a few moments when I wasn't actually doing those things in order to write about them. And put together a video too.

I know, right?

One of the things is gardening. Which I'm basically obligated to do after last year when we built beds for the garden so late that there was no time to plant anything that season.



In an effort to reach a personal goal I set for myself (wait, I haven't written about that either! Gah.), I am attempting to grow upwards of 200 pounds of produce in our garden. In one season. It's a somewhat random number I picked out of the air, based loosely, and optimistically, on Finny's amazing harvest.

That is despite the fact that while her bed looked like the picture on the left on Feb 7, my bed looked like the one on the right on Feb 8.



California vs Colorado, no one should be surprised here.

First thing's first, we had to fill up the empty beds.



This happened back in October during a two week long burst of energy. Everything we used came either from our yard or for free from craigslist. The only thing we paid for was gas to pick it up.

And look! I put all the pictures I took back then into a real and actual video. With music, even.



The important gardening lesson I've learned in the last 24 hours is that the wind is not your friend. The wind rips covers off of cold frames and flattens seedlings.

But that's ok, because it just gives me more material for my new blog where I celebrate all the wonderful mistakes in my life and invite you to join with me.

*The other major time suck has produced no usable pictures and so I refuse to write about it until I have at least one good one. Joey has informed me that I am letting my readers down and even offered to write up the post for me. We'll see if it comes to that.

New Skill- Jewelry Making

We are especially lucky to have a family member (mine and Jenny's Grandpa, Joey's and Kam's Great-Grandpa) who makes jewelry as a hobby and generously offers to share his time and resources.

(This picture was from awhile back. Just look how short Kam's hair is.)

Between Jenny (who took a jewelry making class in high school) and Grandpa, the kids and I have no shortage of teachers. Jenny lets the kids use her wax gun to make designs, which she and Grandpa then cast for them.

Jenny helped Joey make me a beautiful and simple little ring. I love how it looks like a twig wrapped around my finger.


(As I'm looking at this picture of Joey holding my ring, I'm struck by how much her hands look like mine. She looks so grown up here. Which I realize is a strange thing to say about a picture of a hand. But it's true.)

And Kam made a design that became this necklace for his Gram's birthday.

And yes, we let the kids work with the wax gun even though it is pretty damn hot.



This is mostly because we agree with Gever Tulley when he encourages parents to let their kids try moderately dangerous activities, "Trust me, they are going to learn things that you can't get out of playing with Dora the Explorer toys." (Note- head over to that link if you want to hear his Ted talk on the subject. It's a good one.)

They also love to use the flex shaft for polishing the piece after it's been cast.

For now, though, the adults sprew up the pieces and do the actual casting.

Yes, I too am working on some pieces, but since they're gifts, I'll be sharing them a bit later.

New Shavees for St. Baldrick's

Well, it's March. And that means St. Baldrick's! If you've been a reader for any length of time here, you might have stumbled across at least one post about this awesome organization.

(Me and Joey 3 years ago at St. Baldrick's)

No, I'm not shaving my head again. But my nephew and niece are. When our friend Raven shaved her head last year, Jenny's son, Kam, decided that he would be doing it this year.

Since then, Aurora's daughter, Jaden, joined the team, along with her friends, Sara and Maisy. All four of them will be going under the clippers this Friday afternoon. (Maisy isn't in the pictures because she decided to do it after Jenny had taken all the pics.)

A week ago Joey and the shavees got together to film the video below. Then Jenny spent a massive amount of time putting it all together with pictures she took and voice-overs that the kiddos did. I love how it turned out.

One note- The Odd Little Monkeys started as an weekly crafting group, but it's evolving in a way that lets them use their creativity to make a positive difference in the world. This is the first of their endeavors and I couldn't be more proud.

Odd Little Monkeys Presents: IT'S JUST HAIR from Jenny Gay on Vimeo.

(If, for some reason, you have trouble viewing this through Vimeo, you can see the YouTube version here.)

St. Baldrick's is a great organization that provides funding to fight childhood cancer. At last year's event, we listened as one incredibly grateful mom told the story of how her son was alive thanks to the funding efforts of this organization.

So please consider making a donation to St. Baldrick's. And if you feel so moved, we'd love it if you emailed a link to all your friends and family or posted the video up on facebook. The more people who see this, the more kids we can help!

And if they are having one of these in your neck of the woods, it's not a bad way to spend an afternoon, even if you aren't getting shaved yourself. Here are some of the pictures from last year's celebration in downtown Denver.

Homemade Peanut Butter Cups

These are so worth the effort. And what's more, they're so rich that you won't really want to (or be able to, for that matter) eat more than one.

I did these based on the recipe at Have Cake, Will Travel, but I've made enough modifications (mine are lighter on the peanut butter and heavy on the chocolate) that I thought I'd just share the recipe here.

Ingredients for Chocolate Mixture

2 cups chocolate chips (splurge here and get the good ones)

1 tablespoon natural peanut butter

pinch of salt

Ingredients for Peanut Butter Filling

1/2 cup natural peanut butter

2 or 3 tablespoons powdered sugar

pinch of salt

Instructions (Simple)

-Chocolate part

-Peanut butter filling

-More chocolate part

Instructions (specifics on what works best for me)

-Melt the chocolate chips in a glass container in the microwave for 30 seconds at a time, stirring well in between. You'll want it to be smooth and sort of thick, not too runny.

-Add the tablespoon of peanut butter and salt. Stir.

-I found that using individual silicon cups in a muffin tin works perfectly for this, but use paper cups if that's all you have.

-Using a half tablespoon measure, scoop chocolate into each cup and smooth up the side about a third of the way. This part can seem really messy, but don't panic, they'll still be pretty.

-Pop in the fridge for 10 minutes or so.

-Mix up the peanut butter, sugar and salt. I've found that these work much better if this mixture is fairly stiff at room temperature.

-When the chocolate is set, add about a teaspoon or so of the peanut butter mixture to each cup, smoothing down with the back of a clean spoon.

-Put the container with the chocolate in it back in the microwave for 10 to 30 seconds. You want it to be thin and drizzeley now.

-Using the same half tablespoon measure as before, add more of the chocolate mixture.

-When all cups have the top layer of chocolate, feel free to bang the pan up and down on the counter. It will smooth and settle all the chocolate. Pop any air bubbles with a toothpick if you're feeling overwhelmed by OCD.

-Put it back in the fridge until set.

-Pop them out of the silicon cups and give to your favorite people.

A Quandary

Note- At one point, I read the following, "Don't have anything in your portfolio that you need to make excuses for." It was from Patti Digh's book Life is a Verb. And I think it's great advice.

Sometimes.

Lately, though, I've felt that sentence hanging over me every time I work on something to post about here. And I have to say, it's caused a fair amount of creative drain, causing me to hold everything I want to post against my highest standards. I am still creating a bit, just not taking pictures and not sharing the story. And every day that passes that I don't post, the bar gets higher and higher and my creative urges get fewer and fewer.

Which is sad because my underlying goal here is to encourage people to try things. To start badly and then improve. To do it for the thrill of making. Of trying. Luckily I found this post by Paul Overton reminding us of the importance of not being too attached to the wonderfulness of what we produce. Noah Scalin referred to it as "letting go of preciousness."

So what follows will not be that wonderful. It isn't a helpful tutorial or a rousing tale of success and it only has a couple of pictures, way down at the bottom. It *is* a little story about me trying something new. Which might be just as worthwhile.

I recently figured it was time to knit a sweater. I realize that not everyone comes to this decision at some point in their lives, but well, I have.

Up until now I mostly knit just for the sake of knitting. I actually enjoy the feel of making the stitches. I just rarely make anything practical (other than the odd giant headband). Just knitting and frogging, over and over.

Weird. I know.

So after hours searching on Ravelry, I finally found a pattern and yarn. Yarn, it turns out, that no one carries in an actual store in my neck of the woods. So I chose something else because the idea of buying yarn that I hadn't been able to rub against my face just seemed crazy. Yes, I am that weirdo next to you at the store who cuddles with the merchandise.

The process of buying yarn was so involved (should I get this one? yes. no, wait. how bout that one? ya know, I think I like that first one after all) that by the time I'd left the store and walked to my car I felt like punching my fist into the air like Judd Nelson as if to say "Take that, yarn store! Your plethora of choices and lack of what I'd actually wanted to buy did not defeat me!"

I didn't do it, but I wanted to. As I drove away, I wasn't even dismayed at the immense distance between the thousand or so yards of fiber in my bag and the sweater I would be attempting to twiddle it into with a couple of bamboo sticks. Clearly I was delusional. But I'd at least managed to procure the raw materials for the project.

Surprisingly, the knitting gods were smiling on me (well, other than the wreck I created while trying to wind my first center pull ball, but I'll get to that). I cast on the right number of stitches on the *first try*. And my stockinette stitches were nice and even and also (get this) the correct gauge right off the bat, even though I forgot to knit a test swatch.

Now normally I knit like a child, handing it over to a more experienced knitter (my little sister, actually) whenever I mess something up. I'd recently joined a knitting club in which other grown women do this same thing with no embarrassment whatsoever.

But this project would be different. *I* was going to do it all by myself. And I knew that if I dropped a stitch, I would pick it up myself.

Unfortunately when I dropped that stitch, I'd been drinking a bit. And the alcohol made it difficult to understand the video I found here about how to remedy the situation. I would watch it a couple of times, hold my work up to the monitor and completely fail to see how the two were related. (Turns out I was looking at the purl side and merely needed to turn it backwards.)

I also realize that this is quite possibly the lamest drinking story ever told.

Eventually, I simply put my work on a shelf in the closet, next to my first attempt at winding a center pull ball, which was currently a knotted up pile of sad.

(right side= nicely wound center pull ball, left side= complete rudding mess that I can't even bear to look at. I will work on it when I have run out of the rest of the yarn.)

But boy howdy, the next day? The next day I pulled that sucker out and fixed it! Yes, I realize that using a crochet hook to pull a couple loops of yarn through other loops of yarn probably doesn't necessitate the exclamation mark. But this image from this post came to mind and I cracked up because I felt the same sense of purpose and accomplishment.

This is what I have so far. About a hundred yards of yarn fooled into thinking it's a 1 x 2 foot piece of cloth.

Now if I can just convince that cloth that it's a sweater.

So, what do you think? Do you prefer finished projects with lots of pictures or did you enjoy this glimpse into the crazy?