Sarapheena

Friday Pretty

Just a quick stop in to participate in Joyce's Friday Pretties.  This is the last day of school for my ladies and it is jam-packed action from last night through our big Washington D.C. trip next week (and the HUGE dinner party I have planned two days after we return!).

I am looking so forward to summer.  Both girls want to sew....independently!  Yikes!  They saw an article on soap-making and are begging to try it and they are looking forward to canning our garden veggies. When did they decide to go all "Little House on the Prairie?"  Should I dress them in calico and bonnets this summer?

This odd disembodied hand is showing of my Friday Pretty.  It is a very cool ring picked up in the local antiques booth of this blogger.  She has a very well merchandised booth in a very cool antique store near me.  I picked up this ring and a matching necklace along with a bunch of larger items from this blogger (who also has a beautiful booth at the same store).  Anyway, I chatted with the booth owner and the clerk for a bit and then we all got distracted and my lovely jewelry was left behind.

Imagine my delight and surprise when I finally made it back out there to pick it up and the lovely ladies at the store had tucked a gift certificate for the fabulous and delicious cupcake store next door!  Not paying attention to my own parcels was totally my own fault but they felt badly.  The cupcake gift was completely unexpected, totally unnecessary and completely made my day!  The coconut lime cupcake was delicious and eaten before I could take a picture.  It would have qualified as a Friday Pretty on its own!

Happy Friday to all!

That "New Baby" Smell

My girls go to a fantastic Montessori school.  It is small, progressive and has an amazing sense of community.  We are close friends with many, many parents and know the names of all the kids and parents in the school.  The school works hard to promote this feeling of community but really, it just seems to naturally spring from the type of families the school attracts. 

In that spirit, I try to make a baby gift for each new baby that comes along.  Really, its just a great excuse to sew for babies and often the parents let me hold and sniff the new baby while they open the gift!  I adore (other people's) babies!  I relish the chance to cuddle a tiny, warm body and wait for the parents to look away before I steal a little nuzzle and inhale that new baby scent.  There are few things I like better than kissing baby heads!

 

This little bundle is for a little bundle that entered the world last week with great drama!  She was born at home...on accident!  She is the third child and mom and dad are amazing parents but still...born at home?They're totally nonchalant about it.  I think its wild!  They took her to the local Children's Hospital an hour or so after she was born and the staff flipped out!  She is, as yet, un-named.  You've got to come up with a special name to compete with that birth story!

I made this little flannel backed blanket and a couple of burb rags.  Its an old Kaffe Fassett print and some super-soft flannel.  I wanted a light, summer weight blanket.

 The purple Airstream Camper on this ribbon just makes me smile!  I used scraps of loosely coordinating ribbon on cloth diapers for the burp rags.  All told, this was about an hour of work and that includes clearing the cutting table of various debris that had accumulated.  Does that happen to you?

I had to include a shot of my little tag.  I NEVER remember to put a tag in and my husband always tries to remind me.  These are generic tags with my name.  I'd love to get some super-cute "logo" type ones sometimes.  I suppose I'd need to create a logo to use!

In the meantime, I'll just stick little tags on the baby gifts and wait for the parents get distracted looking at it so I can go in for a sniff!

Meet the Family

All right, I said in my first post that this would be a craft/mommy/garden/junk/cruddy photo blog and thus far, I've only managed to cover the junk part- at least there were some photos in that one!  

Today, I thought we could cover the mommy blog portion of things.  These little beauties are my daughters, Hope and Kate.
They look like angels in the photo and I am lucky in that, mostly they ARE angels!  Hope (on the right) is nine and is just finishing up 3rd grade.  She is 100% a mini-me.  Kate is a seven-year old imitation of her Daddy in girl form.  I find this amazing and wonder frequently if it is genetics that make them so very much like us or is it nurture?  If it is genetics, I am completely stumped as to why a love of potty humor and corny puns needed to be passed down to my sweet Kate?  Surely my husband (John) had more desirable traits to pass on?  The girls even look like the parent they favor in temperament.  

Hope got my love of books and speed reading skills.  She keeps books stashed everywhere and will read absolutely anything.  She even reads John's work trade magazines and is in competition with her parents to see who gets the Reader's Digest first.  Since I get the mail and hide the good stuff, I win this battle most often!  Hope is sensitive (even more so as we enter the tween years) but an adventurer.  

Kate is the consummate second-born.  She is a happy-go-lucky girl who lives to laugh.  She is the most affectionate child ever and still so tiny that she can be carried and cuddled regularly.  There will come a day when she can no longer curl into the space of my lap so I am determined to enjoy this while it lasts. Kate will be in the second grade next year.  She is musical and funny and loves an audience (they both do!)  

In the husband department, I got the very best one!  Despite the potty humor thing, he is the best father and the best husband.  He jokes that we have yet to find something he can't do but its not that far from the truth!  He runs a successful and demanding business while maintaining perfect work/family balance.  He can fix anything, leap tall buildings in a single bound and is kind to children and small animals!  It sounds as if I'd better check his undershirt for a giant "S" but believe me, he is pretty great!

I've opted to call my kids and husband by their real names and to show their faces in photos.  I gave this lots of thought before starting the blog and ultimately think this is the right choice for us- mostly because in a week I'll forget the code names and start posting the real ones anyway!

Please imagine my sweet family shaking your hand and saying, "Nice to meet you.  Let's let's get to know each other."

Way better than Junior High...

I often say that I wouldn't go back to Junior High for $1,000,000.  Horrible hair...braces...glasses...and it was a much larger school than my elementary school.  I was quite certain that I'd have no one to sit with at lunch. Joyce from I Love Pretty Little Things has made sure that my new foray into the blogosphere doesn't feel like the Junior High cafeteria!  

Joyce has a Friday feature called "Pretty Little Things" and the concept is simple and fun: just post something pretty on Friday and let her know (via her comments) that you plan to do so.  She will list all participating blogs on her Friday post.  

 My favorite things around our home are silly things I have picked up over the years- each has its own story that means something only to me.  This little dog was all of $1.00 at an antiques store near my hometown.  I was shopping with my little brother.  He's nothing special (the doggie, I mean!  The brother's not bad!). Cute enough but who buys a single bookend?  This thing makes me smile every time I see it and that's good enough for me.

And then we have Little Red...she's a beauty, isn't she?  She stands three inches tall and tends to travel around the house showing up where I least expect her.  I am a bit obsessed with all things Little Red Riding Hood.  That little habit started with this pair of Camilla Engman Converse shoes.  I'd add a picture of my pair but they're filthy at the moment!  Those shoes and this tiny figure are two of my favorite things! 

 

So, thanks, Joyce, for hosting the tour of pretties and for saving me a seat in the cafeteria.  Maybe later we could braid each other's hair and pass notes in study hall?

Blogs Are the New Bonbons

When I quit working several years ago to stay home with our girls, I used to tell people that I was looking forward to the bon bons and soap operas.  I enjoyed my career but I enjoy not working.  When I linger over a great book, get to go on a field trip with H or K or spend the afternoon in the sewing room, I feel a tad bad for my husband.

Since I quit working, I have dabbled in lots of ways to pass the time while the girls are in school.  I plan fabulous trips (that we rarely take).  I spend many, many hours doing volunteer stuff for their school.  I begged for a Nikon DSLR and promise to move beyond the automatic setting soon.  The sleeper surprise hobby has been crafting.

When my husband and I met, he was the artistic one.  He now marvels that I have upped the crafty and he has well, not experienced crafty growth!  I dusted off the sewing machine when I needed a door stop for the pantry door that refused to stay open.  The doorstop was successful after much cursing and somehow sewing and reading blogs became intertwined for me.  I found blogs with so many lovely things to see and read that I wanted to keep the sewing machine out and learn how to do more with it.  I still visit several of those first few crafty blogs that inspired me and can't thank them enough.  Once I made Erin's Twirly Skirt, I was completely hooked.  Tutorials were life-changing.  I'm slowly getting better with the sewing and look forward to the learning curve of the blogging. Blogs and sewing are my bonbons and I can't seem to get enough of them!

Dipping in my toe...

I am certain that many, many blogs begin with some variation on this idea.  Its a bit strange to begin writing something with no audience.  Writing this first post has been one thing that has, on several occasions, kept me from starting my own blog.  Do you simply begin posting as if you have always been doing so?  Do you pretend to be writing to an vast array of friends and subscribers?  

I was inspired to finally stop waiting and start writing by this post from Mommycoddle.  I have been reading blogs for at least four years but very rarely comment on them.  My googlereader is full of blogs that I read daily.  Mommycoddle made it clear that I needed to become part of the neighborhood.  So here I am with my giant moving truck and dozens of cardboard boxes.  It will take a while to unpack and learn my way around this new-to-me thing.  I hope once I settle in that there will be lots of neighbors to join me for coffee.

I have decided that I'll write as if the lovely bloggers who I have followed for years have already found me.  I'll write to share what I'm making (if I can ever step away from the inspiration on my screen and actually MAKE something!).  I'll share the vintage/junk I have bought or would like to buy and I'll bore you with stuff about my kids.

I have a fancy DSLR that I love and I am hoping that the need to post pictures with posts will drive my increased use of the camera.  I'm putting this post up with no photo but with a promise to myself to get one ready for the next post.

So...what we will have here is a crafting mommy blog with cruddy pictures!  I can feel the subscribers lining up already!  Oh, well...I'll give this neighborhood of blogland a try and see what happens.  I'll polish off my commenting skills and try to be a good neighbor.  I'll keep the welcome mat out and the porch light on...