We needed some test swatches on the wall downstairs.

First things first — Volunteers. Luckily, I had two.

Secondly, smocks. Luckily, Daddy had plenty of old tshirts he didn’t mind donating to the cause.

Thirdly… well, there is no thirdly, they just got right down to it!

The colors don’t look anything like this. Just letting you know.

We have narrowed it down (it’s like the a lighter version of the 3rd box), and purchased paint. Taping is finished, spackling and sanding is next.

um…. I guess I am giving myself another hole in the head.

Because I wanna make a quilt for Jocelyn! Wheeee!! It all started because Ethan has a very thick, flannel blanket, that he calls his “warm blankey.” It’s very simple, just 2 pieces of flanel sewn together with a very very thick batting in between, not even quilted, just tied off with yarn.

Jocelyn is not so good with keeping the blankies on her. She just seems to run a little hot (gets hot easily), while Ethan runs cool and loves to be WARM (this is the boy who wanted to wear long sleeves in JULY). So she often kicks off the blankets in the night, and while that was fine in the summer, it’s getting colder now, and this morning when she climbed into bed with us her poor little limbs were so chilly.

I’ve tried to teach her how to sit up and pull her blankets over her in the night if she’s cold, but whenever I check on her, she is always curled up into a little ball with nary a blankey in sight.

So I thought I’d make her a big warm blanket similar to Ethan’s, only bigger, so that it falls over the sides of her bed (harder for her to wiggle out of!)

She requested “Pink, mommy. Pink.”

So I must oblige! I had a fabric in my stash that I just love love love and bought with the intention of making a blanket for her with “someday” .. well, today seems to be someday! Hmm.. but it’s not flannel.

Well, no matter, I’ll just make it nice and thick and warm, doesn’t have to be flannel for that, right? I got to thinking how to use this fabric and thought that a simple quilt with square blocks would be just the thing, maybe some more pinks and a couple greens to set it off – what could be sweeter than pink and green?

Here are the fabrics I bought today, along with the one I already had (the first one), piled onto my scanner. The top two are making me crazy with love. All of them really, but those two especially:

I mapped a sample out just to get an idea of what it would look like — the squares aren’t super representative of what it would look in an actual quilt, since in the picture, the fabric squares are actually only about 2 inches of fabric when in actuality the squares would be double or triple that, so the pattern is kind of missing … but it’s enough to give you the idea.

I’m loving the pink and green. Maybe a white fabric to toss in very sparsely as well would look good?

So I was thinking about the finished product, and I am not pre-washing any of the fabrics, as I am hoping it will shrink up and give it that nice, puckered vintage feel — but to get that, it will have to be quilted, not tied off (like Ethan’s is) and will need a thinner batting (rather than the super thick warm batting Ethan’s has)…

Wait a second here..

original idea:

• quick,
• tied off,
• thick,
• warm,
• flannel,
• big.

Um… project has morphed into:

• quick pieced squares,
• tied off quilted, maybe even machine quilted,
• thick, thin and puckery/vintagey
• warm — thin can still be warm!,
• flannel quilting cotten,
• big.

Ahem.

Well, I don’t care. It’s going to be fabulous!

Ethan’s soccer team’s name is, “LIGHTNING”.

Jocelyn’s soccer team is the “POWER RANGERS”.*

We spend about half of each saturday cheering on these two teams. Even when it’s Jocelyn’s game, she is not on the field at all times. and thus, she is also cheering on her own team at times, and ditto for Ethan.

Yesterday on our way home from school:

Jocelyn: “I’m on team GO POWER RANGERS and Ethan is on team GO LIGHTNING!”

*I changed the “is” in that sentence to “are” and then back again about 10 times. And I’m still not sure I got it right. Fairly sure. But not certain. The noun is singular. So the verb is singular. Right? Right.

Right?

I *knew* you were saying to yourself, “Amy, you haven’t posted any photos in a long long time!”

So I took a blurry camera phone picture.

JUST FOR YOU.

BECAUSE I CARE.

Friday night, the right side of my chin became red, very splotchy, and VERY painful. In … about a 1 inch diameter. Now, don’t hate me (because I’m beautiful), but I don’t get zits. Not really. I am blessed with my mother’s gorgeous skin. Once in a blue moon a small delicate zit may make an appearance along my forehead, and once in like, every 5 blue moons I may get a real doozy on my nose, but generally speaking, zits stay away from me.

So this eruption broiling and festering DEEP DEEP DEEP below the surface caused me great anguish.

Zit cream was purchased. Squishing commenced. I know! I know! You have to WAIT to squeeze a zit! There is a proper time and place, and while it is still broiling deep under the surface, that’s not the time! You have to wait until the lava of pus and goo make an appearance on the surface, in the appearance of that little white head. But in the evening, as I sat on my bed peering into my 3x magnification face mirror (lighted! every woman needs a mirror like this), I could NOT HELP MYSELF. I poked. and I squished. Just a little bit. Then I faithfully dabbed on my zit cream and went to bed.

As I said, I don’t get zits. And the size and magnitude of this… this…. well, I just have to come out and say it, I am forced to believe that this was an alien life form that had somehow gotten under my skin and was incubating there until the mother ship gave it the signal to erupt and take over the planet earth, … this THING that was happening to my face, I was convinced was not a zit. I told James approximately 1,376 times over the weekend that I was going to have to see a doctor about this, where I was positive they would have open it up, excavate, and then re-terraform my face back to it’s normal appearance.

James scoffed, laughed and said, “It’ll be ready to pop in a day or two.”

Monday dawned. Columbus day. We were awful parents brilliant people and took the kids in to school while taking the day off for ourselves and wandered around museums in DC. The pain had faded a bit, I’m sure because I finally was firm with myself to STOP SQUEEZING IT ALREADY! and the full 1 inch diameter had shrunk down. The THING was now hard and concise, like a dried pea under the skin. I felt vindicated. This is NOT A ZIT. NO ZITS BEHAVE THIS WAY. I called my mom and of course, explained to her in great detail my facial disfiguration, and she immediately said, “Go to the dermatologist.”

I immediately turned to James and said, “HA! SHE AGREES WITH ME!”

By the end of the day, he finally admitted that he agreed with me too. This was no run of the mill zit we were talking about.

I was pretty sure it was something caused by an ingrown hair.

So long story short (TOO LATE!) I went to a dermatologist during my lunch hour today. They gave me an injection (can’t remember what it was. steroids? cortizone?) right into the little incubating alien (they called it a cyst caused by either a pimple or an ingrown hair, too similar to tell) and prescribed an oral antibiotic.

I can’t wait until the little guy is aborted already and gone off my face.

I also wish I had taken a picture of my face every day since it started. I thought of doing that, but then dismissed it as being too gross. I should have just done it, because now I want PROOF OF MY DISFIGUREMENT. It’s a little red now, but ever since Monday, doesn’t actually LOOK that scary (not like it did Saturday, oh MY). Also, just looking at me, you can’t tell there’s a hard little pea under the skin. That kind of grossness is a tactile experience.

anyway.

I just thought I’d fill you in on the first dermatological visit of my life. I have to go back in 3 weeks to make sure the alien is gone.

I’ve named it Fred. Please join me in wishing Fred to evacuate the chin area… permanently.

.. At the very least, let’s hope he leaves before the mother ship gives him the signal and planet earth is dhoomed.

… but not really.

Remember all the big talk about making Jocelyn a Belle costume for halloween?

Well, I read the directions, washed the fabric, read the directions, ironed the fabric, read the directions, read the directions, read the directions, cut out the pattern pieces, ironed the pattern pieces, read the directions, pulled out the leaf in my kitchen table, and then read the directions, before I tried to cut this sucker out…

And really felt crappy when I put 2 pieces together that were supposed to be exactly identical, and were SO SO NOT.

This fabric is super slippery and the damn stuff must have STRETCHED and I thought about the 137 more pieces I still had to go and … well..

.. I pitched in the towel.

I suck.

Honestly, I think I just bit off way more than I can chew – I have never made an article of clothing from a pattern before, and it was pretty foolish of me to pick this one to start with.

I broke the news to Jocelyn and she wasn’t happy. (It was not smart of me to do this as she was recovering from an “owie” in my lap, and was already in the grump mode, but she came around when I said we could go and pick out a costume this very evening, after we cleaned up.

Normally, I’m not exactly speedy on following through on these sorts of things, but I made sure we did. The kids cleaned up the toy room, and then by god I got us to Costco, where she selected a costume. She has spent the half hour before dinner prancing around in her new Sleeping Beauty costume, cried when she had to take it off for dinner. Ethan has had his Clone Trooper outfit for a while now, and he joined in the costumey fun as well. After dinner, Jocelyn promptly stripped off all her clothes and donned her new costume anew.

I think she’ll survive not having a costume her mommy made.

So yeah, I am disappointed that I had to give up my delusions of grandeur, and that I have SIX YARDS of this shiny polyester yellow fabric (in case you don’t sew, THAT’S 18 FEET LONG, 45″ in width.) It didn’t cost too much, and I have plans to at LEAST make her a simple dress up twirly skirt out of it, but that will still probably leave me 4 yards left.

I’m sure we’ll think of something.

Anyway.. at least this means I can move forward on some of my other projects – like painting the basement and recovering my chairs.

I have more to say about this Belle and Sleeping Beauty and Disnification stuff at a later date. (preview: The additional de-disnefication tactics that have been taken in our house. Or rather, my car.)

But for now, this is enough to write on a Sunday evening. It’s been a lovely weekend.

Except for the fact that I suck 🙂

-amy

My good friend Linda was trying to help me remember when exactly my blogiversary is, by pointing out that SHE started her blog 2 years ago on October 12th, right when she went to Korea to teach English and starve herself between visits to Subway and Seoul (she’s allergic to seaweed and is a vegetarian and therefore couldn’t eat 90% of the food there. Just between you and me, she could have picked a better country, don’t you think?).

That totally jogged my memory. I had just recently gotten addicted to reading blogs (dooce and loobylu were my first love at first blogs), and then Linda started hers, and I think James had installed wordpress on our server, and I got Linda’s email announcing her blog, turned to James and said, “I want a blog too!” Thank you Linda — so that definitely puts me a few weeks early for last weeks’ announcement that it was my blogiversary, but that’s ok. I’m still going to claim it, because I already did, and I can’t go through all that bother of claiming a different date, I mean, I have important things to do like sitting on my ass and watching Cash Cab figuring out how to make Jocelyn’s Belle costume.

It’s nice to say that I’m looking at a normal weekend ahead of me, and not one that is full of freelance work. “Normal” means a soccer game at 9am and then another one at 11am, but I guess that means we’ll get all that out of the way in the morning and have our afternoon free. Monday is Columbus day, which I have off, but James does not, and the kid’s school is still open. Not sure what I’m going to do with that, but I guess we’ll see. It might be nice to just head into DC by myself and wander through some museums.

Anyway, without further ado, the link for Recycle Friday is one of the first Cute Kids Stories on this site. There are several stories in this post, so sit back for more of an “awwww” than a laugh, really.

And if you have the day off on Monday, and feel like telling me how you plan on spending it, I’d love any suggestions!

a little late, but better than a poke in the eye!

So who’s surprised to hear that after I post the post about which color couch to buy (“I’m definitely going with the brown!”) That I changed my mind about 50 bajillion more times?

But now, my mind is made up, not only made up – couch purchased.

As much as I like the dark brown couch, I think the green one would look better in the basement. Plus, when I piled heavy things on James, he finally admitted to liking the green one better.

It will be arriving in 5-10 business days.

Wahoo!

Let me tell you a story about a girl who had her finger in a lot of pies.

Ok, that sounds dirty, I’ll just talk about me and all the crap I’ve been trying to do.

THE ONE THAT ACTUALLY PAYS
First off, I’ve had a freelance gig. It has been somewhat strenuous, as I have a full time job, 2 kids with soccer, a husband, and a household.. I used to do quite a lot of freelance, when I didn’t have kids, and then when I had kids, but stayed home with them. So when an old friend of mine called me up and asked if I was interested, I told him bluntly that it would really have to be worth my while. I knew that the hours spent on a freelance gig would be hours spent, oh let’s see, not sleeping, not spending time with my kids, not seeing their soccer games, not seeing my husband, not taking care of my house.. and I knew that it would wear me out! So they made it worth my while and I jumped on board. I’ve been cranking on that for the last few weeks, with a big push this last weekend. Now, little bits and bobs pop up, but it’s finishing up nicely. Overall, I’m glad I took the gig, because it is going to translate into the new couch in the basement! The one I can’t decide which color it should be! Yippee! (My latest plan is to scout out the floor models – if the Lichen is on closeout, then they’re going to be getting rid of the floor models too, right??)

THE BABY CRAFTY
A few weeks ago, there was a joint baby shower for 2 ladies in the neighborhood who were expecting.. Correction, 1 was expecting, the other delivered prematurely at 32 weeks. (At the time of the shower, the baby was still staying at the hospital at the NICU, but now she is at home with her family.) So for this shower, I had 1 baby blanket done, and the other partially done, and somehow I got it into my head to make bibs from Amy Karol’s Bend the Rules Sewing book. It was lots of fun, and I’m glad I did it, but I am NOT glad for deciding to do all this the DAY BEFORE the shower. I was kind of stressed out about it, and that’s never a good thing. It makes you think all about the fact that you can buy a 4pk of bibs at Target for $1.99, and that’s never a good thing to think when you’re making something handmade! Oh, and another thing – Did I remember to take pictures? NO I DID NOT. What’s the point in making handmade gifts if you FORGET TO TAKE PICTURES?? Oh right, the joy of giving, blah blah blah. 🙂

THE BASEMENT PAINTY PAINTY
The basement is an ongoing project. James finished the floor with astonishing speed and verve, and as such, I told him that if he would prep it, I would paint it. He hasn’t finished prepping it, but that’s ok because I don’t think I’ll be able to get around to painting it until November.. and that’s only if I can decide on a paint color by then.

MORE CRAFTY! THIS TIME WITH FURNITURE!
I also bought 2 chairs off craigslist about 2 months ago because I liked their bones, and wanted to try my hand at recovering. It’s a good thing I had planned on recovering to begin with, because they STINK. They reek of dank musty smoke to high heaven. I spent one afternoon several weeks ago pulling staples out of one of the chairs, and at the end of the day, I dropped everything I was wearing into the wash immediately, and then went and got in the shower. It was that bad. So now, 1 chair is taken apart and stripped down to the foam, and the other chair is sitting in the garage in all it’s stinkiness, waiting to be stripped. I am even thinking of stripping the wood and painting them. My thoughts: white, chocolate brown, or turquoise. I’m leaning towards the turquoise. Oooh, or bright red. Super glossy! Fun! The color they are now ain’t bad either. I have pictures, I just haven’t gotten them off the camera yet (STORY OF MY LIFE!)

THE HIGH PRIORITY CRAFTY SEWING PROJECT!
And LASTLY.. and now, most importantly… We have halloween coming up! Which means I have 4 weeks in which to construct a suitable Belle costume! Which I predict won’t be nearly enough time! I even purchased the satiny yellow fabric a few weeks ago. I have looked at the directions numerous times and feel that I am in way over my head. I guess we shall see.

So, yeah. Projects, projects. Lots of projects. Lots of projects for me, for me.