be my valentine

my needle-felting efforts this week

Oh, I love this holiday. So needed in sunlight starved January.

Plans are underway for our 7th annual Goates Girls Mother-Daughter Valentine Party (which Audrey always quibbles with, because the daughters have actually only been invited for 4). We're passing out invitation cards at random, so if you're local and we haven't run into you lately, feel free to come: Saturday, February 6th, 10 am-noon.

Hmmm...what Valentine love projects to pursue this year?

I was really inspired by Martha's list, of course. This year the girls' valentine piles will include candy gems in treasured chests

For Marian's class, I think we'll combine these packaging ideas:
sewn glassine and blown kisses

I want to do the spotted secret messages, though I suspect it will be too much this year.
And I want someone to knit me some of these hearts. Feel free.

Purl bee, always charming, came through with these fantastic felt rose barrettes. One for me, too!

And I'm inspired by this by Stephanie Congdon. "I'm sticking with you." Sold out, of course (hers do, so quickly!), but I'm not too sad: I happen to have quite the stash of brown and green materials...

fuzzy

Most of the last couple of weeks have been devoted to fuzzy creations of 3 sorts:

(1) Introducing needle-felting to 3 separate friends. Then more doing it together. I'm drumming up a lot of business for blue goose glen, my favorite wool web source. My fiber choice? For somewhere in the $25 range, they'll send you a pound of wool roving remnants, in a range of colors. A pound is a LOT of wool. 1/2 pound is also available. You can also get needles & other felting supplies. They used to run their store from ebay, but now have their own site, here, with all things fiber.

One of my friend Becci's creations (she's been a needling madwoman!) that she gave to Marian last night.
She's been doing some very cute things with acorns, too: vessels & wee animal caves. So precious you want to taste.

(2) Working on a first birthday gift for my cutie-patootie niece, Mykita. I love dolls more than anything, I think, and hand-sized dolls make me kind of melty inside. I made the body from a favorite cashmere sweater that succumbed to the big moth invasion of 2004, and it is so delightfully soft and light. It has been awhile since I've sewn, and I'm newly hooked. It was just really satisfying. I took some process shots that I'll share later, when her quilt is done, too, but if you just want the doll satisfaction without the sewing satisfaction, I recommend my favorite Waldorf doll maker: Aunt Boo's Babies. On etsy, of course. Her work is amazing. The next pile on the sewing table? 4 space boys.(3) Reuben has been growing hair (dubbed "fuzzies" by Marian when she was growing her own) for two weeks, and I had 122 photos on the card I loaded last night (yup, I just counted), trying to get the perfect fuzzy shot. That wasn't fuzzy. Here are a couple of my favorites:A nice thick fringe of black is growing on those gorgeous baby blues, too. We can't keep our hands off of his head. And: THIS TIME IT'S STAYING!!
(jinx not, please)Oh, you want more? Okay, since you insist. Here are a few, chosen for their very Reubasaurus-ness.That's my baby.

the other child

Just so you know, I have another child.

I just usually respect her disinterest in being photographed.

She's plenty crafty, but more of a writer, and I hope to see more of her writing on her new (ish) writing blog: goatgirly inks.

photograped by Marian, who doesn't always focus..

.

For Christmas this year, she made all of her gifts, but I was only involved in a couple of them, so they, also, weren't photographed to death.

She made a lovely little memory book for me, signs for her dad's office (3 reversible, with options like "back in 5 minutes" or "I'm here; please knock"), a wooden tree puzzle for Reuben, and a bracelet/keychain set for Marian. We have a cousin exchange on my side of the family, too, and I did get a few process shots of Audrey and a friend making block puzzles for the 6-year-old boys they both were gifting to.We went a couple of days before to our library's used book sale, and each girl chose a book with graphics that they thought their boy would like. Her friend's family just returned from a sabbatical year in South Africa, so her find, a poetry book full of mosiac-like African art was an especially great find (and resulted in a perfectly tricky puzzle). A whole picture book with big illustrations was daunting to work with at first, so to help the girls choose their art, I snipped little viewfinders. They were tremendously helpful.

from Marian to Reuben

Miss Marian made a nice gray linen hippo for Reuben's Christmas gift. It was a collaborative effort: she chose the animal & size she wanted to make, then...okay, I heavily influenced the gray linen choice. Marian can be very stubborn about her artistic vision, though, so I like to think she was of a like mind. The green striped inner ears were her choice. She traced and cut out the pattern pieces, and I cut the fabric and machine-stitched the seams. She turned the creature's skin. Marian wanted to use safety eyes and I attached those & the ears so they would all be extra-secure for the hippo-eating baby.Marian firmly stuffed the beast (we chose to use polyester filling so Mr. H will be machine-washable), and stitched up his bum. I love her stitches:
(Marian also gave Reuben the small tin mentioned in the last post, which I fill with various wee bits of the baby-safe variety (Kix are popular) and he loves to open and close and open and spill. It's the biggest hit of his Christmas, even if all of her glue-stick decorations only lasted 23 seconds.)

I badly want Reuben to cuddle this guy to sleep, and he usually will condescend to give him a fat kiss/bite (sometimes I get that sort, too; he's working on those canines!) at night time, but his preferred cuddly is a remote. Or phone. Either is fine, but the buttons are essential, and it's nice if they respond with lights or beeps. Such a techno boy already.
I'm trying to kick 2010 me in the p'toosh and do more house work. I need to do both kinds, of course, but here I mean the sewing and decorating sort. I finally finished the throw pillows for the couch, which I made far too complicated (each one has a different zipper approach, and I should have followed Sally's advice on all of them and used hidden zippers, because she's right, they are by far the easiest and prettiest, but I also rather adore using 10 cent zippers from the local factory outlet. Anyway, you can see 'em on the couch above. The fabric looks hodge-podgy, but was actually very carefully curated, and bought piece-by-piece from etsy sellers. I love them. Next up: getting these off the floor and onto the walls.

first wax

Santa brought Reuben a lovely first set (in a tin! such a sucker Santa is for tins!) of Lyra beeswax crayons. We tucked them in the travel backpack as part of my distract-the-starving-child pre-MRI toolkit last week and he really did catch on that those sticks made lovely bright tracks. He was uninterested in my attempts to teach him an appropriate grip and then rather interested in munching them. Sorry, too expensive, my love! Art lesson the first ended, and we moved onto finger puppets-in-a-tin (sensing a theme, here? He does love to open.).

gbf2

Reuben is running wild and napping very sporadically, and Nathan has been home, with other ideas for those short naptimes, so my time has been munched up. No holiday wrap-up blogging yet (good handmade lovelies to share soon!!) But I had too much good news this week not to post a little something. If not crafty, it's very CREATE-ive. My brother's wife had a safe delivery of this chubby-cheeked darling, named after my father, who died 5 years ago: Greg Bryan Frandsen II. So much family joy with this one, I tell you. We're all weeping over the phone together. His name feels so right. Devn is the oldest son, so the name is his birthright, we figure. How to work out a trip to Arkansas???

Reuben had an MRI on Tuesday, and news is good: less enhancement than the one 7 weeks ago, which supports the theory that what is showing up is "normal" post-surgical healing growth. I especially buy that one because he can move his arm much better than anticipated--full range, as far as we can tell. The kid's a tadpole, and has been growing himself a new shoulder. Thanks for all of your good feeling vibes and prayers.

Off to New York in a couple of minutes: my little brother Paul is interviewing at Rutgers (starting a PhD in Evolutionary Taxonomy in the fall) and we're meeting him for a quick icy city day.

overdue

Marian just slipped out to the mailbox with a fat stack of Christmas thank you cards.

And last year's Christmas thank you cards.
And baby gift thank yous.
(all found in a box, written & thus xed off the list...but never mailed. until today. luckily, many are to the same patient folks. not the best idea for saving on postage, I advise!)

Catching up.

Here's to a 2010 full of that.

Anna Maria Horner's thoughts on joining the human race this year really resonated with me. Read it here, the first point in her 2009 review.