cece is fini!

The CeCee is fini! I've decided to give it to my mother-in-law for Christmas - I've never made her anything particularly special and this turned out quite lovely. When I blocked the 3/4 sleeves, they actually stretched out to full sleves, which I really wanted. I also learned about the construction vs. my body so I'll know how to make another for me eventually.
I am terrible at doing self-portraits
with my camera, but I'll definitely post pictures when my mil gets her gift.

Moo's sweater

I am actually starting to make serious progress on Moo's flowery sweater dress. The back and two sleeves are done. I'm on a 10 row-a-day diet with the front to finish. Ten rows sounds like nothing but the three color intarsia takes a long time and I have to untangle all the yarns at the end of each row. . . . but oh, it's so pretty.

It looks smocked in the body (due to my wayyyyy to tight yarn carry-overs) but I actually really like it - it will be very shaped. I did a fitting with Moo at the farmer's market on Saturday and I think it will be a winner. I might need to do a bit of adjusting at the shoulders - little girls have the tiniest shoulders. But with a pair of red leggings, it will look great. hurrah!

manly polka dots

Can polka dots be manly? Yes! Check out these - E's newest jammie pants. He was utterly disagreeable in posing for me tonight but you'll get the drift. I used one of those super basic pull-on pant patterns - the kind on the spindle that basically shout out, "If you can't make these, turn in your sewing machine."




I also found three more pairs of super soft footie jammies this weekend so I am going to stop with the sleepy time projects for awhile and try to do a bit of tailoring with my clothes. Miss Applebotton needs to take in A LOT of waists on her pants.

saturday market

More dahlias and farmer's market bounty. The blackberries and peaches are just perfect.

fresh air can kill you know

2.17 miles into my walk on the treadmill tonight - just as they went to jury on my tivoed Survivor, the mill just stopped - cold. I dorked over my feet and then kept trying and trying to get it to start again - no go. I am hoping it's just a bit hot, a bit overworked. I am SPOILED rotten by working out to my tivo. Returning to the walking everyday outside without constant entertainment is, well, not appealing to moi. I need my Survivor, my Amazing Race, my Laguna Beach.
Please blow a cold breath towards my treadmill to cool it off by tomorrow morning. My butt thanks you!

froggy jammies

I grew up in a fairly small Wisconsin town and I only knew of one person who went away to sleep-over camp - my friend Kelly got to commune with fillys one summer at Girl Scout horse camp (which still sounds very glam to me today). Instead, my parents took advantage of the local summer offerings, hence my experience at a variety of townie day camps including puppet-making, coil pottery, and bowling camps. I bet there are other girls from the 80's who may have also gone to bowling camp but I haven't met anyone else who, as a child, went to sewing camp. Yes, that was me in the church basement for two weeks, laboring over a pastel Hawaiian printed camp shirt. Sewing camp has served me well - I wasn't a repeat visitor but I parlayed those two weeks into a lifetime of being to able to just practically pull off the sewing projects I am interested in.
Rearranging our laundry room allowed me to make an actual dedicated space to sewing. I'm not a perfectionist and I don't care much about details (not the great makings of a good sewer), but I get inspired by fabric almost the same way I get excited about yarn - the colors, the patterns, the feel . . . my latest completed beauty . . . . the froggy jammy pants for E.


Here are the pants in action - wicked cool for popcorn parties.

older people

Today is E's first day in "OP" - which he says stands for "older people" but actually means "older preschool." He was in "YP" aka "younger preschool" for the past year and really thrived in it - he made two best friends, overcame a tough situation with a bully, started getting interested in art, and really bonded to his teachers.
He is very happy and excited to be moving up to the big kids class. It doesn't hurt that his friend Will is moving too.
We went in this morning and set-up his new cubby. He picked one right next to Will. Then he headed outside to play with his friends. As I walked through the school, I got a bit teary - E's in his final preschool room - he started in Wobblers when he was 11 months old and has moved through Toddlers and YP. He has two years left at the school before starting kindergarten, but I already feel a bit wobbly at the thought.
Yeah for E and OP!

dahlias

I can't get enough of these beauties . . . yeah for the farmer's market.

saturday market fun

We took Nana and Jonesie to the downtown farmer's market and met up with Marfie and family. It was chilly and fall-ish and just a perfect feeling morning. We camped out in the middle of the square and took turns watching the kids and shopping. Jonesie tried samples at every booth. Here is Nana with Sam . . . .


And Jonesie with E and Moo.
We came home with some beautiful
produce and dahalis. I made pesto with fresh pasta for dinner and we've been snack on the fruit all day. The dahlias are amazing. I'll post more picture of those tomorrow.

One last picture of E and Moo - their love is destined!

my hot cuppa's birthday

Happy Birthday Tall House, Double Cup!
You are the big papa around our house and E and I love you so! You only grow more handsome and sweet each year that I know you. You are such a great papa to E - so many of my friends can't rely on their partners to be equal parents, but you are truly my partner in raising our little boy. I love that you read BUST and Bluff - you are a man with your own tastes and interests - and you are the very best friend and travel companion.
So today starts your birthday weekend: dinner out tonight, present shopping tomorrow and a family dinner on Sunday. Let the revelry begin!

my own wife

E spent the day with Nana and Jonesie yesterday. It's such a luxury to have them visit for such a long stretch. Nana makes healthy meals, Jonesie lets E tag around with him and both of them include E in their projects - and those projects mostly consist of fine tuning our household - it's like having my own wife for a week.
Just yesterday Jonesie fixed a broken stool, fixed the ceiling fan in our walk-in closet and watered/weeded my tomatoes. Nana dusted all of the woodwork in the house and started putting out the fall dishes. I came home to a lovely meal and got to have a second stint on the treadmill while she put E to bed. I am feeling extremely lucky! Thanks Nana and Jonesie!

still thinking about the beach

I am still thinking about the lovely weekend at the beach. This is where I could be found most of the time it was sunny. Heavenly!

no labor on labor day

What a weekend on the Oregon coast we had - four days of reading, knitting, playing cards, drinking wine, jumping waves and going for walks. Nana and Jonesie are visiting so E was in heaven, getting attention from everyone. After the first night, he decided that he had to sleep with his Jonesie - even though Jonesie was camped out in a single bed. E discovered a Wizard of Oz gameboard and insisted on knowing the entire story. Nana and Jonesie sang him the songs, played the game and told the story of Oz over and over to him. He's such a lucky boy to have grandparents who will play and play and play with him. And what a treat it was for THDC and I - I read three books while we were there and THDC napped every day, I think.

I made a treasure map for E and THDC buried in the sand, using two sticks for X marks the spot. E recruited a couple of Lost Boys (aka grandparents) to help him find it.
On our last night we had a bonfire on the beach. E told stories and didn't take a breath for about thirty minutes. His stories involved a little bit of everything we had been talking about over the weekend - caves, mice, treasure. It was a lovely weekend.

danish fern

I am longing for these dishes- Danish Fern - they were in the Martha by Mail catalog way back when. Now they can only be found on ebay for a small fortune. I think I'll add them, along with the Eileen Fisher bedding at Garnet Hill, in my lust pile. I am so into brown brown brown, matte, taupe, silver, grey. Aren't they lovely?

roadtrip

Tall House, Double Cup and I spent six hours in the mama mobile, going up to Seattle and back for the Mariners/Red Socks game. It was so much fun! Though, my prediction came true - beer in the afternoon lead to a nap on the ride home. Still, I got a lot of knitting done and it was so cool to sit in Frau Marci's amazing seats behind home base. THDC relived his glory days as a pitcher and was generally beaming all day. I tried get a picture of the highway sign for Sleater-Kinney Road but the photo only showed up that we need our windshield cleaned. I stuck to knitting the rest of the trip. I got 3/4's of a CeCe sleeve done.

bit of cece progress

We ran into EVERYONE at the farmer's market this morning. I was

juggling dahlias, fingerling potatos and pumpking bread when we saw Marian the Librarian and a friend. We were talking books and fawning on E when around the corner popped Moo's dad and great aunt and when we went to meet up with Marfie, Moo, and Sam the Man, our neighbors with the two little boys were there too! We sat for hours sipping coffee, eating nibbles of market treats and watching our children run around like hell. I got serious cuddle time with Sam. We also paid for the first semester of a balloon artist's freshman year by purchasing sword after puppy after crown of pastel balloons. What a fun treat. We hadn't anticpated such fun so we returned to a $24 parking fee, but f it. It was totally worth it.

Here is a bit of progress on Cece. One arm down. One to go.

E's first letters

E dictated two letters to me while he decorated the cards and envelopes:

Dear Jonesie and Nana,
I am working on a project. It's an envelope. My friends are Basil and Will. Basil goes B-A-S-I-L. Will goes W-I-L-L. It's cold.

Goodbye. I love you,
E.

Dear Grandpa and Grandma,
I am working on a project and it's a note. It's a letter. I love you. I miss you.
Goodbye,
E.


Strong on the closing, no? An epistolary life certain to follow . . .

treadmill over knitting

I haven't had much knitting progress to post - I've been working the treadmill while watching tivo instead of camping out on the couch to knit. The good news is that the workouts leave me feeling a little more zen with myself and I've been able to get a second walk in at night while E watches his allotted 25 minutes of videos per day. So I've only been knitting in teeny tiny bits. Tall House, Double Cup and I have Mariner/Red Socks tickets this weekend (thanks Frau Marci!) so I'll get to knit all the way up to Seattle, through the whole game and all the way home - unless the beer makes me too sleepy :) Some serious knitting catch up will happen then.

My most motivating tivo watching list for treadmill walking:

*Project Runway (though dangerous if I switch from power walking to runway walking)
*Laguna Beach (it's so bad, it's good)
*old episodes from Survivor on the Game Network (lots of tribal drumming in the background music)
*Rescue Me (everyone is so toxic on that show that it's easy to forget I am working out).
*Workout (for obvious reasons - though they are hardly ever doing cardio on that show)
*Oprah/Martha (if it's a good day)

take me out to the ballpark, in a suite though, please

E and I headed off to the Portland Beaver's Game on Sunday. It was the library's Summer Reading event afternoon - and since I coordinate that program I felt like I had to be there - but it turned out to be SO much fun! It didn't hurt that we had one of those fun suites to watch the game from or that Frau Marci and her family came too! I don't know how much baseball E really got from the experience - he did a bit of art, played racecars with Guapo, and ate A LOT of popcorn and peanuts. But he also did a lot of rockin' out and tried a bit of the chicken dance.

At the end of the game, the kids got to run the bases - the look of exhileration on E's face was fantastic - I couldn't stop smiling.






Yeah for minor league baseball and yeah for watching from the suites.

saturday fun

Tall House, Double Cup was off in Reno with his brother and dad for some boy bonding/gambling so E and I had a very close weekend of activities . . .
Our Saturday was kind of packed with fun stuff - especially in light of the hot hot hot day it was. We had E's school picnic - where the parents dished on the teachers and the kids ran around in packs, so excited to see each other away from the school. E was a little nervous when the fire truck pulled up but eventually was won over when they sprayed the hose.


Then we had a mini-Mexico reunion with three of the six families who went to Casa Tres Vidas last February. We swam and grilled out. Frau Marci made killer grapefruit vodka and tonics - my new favorite. E swallowed a bit too much pool water and ended up a bit sick on the drive home. He implored to sleep in my bed and I didn't protest one bit.

dolphin success

E had his last swimming class for the summer - big break throughs during this session - the back float, the side float and a touch of his face in the water. I asked E what it felt like when he put his face in the water, "Like dying" - his very matter-of-fact reply.


He was cute happy with his certificate but I think the Sponge Bob ice cream treat he got as his end of session reward was the real highlight for him.