We took out our advent calendar and hung it up yesterday. The children were ecstatic–their mother less so. I’d like to make a new advent calendar, something sparkly and with more candy involved.  Sounds like an easy sell to a bunch of kids, right? Oh no, my daughter started asking about advent activities before Halloween. I do love many of the things we do during advent, but around the 20th I run out of energy. If my kids weren’t such sticklers for tradition, these are some of the advent calendars I might make:

Books! 24 christmas books! Looks awesome, but sounds expensive, right? All the books don’t have to be new: use what you have, hit the thrift store, wrap a library book (why not?!). I think this is a great, simple, no-stress advent calendar. The kids get the excitement of opening a present each day and you all get to cozy up together on the couch every evening.

Many Christmas songs and traditions come from Germany, so why not an advent calendar too? All 24 of these sweet boxes are printed with a christmas scene or saying (in german). And they are available as a free download!

I love the idea of lighting a candle every night for advent. And I love even more the thought of having 25 candles burning for christmas dinner!  Here is another advent calendar that uses tea lights and a tutorial for numbered luminaries.

Martha Stewart always makes office supplies look awesome. This would be a great advent calendar for flat gifts: stickers, temporary tattoos, coloring pages, more stickers, cards, other flat things.

Yes, this is an activity advent calendar, but it’s free and printable and totally awesome! Plus Mr. Printable is a great site for (flat!) things to put in all these advent calendars too! Go check him out.

Delia from delia creates made this super huge! super fantastic! countdown to christmas advent calendar. Pop on over to her post to see this and so many more amazing christmas things she made.

Have you unearthed your advent calendar yet? Or are you making one? Or are you going the chocolate calendar route?

This cashmere baby set is very quickly becoming my go to baby gift to make. One shrunken cashmere sweater will usually yield one pair of pants and a hat (both in newborn-ish size) with some scraps leftover for a toy of some sort.

The hat pattern is the same martha stewart pattern I’ve used over the years, but I’ve redrafted it so many times I don’t know if it’s the same as hers any more. This one turn out a little helmet-y. I wanted to add ties to it, but nothing seemed to work: the jersey bias tape I made was too janky looking, the braided jersey was too thick, and the cashmere wasn’t stretchy enough.

Instead of continuing to fuss with the ties, I just made another hat. This one is made with the pilot cap pattern from Sew Liberated–an excellent pattern. I added a lining to the pattern because the striped jersey fabric I was working with was so thin.  I love this one to bits. I don’t know why I never made these when my kids were little, but everyone I know who has a baby is getting one from here on out!

Last time I made this ball, I hand stitched it. This time, well, this time there was less time. The ball turned out a little pointy–not really what you are looking for in a ball. Next time I might try hexagons. Jennifer Murphy has a lovely tutorial for pentagon balls that I used for this ball. She had the great idea to add a bias tape handle! There is a little jingle bell inside the ball, so the baby can hold on to the handle and shake it until her mother goes mad.

Do you have a signature baby gift you make?

I have been on a bit of a crocheting kick recently. After all the sewing for kcwc I got rather sick of looking at my sewing machine. And I got sick of certain little people poo-pooing things I made for them. So I went to the yarn store and bought some beautiful, soft, and squishy yarn to make something just for me.

I’m not usually a fan of things trying desperately to be something they are not–think tofu dogs. Crochet is not knitting, even though they both use yarn. Crochet is its own art and has its own strengths that I try to showcase. But I wanted so badly to make the bandana cowl pattern by Purl Bee.  Looking at it was painful, because it is so perfect, but I can’t knit to save my life.

Thankfully someone made an equally awesome crochet bandana cowl–no tofu dogs in sight. The cowl is the same shape as the knitted version, but I think the stitches were chosen by someone who loves crochet and knows how to show of its strengths.  It worked up super fast in the gorgeous wool/silk blend yarn I bought. All the cowl details are on ravelry if you are interested.

ooo! looks like there’s a little crochet on crochet action going on in this last picture.

I’m over at a happy stitch today for her new series fail friday. I was so happy that Melissa asked me to contribute, because crafty/sewing blogs really need to talk about mistakes more. The pretty pictures are nice, but everybody screws up sometimes! Failures are hard to own up to, but honestly they are a lot more interesting and a hell of a lot funnier than perfectly perfect projects all the time. So go check out my post about my kcwc double fail!

Today I am super excited to introduce you to Mary Jo of Five Green Acres. I am lucky enough to know Mary Jo in blog life and real life. She is a whirlwind of creative energy! When she walks in a room you cannot help but be swept up in her projects and plans and insatiable curiosity about all things crafty.

This is wool. First Harvest: Backyard from Mary Jo, FiveGreenAcres on Vimeo.

Years ago, Mary Jo had an idea that started with carting home sheep in the back of her minivan. Since that day, she has thrown herself into raising sheep, grazing sheep, birthing sheep, and shearing sheep. If that weren’t enough, she then went on to clean the wool, card the wool, dye the wool, and spin the wool. And now yarn! gorgeous, squishy, soft, subtly colored yarn! Please watch this lovely video to see the birth of  beautiful yarn, named appropriately First Harvest.

Because we live so close, Mary Jo delivered a skein in that same minivan! Then my work began. I needed to find a project that was worthy of the yarn. A skein of First Harvest yields a precious 100 yards.  I asked her how she determined the weight and length of each skein:

When I set about spinning up the dyed fiber, I knew I wanted to make a yarn that could be knit up fairly quickly – something that was at least worsted weight or heavier.  The downside of this is that I can only fit so much on my spinning wheel’s bobbin before it becomes too full, limiting the length of each skein to about 100 yards.

Another thing about designing yarn – determining the gauge can be something of a guessing game.  It all depends on the size of needle (or hook) used, right?  I had determined that First Harvest was about a worsted weight, comparing it to other yarn I had in my stash, but now that I’ve added the yarn to the Ravelry database, I see that by their standards First Harvest is a Bulky weight.  Ravelry gets the final say, I suppose, so I’m changing my tune – Bulky it is.  The semantics of weight don’t matter as much in the actual working up of a project, as long as you do a gauge swatch, which we all do, every time, right?  Hee.

I of course did not swatch, so I crocheted and ripped and crocheted and ripped and crocheted and ripped. I couldn’t find a pattern that was special enough for the yarn and used just the right amount of yarn. Finally I gave up the never ending Ravlery pattern search and made up my own pattern (first harvest cowl pattern here).

 

I came up with a pebble-y stitch that shows off the yarn beautifully. Mary Jo created this gorgeous gray/brown color with sumac berries of all things. She named it Portobello, which describes it perfectly: mushroomy, earthy, soft and loamy. Of course I’m not perfectly pastoral, so I added a stripe of shocking blue for the city side of things.

Visit Mary Jo’s blog, Five Green Acres (and shop, This is Wool) to see more of First Harvest and hear stories of her yarn from sheep to skein.