1. gate with blue orange mint, 2. Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds, 3. storm at sea recycled top Sold!, 4. DSCF4266, 5. color wheel_400 (flat files), 6. Untitled, 7. 61., 8. la primavera en el living, 9. obviously a bit over the top.

it’s friday (duh) so I thought I’d pop in here and show you a few of my favorite photos. I am particularly taken with that last one. I know Melinda was just trying to pick a color to paint her house, but those colors together are so random and awesome. I kind of wish she would do the whole house like this!

You told me I had to, so I did: I made a matching tie. I used the pattern and tutorial for the little boy’s tie from the Purl Bee. It came together super quick and in one evening I was done. The tie is almost completely hand sewn. If you set up the ironing board in front of the boob tube, you too can make a tie in a night. “Little boy” is a little vague so I didn’t know if the tie would fit my son (he’s three), but it’s actually perfect.

And it was warm enough that they didn’t have to cover up their cute outfits with a winter coat. I remember there being many snowy easters when I was a kid. They even got to have an easter egg hunt outside. Yay for crazy midwestern weather!

I bought the Liberty of London cookie jar from target for my mom’s birthday. I also picked up a kid’s sundress while I was there solely for the fabric, but now a little bird tells me they will be selling cotton curtain panels (aka straight up yardage) sometime soon!

Now you can’t just give someone a cookie jar and not put cookies in it, so I made some chocolate cherry oatmeal cookies and damn if they weren’t pretty good.  Dried cherries are dear, but they are so, so good. Raisins would work, but then they would just be oatmeal raisin cookies and that’s no fun.

Chocolate Cherry Oatmeal Cookies

Ingredients

• 2 sticks unsalted butter, room temperature
• 1/2 cup packed light-brown sugar
• 1/2 cup granulated sugar
• 1 large egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 tea salt
• 1 1/2 cups oats
• 1 cup dried cherries
• 3.5  ounces good dark chocolate, coarsely chopped

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
2. Cream the butter and both sugars on medium speed until light and fluffy, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the egg and mix on high speed to combine. Then add the vanilla.
3. Sift together flour, baking soda and salt. Add the flour mixture to the mixer (make sure it’s on low) and mix just until combined. Add the oats, cherries, and chocolate and mix by hand.
4. Spoon heaping tablespoons full of dough, a couple inches apart, onto a lined baking sheet.
5. Bake cookies until golden brown, about 15 minutes. Cool and give away or keep them all for yourself.

This is the first year that I’ve made my daughter an easter dress. I think it was just too hectic the past few years for me to get one done, much less done on time. But this one was done with a week to spare! Can you believe it? Well the hem is pretty wonky, but I don’t really care because she loves it.

source

The pattern is from the japanese book Girly Style Wardrobe. The dress is incredibly simple, but in japanese it’s a little harder. I could not for the life of me figure out how they wanted me to cut pattern pieces for the tie, so I just made it up as I went along and they are shorter than I would have liked, but whatever. I did actually make a muslin (because the floral fabric she chose for the dress is vintage and so, so lovely) and I should have learned about the tie with the muslin, but I screwed it up totally on that one and didn’t fix it, even though that ‘s what muslins are for silly (I’m sure it will show up on ye ol blog sometime).

I would like to make my son a tie to match, because how adorable would that be, but easter is two days away and there are eggs to dye!

The reverse applique swing skirt from Alabama Stitch Book by Natalie Chanin has been on my to do list for so long now, so long that she has written and published a new book in the mean time. I thought I might be able to make this skirt in time for easter, but it is far from finished. I’m not quite sure if it will work anyway. I went to Joann’s to get the cotton jersey called for and of course they don’t carry cotton jersey.  Poopy Joann’s, almost without fail they will be out of or not stock exactly what I what I go there for.   So instead of cotton jersey I got two different fabrics: the blue is a knit interlock and the purple is a rayon jersey. I don’t know if the blue is stretchy enough. I thought maybe the super stretch rayon jersey would make up for it, but then the fabric paint I got at poopy Michaels is hard and scratchy and it might keep the fabric from stretching even more.  Michaels used to carry the nice jacard fabric paint, but they stopped and switched to the cheapy kind. I need to plan ahead so I won’t have to go to these damn stores.

So we’ll see if it works. I might have to make it all again, but it’s actually been kind of fun so far. And I love me some freezer paper stencils. Printing this pattern over and over really makes me want to print my own fabric (for what, meg? more projects, really you need more projects?).  It wouldn’t actually be that hard now that I’ve discovered the lazy man’s way to use stencils.

and now for the lazy man’s freezer paper tip:

When I was making this skirt I didn’t want to cut 20 or 30 leaf stencils, so I cut 3 and used them over and over again.  I couldn’t wait for the stencils to dry between uses (time is precious! the baby is napping!) so I put another piece of freezer paper over the stencil, plasticy side down, and ironed over both. Then I gently peeled the top freezer paper off and voila! the stencil was ready to use again. The paint was still wet on the stencil, but as long as there are not glops of it, it won’t come of or bleed onto your fabric. The stencil might come loose a little in places when you peel off the top sheet, but this is the lazy man’s way after all, if you want perfect, well then do it your way miss perfect.