Tailored For Two

I love making handmade gifts but sometimes I drive myself into a frenzy as I desperately try to complete them in time. For some reason, I always get a brain storm of ideas two weeks before Christmas or someone's birthday and then I spend every waking hour and spare moment up until that point frantically crafting my gift. Every year I routinely stay up into the wee hours of Christmas morning knitting that last sock or blocking a scarf that I'd had the sudden inspiration to make only three days prior. Once, when my older brother came to visit for his birthday, I literally cast off the hat I was knitting him and then the very next moment, shoved it into his hands as he was walking out the door. Needless to say, I save a lot on wrapping paper.

But this year I have vowed to try extra hard to plan ahead! My first challenge was my niece's birthday coming up this May. This time I began knitting right after New Years after I found this pattern for a girl's ruffled bolero in the December holiday issue of Knit Simple magazine.

 And because I finally planned ahead for once I even had time to knit a matching one for her Barbie doll!

Best of all about planning ahead is I feel so relieved. No more scrambling and staying up until midnight tediously weaving in yarn ends. Also, now I finally have time to wrap it up all nice and give it properly. It definitely is better to plan ahead but there's still a lot more birthdays coming up so I guess I'd better stay busy!

 

Rainbows and Blossoms

What lies at the end of the rainbow?

 

Spring!

 

This was one of the biggest and brightest rainbows I think I've ever seen.



Lucky for me it stopped raining long enough so I could run outside and snap some pictures of it along with all the beautiful cherry blossoms.

 

 

Funny how spring can go from being so rainy and nasty to so very pretty.

 

Baking Bread

There's nothing like the smell of freshly baked bread wafting through the air, especially when the weather starts to turn. Recently I tried my hand at baking bread for the very first time on my own...

Unfortunately things didn't go quite right. My hot cross buns are a bit... flat. Bad yeast, I suppose. Opps...

But thankfully the dollhouse bakery has had a bit more success in this area.

More goodies have arrived for sale in my Etsy shop and more are coming soon!

And now I must go redeem myself from my bread baking fiasco and make some cookies...

The Dollhouse Date Book

I've been making and selling dollhouse miniatures on Etsy since about 2006 and have always enjoyed setting up and photographing the little dollhouse scenes. After seeing my mom self-publish two craft books I got inspired to make one of my own. The idea for this book sprouted about three years ago and I decided it would be a fun and simple project to start with.

Fun was right... but I was wrong about the simple part. 

Making a book, even one as simple as this one, is a lot more complicated than it looks and I found this out quickly. I worked on it off and on for awhile but every time I revisited the project I seemed to have a new idea of how to do it and then would begin all over again. Needless to say I got nowhere with this method.

So finally about nine months ago I decided enough was enough. I must finish this book before I lost the aspiration completely and it became just another one of those forgotten, half-executed ideas that after a fashion usually end up in the trash can or shoved into the back of a drawer or cabinet. Or as in the age of computers, they reside abandon somewhere on the furthermost reaches of a hard drive collecting virtual dust. I hated that to be the case with this project so finally I dug my heels in tried to devote as much time as I could to it.

And now it's done! Finally! *Big satisfying sigh of relief...*

Now I can move on to all the other hundred project ideas that accumulated in my notebooks during this time...

I had fun making this book and learned a lot. I hope it might be of some amusement and hopefully usefulness. I may have not hand stitched the book together or anything but every page was done by hand, by my hands and with love. :)

Learn more about the book here.