play

bea, is very good at playing. she has the capacity to shut herself up in her room and play for a couple of hours without a break. she makes up little stories amongst her little bits and bobs.

the capacity for play is really nice to have. it means you will never be bored.

i've been playing with photos and playing at making a website.

here are the recent fruits of my creative play.

the photos are over exposed photos of the kids layered with 'bokeh' photos.
i kind of like the surreal feel to them.

B and K decided to have a tea party photo shoot.

last week. on tuesday morning, bea decided that what she wanted to do was have a tea party. photo shoot. i had to chuckle. she claims she is starting to believe me when i say taking photos is a job. maybe this photo shoot idea was her way of saying sorry for laughing in my face when i told her i was starting to take pictures for people as a job. she literally scoffed and said 'that is NOT work. where is your office?'

so, we dutifully rounded up some items that would be suitable for a tea party. in the end, it had to be watered down quite a bit from her initial ideas of tablecloths and cucumber sandwiches. in the end, she settled for neenish tarts from the shop and apples and pears in a pail. water in the teacups instead of honeyed tea, as she'd originally thought.

here is their little story.



two girls decided to have a picnic tea party in the field. so they packed their snack and ran off together.



they found a spot that was just right and set down their things.



they had a spot of tea (ahem, water).



and a lovely chat.



until the sun was low in the sky (and the baby brother was too cranky for anymore photos to be taken).



the end.

.

late afternoon and evening, the other day.

tea leaves // a short sleeved version

hooray! i finally finished my first ever hand knit adult garment. i actually finished it quite a while ago and did some fine tuning (frogged about 4 inches off the bottom, moved the buttonholes a bit and shortened the sleeves). And now, i'm more than happy with it. i love the short sleeves and it is perfect for the weather here (and will be perfect for all year round in Canada I'd say).











i had been wanting to make a tea leaves cardigan for awhile - tiny tea leaves originally, and i probably will eventually make a little version for my little daughter. but no more wool will be purchased this year, so tiny tea leaves will have to wait!

i used a somewhat rough yarn, cascade sport weight. after blocking it did soften up quite a bit. I'm not really affected by the itch of wool luckily, so this cheaper 100% wool did the trick.

Wool from here.

Pattern from here.

bird feeding

the little folks out feeding a little magpie the other day. i believe it was ritz crackers.

a daily event - running out in the paved area outside our townhouse for a bit of a let loose turned a bit special with the arrival of an inquisitive young maggie.

feeding birds is actually really fun! i'd forgotten. . .


i thought they looked cute in their home made head and tail zebra fit outs. although i'm pretty sure ruben isn't the 'head' of this duo.

bokeh // camera play

recently, i had a little foray into bokeh, a japanese term for blur pertaining to photography.

fun! and super easy. tutorials here and here.

these were all taken in the backyard and in a dark bedroom, using pink fairy lights as the light source. 

i like the one at the bottom left, the hearts look a little like fluttering white butterflies.

pinterest // a new place to squander time

oh dear.

Source: remodelista.com via Tracey on Pinterest

OH BOY! this is just one little pin up from one little pinspiration board on pinterest.

you can browse boards by subject matter, but mainly it is of the home/diy/art/design/scrumptious food persuasion.

a good place to start, if you want to be inspired.

what we ate

we ate some yummy things this weekend. there was healthy stuff involved (rice bowl, tuna salad) and there were some not to healthy things involved (ahem, peanut butter cookies, sticky date pudding, fish and chips).

LUNCH//


lemon zest and parsley tuna salad on fig and caramelized onion crackers with organic cherry tomatoes

this is often what lunch looks like for me and the kiddos. i don't love sandwiches so i often struggle to figure out easy lunches.

TREAT//


peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies.

oh geez. these cookies turned out really well, not surprising considering their ingredients. i'm eating one right now actually. they have a very sandy texture, and a short-bready sort of feel. mmmmm.

here is the recipe.

DINNER//


red jasmine rice bowl with grated veggies, deviled eggs and nutritional yeast dressing.

inspired by the growing season's rice bowl, we ended saturday on a healthy note! organic red jasmine rice with some chickpeas thrown in and grated raw seasonal vegetables. sprinkle black sesame seeds, pepitas and sunflower seeds, and add deviled eggs and a delicious nutritional yeast-based dressing for your B-vitamin fix (notoriously difficult to find in vegetarian diets). mmmm, umami overload! you feel healthy just eating it! here is a rough recipe for the dressing, although i am not known for accuracy in these matters - i tend to make salad dressings by taste. you may want to taste and adjust the balance of sour and savoury on this one according to your own tastes!

buttons and bottle

this game, requiring only buttons and an old bottle has really captivated him. he is pretty good about small things. although he thought the bottle looked ready for a sip once full of buttons. ahem. luckily it was an adult supervised activity!



Bea goes to a montessori preschool, and there is an emphasis on giving children 'real' versions of adult objects as well as avoiding having all toys with the same plastic texture.



i love how he concentrates hard on new tasks, honing new skills. he loves to put things into containers. he still thinks tidying up is an exciting activity - one that requires clapping and rejoicing. not so his big sister. each object placed within another punctuated by a definite 'there'! (although to my mummy-ears only, non-mother ears may here something that sounds more like 'deh')



he is a very active little guy - i definitely notice a difference between him and his sister at this age. i'm just learning he might need to be directed into quiet activities more than she ever needed it. for the moment, this bottle and buttons are holding him captive.

chocolate wafer yoyo cookies (aka diy oreos)

i made these 'oreo' style cookies recently. i found them at smitten kitchen. mine didn't look the way they were meant to, but still, were pretty impressive really. sort of looked like what macarons would look like if macarons were cookies. which is a roundabout way of saying they turned out macaron shaped.

however, i felt a little confused about why i decided i needed to make oreos from scratch. in retrospect, i don't even really like oreos that much. i would probably never buy oreos from the shop. i think i was simply seduced by the photos and the idea.  she smote me with her scrumptious description and pristine stacks of perfectly formed chocolate wafers with icing betwixt.

i am happy with the inspiration though - i think i will definitely be on a quest to make my own sort of wafer-icing combo, perhaps a nice spicy gingerbread with cream cheese icing. i LOVE cream cheese icing, probably a million times more than regular icing.

do you ever wonder why you are making something when it is easily accessed at a shop?
the short answer is that the food made from scratch in your own kitchen often cheaper, healthier and tastier. you know exactly what went into it (grubby kids fingers included).

further points in favour include (but by no means are limited to) less packaging, less brand recognition and associations taking up precious space in your kids and your own brains, the resources saved by shipping bulk items rather than value added products and the pure satisfaction of smelling the heavenly scent of cookies wafting through the house and out the door into the neighbourhood and down the street (wind providing).

cast off, cast on

cast off: one not so little baby sweater. it should do him for a couple of years and i've some yarn leftover stored in a zip lock bag for future addition of more stripes to elongate the arms and body length.

i'm pretty sure elizabeth zimmerman gave me the idea when she discussed unravelling entire sweaters and knitting them again to accommodate growing children. i'm more than sure that a few extra stripes on this sweater will stretch it to at least half a decade of use, which is more than i can say for a lot of my clothes. choose colours wisely and this approach really validates purchasing good quality, natural fibre yarns for kids knits.



i used noro cotton/silk blend (the grey-black stripes) and some sort of merino wool sock yarn. the sweater was meant to be a stash buster which is why these yarns were never meant to be together - the sage green wool is probably a third of the thickness of the noro in some places (the noro is quite variable in gauge) so the finished stripes look a little wonky together, but not too wonky. it certainly won't be mistaken for a store bought sweater let me tell you.



cast on: organic cotton sweater for myself! i must admit i am a bit daunted by the sheer size of, well, myself and the seemingly endless number of  off white stitches this involves my fingers knitting. but i've got these really clicky and slide-y metal needles going and the sweater is meant to be a loose and drapey knit, broken up with tiny noro stripes, so i'm hoping it won't drag by too slowly.

i will keep you posted, now that i'm posting again.

holy smokes, i'm posting

oh my. i haven't posted anything for 4 months! i have been making, and i have been commemorating things made in photos but i haven't been posting. some of this can be explained by an increasingly active boy babe and a sewing project i've been putting off (therefore rendering myself unable to start other projects without feeling guilty, resulting in a strange avoidance of sewing and fabric stash perusal). happily, i've (more or less) finished the dreaded sewing i'd been dreading, and done heaps of yummy kid stuff sewing.

blogging i guess has taken a back seat, for many reasons in addition to the ones above. but recently a few things have happened which converged to increase my chances of blogging. i got a comment from the daughter-in-law of a blogger i really like, i joined photobucket (ran out of free space on flickr) and i read a really good post accompanied by amazing photos.

and so, my inspiration cup runneth over and i had the photos taken (with a new amazingly beautiful camera) and therefore, i had to post something. i think my stalemate with blogging might be over for now.

without further ado, here are his and her new pants. his are cut from an old striped t of mine, and have a sort of harem pant cut. hers are tights made from purple bamboo stretch-velour. i know! i actually also have made myself a pair. i think velour could be a new tights fabric of choice for me - sometimes tights aren't quite as warm as you want them to be in the winter and the pile of the velour really contributes to the coziness factor.

the location is the wynnum croquet club. it was really fun to shoot.







seriously, i am going to be posting again. soon. i have things to record, including my very first ever pieces of clothing that match my daughters (gasp! i know, i've reached a new level. i'm not sure where that level is though. higher? lower?).

how to make snowflake god's eyes.

this week i made some christmas decorations. i'm not really a christmas decorator, although i would like to be (on my terms!) but i was really happy with the way these sort of god's eyes inspired snowflake decorations turned out. the kids love them too, bea insists that they are actually dream catchers.

it was a good way of using up bits of yarn and they are really quick and easy to make. plus god's eyes are so hot right now, you know?

bright colours keep them from venturing into blair witch territory, and the pom poms give them a sort of gypsy circus feel.