Do you see all of my handsome boys there together?  Oh my.  And a little man in a little suit.  Oh, I do so love this sweet boy!  It doesn’t get much more adorable then this.  Clearly he went  everywhere, saw every little thing and talked to everyone.  Also, I think that the photographer may have been a bit smitten (understandable).

Details for the bow tie can be found here.  As you can see, he was not forced to attend in his pajamas, as originally predicted.  Woo-hoo!  Score one for me!

The pattern is Butterick 6894, views B and D.  My copy is 12 years old, but it is amazingly still in print.

The fabric was a beautiful, thick, wool blend suiting with shades of grey, brown and black all mixed up in heathered diagonal stripes.

I had planned on making the older boys vests to wear.  But when I found these full outfits (shirts, pants, vests, and ties) on clearance, for around the same cost as just the fabric, well…considering everything else I wished to accomplish, it just seemed the way to go!  And they look fabulously handsome all the same, yes?

All photographs by the lovely and talented Dawn Joseph.

We built a fire pit.

It’s quite large.

For the Daddy:

Top Ten Reasons that You are Loved

by Galen

A portrait of my children, once a week, every week.

 Iain: on a rainy day

Elijah: just doing his thing

Galen: he loves the woods

Màiri Rose: finally catching up

I wasn’t going to bother with flowers for Màiri, but when she heard that all of the other girls were going to have some, she didn’t want to be left out!

While looking at other floral supplies, I came across these bags.  I hadn’t really seen anything like that before and I thought they were kind of a cute idea.  Rather then buy the $27 bag, I bought a plain, $3 one and embellished it myself.

I do not have pictures of the process, but it was fairly straight forward.

I used a bit of unbleached muslin that I had laying around for the skirt.  First I measured from the top edge of the basket to the fold for the bottom.  Then I measured around the edge of the basket.  I multiplied the second number by 2.5.

1st measurement by 2nd measurement x 2.5 is the size you need to cut your fabric.

You can finish the edges if you like.  The unfinished edges really appealed to me for whatever reason, so I just left them.

Fold the fabric in half, right sides together, lining up the short edges.  Stitch the short edges together.

Run a gathering stitch along the top and gather evenly to fit the top edge of the basket.  Pin it to the basket and stitch in place.  I used a zig-zag stitch for this.

At this point you can do whatever else you like to decorate it.  I used a strip of 3/4″ cotton lace, that I had leftover from Màiri’s blessing gown.  I sewed it over the top edge of the skirt.  Then a used a little scrap of Alençon lace from my gown as an applique to cover where the lace trim was joined.  The whole thing took around 15 minutes.

To fill it, I found that a milk carton was the perfect size, so I cut the bottom off an old one and cleaned it (obviously).  Then I cut a chunk of floral foam to fit neatly inside.  Once the foam had been soaked, I simply stuck spray roses into somewhat randomly.  I really only wanted to use the peach roses, but we had so many of the other ones with short stems, leftover from bouquet making, that it just made sense to use both.

It was a little heavy because of the water saturated foam, but the Wee Miss thought it was great.  And now she uses the bag to hold all of her hair ties and things.

All photographs by the lovely and talented Dawn Joseph.

THE pictures are here.  I’ve decided to kind of unveil the details slowly, craft project by craft project, in the same sort of the way that the day itself came together…

Flowers!  Lovely, lovely flowers.  From the very beginning I really wanted lush floral arrangements (you can find some of my floral inspiration here).  I had planned on making them mostly with flowers from our own garden, but between needing to go with an earlier date to accommodate various schedules and very late and cold spring, I knew there wouldn’t be enough options.  Besides, with the ceremony and pictures happening outside I didn’t want to strip the gardens bare.

After a good deal of research, I decided to order from Potomac Floral Wholesale Inc because as far as on-line wholesalers go, they had a very large selection and small minimum orders, which meant I could get a little of several things, instead of having to devote our entire budget to a lot of one variety of flower.

To make up my bouquet, three small bouquets for my mother and sisters, an arrangement for Màiri and two large arrangements for the tables, I purchased;

12 stems of ‘Romantic Antike’ Garden Roses

20 stems of Girlie Folies Peach Spray Roses

20 stems of Ilse Spray Roses

10 stems of White Lilac

4 stems of White Hydrangea

and

10 stems of Hypericum Berries- I had wanted peach, but they were out of stock and I believe they substituted pink.

We supplemented this with bleeding heart, herbs and maple leaves from our garden.  Galen filled jars and vases with dandelions, which were placed randomly around the house (his idea) and seemed very “us” so we went with it.

My sister and I put everything together two days before and keep them cool on the porch and under the house, since the fridge was overflowing with food and cake (more on that later!).  We made everything except for the floral crown (4th pic down).

Some helpful resources for DIY wedding/vow renewal/really any special occasion flowers:

How to Do Your Own Wedding Flowers

How to Make a Wedding Bouquet

DIY: Spray Rose Bouquet

How to Make a Wild Flower Mart Wedding Bouquet

All photographs, with the exception of the top two are by the lovely and talented Dawn Joseph.

The other night, the Wee Girl and I skipped out on our regularly scheduled baseball game, in an attempt to get her some much needed sleep.  After getting her off to bed early, I spent some quiet time alone in the garden, with an open window between us.  It’s so hard to convey the state of a garden in a post like this.  I rather wish I could just wander through and talk about things as I come across them, somewhat in the style of The Edible Garden (which I’m a bit obsessed with at the moment).  Or perhaps I could just have you all over and fix you a cup of tea and give you the tour?  That would be more satisfying.

The flower garden is amazingly lush and full for having just been started a year ago.  So many different shades of green.  The columbines are the shining stars of the moment, with the lupines and iris coming in right on their heels.  My peonies are still a couple of weeks off, but they are HUGE.  Astonishing.  Covered in hundreds of buds.

A lot of my time lately has been spent in the herb garden which was wildly over-grown when we moved in and generally somewhat neglected our first year.  Herbs are good at fending for themselves and other things were much more pressing.  But reclaiming that area is a priority for me this summer.

In the kitchen garden we had many greens winter over…chard, kale, collards.  I’ve let them all go to seed as kind of an experiment in natural reseeding and the butterflies are in love with me at the moment.  During the day there are just big masses of fluttering bits.

The garlic is mind boggling.  It’s up to my waist.  Màiri and Galen play in it like a corn maize.  All of the other root vegetables have been thoroughly unimpressive so far.  Full beds of tiny carrots/parsnips/beets that never seem to change much.  Even our radishes, which were our number one crop last year, have only been so-so.

There is a rather pudgy groundhog, who was perfectly adorable and charming when he lived in the drainage pipe up the road, but is perfectly intolerable now that he’s moved into the retaining wall of my herb garden.  He insists on eating all of the tops off out pea plants and knocking about all the trellises.  We want our peas!  boo.

Writing about The Wee Girl’s birthday sweater made me think of the birthday party I never posted about.  She wanted a tea party and gingerbread and to invite “lots of people”.  When specifically asked, “lots of people” amounted to Steve, Iain, Elijah, Galen, Pop-pop, Me-Mom, Aunt Tina, Aunt Rachel and myself.  We managed to round up eight out of nine, which was more then enough to keep her happy.

The dress she’s wearing is this one.  Which just barely fit her then and doesn’t at all fit her now.  I can’t believe how much older she looks a mere 5 months later.

For her crown a made three little roses from this pattern and sewed them all to a strip of green fold over elastic.

The hanging decoration was a day-of, off-the-cuff invention.  I stripped all of the greenery from the grapevine wreath base I had twisted together for our advent wreath and replace it with long bits of ribbon and lace and suspended it from the ceiling. It’s hanging in their playroom now where it always makes me think of May Poles and springtime.

A portrait of my children, once a week, every week.

 Iain: performing

Elijah: cooling off

Galen: a baseball field with a playground is still a very happy thing

Màiri Rose: dear sleepy girl!  I think bedtimes have been coming too late for you this week!

on a cool spring evening.

 Fear not, I’m not going to completely ignore our wedding/vow renewal and the many, many, many craft projects therein.  There will be pictures.  There will be so many pictures and so much written, that you will swear off ever coming here again for fear of being forced to endure yet another vow renewal related post.  You will be begging for mercy and longing for the days of a nice boring post on Waldorf math.  But while we wait for the professional pictures to come, there might as well be some catching up.  For I missed a great deal of posting over the winter and early spring.

Case in point, Miss Màiri Rose’s birthday sweater, with matching sweater for little Rose of course, gifted on 1/5.  Rosebud’s is The Mira Sweater, by Elizabeth Murphy, made from the yarn that Galen and I dyed so long ago.  Rose’s sweater is the Luna Doll Sweater, also by Elizabeth Murphy and made from scraps of yarn in the same shade’s as Màiri’s.

We were kind of pathetic.  We took a truly shocking number of naps.  And when we finally got up to go somewhere, we would spend the car ride whining to each other about how long it had been since we had laid down.  Sometimes it had been hours.  Hours!  And maybe we should just go back and lay down again?  I think that were it not for the threat of starving to death, we might not have gone anywhere at all.  We tried to go to a movie, but they switched it out for something else, which completely befuddled us and we had to go back to the room to rest and recover.  Wild stuff.  I may be exaggerating a little about our level of inactivity, but only a little.  Unless laying in a whirlpool tub constitutes activity.  Or those 15 minutes in the sauna, before racing off to the ill-fated movie.  Those three and a half days were all just recovery.  I think we needed a whole second vacation before we could muster up the energy to actually do stuff.

We didn’t see the sun the entire time we were there.  It rained a lot.  Every day was dark and grey, wet and chill.  The very sort of weather we seem to have brought home with us.  Only now we’ve got a bit of snow too.  It snowed today.  I am so not impressed.  I brought two pretty dresses that I never have an excuse to wear and the zippers  on both of them broke and I didn’t get to wear either!  The one day that we did get motivated and up and out early, keen for an island adventure, we were gone for 7 hours and manged a grand total of 45 minutes on said island, approximately 40 minutes of which were spent looking for a bathroom, that evidently didn’t exist.  You can just imagine the nap we needed after that one.  And yet, yet….I didn’t make a single meal the entire time.  And we didn’t wash a single dish, not one!  No one came crying to me about being hungry (though Steve may have been close that one day).  I didn’t break up any fights or find any lost shoes.  I slept a lot, and managed to put on make up twice.  And not a single person that I saw, the entire time we were away, made farting noises with their armpit and giggled.  And it is the first time that I can say that combination of things about any three day span in the last 13+ years.  In other words, it was pretty darn dreamy.

All the same, it’s good to be home.  When Steve left bed this morning, I blew him a kiss, which Rosebud, who must have stirred without us realizing it, immediately echoed, before curling up in a nest of pillows and blankets with me.  Yup, life is good.