Will Scarlet, in Robin Hood, illustration by Greg Hildebrant.

Robin Hood, from Robin Hood, illustrating by Greg Hildebrandt.

Lancelot from Young Lancelot, illustration by Jamichael Henterly.

Niniame, Lady of the Lake, as pictured in Young Lancelot.  Illustration by Jamichael Henterly.  Costume inspiration by big brother Galen, as I don’t believe she’s ever even heard this book.

 Collection of Goofy Kids by Melody and Steve.

Pattern: Tea Leaves by Melissa La Barre

Yarn: an unnamed honey colored wool found in the “seconds” bin at a the fair stall of a New York fiber mill.

I’ve been wanting to make myself one of these for a while now.  Even before I made Little Rosebud hers.  With my favorite cardigan getting more ragged by the day, the conclusion that no one else in the family was in desperate need of anything, a big pile of dirt cheap wool and a long car ride to knit away, the time was ripe.

This has been done for a couple of months now, but is just starting to see regular use in cool mornings and evenings.  Within a month I foresee myself wearing it pretty much constantly.

I had considered adding some crocheted patch pockets, decided against it and am now waffling again.

And, since I never shared the details on the dress I happen to be wearing (though you did get a glimpse of it in one of my Week in the Life posts)…

 It’s a heavily modified dress, more or less based off of the Big Button Dress Tutorial and made out of chocolate brown linen.  I didn’t have any fabulous big buttons (for shame!), so I skipped that part.  I also didn’t have a zipper of the right size and color.  I gave it a notched neck so that I could slip it over my head, I want to say easily, but that’s not exactly true… more like carefully, with much shimmying, but it works.  The top part on my version is fully lined.  Originally I used a decorative stitch on my machine to trim the edges, but I didn’t like that at all, so I covered it all with some cotton lace, which I like very much.  And the bottom was trimmed with bias tape because I was feeling lazy and pressed for time and didn’t feel like hemming it properly.  I wear it often, but if I were to make it again, I’d add just a bit more length to the top piece to give a little more ease in the arms.  Just a friendly little tip in case someone out there wants to make one as well!

We finally, finally started work on his quilt.  Together.  I think it’s even better this way.

So, I totally missed the Kid’s Clothing Week Challenge this year.  Which is a pity because I really do enjoy participating in that event.  At least there is still the flickr group to scour for ideas and inspiration.  If I ever actually find the time to do so.

Which is not to say that I haven’t been sewing.  Oh, no.  There has been sewing.  Spring seems to bring that out in me.  Gardening when it’s fair and stitching my way through the thunderstorms.  That’s spring.

A spring dress for the Little Miss and a matching one for her Little Miss.

You tell me how I was supposed to pass up a fabric called “Kittens Knittin” (by Michael Miller, I believe it’s out of print now) when it appeared on the remnant wrack?  Don’t even bother to waste your breath.  Obviously it would have been impossible.

The pattern is view D from the 2001 Butterick Fast and Easy pattern #3045.  I think I’ve deemed this the spring dress pattern of 2012.  I’ve made two of them so far.  And it has proved to be both fast and easy.

This time I added some length, a bit of eyelet trim and changed the position and size of the bow. Sweet little Rosie‘s dress was improvised.

And a couple of her with my dad, just because they’re cute together…

a.k.a. the rainy day skirt

The forecast for the boys’ baseball season opener?  Low 40′s and rain.  Splendid.  And high time for a defensive play of my own…

I whipped up this skirt in about 15 minutes, using the wool leftover from the Wee Girl’s jumper.  Because I’m all too well acquainted with the 6th inning feel of metal bleachers during a crisp mountain evening in the spring time.  In fact, it’s almost as quintessential as peepers or maple syrup.  I paired them with my wool leggings for added warmth.  And yes, it was still cold, but bearable.  I had been planning on saving this fabric to line my hunter rain boots, which was not a bad thought, considering my numb toes by game’s end.  But this little skirt is seeing a lot of use.  And even a bit of snow at a game last week.  Ah, New England in the spring!

~the Wee Girl was up most of the night complaining that he “tummy hurt” and asking me to rub it.  We’re both very tired this morning.  I had all sorts of plans for the day, especially if the weather was nice, which it seems to be!  But I think that perhaps we had better stay close to home.

~Thursday is bathroom cleaning day.  I was completely convinced it would also be bathroom painting day, but it didn’t work out that way.

~Iain and Elijah are each working on a map of our town now.  I’ll take pictures for us, but I think I’ll opt not to share them here.

~Màiri Rose makes up little songs and sings them to herself and others.  Sometimes she just goes right from one song to the next.  Today I tried to keep track of some of the little snippets of song I heard from her.  None of it’s complete, but this is what I have.

~~~The Songs of Màiri Rose Irene, Age 3~~~

The birds were flying up in the sky, the stars were flying up in the sky. The birds were flying then they came on down and the birds were singing to me.

The people all swam at the ocean and they lived together.  They all lived together in their little house.  And they ate pancakes.

Over the ocean, in my little boat.  The boat was singing to me.

Then they all lived together in their little crooked house.  Then they all swimmed and swimmed and swimmed.

~~~~~~~~~~

~Did some touch up painting and trim installing in Iain and Elijah’s room.

~They are off to practice again tonight.  In the rain.

~”It was Pop-pop and then it turned into Me-Mom!” ~the Wee Girl, after getting off the phone with my parents.

~While dinner cooked and the dishwasher ran, and the fourth load of laundry for the day was in the wash; after Galen had had his fill of loom building for the day, I managed to sew 4 or 5 seams.  I have two little dresses starting to take shape.

~Snow and sleet all morning.

~Elijah built the fire today.  His first.

~Pre-breakfast: banana, pear, orange and collard smoothie

~Actual breakfast: red cabbage, carrots, cucumbers, radishes, olive, guacamole and tulsi-mint tea with honey.

~Too wet to take sketch books out to continue our wildflower study as planned.

~A lot of the morning and early afternoon was much the same as yesterday; quiddler over breakfast, chores, more baseball play (yes, even in the snow), school work, etc.

~Everyone needs things for spring, so I’m trying to get a bit of sewing in each day.

~Library day, which just happens to coincide with a tea party at the library

~I wore the dress I made last week for the first time.

~So funny and a little nice to be introduced to all, as Mrs. —-.  I feel certain that Steve looked over his shoulder for his mother!

~the two small fry came back well fortified with A.A. Milne.  Rosebud calls them “knee-the-pooh books”.

~More horse magazines and “Caroline books” and “Rose books” (the series chronicling Laura Ingalls-Wilder’s mother’s and daughter’s lives) for the bigger ones.  They went through all three of the ones they brought home last week.

~The only thing I managed to grab was a couple of wildflower guides for school this week.

~It’s off to baseball practice for all of the big boys, including the very biggest boy of all.

~Working on Mother’s Day cards for the Grandmothers

~Dinner,Part I: chicken dippers and broccoli

~Littles to bed

~Dinner, Part II: the same thing two and a half hours later.  Only with tea this time too because I knew they would all come home chilled.

~Between the three of them I get an almost literal play by play of the entire practice.  Even though they are starving, it’s hard to get them to even sit down and eat, they are still so excited.  And while they eat they are constantly popping back up again to show me just how a certain play was made.  It was a very good practice!

~The biggest problem with us all sleeping down here is that this little munchkin:

is not sleeping!  Until the upstairs floors are finished we’re all sleeping in rooms just off and open to the kitchen/dinning room area.  Which means that late nights for them more often then not, inadvertently turn into late nights for him.  This photo was taken 3 hours after his bedtime.  sigh.  He would be watching us at the table, then every time I looked over, he would quickly lay his head back down.

About the photos first- these are some very new little neighbors that we’ve been visiting and helping out with a lot in the last couple of weeks.  The twin nurslings below (3 days old in these photos) are a happily bonded set sticking close to their mama.  We give them lots of space and try not to get in the way of all that is good there.  The little lambs that you see in-arms here (a week and a half old) were rejected by their sheep mother and needed a two legged mama to step in to provide them with care and feeding.  Or, when available, several.

And now for the part where I need your help!  I need suggestions for several things in life right now.  Number one is something new to read.  I just finished Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women’s Writings of North America, edited by Gloria Bird and Joy Harjo, a thoughtful gift from my sister.  Having thoroughly enjoyed that tome I’m ready to move on to something new.  Any suggestions?  Perhaps something inspiring in the realm of education?  We’re currently re-doing our local history block (along with math review) with both of the older boys, since we were in different towns and a different county when they originally did them.  It fits well and makes sense with our life right now.  But I’m undecided as to where to go from here.  At the same time I’m feeling that end of year push of everything I want to get done before summer starts and we take a bit of a break.  So inspiring in the world of education would be very good, but I’ll take any and all suggestions for a good read!

Number two: I need something to watch.  A late night knitting companion, if you will.  Because I do sometimes like to watch a bit of something and knit at the end of a long day.  So suggestions?  Preferably something available on Netflix instant watch?  TV shows work well because they are nice little watchable chunks and perhaps even more importantly, I don’t have to come up with something new to watch from day to day, I can just click “play next episode” because really deciding on something new is far too over-whelming at that point in my day.

And finally I need boy clothes sewing pattern ideas and inspiration.  Because I have boys that need clothes, but I am bored, bored, bored.  Bored I tell you!  With the same old.  Bleck.  You must help me find something new and exciting that I can get into sewing or else they may just have to go naked because I can’t talk myself into sewing another dull thing.

Eggs of all sorts; blown ones, hard boiled, eggs painted with water colors, dyed with beets, turmeric, onion skins and henna, some dyed in patterns created with rubber bands, some with flowers and leaves pressed to them, some colored with pencils and crayons.  In the last picture are felt egg pockets inspired by dear, sweet Taisa.  Last year I said that some year I would get around to making felt eggs for stuffing.  Who would have thought that it would be this year of all years?  Certainly not I.  At the time I had something fancier in mind, like these.  And I would still like to make some of those at some point, but when I saw the very simple ones on Small Wonders I thought, I could do a few of those this year.  Then maybe next year make some more of the same or a different sort and so on until we were all covered.  But really I wasn’t sure that I would get to them at all.  One day when I was sewing Galen was itching for something to do, so I cut one out for him to hand sew beside me.  He finished in record time.  Since my machine was all threaded and in front of me, I decided to play with some of those decorative stitches that I never use for the next one.  I decorated the front and he sewed it together.  When Iain and Elijah saw them and the possibilities for all of the fun things the machine stitching could do, they raided my felt stash and took over production (I did help with a couple more).  They fooled with all kinds of things and decorated the fronts, then passed them along to Galen to hand sew or sewed them closed on the machine or hand sewed them themselves.  We actually decided that we liked the ones that were sewn closed by hand the best, as there is more room in them.  It’s a shame I didn’t have more spring-like colored felts on hand.  But they kind of remind me of Pysanka , those vividly colored Ukrainian Easter eggs.  All together we made 24, which meant 6 eggs for each kid and a plastic free year, just like that!

The baskets this year ended up being like a whole day smorgasbord of snacks.

In lieu of books (for the first time ever), we gave them supplies to finish their rooms.  I’m strongly anti-bringing anything into the house that might end up on the floor at the moment.  So we gave them things like stencils and material for curtains, instead of books and yet more little stuffed bunnies and the like.

(the auto-focus on my camera is broken and no one else has quite gotten the knack of manual focusing)

I don’t know why I always insist on sewing Màiri Rose a spring dress for Easter.  I very well know that the weather is just as likely to be winter-like as spring.  Yet I can’t seem to wrap my brain around making a warm and cozy Easter dress.  Maybe a long-sleeved dress in a spring print?  I don’t know what the answer is.  I do know that this years was entirely hidden under a cardigan for most of the day, along with my spring dress, and that we were both still cold.

Last year first, since it occurs to me that I never managed to post about those projects.  You already saw his 2011 birthday sweater and the pumpkin.  His birthday table this year (shown here), was set up on one of the gorgeous play stands that Steve built for him last year.  I’ll be sure to get a picture to share of them all set up at the new house.  They are currently there and I am currently not.

This is the crayon roll that I made for him: 

And this is the shield that Steve helped Iain and Elijah to make for him:

It was Steve’s design, there are two leather strips on the back to slip your arm through.  Galen decorated it himself, after the fact.

He’s very fierce you know, even with what I believe to be a bit of blueberry juice on his forehead.  How it got there, I couldn’t possibly say.

There was also a cloth bag that I made to hold the little wooden animals that my parents got him.  It was just a simple drawstring thing, made out of a fabric printed with nursery rhymes and vintage looking illustrations.  It’s in a box right now, so no pictures of that either.

And now on to this year!  We made much less this year.  Considering everything that’s been going on, I let myself off the hook for the doll that I had been planning to make him.  I thought that was uncharacteristically reasonable of me.  It’s possible that I may even be learning a bit of self-preservation.

There was, of course, a birthday sweater…

The pattern is Hestapeysa, again.  The same as for Elijah’s most recent birthday sweater.  This time I didn’t modify it at all.  I just made the child’s size.  Well, I did add  in a bit of a fourth color on the on the yoke, but otherwise…

The other bit of home-made came from Iain and Elijah, in very typical (for them) style.  They went out into the woods and cut a branch, then came home and whittled an entire baseball bat out of it, just like that was a regular old, every day, type of thing to do.  Which I guess it is.  For them.

I think it was his favorite gift ever.  He just kept shaking his head, wide-eyed, saying, “I just don’t know how I can ever thank them enough!”