Lovelihood

To what end I'm making these little hexagons, I don't yet know. If I can keep it up long enough, maybe a quilt. If not, maybe coasters, despite the fact that we don't actually care about our furniture (as evidenced by the way we let the cat treat our couch) and have never before employed coasters in our home. I'm not one for hanging decorative quilt things on the walls. But I am actually considering indulging Bear's bedtime buddies with little quilts of their own. Not terribly fond of any of those ideas except for the first, so I suppose I've committed myself to many, many hours spent hand-stitching scraps of fabric.

Starting on the second day of this snow event, I've been working on this little tic-tac-toe mat for The Boy. The board itself, with a pocket sewn into the back to contain the markers, came together easily the first night. The hexagons, I've been shuffling around the house to work on while the kids work through their stir-craziness. I finished off the last marker this morning and handed it off to The Boy, who, appreciative of all things rainbow, went to work devising all-new rules to the age-old game.

It finally dumped on us last night, after a half week of threats. The Mr. and the kids, having been sequestered to home all week just on the promise of bad weather, wandered the house with cabin fevered angst. I, happy to be snowed in after a couple of foul-weather commuting days, settled in under some blankets with my hand-sewing.

That bushy little growth I'd stuck in my inverted planter back in the fall is now more of a hanging vine, at first just invading The Mr.'s headspace over the sink, but now also tickling at my cheeks when I scrub at dirty dishes.

There is a tedium associated with english paper piecing that has perhaps scared me away in the past. Last night, it seemed just the thing to try my hand at. And while I was at it, I put together a little kit to keep all the little bits together.

The Boy greeted the snow day with a five-year-old's eagerness to suit up and get out to the business of snowball-making, an enthusiasm quickly adopted by his little sister, who, in the day's quieter moments, would beseech us for more snowball time. It seemed like as good a time as any to bring out the Polaroid to capture in a low-tech way a low-tech kind of play.

Growing up in the Bay Area we had zero snow days that I can recall. I'm sure there was a slushy day here or there, and plenty of mornings with stubborn rimy coats on windshields and shrubbery. But having been in the Northwest for the past decade and a half (minus that couple of years in much warmer climes) the novelty of snow has pretty well worn off, replaced with the annoyance at the interference with my marathon training, and dread at the prospects of Monday morning commute. Still, with the right camera phone filters, it can be pretty.