Lovelihood

As a mom, I dutifully and proudly hang, use, display, frame and wear the all the painted, glued, strung, pressed, molded, glittered and sometimes weird things the kids make at school and giddily thrust at me while stumbling over their own awkward feet. And while things bearing my name aren't generally my preference when it comes to jewelry, as the Boy explained, he made it for me because it has my name on it. And that's logic I absolutely cannot refute.

Just a belated little something I finished up and shipped out today, cobbled together from strips and bits remaindered from past and on-going projects and the thread already wound through my machine. It's May. No time to dwell on any single haphazardly assembled project. Especially if it should have been completed a month ago.

There's a birthday in the house today, and that means that, unless we're in the middle of a cross-country move or it's my birthday, little cakes get baked into jars. They also get a healthy coating of soy cream cheese icing (why, what would you top your vegan carrot cake with?), but somehow that always happens after the camera gets put away.

Finishing up the stitching on my latest sashiko project. I've got to fine tune my designing process. Mostly, I need to figure out how to clean up those corners. And I could probably use a more diverse palette of colors. Because while I love orange and aqua, and orange and aqua together, I'll probably want to stitch with some other colors eventually.

I'm still in that first-year state of smitten-ness with our home, watching the hedges and trees and dirt swatches break out in flower and tender greens and whatever else it is that a yard does when you're not really tending to it. Things grow here, creeping and self-propogating, taking over entire lawns in the course of one season. I can say I enjoy it, because it's the Mr. that's battling that patch of ivy on the retaining wall next to the driveway.

The best kind of races come with tear-aways on the bib redeemable for a free doughnut. Also, ones where I burn previous personal records are pretty sweet. Chip time: 29:18.

The problem with making things for people not living with you is that your access to those things for photographic exploitation is severly limited. And when you're flitting around, fighting to get out of the house for a 12:15 birthday engagement on the other side of town, and can only rattle off a handful of uninspired shots before tucking the object into its gift packaging, sometimes those pictures, when you download them ten hours later, turn out to be a mostly blurry, fragmented documentation of the thing you spent the last couple days' worth of naptimes making. Then again, this little tutu, a deviation in fabric from the tulle-laden master copy outlined in this book, was just a first draft for the one Bear will eventually twirl her little heart out in. So hopefully there will be better photo ops later.