Lovelihood

After dropping the kids off at school this morning, I made an emergency stop at the fabric store for buttons. My paltry stash just didn't have the fasteners neccessary to pull the baskets together. Of course, since those buttons do nothing more than hold the stitches in place in their tidy little holes, I suppose I could have done without them altogether. Bah.

I'm no stranger to batch-preparing breakfast stuffs for jar storage. Bear's first foods were the brown rice cereal and steel cut oatmeal I would cook up for her en masse a couple times a week. I'd grind up the grains in the blender until powder fine, then cook up batches of it to stockpile in the fridge in the most adorable of the canning jars, the 4 ouncers that became the our baby-food container of choice for the next six months until she was a full-fledged member of the solid-eating crew. So I don't know why it hadn't occured to me before to make up my own oatmeal in the same manner. Because I love a bowl of steel cut oatmeal in the morning.

One easter basket done. Except that I still haven't figured out what I'll use to attach the sides. Some kind of button configuration, probably. Still contemplating fabric combinations for Bear's basket. More burlap would be standard. And prudent, seeing as I picked up a huge lot of burlap bags pre-christmas for bucket-making and only used up one. Or I could cut up the funky laminated hotpants-pink linen I snagged from the remnant bin.

Wood may not be the most ecological choice for egg decorating, but it won't send The Boy into a hive-y outbreak either. Yeah, there's a very attractive papier mache middle ground, that we'll get to one of these years. As for this year, these will have to do.

I was finally inspired last night to start production (well, pre-production) on this year's easter baskets. Drafted up a simple one-piece (two, if you count a simple lining) design based on this one, made a teeny tiny paper prototype and transfered a much larger version onto my tried-and-true grid material that I trace all my patterns onto. I'm hoping the final product won't be held together with a couple of straight pins, but inspiration and energy has been on short supply here since The Mr. left us, again, for warmer, drier climes. I'll just be happy to remember to sew some handles in.

We've been eying these downy little birds since they started coming around, frequenting the trees at the front of the house, since the calendar marked Spring's arrival. Bear would screech some kind of "b" noise and we'd all press up against the windows and spot one, sometimes, hopping between branches, but more often taking flight for less screechy environs. So we filled that feeder in the back with some seed, hoping to attract the little guys and encourage a longer stay for our visual amusement. But the first week only brought us huge blackbirds of some generic variety, too big to perch daintily on the feeder's ledge, instead gripping onto the sides and flailing so madly as to rattle the whole thing and scatter seed from the mesh sides, while the cat chattered and paced on the other side of the french doors. Perhaps determining that the spectacle was not worth the paltry seed, the blackbirds have ceded the feeder to the cute little songsters it was always intended for.

It seems that birthday party season has descended upon us. Today's party's goodie bags, filled with candies and Play-do (thanks to such party gifts, we haven't had to buy any for a good few months) featured a bejeweled wand (not a real one, declared The Boy, because it's not a catalyst for any actual magic). A parent offered to switch it for a "boy" goodie bag (which Bear ended going home with), but Boy declined, like I knew he would. Because pink glittery wands are just the sort of thing he gets excited about.