Category: Uncategorized

Are you done?  I confess, I’m not.  I make most of my gifts and buy handmade for the majority of the rest, which can be slow, but rewarding going.  I’ve been putting the finishing touches on my Midday Faire swap buddy’s gift tonight (no pictures until she gets it!) and am taking a few minutes to put some items in my store and give you a little bit of a roadmap if, like me, you are looking for some last minute handmade gifts to purchase.

On Thursday at noon, I’m having a small stocking here.  You can see previews now and purchase items anytime after Thursday at noon.

There is a special set — four skeins of yarn that I dyed, envisioning a Clapotis or small shawl.  It is pictured both reskeined and as dyed so you can get a good idea of how the colors blend.  The yarn is a lovely silk/wool blend in the Evangeline colorway.  Enough said.

I’ve also listed playsilks — they come gift wrapped and with the addition of a handmade tag I will write your message on.  If you aren’t familiar with playsilks, they are one of those toys that encourages children to play with their imaginations.  Big, billowing squares of habotai silk, hand-dyed in beautiful colors.  Children love them.  Adults secretly covet them.  They make fabulous and reasonably priced gifts, and best of all, I’ll do all the work for you and put them in the mail.  Phew.  Relief. 

You can find more great gifts on my main site, www.elliebelly.com, where I have art, journals, and handpainted clothing along with yarn and playsilks.  There is a bit more yarn in my Etsy shoppe.

If you are looking for practical art, stop in at Collage Congo — where a number of artists have combined forces to stock their handmade goods.  Seriously, I’m only telling you about this because my own shopping is done, but Collage has everything from handmade stockings to altered art ornaments.  Collage is beyond cool — if you are a fan of Karen Owen’s art, her quilted bags are incredible, especially the knitting bags (hint, hint honey, if you’re reading this) and Jennifer Roth Burnette’s batiks are delicate and ethereal.  If you’ve taken the handmade pledge or if you’re thinking about it, Collage is a great place to carry out your intentions!

Today is the last scheduled day for my yarn listings (click HERE to see them) to raise funds for a donation to Heifer.Org.  For those of you seeing this for the first time, Heifer is a charitable organization that helps hungry people by providing them with the tools necessary to become self-sufficient.  Heifer lets donors pick an animal to donate and the obvious choice for a knitter seemed to be trying to donate a sheep.

The results from the first two weeks of "Give Back" listings have been so encouraging that I’ve set my sights a bit higher, and my goal is to donate Heifer’s Knitter’s Basket item — two sheep and two alapca.  The idea of people raising their own wool for goods to sell so they can take care of themselves, while raising generations of animals to help other become self-sufficient too is very appealing to me.  And that goal is reachable.  Please come and take a look at the last Give Back yarn listings and help me reach my goal!  Here are some of the items that are available.

And, even a little bit of roving for spinners and felter.

Please come by and bid generously for this wonderful cause!  I’m looking forward to reporting back next week with the total amount we raise and the donation we’re able to make.  I’ll also have one last auction due to the kindness of Katie, who won one of the earlier lotteries and decided to make a donation of her own.  Katie has sent some wool care products and I’ll be putting together some yarn, stitch markers, and Katies’s items together for one last Give Back item.  Make sure you check back in this weekend, for this one last, wonderful item.  I really thank all of you for helping me give back — something that we can all do to help make other people’s lives better.

Dear Family:

Every year at this time, you send me requests for information about what the kids want for the holidays.  Usually I send you a rather pedestrian list of books and video games.  The truth is, our children are a sort of predictable bunch in this regard.

But Ollie is, well, different.  He has a special request this year.  Perhaps it is a side effect of having a mom who is constantly packing things up in boxes and shipping them off to exciting places.  What Ollie really wants is a nice box, big enough for him to comfortably fit inside of and play.  Until then, he is trying to make do.

Love,

Joyce

It was mostly meant to be a day doing things like this in my house, a lovely, sleepy, federal holiday of a Monday:

Some people, perhaps inspired by catnip treats, had different ideas however (please note that the male is sleeping while his sister takes care of business):

Since my dreams of a lazy day evaporated, I spent a lazy afternoon dyeing and painting yarn.

This is some of the yarn for the Heifer Fundraiser (it starts this Thursday — please drop by to read about it or scroll down to the next entry for info).

That’s cheating a bit, isn’t it?  But I think you will love it.  So far, I have two items up, sock yarn and organic merino and I’m doing a mixture of raffles and auctions.  Lots more pretties coming, including this yarn, which is going to be done up in skeins for hat knitting.

And then there was this, painting some yarn.  This is the last colorway for a wholesale order I have enjoyed immensely both because it is for an eco-friendly store and because the owner has a devastatingly good sense of color.

Don’t be deceived by the neat and orderly appearance.  Although this was actually how the table looked when I was done with this particular colorway, generally, there are little pots of dye and brushes everywhere, and often a cat (or two) with a brightly colored tail.

Having survived the holiday, I am really looking forward to tomorrow!  I’m taking a class at my Local Yarn Shop with Nora of Noni Bags — she is teaching a class in finishing.  I have knit this:

I’m going to pop it in the washer at the crack of dawn tomorrow, before my 7:00 a.m. meeting, and then dash off to the class at 10:30.  I am hoping I won’t be too much of a challenge for her teaching skills  — I’ve got the two ended zipper and a couple of different potential fabric choices for lining,  but the most I ever seem to manage are a couple of magnetic snaps, so this should be interesting!

A lot of the time in my house, things that are far more pressing than work, relaxation, and even, perish the thought, knitting, transpire.  Yesterday afternoon I had one of those experiences.

I found Ollie, who is four and about to start Kindergarten, in the kitchen, mixing up a large bag of cherries in a big bowl of water, and getting ready to add some flour and sugar.

It was clear we were going to be cooking.

I tried to buy him off with brownies, but he wouldn’t agree.  After intense negotiation, he assented to substitute peaches for cherries, but he was pretty set on his original plan.  I added a couple of extra ingredients, and we made a cake, along with Ellie who wandered into the kitchen and graciously helped out with licking the bowl after the cake was in the pan.

Although I was a little bit worried that this haphazard method of putting ingredients together would make a pretty nasty slush, we ended up with a delicious cake, sort of a fruity pound cake, that would also be delicious as cupcakes.  I thought I would share the recipe with y’all, since I can’t show you a picture of the finished cake — it disappeared too quickly.

                                                            

Ollie’s Peach Cake

Preheat oven to 350`/ Set two sticks of butter out on counter

Dice up two fresh, organic peaches.  Allow small child with you to eat a couple of bites.

In a medium bowl, mix 1 cup flour with 1 teaspoon baking powder and a dash of salt (amuse small child by letting him level the measurements)

Cream butter in mixer.  Add 1 cup sugar.  Mix well, scrapping down sides of bowl as necessary.

Add in four eggs, one at a time, mixing after each addition.

Add 1 teaspoon of vanilla (or cardamon) extract.

Mash peach dice in a small bowl – pressing against the side of the bowl to extract a little juice.  Put half of peaches in butter/sugar mixture and mix.  Then, add half  of flour mixture to butter/sugar and mix.  Repeat again, using up all of the peaches and flour mixtures.  Mix well to incorporate.

Grease or use cooking spray in a loaf pan.  Pour batter in pan.  Bake for 70 minutes at 350` (or until done).

Let cake rest 10 minutes, while mixing up a glaze from 3T sugar and 3T peach (or other) juice. Remove cake from pan.  Poke gentle holes in cake with a spike and pour glaze over cake.  Cool.  Devour.

You would not be able to guess from this photograph

that this was a very serious occasion.  Those are Ollie’s feet, disappearing beneath a pew, as he and his friend Issac scampered through the church after his baptism.  I would like to be able to tell you that scampering only occurred after the service was over, but that would not be true.  Ollie and Issac pretty much whooped it up through out and enjoyed themselves immensely, making it a very satisfying baptism for all of the adults involved.

Baptism is probably a touchier subject in most mixed-marriages than it is in ours, but I love the church Ollie was baptized in.  It has a very solid, secure feeling to it — the sort of place that helps you understand the magic in religion and feel like miracles really do happen, all the time in our daily lives, if we just take the time to notice them.

The one miracle that did not occur for me was the event know in our family as "the blessed taking of a photograph in which all four children are at least looking into the camera if not smiling."  Although I shot at least 20 frames (since they were all bathed and wearing clean, vaguely respectable clothing at the same time — a rare occurrence in our household), this was about the best I managed.

It’s a miracle to have four beautiful children, including two who like knitting and three who lay claim to some sort of artistic territory.  I’m constantly grateful for their presence in my life and the reminders that not all important occasions are meant to be serious ones.

If you haven’t discovered LOL Cats yet, you probably don’t live with a teenager or you aren’t a 20-something.  But for some strange reason, the juxtaposition of cute photos and bad grammar is strangely appealing.

My own kids are very taken with the lol cat who says "I made you a cookie.  But I eated it."  And they do seem to be cropping up everywhere.

So, with all due apologies, this is my own sweet little LOL Cat Harry, Protector of THE STASH.