Another one of the moms was interested in that hat pattern, but in a larger size and in pink 🙂 I figured out how to make the pattern a wee bit bigger to make a girl’s size.
This is based on the Lacey Casey hat pattern and a picot flower I found here.
I decided to go back to making some more tawashi to take a break from the dishcloths I have been working on. Today, I started on these three, two strawberries and a fish 🙂
When I took a break to go online for a bit, there was a post on one of my forums about looking for a crocheter to make a hat. She posted a link to a project on Etsy. I found similar ones on Ravelry and decided to try it out. Here is the finished hat. At least so far…I am waiting to hear if she is ok with the flower. It has 5 petals instead of six, but I liked it, LOL.
This is based on the Lacey Casey hat pattern and a picot flower I found here.
The neighbor girl came over to play today and the kids spent a bunch of time playing house, complete with a fantastic kitchen. They made all sorts of goodies out of homemade play-doh, including yummy cookies 🙂
The kids and I played Dominoes last night and then moved on to setting them up as tracks and setting off the chain reaction of falling dominoes.
It wasn’t actually meant to be a hat for her, but when she saw me making it and she tried it on, I decided it could be hers after all.
The pattern is unique because it is made from side to side using the Tunisian simple stitch. You work a repeating pattern around and then, in the end, seam it up the back. I used the leftover Homespun from J.’s hat and the owl bag I made.
I am thinking of adding earflaps and edging it in white fluff…
I don’t know if more than 2 days have ever gone by in our house without Lego building and playing going on. And we got them when my daughter was 1 1/2! The kids love them. I think they are the best. Here are a few random shots from today:
I love the water bottle holders I made for Cedar Point. Since then, I have made one for a friend and an extra (pink one) for us 🙂
Sometimes, designers on Ravelry will ask people to test a new pattern for them in exchange for a free copy of the pattern (and the chance to try out something new).
I volunteered and was picked to be a tester for a new dishcloth/ tawashi pattern called Galaxy. I got to give my feedback on how easy the pattern was to understand and offered suggestions for things that I thought might be made clearer. It was fun!
Here are 2 of my finished samples:
And it sucks (to my eye) 😦
Of course, the kids love it.
I tried to avoid stitching it per the directions because I was being a perfectionist and I wanted each spike to have the same color pattern. So I stitched all the spikes separately and then attempted to sew them together. TWELVE spikes that have pentagon bases are hard to keep track of when the bases don’t really look like pentagons…they basically look like circles. Thus, some of them were stitched more like squares with just a wee bit attatched in that fifth corner.
I did manage to take a picture of it “just so” so that it looks like it came out right.
Photos are nice sometimes 🙂
I don’t think I care about it enough to take out the stitches and try again, but maybe someday I will. The whole project was just meant to be an exercise in “if I could” do it.
UPDATE: Ok, I am anal. I couldn’t help it. I spent the morning taking out the wrong areas and fixing them. Much better 🙂 Now it looks like it is supposed to, which is much more round and ball-like…
The neighbor boy has been around a bunch this week and the boys have been going back and forth between the two houses. Today, they got out the RC cars and decided to race them. My daughter loved the job of starting the races and jumping and cheering. She refused the job of retrieving the wiped out cars, LOL.
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My son, who recently said he didn’t really like puzzles, decided he did like them after all when he tackled the Pokemon puzzle on his own. He then requested some puzzles we used to do a long time ago. He did this truck one and another one of endagered wildlife.
I have a few more cardboard ones from the thrift store, so we will see if the interest lasts…
I took a little bit of time to see what game websites worked best with the wii browser today so I could make an easy menu for the kids to use.
The ones that worked the best are:
Arcademic Skills
Game Goo
Poisson Rouge
Starfall
Peep
Ant War
Professor Garfield
Hoops and Yoyo
Ghost Blasters
Orisinal
These sites all have non-flash games that work well within the Opera browser. The game images are clear enough to play easily and there isn’t much need to “scroll” the screen while playing.
My daughter came in while I was testing things out and got sucked into Starfall.
My son loves to play with words and be silly. We had fun this morning playing with our magnetic word set. At first we started off making regular (boring) sentences…then he decided to rearrange them and make them a bit more dramatic 🙂
We added in some dry erase markers to help illustrate.
One Million Giraffes is a website set up to collect images of giraffes that people create without using the computer. The goal is to reach 1 million by 2011. The count is currently over 101,000.
A few of the local homeschoolers I know have been sending in pictures and I asked our kids if they would like to do it to.
So far, we have a marker drawing and a “car” giraffe.
I am going to make some of my own, I think…
If you think this is something you or your kids would enjoy, pass it on 🙂 Let’s see what 1 million giraffes look like!
We headed down to my mom’s house today to celebrate my step-dad’s birthday. He is 75 today 🙂
The kids wanted to make a gift for him and I thought that was a great idea. We decided on cookies. I asked the kids if they would like to try making letter cookies because I made them when I was a kid. We made a few of each letter to hopefully handle any breakages that would occur, LOL.
Here they are:
My daughter also made him a card by using our stamp set and then coloring over the images with markers.
I mailed out my last envelope for my “other hobby” swap this week. This time it including wool roving, a felting needle, and a pattern to get her started. I also included a keychain LED crank flashlight, a Sharpie, 2 bags of tea, a tiny Altoids tin, and a matchbook notebook (that didn’t make it into the picture).
I received my second envelope this week too!
It contained a boxy zippered bag, some embroidery floss, a fridge magnet, some strawberry buttons, and some tea 🙂
I have been adding some new links to my website this week- basically looking in my “favorites” folder and then uploading the links to the right web pages.
One of the websites I had bookmarked was Arcademic Skill Builders. It specifically said that you could play the games on the wii by using the internet browser and typing in the web address. I decided to check it out with the kids. They both liked the fact that the games were like arcade games where you could aim and click at the right answers.
After playing around with it for a bit, I wondered if the other game websites the kids use would work well with the wii. Lots of them do! Unfortunately, the wii uses the “Opera” browser which does NOT support Flash games and movies.
I think I may build a page of “wii friendly” games for the kids.
Game Goo:
Building Sentences
Antonyms
Rhymes, Alliteration, and Rhythm
Ant War:
Hoops and Yoyo:
I picked up a few puzzles at the thrift store last night (after sitting in the aisle counting the pieces to make sure they were all there, LOL)
I LOVE this one! It is a wooden puzzle with special cutout pieces shaped like objects (a butterfly, frog, shovel, dog, and more). I started it last night when I got home and then finished it today when we got back from swimming.
My daughter jumped in to help at the end and was having fun, so I opened one of the puzzles I got for the kids. Pokemon!
So I am posting it here and sharing it 🙂
I just learned about a really cool artist and author named Keri Smith. I have actually seen one of her books in the store before but didn’t pick it up at the time- I thought I would wait for the kids to get older and do the stuff together.
Anyway, I read about her on a blog I follow and I thought the project shown was really cute. Here is the original post.
She has lots of fantastic ideas on her blog.
This page is great:
Here is her list of 95 creative ideas to get you moving. I just printed this out!
Hope you enjoy!
My daughter put on a spectacular musical show for us last night complete with costumes and dancing and gymnastics and singing. It was quite a scene 🙂
