Been a while, busybusy!

It's been a while since I've updated the ol' bloggityblog, but that doesn't mean I haven't been crafting! Since learning to crochet a month ago, I've made several really cute hats, and have even created my own pattern for them (and tested it several times to make sure I wrote it correctly!). Wyatt's is super cute, he still doesn't care for it to be on his head longer than a few seconds, but what are you gonna do? Hehe!

And here's his hat with another hat, same pattern but a size smaller, for an undisclosed baby's first birthday gift!

Other than those hats, I have not made too much else, though we've been very busy around the house. Red had some time off of work, and we were very productive with it! We finally painted the livingroom, after having had three gallons of paint waiting in the closet for over a year! It's wonderful! We also painted the spare bathroom, and did alot of touchup spots elsewhere in the house were we missed the first time around. It's also inspired quite a lot of spring cleaning and decluttering and reorganizing, which is long overdue (mostly on my part). In trying to make more shelf space, I'm cutting out interesting articles and recipes and such from my rather large collection of Real Simple magazines (I have issues dating back to 2004), and am puting them in a binder. If I do ever finish that project, I'll probably do the same for my smaller collections of Sunset and Good Housekeeping magazines. Not entirely crafty, but definately needed to be done! We've also been starting work in the garden and greenhouse, it's still too cold to plant outside (infact we just got snow last night and are expecting more this weekend) but we've started seeds indoors and are having great success rates of growth! (which reminds me of an easy reusing craft project to make seed starters, I'll post that next in a separate post!) We will hopefully be growing a lot of produce this year, so much so that we've got plans to put in more garden beds and have turned previously ornamental beds into kitchen garden beds, so I hope to have alot to make wonderful preserves out of this summer and fall!!!

There is an interesting note circulating around facebook lately, where for the first 5 people who respond (who are not in your current circle of friends you see regularly), you will make them something -anything- and send it to them. (the catch, as with most chain things, is that they too have to post the same note and do the same for 5 of their friends. Cool, huh?) I decided to do it for the first 8 people, and I have until the end of the year to send them all homemade gifts. I'm excited about it! I imagine I'll probably stick pretty close to crafts I already do well enough to make them speedily, and it might be a few months if I'm going to include freshly made preserves and whatnot, but it's going to be fun. I've got a good mix of people to make gifts for, some old camp friends and old highschool friends (all of whom I haven't seen in years), and a few mommas from my webmd circle of mom friends, most of whom I've been in contact with since we were all pregnant together (I feel like I know them all, and even refer to them in conversation with Red and others, as though I see them every day! In fact, I do see them every day, but just on webmd or facebook!). It's a pretty cool experiment, the main point is to reconnect with old friends and such, but I like especially that it's a homemade handmade thing that you actually mail to them, rather than just sending someone an e-card or something... And what's also fun is it is getting people who wouldn't otherwise be inclined to be crafty into making handmade gifts. It's the best chain note I've ever seen, beats the pants off of silly quizzes or surveys or those stupid emails that say if you don't send this to 800 of your friends in the next 37 seconds your dog will bite your face off the next full moon... Gotta love those. At last, a note worth posting, one that is actually productive! (Not to say I've never filled out a survey or taken a quiz, but still...) In a world that is becoming faster and more into instant gratification, it's important to remember and appreciate that not all wonderful gifts or ways to connect with friends are point-and-click. (infact I would say that the most wonderful gifts or ways to connect with friends are most certainly not point-and-click.)