I’ve been playing with Google Maps

I thought this would be a fun way to keep track of knitting stores. I even included Toku-Hands that we visited last summer in Tokyo.

I learned this last year at a meeting of my teaching sorority. It is the easiest way to make a homemade fresh wreath that I have ever seen. Even the kids helped a bit.

Materials:

• Artificial Evergreen Wreath (trust me, they’ll never know)

• Lots of cut evergreens.
• (Optional) Dried flowers and seed pods from the garden.

Directions-before making the wreath

• Gather the evergreen cuttings. Start collecting early. Mine is cedar, boxwood and other clippings from the yard. Honestly I have no idea what the variegated stuff is. The cedar we scored down the road. A neighbor was cutting back some shrubs and left it out for trash collection.
• Put the cuttings in a bucket of water until ready to use. Keeps then nice and fresh.

  

Directions-How to make the wreath

• Start by setting up your work area. If working inside put down newspaper.
• Put the wreath form back-side down on your work surface and push apart all the branches. Basically you will be using these branches like pipe cleaners to tie the fresh greens to the form. It is easier to do this if you untangle a bit first.
  
• Cut the fresh evergreen into bundles about 4 to 5 inches long.
  

  

• On mine form there are two rings, one inner and one outer. I started on the outer ring.
• Place the first bundle down and twist two branches around the bundle, about 2 inches from the cut end of the greens.

  

  
  

  

• As you work make sure to lay all the cuttings in one direction, overlapping by about 3 inches. Try to tuck the branches of the artificial wreath behind your cuttings. It fluffs up the wreath, and fills in any gaps, but is otherwise invisible.
• Continue adding bundles until you have gone all the way around the form.

  

• Tuck the cut ends of the last bundle under the end of the first bundle, twist into place.
• For mine I did the outer ring in cedar, then for the inner ring I alternated boxwood and the mystery shrub. I then added dried flowers from the garden-gomphrena, seed heads from garlic chives. You could also use pine cones, seed heads from crepe myrtles, berries, bows, whatever you have on hand.

  

Note: I checked with my garden savvy stepmother-the yellow speckled stuff is Aucuba.

We had a great Thanksgiving. I even survived the in-laws. No small matter, that.

I also had tons of time for crafting. Here’s a sneak peak:

I’ll be posting on a few of these separatly later this week. Today I am home from work today. Big-sis has a nasty stomach bug. Go wash your hands…seriously.

And if you are interested in playing along with the Handmade Holiday Craft-Along, jump right in. Let us know what you’re making for the holidays!

I don’t know about y’all, but I am already getting a bit overwhelmed by the thought of the holidays. I generally try to give as many handmade things as possible. especially this year with toys since what you buy may be poisonous and recalled in a week anyway.

So, to keep my momentum going I decided to host a craft-along to encourage people to give handmade this year.

Handmade Holiday Craft Along

Goals

1. Encourage people to give handmade gifts for the holidays
2. Turn away from the over-commercialization of our holidays (you never really wanted to be a corporate stooge, did you?)
3. Give resources for gift ideas

As we roll throught he holiday season I’ll post gift ideas and links to cool projects. I’ll also publish a list of participating crafters. I’ve set up a Flickr group for folks to share what they are working on.

Rules

1. Make something
2. Give it to someone
3. Show it off

To join e-mail me (becca (at) handmademom.com) or leave a comment.

Here’s a button for you. (Please save to your server).

A quote from big-sis. We’ve been sick for the last two weeks here. First the kids, then the parents, now even the grandparents have the scourge…which has meant that the two very energetic girls have had little to do but play with each other. Little-sis wants to play mermaids constantly and I think big-sis has had enough.

We’ve also been hit hard around here by all the recalls. The funny thing is for big-sis’ birthday this year all the moms called to see what to get her. Everyone was wondering what to do because of all the lead recalls. So, she got lots of arts and craft stuff, including Aquadots. So the husband and I had a fun night crawling around on all fours making sure we had them all up. The girls aren’t likely to swallow anything, but we have two infant cousins that will be here in the next few weeks and we’d rather not have anyone in the hospital. It’s gotten really hard to find stuff you can trust for kids toys. Because of that we’re trying to do mostly books/homemade for gifts this year.

The girl’s four year old cousin is so upset she actually learned to spell C-H-I-N-A and if she sees it tosses anything and everything with it on the bottom. Fortunately here the girls haven’t freaked quite that much, but little-sis refuses to watch any Dora after we had to toss a bunch of Dora stuff. Dora the Explorer is dead to us.

A few days ago I posted a link to the how-to for the family memory game I made the girls last spring. Caryn asked for directions of how to play, so here goes.

Memory Directions

• Shuffle the cards
• Lay all the cards face down in a big grid
• Taking turns each person flips over two cards. If they match they keep the pair. If not they put the cards back in the original position.
• The next person takes their turn.
• When all the cards are picked up the person with the most pairs wins.

Variation: You can also let a person keep flipping over cards as long as they are finding pairs. I find with the little kids they do not like this as much.

I have way to many knitting projects in the work as it is, then I had to go and spot this:

This is from the Ramblings of a Knitting Obsessive blog, which I love. Isn’t it cute? The directions seem pretty clear, so maybe once I finish a kids cardigan, some baby hats, a pair of socks and a new vest pattern I’m working on…

I really need a cardigan, my old one died, and I think this would look good in green….

We’re finally getting some chilly weather here. Lots of hope for snow this winter. Last year, after the move back from Florida we got about 3 flakes, so my little flakes really do not remember what snow looks like.

We’re starting to work on our Christmas list. Last spring I made the girls a Family Memory game. I think we might duplicate this for their cousin in Williamsburg. The girls have love this, and it’s been a fun way to remember everyone.

We’re also starting to think about teacher gifts. This is a hard one for me personally. I teach, and the last thing I want is to saddle someone else with a bunch of “apple-crap”. I am also on a public schoolteacher’s budget, and like the idea of hand made.

So we’ve been working on a hot chocolate recipe, and think we’ve hit the final formulation. Little-sis likes to play Top Chef when we do our taste testing which is pretty funny. The plan is to put this in small cellophane bags and put this in a holiday mug.

Hot Chocolate:

• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 1/2 cup powdered sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon Cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger

Mix all the ingredients in a bowl. Put in small jars or gift bags.

For the tag:

Mix 2 teaspoons with 1 cup of hot milk. Stir and enjoy.

The girls are still at the point where they like goofy hair accessories. This is the Santa Barrette cover made of felt.

Here are some plain red ones with light blue snowflakes.

Materials

• Felt in various colors
• Embroidery Floss
• Needle
• Clip style Barrettes

Directions

• Print out the pattern below and cut out all pieces. The top and back are flesh colored, the hat red and the beard white (duh)
• The bottom rim of Santa’s Hat was done in French Knots
• Add the face-eyes French Knots, Mouth in an outline stitch
• Use a Blanket Stitch to attach the beard to the face
• Put the back and top pieces together, wrong sides facing. Put the hat on top. Work around the back piece using the Blanket Stitch, making sure to catch the hat as you go.
• Slip the barrette in, and your set to go.

Need some help with the stitches?

That snappy gal over at Primrose Designs has an excellent stitch school with directions. Very clear directions and great pictures.

Enjoy!

 

So we can get started on:

 

The girls started their drawings for our Christmas cards last night. Our current favorite is “The wise men did not wear hats, they wore towells”. The husband thinks it is the best Christmas message ever, I am not sure how on point it is, but most of our relations will find it funny.

 

I do have to say we will especially miss:

 

 

I’ll try to scan in the Here’s the pattern I’ve been using for the barrettes. tomorrow. We’ve had a lot of fun with these felt covers.

 

 

 

OK, lame post, but this is more for my own reference…I have a ton of sites I use for knitting graph paper, so here’s the collection.  If you are charting your knitting the stitches are typically wider than they are tall, so regular grid paper doesn’t work. As a math nerd I lovegraph paper. Always have. This was one of the best things about Japan. Graph paper in every store. 

knit stitches

• Sweaterscapes store
  I likethat this one lets you pick the paper that is best for your gague. The files are jpegs. Plus they have a really snappy free pattern for Opera Gloves.

  

• Ruth’s Blog
  also has great directions for creating graph paper with excel. Math geek that I am I love this one.
• Here’s another
  set that lets you scale your own, plus you can add color lines and extra margin for notes.
• ABC’s of Knitting
   And if you want a PDF, this one’s for you. Again you scale it by rows/stitches. Even better thay have a few pages about Japanese knitting with directions on how to read the directions…I got several craft & knitting books in Japan, so this is super handy.