Posted in Cooking and Baking, Eat Well, Recipes on Apr 21st, 2012
Sugar in my peanut butter? Artificial flavors in my salad dressing? Red #5 in my barbecue sauce? BPA in the linings of canned food? No thanks! It’s better for the environment, my family’s health and my wallet to make from scratch some of the common items found in pantries across America. Click over to the [...]
Posted in Crafting with Kids, Create, Kids' Crafts, Paper Crafts, Paper Crafts, Patterns & Tutorials, Spring, Upcycling on Mar 29th, 2012
Sairshe and I took advantage of a sunny Spring Break day earlier this week (today is stormy and rainy, in true spring flip-flopping fashion) and made these pretty flowers made from egg cartons. I’ve been seeing wreaths made from flowers like this on Pinterest lately and as I was tossing an egg carton into the [...]
Posted in Children, Family, Gardening, Spring on Mar 26th, 2012
Oh, Portland. I love you but this weather is a little ridiculous. We don’t get much snow here, especially not in March, but on the third day of spring we woke up to an inch of snow. Sairshe was a little sad to see the flowers she planted covered in snow. By the time I [...]
Posted in Gardening, Holidays, St. Patrick's Day, The Outdoors, Uncategorized on Mar 17th, 2012
You can find my writing today at the EcoEtsy blog where I have a post up all about clover and eco-friendly lawn care. Fitting for St. Patty’s Day, don’t ya think? In real life I’m hanging out with my 2 little Irish lasses, at least one of whom is sporting a new shamrock hair clip. [...]
Posted in Felted Sweaters, Holidays, Patterns & Tutorials, Sewing, St. Patrick's Day on Mar 15th, 2012
Here’s a little felt shamrock tutorial for you. It’s a super quick project that there’s still time to make, even though St. Patrick’s day is only a couple days away. I used a felted wool sweater as my material because I have an abundant supply but any felt will work. You can sew or glue [...]
Posted in Gardening, The Outdoors on Mar 14th, 2012
A few weeks ago, Sairshe and I dug up some old plants and prepared a little patch of dirt in front of our house to plant some peas. Somehow that little project turned into a much bigger one. Funny how those things happen. We’ve been wanting to reduce the amount of grass that we have [...]
Posted in Create, Easter, Felted Sweaters, Holidays, Spring on Mar 10th, 2012
3/14/12 Update: You can sew these too! Pattern can be found here. Meet Hungry Bunny, Pretty Bunny, Woodland Bunny and Love Bunny! These cute little egg-shaped bunnies are my latest creations. They’ve arrived just in time for Easter and these four are already available in my shop. I’m imagining them decorating springtime tables, getting nestled [...]
Posted in Create, Felted Sweaters on Mar 4th, 2012
Two new friends showed up here yesterday. I have so many little pieces of felted cashmere and wool sweaters that I finally decided to use up a few. Sairshe picked out the colors and I first whipped up this cute little owlish bird. I used this simple free pattern here. It’s just 2 triangles and [...]
Posted in Children, Family, Gardening, Spring, The Outdoors on Feb 24th, 2012
I’m tired of my front steps looking like this. I try to ignore the dead plants and broken planter every day as I rush in and out of the house with 2 kids and their accompanying backpack, coats, books, stuffed animals and everything else they want to take with them into the car and then [...]
Posted in Crafting with Kids, Create on Feb 20th, 2012
Thanks to an awesome tutorial by Lil Fish Studios Sairshe and I made some felted rocks today. It was the perfect easy project for this school-free day. It was really fun and our finished rocks feel so soft and fuzzy and lend an air of springtime to our table. We started by wrapping our rocks [...]