By the time I got to work, the forest was full of melting snow dripping from the tree canopy and the newly blossomed trilliums were heavy with moisture.

 But then things turned around and we took advantage of the weekend’s nice weather and embarked on another front yard project.

We made some raised beds and the kids, still in their pajamas, were quick to get into the middle of the action.

Sairshe is the self-proclaimed “Queen of the Dirt Mountain.” Mike is getting tired of shoveling dirt.

We transplanted our blueberries that used to grow in the backyard.

The best part? We actually made money on this project. Here’s how it broke down:

Lumber was  $60 – $50 gift card = $10 cost. That’s pretty good but it gets better. Nice people 7 blocks away just happened to be giving away a pile of fill dirt from their garden that was just the amount we needed. Convenient, right? They were so happy someone took their pile o’ dirt that they paid Mike $20, giving us a $10 profit. If only all home improvement projects could turn out like that.

From afar our berries look like bare sticks but up close they are showing signs of spring.

I also cleaned up our strawberry patch and found this one eager blossom. Maybe we’ll have early berries this year?

After all that work we had plenty of time to lounge on the couch. For the record, I didn’t edit the baby’s eye color at all. Really.

Our chickens are all laying regularly again after their winter hiatus, a real sign that the days are getting longer. I love that their eggs are all different colors.

I’m enjoying the sun but not holding my breath that it’ll stick around quite yet. Who knows. Maybe it’ll snow again this week.

How’s your spring shaping up?

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. I may be doing a little Irish jig in my living room and will certainly be wishing my grandma were still around to cook me a dinner of leg of lamb with mint sauce. I’ll likely drink a little Irish whiskey in honor of my grandpa.

Sláinte!

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 around our house. Did you know that watering a lawn can double your household water usage? It also takes a lot of time and energy to mow it. Some of our lawn has to go.

We also walk across our front lawn every day going from the house to the car since the walk around the car to the sidewalk is just too much sometimes. We’re a shortcut-loving family, what can I say? The little patch of dirt I exposed turned into a much larger one- a path across the front of our house. Here’s what things looked like before. The pretty flowers we planted last month notwithstanding, things are a little overgrown and messy. The mailbox is hard to get to and in the summer our water spigot is always buried under overgrown grass since we can’t mow right around it.

Mike spent an afternoon removing the grass and removing a couple inches of dirt. It was a lot of work! The Dig beer was an appropriate finish to that afternoon.

Then we laid weedcloth along the path since we don’t want grass and weeds popping up where they don’t belong. We anchored the weedcloth and defined the edges with some plastic landscape edging.

Carys Áine was the first to test out the new path. I think she approves!

Then came the heavy lifting, or shoveling. All four of us helped fill in the path with gravel.

Now when I get out of the car I have this pretty walkway to use to get to the house.

My favorite thing, though, is the area in the first photo. We extended the gravel to go around our mailbox and water spigot. No more overgrown corner of the yard. Our flower pots look pretty and I think our mailman appreciates it too.

We have enough gravel left over to put around our garden in the backyard and we plan on taking up some of the grass back there too. Since we put in the path, we’ve had nothing but rain so we still have to cut the excess weedcloth from around our path and we plan on putting some plants in between the path and the house. We also hope to further reduce our lawn by replacing some it with this eco-friendly alternative. Oh, and plant those peas that we set out to plant when all this started.

Do you have any yard projects in the works? Do you share my dream of a yard with more native plants and less lawn?

Sairshe was excited to use her new gardening gloves and Carys Áine was even got in on the action. It was so cute to see them working together.

Sairshe took her planting job very seriously. There was only one brief moment of yelling at her sister for crushing flowers in her little baby fist, though she didn’t mind when Carys Áine tried on her precious gloves.

But the biggest source of fun was the dirt pile Sairshe made in the middle of our lawn when I wasn’t looking.

The front of our house looks a million times prettier. Grandma Diane is visiting and helped pretty things up too.

When Mike came home, he pretended to not recognize our house and drove past twice while Sairshe watched out the window, laughing hysterically at how she had “tricked Daddy.”

Success.

I certainly didn’t intend to have such a long blogging hiatus but it happened anyway.  It  started with my summer from hell.  Soon after the lovely birthday party, summer camp started.  Lots went wrong- mostly database issues resulting in registration issues and unhappy parents mad at me- but also 3 staff members quitting in the 1st 2 weeks of camp for a variety of (mostly) understandable reasons and it all made me want to go home and not come back.

Oh, it wasn’t all bad.  In the end almost 1000 kids had a great time and my cool-on-the-outside-freaking-out-on-the-inside demeanor served me well and resulted in what everyone said was the best summer of camp ever.  Yay me.  In the midst of that, I had no energy left to write and once I stopped it was hard to start back up.  I’ve probably written 25 posts in my head but that does you no good.

Since I left you, my garden grew and grew and we canned a whole lot of delicious produce.  We planted giant sunflowers and now have so many seeds!

Buffy, Oolong and Wynonna grew up and started laying delicious eggs.   One hen tried to fake us out by laying 14 eggs in a secret spot before we found them!  Then last month, sadly and suddenly, Wynonna died mysteriously, and seemingly peacefully, overnight.  So we got 2 new hens- Matcha (an Americauna) and Brown Betty (a Welsummer) but they’re not laying yet and I don’t have any pictures of them yet.  Now Oolong is molting so she’s not laying either so we’re down to one laying hen.  For now.

After camp was over we took an fun, relaxing camping trip to Paradise Creek in the Gifford Pinchot Forest in Washington.  We relaxed and explored, ate smores,  hiked on a path to nowhere and admired the pretty colors of the volcanic rocks that were all along the creek.

I’ve  only really been knitting in the past couple of weeks but I have plenty of projects that will show up here in the next few weeks.  The same goes for spinning.

I renamed my business and moved everything over to a brand new shop and website.  The story of why will come soon.  I love my new name and logo and am gearing up for the busy shopping season.

That’s the quick and dirty lowdown.  I’ve got to start small.  It feels good to get some words out there and I’ll be a little more detailed in my next posts.

So far we’ve eaten broccoli from the garden and will have fava beans and snap peas soon. We’re also growing lettuce, garlic, leeks, a million onions, kale, spinach, kohlrabi, 3 types of tomatoes, purple string beans, 2 types of shelling beans, japanese eggplants, jalapeno peppers, gypsy peppers, carrots, 2 types of potatos, basil and a few other herbs. Whew, that’s a lot! I’m really excited about having so much fresh produce right in my backyard! We also have raspberry, strawberry and blueberry plants. We’ve been enjoying the strawberries for about a week now and I just ate my first ripe blueberry this morning. Delicious!

I’m getting ready for some fun craft shows and art fairs this summer and have been working on a new product. I have this french press cover listed in my shop and several more will be for sale soon. Mike and I tested it out and it definitely keeps coffee warm longer and it adds some style to a french press.

Like my other items for sale, it’s made from a recycled wool sweater. This one is actually a wool/angora blend so it has a little extra softness. I tried some different methods of closing it and finally settled on these beaded ties. They wrap around the buttons so it can be closed as snugly as you’d like. It makes the cover a little adjustable so it’ll fit different brands that may be slightly different sizes.

Etsy is having a “yart sale” today through Sunday. It’s like a yard sale, but with art. I have a whole section of specially discounted items and you can search for “yart” on etsy to see what other good deals are out there.

Why not start in my own backyard?’ I do wage war on dandelions each spring but when it comes down to it, it’s hard for the scientist in me to not admire these tough little plants. with their long roots and hardy seeds that disperse far across the yard with the slightest breeze, they seem perfectly evolved to take over the neighborhood.

Then there are the flowers- bright yellow sunbursts. They deserve a little admiration.

Crabapple trees are blooming down the street.

And a neighbor has these cute, tiny blue flowers filling their yard.

I love seeing the beautiful trilliums appear in the forest. I love that their color varies from white

to pale pink

to deep purple.

All of the images are of coin purses/pouches made from recycled wool and cashmere sweaters. Some are available in my etsy shop now and the rest will be added soon.

I’m inspired to go create some more. Where do you find inspiration?

We came back and made the trek to Mt. Hood to pluck our tree out of the wilderness. It was a gorgeous day and our tree actually looks pretty good in the house despite a crooked trunk and a giant bald spot. I like that it looks like a forest tree and not a manicured farm tree.

I took a quick break from the insane amounts of sewing I’ve been doing for my etsy shop and finally discovered the joy of knitting bulky items on big needles. I’m normally a fine gauge knitter but when you’re short on time, there’s nothing better than knitting a hat in a day! This is the Unoriginal Hat by the Yarn Harlot. You don’t really need a link do you? Just google it if you’d like. The yarn is Cascade Pastaza doubled and while it feels really soft in the skein, it’s a little prickly on my head if I wear it for a long time.

We went on a walk a few days ago and I loved that the whole family was wearing hats knit by me!


My mom visited last weekend, braving the snow and Crafty Wonderland’s Super Colossal Holiday Sale like a real Portlander. Because of the nasty weather, not as many people came to the show as I’d hoped but I still managed to make a little money.

Now to start on those Christmas presents!

Even though the weather was grey and drizzly this weekend (how quickly weather changes in Portland!) we spent a lot of time outside. Here are some pretties from the weekend.

We went to the park and there were already lots of leaves on the ground. It really is feeling like autumn. I want some more sunny days!
Did you know that winged seeds are called samaras?’ I love this cluster of them.

I saw this tree while walking in our neighborhood. I don’t know what it is but I think the fruits hanging down are really pretty.

This is a volunteer plant growing in our front yard. It’s probably a pumpkin but I’ll have to wait a while longer to find out for sure. I like mysteries!

Climbing the steps back home. I do love nasturtiums.

Finally some knitting to show! I’ve mostly knit for the baby this summer but these are Mike’s socks! They’re his first pair of handknit socks and I think they’re a hit. They’re basic toe-up socks with a heel flap and 2×2 ribbing up top. The yarn is Regia 4-ply and the color is Patch Antik #5759.

So the contest. The lovely Vanessa of Designs by Vanessa is hosting a contest on her blog and the prize is a coffee sweater from my etsy shop! So go on over, check out her blog and enter to win!

Hopefully I’ll have some more knitting pictures soon. I hope you’re all having a nice Monday!

Sesame won’t eat strawberries if I offer them to her at mealtimes while she’s in her high chair, but when she could pick them herself, she tried to eat them all! Despite her face in the last picture, she really liked them and amazingly most of the mess managed to stay off of her clothes.

I made fabulous strawberry shortcakes for dessert tonight. I had some creme fraiche in the fridge so I mixed some brown sugar with it and used that instead of whipped cream. Add some fresh-from-the-oven biscuits and fresh-from-the-garden berries and it was a winner!

I’ve been knitting this mess for a while and I finally have all the pieces done. After knitting this a while back, I didn’t think I’d do it again but, well, a knitted toy is hard to resist. All these pieces will be this cute little crab (Ravelry)! That’s the body, 8 legs, 2 claws and 2 eye stalks that you’re looking at. It’s for baby Lucas, whose mother is Cindy, one of my best friends but they live all the way in El Salvador so I don’t see her often enough. I hope the little cutie likes it.

The pattern isn’t written too well and is quite fiddly, for lack of a better word, but I’ll share more about that later. Speaking of patterns, I’m going to write up my loose pattern for the soaker skirt since several have asked for it. Look for that soon! In other housekeeping news, I’m hoping to add some stuff to my shop soon. With all the birthday madness, and my job starting full time next week (eek!) I have been neglecting it a little.