Owlishly

I forgot to mention, I'll refund the 29%, so please pay first :)

Birthday Sale!

Well, it's better late than never... right?

Since my birthday is November 29th, the Etsy sale will be- Spend $10 or more, and get 29% off your entire purchase- Just type in Birthday in the note to seller to get the discount!

The sale will run from now until 11:59pm PST November 28th, 2009, since we're leaving the morning of November 29th to camp at the beach for a week, and my shop will be closed while I'm away.  Today my in-laws leave, and I'll have a tiny breather before having to get into Thanksgiving mode so I hope to have a little time to get some pattern work done.

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I'm trying to keep Christmas simple, so I'm making a waldorf doll for my daughter (fingers crossed!) and a spiderweb blanket for my little boy, since he is constantly caught using my little girl's flower blanket as a spider web that he catches things in. He likes spiderman a lot, but he likes actual spiders even more, so it's going to be black with white details.

If I have time I'm going to make a doll for my niece too, but with as busy as we ware lately, I can't make any promises!

Oh, and another thing- I made the Pioneer Woman's sweet potato dish for the Thanksgiving fiesta at my son's school last Friday- it's a keeper!  I usually make sweet potatoes with a tiny bit of butter and brown sugar, but I thought I needed to up the ante for his kinder class since all last week I kept hearing how gross sweet potatoes were from a lot of the kids in the class. 

I'm happy to report that all except 2 kids gobbled it up, but I think it had a lot less to do with my cooking skills as it did with all the sugar in the recipe :)  Nevertheless, it's going to be my contribution to our family Thanksgiving dinner this year!

So, that's it for now, hopefully this post wasn't too all over the place, and if I'm not here before- Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

So...
typepad is doing microblogging now. I wonder how this will work out versus twitter and regular blogging.

Back so soon?

Why yes, yes I am :)

I know, I'm horrible at blogging this year.  I blame it on a multitude of things that have happened since this summer that I have no control over and realizing how horribly I deal with them.

I did have a good reason for not coming back as soon as I wanted.  I was sicker than a dog last week.  I wrote that post and then the next day couldn't get out of bed.  And then didn't get out of bed for 2 additional days after that.  The flu really kicked my butt this year, and it's so nice that it happened when I have a million things to do.

Seriously, so many of you are better people than I am.  I don't know how you manage to run households, make gifts, get ready for guests, and just keep up with life in general! I was not even close to thinking straight last week, and I'm am so embarrassingly far behind on emails, but I'm trying very hard to make sure that pattern purchases get sent within the 24 hour window I've given myself. 

I have two dolls that I'm almost finished with, but I have no idea when I'm going to be able to type up/design the pattern- one is a panda girl and the other one is a winter themed girl.

So instead of dwelling on that and the other 32 million things I need to do, I'll share the two little knitting projects that I finished last month for my daughter's dolls- a sweater for the girl and a sweater vest for the boy.

Eventually I'll work my way up to knitting for bigger bodies, but it's nice to start small. (more details are at flickr & I'll add them to Ravelry soon)

I should probably start cataloging my accomplishments more often than talking about what I haven't done/need to do.  So I will share that I've finally saved my computer's guts to an external hard drive that I bought months ago, but never took out of the package.  I've also organized my desktop, deleted a bunch of useless photographs cluttering iphoto, reorganized my music on itunes and caught up on all the software updates I needed to get to. 

I also cleaned out the cupboard underneath the kitchen sink- I'm super sensitive to chemicals and when we moved 6 years ago the woman who came and cleaned the house for us left a box under there for me that I never opened... until 2 nights ago.  Got rid of that sucker, and breathed a big sigh of relief!

My brother-in-law and mother-in-law will be flying in for a visit this Saturday and will be here until Tuesday so I don't know how soon I'll be back before their visit.  Since this month is my birthday month though, I was going to have another pattern sale- it'll probably only run for a week, maybe like next week because we're going to be gone on my actual birthday.  We're stopping in at Disneyland on the 29th for a couple of woo-hoo-it's-my-birthday rides before heading down to the beach to camp for the week.  I love camping at the beach around my birthday- it's my absolute favorite type of beach weather :)

Well, that post was all over the place, but I always seem to be needing to play catch-up when I post lately :)

Let's play catch up

It's been a while hasn't it? 2009 just hasn't been a good year for blogging for me, sorry about that. 

Well, that little Magdalena doll that I showed you last month- she's a free pattern for The Saturday Evening Post.   

 

Her pattern is a bit different than my usually patterns offered- it's a small pdf with one image of the completed doll & instruction.  She's somewhat simpler also, since there's no leg joining, and she'd be cute in so many different colors too! 

This one was made in all (mostly from my stash) Malabrigo since I was curious to see what it would feel like, and while it does feel super soft and warm and squishy, I don't think I'll continue to do more in all Malabrigo, it seems like it would pill if it was played with vigorously.  This one's for my mom though, so it's not going to be handled very much.

Other than that, there hasn't been much yarn involved crafting.  Being sick and passing it around back and forth between the kids an I just wasn't conducive to feeling like doing anything.  I had to finish up the kid's costumes, so I did spend some time at my sister's sewing my niece & daughter's ladybug costumes, and then I needed a teeny break before getting to my son's spider costume- he wanted to be a big hairy spider- completely disgusting!

I've started on a couple of things lately, but have barely progressed enough to mention it, and won't be able to spend much time doing anything yarny anytime soon either.  My youngest sister's birthday is next week, and then my niece's is the next week, with my mother-in-law and brother-in-law are coming the week of Thanksgiving. Needless to say, I'm getting to the point where I'm thinking about pulling out all my hair since I still have some portrait editing to do for my sister, and curtains and a duvet to make before my nieces birthday, and then just general visiting guests stress :)

I'm finding that I've become a technological issues magnet lately too. My camera is acting up, or at least the connection to upload images- I can't tell, so no new pictures except this one-

  

It was taken with my computer.  It's of the Girl's capped sleeved spring shirt by Shellee Floyd and of a Littlest Pet Shop Lamb that my little girl gave me, since I like wool and she remembered that wool comes from sheep and said I should take a picture of the lamb with her little sweater :)