spring is on it's way!

on our walk home from school today we passed a beautiful rhododendron bush beginning to bloom (bottom pic)! and when we arrived at our house we had a few small blooming flowers next to our front porch. i have seen several robins hopping around the yard, spring is coming! it's the only season we haven't yet experienced since moving to our new part of the country. our winter had been my favorite of any winter i can remember anywhere, as it was frequently filled with sunshine & a few weeks of snow on the ground. the one thing i will not miss about winter is being cold inside the house! our house is not insulated, & has one very inadequate heater located in the living room that is the only source of heat. my smartwool socks have been a necessity on our hardwood floors.

now for a warm cup of coffee ....

technical difficulties, gnomes & fairies

i have been cut off from the cyber world for quite some time, as my macbook pro required extensive repairs, which ended in it having to be completely refurbished. this included replacing the hard drive, hence the loss of anything we didn't have backed up, mostly pictures from the last 6 months of our lives. :(

the upside is it's quite pleasant in many ways to have no inkling of what is going on in cyber space, and i had so much more time for knitting! for a while now i have been searching for a pattern for a gnome/fairy style hat, something pointy but not outrageously so. i was frustrated with what i was finding both online & in the pattern books at the knitting shop. eventually i ended up modifying a pattern for an adult hat from a book i've had for a long time, "stitch n' bitch nation". the adult hat version has earflaps & i had always thought was unattractive for a grown up. however, for a child it was exactly what i was looking for! i really enjoy working this pattern, which begins at the top on double points.

i am very happy with the results, and i think i can use up a lot of the extra yarns i have that i've never quite known what to do with. the first hat i made for my 5 yr old, whose favorite color is yellow & has been asking me to make her a yellow hat for quite some time. for this one i used spud & chloe outer (in cornsilk), a nice, bulky, but very soft and warm 65% superwash wool/ 35% organic cotton blend.

the green & pink i created specially for my adorable 21 month old niece, fern. i bought the green a few months ago with the intention of making something for her, but hadn't stumbled upon the right pattern. after making the yellow hat, it struck me that the yarn i had purchased for fern would look really neat in this pattern, and it turned out to be probably my favorite had i've made yet. i can't wait to see her in it!

hat for ella finished! & thanksgiving

i finished this hat for our friend ella a few days ago, but then our computer crashed for a few days, so i couldn't post pictures of it until just now. i'm happy with the way it turned out, and i hope she is too! :)

next it's on to her little brother everett's hat. i have been searching for a good rust colored yarn, something textured or variated in color just a bit. haven't found what i'm looking for, so might substitute with the same orange that i used here in ella's hat.

it was our first thanksgiving in our new home state of WA, & it was a great one! we had snow still on the ground from a few days prior, and since i grew up in the mid-west, snow always makes it feel like the holidays to me. the only downside was that it started to warm up enough for freezing rain, and we couldn't go down to kirkland (about an hour south) to our friend's house for thanksgiving dessert. but we did have a nice cozy meal with our quorn roast, mashed potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, corn, green beans, hawaiian rolls and spiced cider! apple & pumpkin pies for dessert.

as we get into the holiday season i am really looking forward to getting the decorations out & even more so to the decorations the kids will make. they did such a great job with what they came up with at halloween. all i have to do is make sure they have the paper colors & colored pencils they need, & the rest they come up with on their own. they have tons of fun & encourage each other & could sit at the table for hours creating happily.

tonight i found a small folded note that our 9 year old had made & delivered to our 5 year old. it said inside; "Amalie's Mission. Capture Bulldog Trash Basket. Supplies: cage, wire, rope/yarn, bone, chew toy, fake fingers." i laughed so hard when i read it, & wanted to ask why the fake fingers were necessary, but since it was labeled "top secret", i didn't want to let them know i had seen it! :)

this week's outlook ...

here is my sweet baby modeling the rainbow hat (crocheted). for kids hats i love working with the super fuzzy synthetic yarns, they are SO soft & almost furry looking. :) this particular green is very bright but i think it works!

this week i am working on using more earthy tones, as well as adding a new design. fuzzy also, but knit. can be made for adults or children. it's a pattern i've never tried before, so we shall see how it turns out!

also this week i will be making hats for our friends ella & everett. for ella something that combines purple, orange, turquoise & lime green; for everett something in earth tones brown, rust & green. i'm very excited to get started on these, but first i have to make a run to the yarn shop! i don't quite have the exact colors i want. i plan on driving up to bellingham to check out 2 of their yarn shops.

today brings ...

i regret that i wasn't blogging through our whole transition from nashville to washington state. it was one of the most complex things i have ever been a part of, helping my husband to orchestrate a move of over 2,000 miles with 4 children. it took a lot of help, from a lot of wonderful people, to get us where we are now. it was a painful, sometimes seeming impossible task. but we did it! we set the goal and we made it, and it's working for us.

we love living in a small town. we are half a block from a huge wooded park with a playground, 5 blocks from the kid's school, a mile from the library, a mile from the food co-op (where i am working part-time), a mile from the post office, a mile from our naturopath's office. life has slowed down for us in a wonderful way & we are enjoying every day of it. when we lived in nashville there was a time when we were driving almost 500 miles a week. now there are stretches of days where i'm not in a vehicle at all.

the other day after walking the 3 older kids to school, aven chose not to ride in the wagon on the way home, but wanted to walk and hold onto 2 of my fingers (her hands are still so tiny she can't really hold my hand). it was a slow walk, as we walked at her pace, and the sun was shining and the air here always smells like the conifer trees. off in the distance i could see the san juan islands to the north & the olympic mountains to the south. i felt an encompassing happiness, this sweet walk with my baby girl surrounded by this incredible environment. every once in a while aven would stop to examine a bug or a rock or a plant along the sidewalk. this is the life we have been waiting for. a life where we can accept what each day brings with happiness and gratitude. this place makes that possible for us. everyone who has a place that makes them feel that way, should be in that place. :)

parent's room

this is our bedroom, it is a cozy attic room. i bought the quilt from my friend leia, who had purchased it for her new bedroom, but decided on something different. i love it because it resembles a quilt in one of my favorite childhood books, "sleepy time" by gyo fujikawa. in it, it shows japanese children going to bed on their tatami mats, covering up with pretty quilts with hexagons on them, and i always wanted a quilt like that! now i have one, and it makes me happy. :) in talking about moving and things we will keep and things we will get rid of, this is at the top of my keep list! the chair in the corner i bought at one of my favorite stores in nashville, wonders on woodland, which carries a really nice selection of antique/vintage furniture for really low prices. i got this chair for only $40. it's also at the top of my keep list!

this week the kids are on spring break and we are going to use this time to get the house in order so that we can begin going through and sorting things for yard sale, donation, to give to friends, and to keep. i'm also planning on purchasing a new bookshelf to help me organize our "multi purpose room", which is i guess a den. right now it's just the catch-all room, and it seems silly to buy a piece of furniture when we are currently trying to get rid of things. but i'm hoping it will help us keep organized for the remainder of our time here, and be helpful for getting us re-organized in WA.

a change of plans

since my last posting (wow! a long time ago!!) we have decided to seriously, for real this time, make the move back to washington state. paul has been working 2 jobs, 5 days a week @ each, for almost nine years now. nine years. and he has never loved nashville. so to work that hard, just to maintain a life somewhere you don't even enjoy living, seems a little bit pointless.

we love washington, both of us. i realize how lucky we are to both want to be in the same place, to both be at our happiest in the same place. our kids deserve to be raised the way we want to raise them, in a culture we are more comfortable in and that mirrors our values. that isn't nashville. and it's hard for me in so many ways to say that, because although i didn't grow up in nashville, my family roots are here, most of my summers and many of my christmases as a child were spent here. all 4 of the kids were born here. and we have tried to make it work here, god knows. we have so many wonderful friends, and leaving will be sad. our goal is to move this summer after school is out. dare i even say it?

in our quest to simplify, this will be a major help. right? whenever we move, we get rid of a lot. and this time, because the cost of moving so far across the country is so much, we have extra incentive to bring only the things we really love.

i feel like i haven't been at all successful in simplifying. for a few months, when paul's work schedule was particularly rough on us, i hired some wonderful cleaning ladies to come once a week to help me keep up and get on track towards weeding out all of our junk. the first time they came they told me "your problem is you have too much stuff!". i know! i know. although, i must say, over time i realized that's only partly the problem. the other problem is, we don't have anywhere to organize our stuff.

recently i came across this wonderful blog: http://lovelydesign.blogspot.com. the creator, sharilyn, has such a beautiful way of organizing things, i have found a tremendous amount of inspiration from her photos of her home. she works from home, and raises her daughter full-time, so she has to keep very organized! i realized through looking at her home that simplicity can come from organization. lucky for me, i love to organize! not so lucky for me, i rarely, rarely get the time. sigh.

here is a picture from a brunch that paul and i had last week with just amalie and aven at marche. it was a really sweet day!