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Scribbles

Need a great gift idea for a kid? Scribbles: A Really Giant Drawing and Coloring Book by Taro Gomi is a coloring book that really gets the creative juices flowing. Maddie already had Doodles: A Really Giant Coloring and Doodling Book, which we bought her before we went on vacation last year, so I knew this was going to be a winner. We actually use Scribbles during school time. She picks out one set of pages and she works on the right hand side while I do the left. It's a great way to play creatively with your child/grandchild/niece/nephew.

Perhaps I should explain a bit more about what kind of coloring book this is. On many pages there is an incomplete picture (for instance, an empty vase on the pages I show above) and there is a suggestion of what to draw to complete it. Usually it's very open ended -- fill the vase, draw an outfit, what is on this hill, draw a super scary monster, or some such thing. Very fun for kids and adults! Maddie and I both highly recommend these books.

Back in the office

Well, the house remodeling is still underway, with the painters here through the weekend, but the office is pretty much complete.  The office furniture arrived yesterday evening and I started moving back in right away.

My goal is to keep a clean desk policy (although I know that is probably unattainable) and to make sure that there is a place for everything.  My project for the upcoming week is organization as I start to bring everything back into this room. 

It's good to be back!  And the simple new furniture -- that all matches I might add -- is very calming.  Here's one last look at the old room so you can get an idea of the change:

Whew -- glad that mess is gone!

Yo-yo fun!

Have you tried the new yo-yo makers from Clover yet?  I have them in just about every size and shape -- probably because I haven't seen a crafting gadget I didn't like.  They make yo-yo's super easy and fun!  I'm working on my ornaments for the 2nd Annual Holiday Ornament Swap.  (There's a Flickr Group too!) and I'm almost finished making my yo-yo's but I'm enjoying them so much that I think I'll continue making more so I can have a holiday yo-yo garland for my new office.

(Speaking of the office, there has been progress and I'll post photos soon!)

How to make yo-yo's here:

• Heather Bailey's tutorial
• PDF showing how to use Clover yo yo makers

More holiday yo-yo inspiration here:

• Heather Bailey's yo yo garland
• Soule Mama's yo yo garland
• Sunshine Creations' yo yo Advent calendar
• Old School Acres' wool and yo yo ornaments

I'm sure there are ton's more -- leave me a comment with a link to your favorite yo yo idea!

Sampler Almost Finished!!

I am completely cross stitch obsessed lately -- which isn't all that surprising.  I learned to cross stitch back in grade school and took to it right away.  I love that you can do it in front of the TV since it's seldom that I can sit and watch TV without my hands doing some project.  There's more to it than that, but I'm not sure what it is.  Perhaps it's the fact that women have been making samplers -- and doing embroidery -- in all parts of the world for so many generations. 

I've been working on this sampler for most of the year -- my last update posted on the blog was back in March.  As you can see, I've gotten a lot more done since then.  In fact, I am on the very last band!  Unfortunately I just ran out of the dark blue color floss, so I need to run out and get that.  But I fully expect to finish this up before the end of the year. 

Next year's cross stitch project just might be this:

This is Quaker Christmas from ByGone Stitches and I'm a bit obsessed with it.  I think I'll treat myself to the floss, fabric and chart for this design as soon as I finish the sampler.

Oh no!

It's 3:05 and the painters aren't here yet.  (They never did make it here last week, but said they would begin the job today.)  Okay, so they were supposed to be here at 3:00 -- they aren't really *late* yet -- but I worry.  I want the painting finished so I can put up my holiday decorations. 

Maybe I'll go start a game of online Scrabble.  They are sure to arrive the moment I begin a match.  right?

*Update*  Woo-hoo!  They are here!!

Maddie's Annual Winter Mittens

Every year I make Maddie a pair of handknit mittens.  Her favorite so far were these knit back in 2003. (OMG -- how long have I been blogging?!  And isn't she the cutest little thing!  When did she grow up so much?)

Other years we've had varying success (complaints that the yarn was too scratchy or not the right color), so this year when we made an unplanned stop in Geneva, IL and found a parking spot *right in front* of Wool & Co., I decided it was time to start this year's mittens.  I let Maddie walk around the shop and decide on the yarn that she wanted and the girl has good taste.  She picked out a ball of Nashua Creative Focus Worsted -- 75% wool/25% Alpaca -- in a lovely, saturated teal blue aptly named Brilliant Blue. 

I've never knit with this particular yarn before and was a bit worried since it is just a single ply yarn, but after knitting about an inch of K1, P1 ribbing for the cuff, I was impressed.  This yarn has lovely memory -- making the ribbing nice and tight -- and is very soft.

I took the easy route (maybe I'm learning) and pulled out Ann Budd's The Knitter's Handy Book of Patterns.  I just love this book for simple items like mittens.   I knit a wee swatch and found my spot in the table for mittens and I was off.  Sizing for 6-8 yr old girls was spot on and I had mitten #1 knit in no time.  If you have some holiday knitting to do for a girl or boy, I highly recommend mittens -- quick easy and fun to knit!

Thanksgiving Baking

Yesterday was pie baking day -- my contribution to Thanksgiving dinner at my mom's is 2 pumpkin pies and one pecan pie.  I made them completely from scratch and I have to say that making the crust isn't really that difficult -- especially if you have a food processor.  The pumpkin pies did take about 30 minutes longer to cook than Martha said they would, but the pecan pie was ready to come out of the oven after 60 minutes, just as she said.  I just pulled both recipes off the Martha Stewart website because I was a bit lazy.

Then at about 8pm I lost my mind and decided that since I had been baking all day anyway, I should just make cinnamon rolls from scratch too.  I made the dough, let it rise, rolled it out, filled it, shaped it and put it in a pan in the fridge overnight and baked them and glazed them this morning.  It really wasn't all that difficult and I'm wondering why I don't do this more often. 

I used what is quickly becoming my favorite baking book for the recipe -- Williams-Sonoma Essentials of Baking.  I just changed things up a bit (2X the cinnamon filling, 2X the glaze, only cut into 12 instead of 16 pieces, etc.)  This is the cookbook I used as the basis for the awesome cherry white chocolate scones I made a while back.  Williams-Sonoma has excellent cookbooks!

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates it!

Reading List

It's been a while since I updated my reading list and I'll forget what I've read if I don't get it down here.  Maybe you'll find something for some of the people on your holiday shopping list!

I believe that last time I did a book post I was in the middle of The Nasty Bits by Anthony Bourdain.  What an enjoyable read!  I'm a closet foodie ( the Dean & Deluca catalog is like porn for me -- seriously), so I love reading about food.  Bourdain's food writing is raw and accessible -- sometimes eye-opening, sometimes stomach churning -- but always interesting.

I finally read Lian Hearn's Heaven's Net Is Wide from the Tales of the Otori Series -- this is a prequel to the trilogy I read over the last year or so and is an excellent book!  If you are going to read the series, read this one last.  (More on this series here & here.)

Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon was my next read.  I was so taken with Barabra Kinsolver's book -- Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life -- that I decided I should explore some other books of this nature.  Plenty didn't excite me as much as Kingsolver's book (which I absolutely loved) but it was a very interesting look at another way to go about eating locally.  While Kingsolver and her family grew much of their food, Smith and Mackinnon lived in an urban area and were forced to find other alternatives while sticking to their 100 mile diet.  I'm not much of a gardener myself, so I enjoyed reading about their hunt and hope to do some of this myself over the coming year. 

After reading The Road and being so so moved by it, I knew I wanted to try some more of Cormac McCarthy's books.  Pete had a copy of All the Pretty Horses that he picked up at the used bookstore, so I gave it a try.  Now McCarthy is probably best known for his "cowboy" stories -- a genre I am not accustomed to reading.  However, I soldiered on and found this book quite enjoyable, although I was not moved by it as I was by The Road.  Quite a bit of dialog is written in Spanish, which I found distracting -- but if you know a bit of Spanish, I'm sure you could read it easily enough.  I probably won't be reading any of his other books, but I think this book would be great for anyone with an interest in westerns.

I'm now reading American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza by Peter Reinhart.  While it is a cookbook technically, there is large part of the book devoted to Reinhart's quest for the perfect pizza which takes him around the US and Italy.  I love making homemade pizza and I think this book will give me a greater appreciation for it as well as a vast amount of knowledge concerning how to make a great pizza at home.  Reinhart is also the author of the most excellent cookbook --  The Bread Baker's Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread.

I'm not sure what is up next in fiction, I'm thinking of re-reading J.R.R. Tolkein for the holidays.  Or maybe I'll go in a totally differrent direction -- until I decide, I'll keep reading about pizza with my tummy rumbling and my mouth salivating -- yum!

Progress

We are back at home after being driven out by the fumes for 3 days.  No one mentioned the toxic fumes when we ordered the flooring job.  Luckily my mom lives a few blocks away and has a few spare rooms.  Here is the office floor, sanded and refinished.  It looks so much better than it did!

And here's a view of the 80 year old floor in the front foyer, which butts up to the new floor in the living room.  (New floor upper right side -- old floor on the lower left.) 

And here's a view of the corner of the room showing the new floor and old paint.  The painters arrive tomorrow -- hopefully. 

As if I didn't have enough going on . . .

The tree service has come to remove a huge dead tree from our yard.  This stealth photo was taken from the window in my temporary office. 

Great -- noise coming at me from all sides.

Destruction

End of day one looked like this.  Now, I've never had any work that was this extensive done in my house before and I must say -- the dust!  It's driving me crazy!  And they haven't even started sanding yet, which is the dusty part, right? 

And look at this lino that was under the tile in the sun room.  Removing the radiator covers revealed that the room was also painted bright aqua at one time -- can't you visualize the combo in it's heyday?  (Oh there was a pink bathroom in this house too -- and the little eating room as we call it was once a shocking jade green!)

Speaking of paint colors -- I'm going insane trying to pick them out.  Finally when Pete came home I snapped at him about the colors and he helped me pick them out -- in the dark -- while climbing over all the furniture crammed in the dining room.  Thank goodness for him! 

Office Remodel Scrapbook

The flooring guys are here and are very nice.  Noisy, but nice.  I mean, they are ripping up a floor and subfloor today, so I expected pounding.  What I did not expect was that I would only get about three hours of sleep last night.  Oooof!

So, in order to cheer myself up and see the bigger picture, I am putting together a "scrapbook" of office design items that will help me to visualize the end result.  Here goes!

Ah -- refinished floors!  Looking forward to that.  The current floor had almost no finish at all left -- and there were paint splatters here and there.  They are sanding the existing floor and refinishing the two steps that lead up to the office which are currently painted dark brown (although the paint is terribly chipped and nicked up!)  You can see those steps here.

New desk(s).  These modular desks from Pottery Barn will be along two walls -- two of them will be across the long wall at the back of the room (the side with the three huge windows) and there will be a corner desk to match in the south east corner.  I'm getting the black just like you see in the photo, but I don't plan on getting that little hutch thingy.

Next is white wood blinds.  I tried to find a simple photo on the web, but didn't have much luck.  So picture plain white wooden blinds -- no tapes, but I do plan on getting the routeless ladders (slats without holes in them).  I'm thinking they will give me the look of shutters on the cheap.

Wall color -- I'm thinking Krypton from Sherwin-Williams, although it may be a bit cold with the black and white.  The wood floors will warm things up a bit though.  So here's the basic color scheme:

On the back (north) wall, I need some bookshelves/cabinets to hold all my work stuff.  I'd also like to have room for my craft books, fabric and other craft supplies.  I absolutely love the Windham Cabinets from Crate & Barrel, but I don't think they will hold enough stuff.  I'm thinking maybe the Liatorp:

from IKEA.  You can get doors on the bottom half which is nice.  And they seem a bit more substantial than the other option -- the Billy:

Also from IKEA.  We already have 5 Billy bookcases in the house, so I'm familiar with these -- they are basic and hold up well -- we've moved twice with one of them and once with the others.  But I think I want something more stylish this time around.

Well, that's the plan so far.  You should hear the noise here -- it's unnerving!

Renovation

Okay, so I mentioned an impending office remodel a while back -- but what ever happened?  Well, after *much* contemplation, and some difficulties finding reliable floor refinishers -- things are finally coming along!

After two days of hard labor, the office is now completely empty (except for the modem and router which must remain in there if my internet connection is to continue) and the spare room is ridiculously full.  I have an idea for the new paint color, but I am at a loss for new window treatments.  Any suggestions?

Oh, but this is not the only room getting a makeover -- the family room and sunroom are getting brand new hardwood floors!  Right now the floor looks like this:

Yeah -- shiny white tile.  Ewwwwwwww!  Not sure what the last owner was thinking when she had this installed.  This is one project I've wanted to do since we bought the house 3 1/2 years ago.  I'll also need new window treatments for the sun room which is currently sporting some lovely synthetic shears (completely with tears and frayed edges) on some windows and some dirty and dusty lace panels on the others.  Also need suggestions for these windows -- there are *a lot* of them, so I need something that isn't too expensive and preferably something adjustable since these windows face west and the sun shines right into your face as you sit on the couch later in the day.

Well, the next two weeks are going to be trying, with workers in here and so much destruction and construction.  I'm looking forward to having this done before the holidays, but I'm dreading the part that is about to come.  Wish me luck & a working internet connection!