Monday, August 10, 2009

Hannah's Winter Knitted Set!

I was pretty bored at my MIL's after the first week with all my crafty things in storage so when I got done making Hannah's little knit shrug from the handspun I'd done, I took what was left and I knitted her a little hat.

AND then I was still bored so I knitted little mittens. She LOVES her mittens! Actually, she loves all this stuff and tried to wear them, mismatched with tank tops and shorts, at random even though it has been being 95 degrees outside. I've only ever knitted one other pair of mittens before, my Bella cabled mittens from the Twilight movie (which I LOVE LOVE LOVE and can't wait for cold weather to wear them!!) so I was pretty excited that I was able to do such a little thumb.

After I was done with the mittens, I was still kind of bored and wanted to knit her some matching slipper socks. I had since run out of the handspun, and, since I was using a solid lavender acrylic yarn, I wanted to come up with some kind of pattern to make the slippers more interesting. Using just knit and pearl stitches I designed these, which look like Mary Jane slippers with bobbie-socks underneath! I took pictures and I'm going to try to write up the pattern and let Mom or Diantha list it in their etsy shops 'cause they're just so cute!


Hannah loves these too, and wore them all night Saturday night and then awoke Sunday to find that they are kind of slippery on our wooden floors! I will have to put some non-skid paint on the bottoms of them. All in all a pretty cute set I think!

Jeremiah's Flaming 'Edward Scissorhands/Frankenstein' Curtains from Hell

There has been too much going on in the last week and since I don't have internet access at my house anymore (gasp!) or cable for that matter (the Horrors! the Dark Ages!) I'm just going to comment on things one or two at a time instead of all at once.

First off we shall talk about Jeremiah's 'Edward Scissorhands/Frankenstein' Curtains from Hell. I priced curtains for Jeremiah's car-themed bedroom and they were going to run me about $80 for very simple black or navy curtains. I couldn't swing $80 so instead we decided I'd just make them. Off to JoAnn's for some black fabric that he said looked like tires and coincidentally I had used in the quilt for his bed 2 yrs ago. He wanted flames around the edges. Okay. It cost me $40 for fabric. Half the money saved!

We didn't actually measure the windows. Tony kinda held Jeremiah up to them and we guessed based on his height. Not a fool-proof plan for sure, but it looked like it would work. I thought I'd need 2, 2-yd x 44" wide panels per window. I held a 2yd piece up and it seemed to be a half yard too long. Easily remedied by hacking a half yard off and then cutting all the rest of the panels 1.5 yds. I cut strips of the flame fabric and began to sew.

I ran out of flame fabric.
Ugh.

I also didn't have my ironing board so I was having to sew down seams to make them lay flat so I could do things like hem. I get the first panel almost done, held it up to the window and it was TOO SHORT. Aarrggh! So, sew a 5" wide strip to the top to turn back as the hanging sleeve and add a 7" wide panel across the middle somewhere and tada, it's long enough.

These curtains have seams everywhere (hence the Edward Scissorhands...which reminds me, remember when Edward was the man and we all had Edward tshirts but he wasn't a vampire? I digress...) They are not award winning by far but Jeremiah likes them and that makes me happy. Good 'nuff. I still have one more to make.

Everything else is getting a fresh coat of paint, including Jeremiah's dresser which used to have green stripes painted on the front to match his baby-animals nursery but now it getting painted the same dark blue as his trim. Since I took this picture I've painted the other door.


And Mom and I collaborated and painted this mural on one of his walls. He told us it needed 4 buildings. We added a train to surprise him!

Mom made one of the buildings, the house, look JUST like our house except for the hot pink front door. He said it needed a hot pink door. Oh, and that the car had to be PURPLE. Okay!

The little barn also looks just like Tony's little wooden outbuilding. The train depot says JWB Depot because thoses are Jeremiah's initials. So cool!

Ghost Writer Post 2 - House!

We had to paint the mint green living room and we used the very scientific method of dumping half a quart of deep tan paint my Mom found in her back porch into a bucket with a gallon of white paint and voila! close enough to the nice neutral-but-not-boring tan color we were shooting for. The color we ended up with is actually the EXACT color of a Wendy's original (chocolate) frosty. It makes me hungry.

Everything in my house is kinda jury-rigged or half done right now. The red curtains are hung but were too long so instead of cut them off and hem them, I pinned them. The blue curtains might not even be going in here (I'm going to try to get more red ones) but they are a stop gap measure. Tony bought me some curtain rods to hang them but I couldn't get the screws into the real-wood trim around the windows so I nailed the curtains to the wall. Sigh. The gap in the paint around the top of the room will be covered by white crown molding which hasn't been purchased yet.

Tony finished taking all the acoustic tiles off the ceiling to find that someone had PAINTED it charcoal gray. Hmm...maybe to cover up the fire? We'll get to that in a minute. We painted it bright white and it made the room look instantly better! Once we had the ceiling and walls painted we were able to tear up the nasty carpet. To find lovely hardwood floors underneath. That had 4,000 staples that had to be picked out with a small hammer, screw driver and pliers. Nothing like sliding around on your butt on the floor for 2 hrs in 20yrs worth of cat/dog pee dried into the pad, stuck to the floor.

The living room floor will have to be refinished which probably would have been more wise to do before we moved in but we just couldn't wait any longer to get into our own place and let my MIL back into hers. Under where we put our couch, under the nasty carpet, we discovered that once upon a time some original owner must have caught their Christmas tree on fire. There, in the floor, was a burn (in a couple little places deep enough that it will still be black even after we refinish it) that looks like the scene from Christmas vacation where they burned up the cat under the tree.



Probably it was a 5 or 6 legged Christmas tree stand but I like to think it was a cat.


The bathroom which was originally dark teal is now a nice white even though it still looks slightly mint with the lights off. We gave it 3 coats of white, including 1 of primer, and I ran out of patience with it so that's all it's getting.


Jeremiah's room you can see in the blog about his Curtains from Hell.


Hannah's room is a cute, cute light lavender with dark purple trim. We are using blue and green accents too just to shake things up. We got her furniture put in there but not any of her quilts or pictures hung up yet. It looks bare but I think because everything is just down low since she's a shorty.

We have done a TON of work in the last week since we moved in (and in the week before since we closed) but still lots of work left to do. The good news is, we have 30 yrs to do it!

The kids are really thrilled to be here (see?) and Tony says he loves it. I'm glad it's already starting to look and feel like home, even if it's still all a mess and boxes.

Jeremiah wanted to take a picture of me the other morning. He said for me to cheese really big, and then he cut my head off.