How to Enjoy a Blizzard

1. Stay inside your cozy home with your family.

2. Stay in your pajamas all day.

3. Have hot coffee, hot chocolate, and/or hot tea pretty much all day.

4. Watch at least two movies before lunchtime.

5. Do lots of puzzles.

6. Have grilled ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch.

7. Work on a project.

8. Build a fire. (Note: bring lots of wood into the house a couple days before the snow is supposed to fly so you can keep it going all day without going out for more, and so it will be dry and free of snow.)

9. Play memory.

10. Construct miles of new train tracks.

11. Watch your kind neighbor snowblow much of your driveway and sidewalk.

12. Wear slippers.

13. Put on some music that makes you smile.

14. Read a book, like Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter (to remind yourself this really isn't a huge deal despite the bizarre fixation the media has on this very ordinary phenomenon). Afghan or quilt required.

15. Give your pets some extra treats.

16. Play-Doh Fun Factory

17. Watch the neighbor kids (or your dog) play in the snow.

18. Enjoy the privilege of living in a state gets beautiful snow (not everyone is so lucky, and I say that with no sarcasm whatsoever).

19. Silently judge people in the south for whom everything stops when it snows an inch. Feel smugly superior (until you realize that spring is just around the corner for them and two months away for you).

20. Be thankful for the guys out in snow plows and salt trucks who are busy clearing the roads for your commute tomorrow.

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Blue Beret

Have you noticed that I like blue? It has long been my favorite color, supplanting hot pink (can you imagine?) when I was about 12 or 13 years old. I like most shades of blue, but this deep, rich, jewel-toned one is way up there at the top of the list. When I decided I wanted to crochet a hat, I went to Jo-Ann's and quickly zeroed in on this beautiful blue alpaca yarn and bought it—before I even looked through patterns. Luckily in my friend Kristin's humonguous stash of Crochet Today magazine I found the pattern for this beret and it worked with the weight of yarn I'd chosen:

By the way, how do you like the new specs?

I didn't finish it in an afternoon, as the pattern suggested I might, but I did finish it after just a couple nights' work (and that was with ripping out three rounds where I had messed up). It was nice to start and finish something within that short timeframe since my other projects keep lingering on and on and on. I really do need to make the most of what's left of winter and get my hand quilting done. But I'm so very tempted to just keep making hats. *sigh*

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The end of another January . . .

One month of the new year is already gone. Amazing to me how much faster time goes with a little one in the mix. I hardly had time to get depressed.

We've had a nice amount of snow so far this winter in the middle of the Mitten (look at a map of Michigan if that phrase has you stumped). Not too much, not too little. I tend to be more bummed if there is too little snow than too much. Too little means gross dead grass and mud all over the place. For someone who works from home most of the week, too much almost doesn't exist. I don't mind shoveling the walk and the driveway (especially when these guys help out).

And I'm usually pretty cozy inside and love a nice white backyard to look at out my window. If it's gently snowing, so much the better. I can put on some nice music and thoroughly enjoy the snow. We've even had about five or six days this month when the sun was shining, which is pretty phenomenal.

To tell you the truth, while I'm looking forward to spring when Calvin and I can resume our walks to storytime and the park and he can start helping me plant our kitchen garden, I'm not unhappy that there at 2+ cold months ahead. While I'm starting to think about what to sew for my Easter dress, I know that Lent must come first. While I'm wondering how the daffodils I planted this fall will look in the spring, the garden is far less work in the wintertime (well, it's no work at all).

All that to say that I'm mentally stable about the fact that tomorrow February begins. And that's partially because I just crocheted my first hat. Who wants to have a warm alpaca beret on her head when it's above freezing?

Here's the preview.

Tomorrow the reveal.

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Me and Oslo

This is who I have been hanging out with this weekend. His name is Oslo. He is a Eurasian Eagle Owl. I could talk about him for an hour.

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A Summery Apron for January

I made this with myself in mind, but my still-large waist doesn't do the style justice. You can find it in my Esty shop, Stuff To Charm You. It's made from a 1940s/1950s pattern (not sure which era, exactly) and I even made the bias binding myself. If you're a medium or a large with a slim waist, it's just right for you!

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Laundry Love

I don't know about you, but when it comes to laundry, I'm not a fan of socks (cheeky little fellows who like to play hide and seek), delicates (too prim and proper for the common dryer, are you?), or my son's tiny clothes (there are just so many of them in a load!).

Here's what I like: towels, sheets, and tablecloths. All things that are superbly stackable. There's nothing like a solid stack of fresh towels. And after getting de-prioritized for weeks and weeks (yes, that's a Christmas tablecloth in there) while we did loads of essentials that I hate having to put away, a lovely stack of tablecloths ready for the drawer.

Simple. Rectangles. Love it.

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My First Knit Shirt

Sewing Myth #82—Busted. Knits are not actually the devil's preferred fabric.

I am really happy with how my first knit sewing project turned out and I didn't find that sewing with a knit fabric drove me to the edge of insanity. It wasn't hard, just different. It required slightly different handling, but it is nothing to be afraid of. So if you're avoiding knits because you've heard they're too much trouble, I say give them a try. Buy good quality fabric and use a pattern designed for knits and I'm sure it will go fairly smoothly. You just have to slow down and read the directions and not pull too much on them.

And frankly some things are actually easier. I'll tell you, putting in the sleeves of a knit shirt is easy compared to set-in sleeves in a non-knit fabric. And there's no facing. And no closures. It's pretty darn cheap. And expanding to knits means more fabric patterns to choose from.

So, fellow seamstresses, maybe it's time to branch out a bit.

Coming up soon, I'll be doing this shirt pattern again in a very different, more open knit in super-springy green. I'll lengthen the pattern a wee bit and I may do 3/4 sleeves. We'll see.

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There is music in the word home . . .

Last night's low temperature was 0 degrees Fahrenheit. That's 32 degrees below freezing. That's -18 degrees Celsius, for all you rest-of-the-worlders. That's cold no matter what scale you use. Today's high is 16.

It's January.


Even though the days are supposedly getting longer, in late January it is usually so cloudy that it feels like it's getting darker earlier and earlier still. This is 4:30pm and the inside of the house is dark, dark, dark as the snow flies outside.

 And in January I'm reminded how lucky I am to live in a supremely cozy brick house with heat and a fireplace and hot coffee and slippers. It may be gray outside. The wind may drive the cold into my very bones. My fluffy half-Samoyed dog may actually want to get back in the house after going out in the morning rather than laying in a snow bank like she usually does (voluntarily) all winter.

But my little boy can tear around his warm house in slippers with fire engines on them. My husband can fix the model train setup in the basement by the space heater. And I can sit inside in tights, a comfy knit dress, a shawl, and slippers and be perfectly content. Add a cat on my lap and a dog on my feet and a cup of hot cocoa and I'm very, very, very happy.

I'm getting through this winter fairly well with only a few moments of despair at the blank sky. I'm getting back to clothes sewing this week and I am continuing my regular exercise as I work up to running a 5k. And next weekend I will spend about 12 hours working the Michigan Veterinary Medicine Association convention for the zoo. I'm slowly but surely gaining the upper hand in the battle against atrophy in the house, moving troops of towels and socks, taking command of piles of random stuff gleaned from various corners of the house.

Sweet the smile of home; the mutual look
Where hearts are of each other sure;
Sweet all the joys that crowd the household nook,
The haunt of all affections pure.
                                                   ~John Keble

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The Circus

Last night we took the boy to his very first circus. He. Loved. It.

Here he is ready to brave the single digit temperatures to go see tigers, elephants, and acrobats.

After we found our seats his little mind worked to take it all in.

Pretty soon he was all smiles, watching the clowns (which he found amusing rather than creepy), pony rides, and elephant rides, and anticipating the release of the six tigers that had just been wheeled into the arena in cages.

Sorry this picture is so blurry.

He also greatly enjoyed the snacks daddy got while waiting for the show to start.

And finally the show began with the tigers.

Two hours of pure entertainment with some really incredible and unique acts from all over the world. Performing dogs, cats, and pigs. People driving motorcycles across tightropes. Acrobats, hula hoopers, people spinning on ropes, vase balancing, plate spinning, people vaulting through the air doing flips, trick jump-roping. Yes, there was even a human cannonball. The only thing I could get decent pictures of was the tigers. After that the lights were too dim and the acrobats too fast to capture. Plus, some things are better to capture in your mind's eye, not from behind a lens.

By the end of the night, Calvin was dancing, bouncing, clapping, and giving a hearty "Woooooooo!" to encourage the performers and let them know that we appreciated their talent and were having a great time.

This is definitely on our list of things to do next year when they come back. What great fun during a bitterly cold and gray month.

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Grandma Wiggins' Cross-Stitched Quilt

My last heirloom post involved my great-grandmother Elizabeth Smith. Forty to fifty years after she finished her yo-yo coverlet, her daughter-in-law Helen Wiggins (married to two of Elizabeth's sons, Norval and Linny—not at the same time) was working hard on a very different quilt. In the 1970s, my grandmother Helen was cross-stitching this masterpiece.

You can tell from the colors that this kit was a product of the 1970s, can't you? According to my mother it took her mom years to finish the cross-stitching but she's pretty sure it was finished by the time Linny died in 1986.

After Lin died, Helen moved from Detroit to Bay City to be closer to my parents. She looked for a few years before she found someone to hand quilt the piece.

I don't know the identity of the quilter or how much Grandma paid, but I think she got her money's worth no matter what because it really is very fine quilting. It's hard for me to imagine putting all that work into hand quilting and then handing it back to its owner, no matter what I got paid.

This quilt is sized for a double bed. If we had a guest room, this would definitely be on rotation. But I don't envision a time when we'll have a double bed in the house, so for now we generally use this on the couch when Mom comes to visit overnight or on the futon downstairs on the rare occasions we have other overnight guests.

In fact, it's the only heirloom quilt I actually use because it is the only one that isn't pretty seriously damaged, probably because it is a more recent creation and has certainly never been washed. To my knowledge, Grandma never used it. I never saw it until after she died in the late 1990s. It's a shame that she worked so hard on it and paid to get it quilted and then put it in storage. If you're a quilter or a knitter or a crocheter, use your creations. It makes them happy to be used.


Helen and Linny



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