sniffles and jack o' lantern painting

The children and I all got hit with colds this week (I blame myself for slacking with thieves and elderberry syrup for a few days). I tried to ignore it and write off our sniffles as just seasonal allergies but I guess that was really just wishful thinking on my part. We are spending the week resting all cozy and warm inside our house. Housework has fallen by the wayside (isn't  that always the first thing to go when you're sick?). Snuggling in blankets and crafting have taken over. Something about creating seems to bring comfort to my sick little ones so this seemed like the perfect time to try a craft my friend Cynthia recently shared. It is geared towards younger children (Like Little L's age) but my girls can never pass up any sort of crafting opportunity and joined in.
 
The project is really similar to our watercolor Jack O' Lanterns except instead of using beeswax crayons to make their faces, you cut them out. Then you glue yellow tissue paper to the back so they look like they are illuminated by a candle. I think they are pretty sweet. I love (and should have expected) that Little L's Jack O' Lantern has shark teeth.

Here is our favorite Halloween song to sing while you work on your own Jack O' Lanterns:

Jack O' Lantern, Jack O' Lantern,  How your light it does shine,  Sitting up upon the window,  And your light it does shine. 
You were once an orange pumpkin,  Sitting on a pumpkin vine,  Now you are my Jack O' Lantern,  And your light it is mine.
Have a beautiful rest of the week, friends!

sniffles and jack o' lantern painting

Keep Calm Craft On {crafting on}

The act of creating, in one form or another, preserves my sanity amongst the chaos of life. This explains why I always have more than one project going at a time as well as why my housework tends to fall behind. I enjoy seeing what others are working on and keeping calm with, too. What are you creating? What is keeping you going? Snap a picture or two and share it with the rest of us by leaving your link below or on Instagram #craftingon

Still working on Baby F's tree vest although now I feel like I am just dillydallying instead of focusing on the Christmas crafting I really should have started already. I am thinking maybe I should just set this aside for now but I almost fear that I will forget the cabling rhythm I established. Decisions, decisions...

What are you working on? Happy creating!

An InLinkz Link-up

Keep Calm Craft On {crafting on}

Golden October

I so love C's long hair.



  Scarlet and yellow, golden and brown,  Winds of October Blow the leaves down  Tear from the branches, their curtains and spread,  Carpets of yellow beneath them instead.  Glistening with rain or a blaze in the sun,  Falling in showers or dropped one by one,  Fluttering treasures of autumn come down,  Scarlet and yellow, golden and brown.    - MT Schunemann
We had a beautiful rainy October day recently and went outside to play. The children all brought their nature baskets and we gathered all the souvenirs autumn had to offer to bring back home with us. Now my home has its annual autumn smell of fresh leaves, thieves EO and beeswax. It smells heavenly. Somehow every year I forget just how much I love this piece of autumn (even though we have been beeswaxing leaves since October 2009! You can see all our posts here). That is until we pull out the beeswax crock pot and turn it on, simmering beeswax for days on end. I feel like only now can we say, "Let autumn commence!"

p.s. - I finally caught photos of C in her owlet sweater. I knit this last year for her and modified it the same way I did Little L's so that it was knit from the top down. Rav details can be found here.

Golden October

Foraging

A couple of weekends back my family and I traveled to Pine, Idaho. Kevin and the girls had been there many times before, camping with AHG, but Little L, Baby F and I had never been. They knew I would love it there with its abundance of trees, endless amounts of foraging, and Steller's Jays (one of my favorite birds) so they took me on a day trip. I mentioned the trip to one of my neighbors before we left and she said that she found elderberries in that area (She knew I had been searching for them but wasn't willing to drive on the "cliff of death" to get to them in a location nearby. I named it the cliff of death because it seriously had me in tears the one and only time we drove on it three years ago). With that knowledge in mind, I made it my mission to search for the berries while we were there and teach my children how to find them.

They were not hard to find at all. I actually kept spotting them on the side of the road on our drive up. At first, in my excitement, I wanted to make Kevin pull over the van so I could start gathering some but then I realized that wouldn't be the best idea. Plants right next to the road are coated in exhaust fumes. So I tried my best to exercise some self control each time we passed another shrub. However, I did keep pointing and blurting out, "Elderberries!" like a little kid. Small steps. 

When we arrived at the campsite that AHG used I couldn't believe my eyes. We were surrounded by beautiful coniferous trees covered in moss, just like back home in Oregon. I could hear the sound of water rushing, squirrels chattering and chickadees chirping. Misty rain kissed my face as it fell all around us. Oh yes, my family knows me well - Pine was just what this Oregonian heart needed.

After I got Baby F in the carrier on me, the girls were running about excited to show me all the wild herbs they spotted there on their last camping trip. On a side note - I am so thankful we got the Herb Fairies set last year. The girls knew how to search for and identify the herbs all on their own. They found curly dock, chamomile, spearmint, blue spruce, lemon balm...and I know there was more but now I have forgotten. I am sure if we had more time to spend there we would find even more. As we climbed down to the river bank I started spying elderberry shrubs. I walked over to examine them and once I knew for certain they were elderberries I showed the children. K told me that she was playing with the berries last camping trip but didn't realize they were edible (I taught her when she was young to never eat wild berries without checking with me first. I have this fear of wild berries and mushrooms). We started filling our bags with the berries, going from shrub to shrub making sure to leave plenty for the wildlife. In the end we had three overflowing grocery bags filled with elderberries. Plenty to last my family of six through the winter of this year and possibly the next! Once we did some more foraging, soaked in the beauty, played with Kaze in the river and carried a soaking wet Little L back to the van we headed home.

My house has become an elderberry processing plant since then. Would you believe that I am still processing them? I don't like to work with them around Baby F (choking hazards with poisonous stems) and since he doesn't seem to want to take naps lately I am slowly moving along. I also discovered that the bloom (white coating) on the elderberries can be tricky and hide the actual color of the berry. They look ripe but when you rub the bloom off you will see they are red or green (poisonous) instead. You can see in the photograph below what I mean. All the berries on that tray looked ripe when I put them in the oven but once the bloom came off there were quite a few green and red ones for me to discard.



I am currently dehydrating batches of them, freezing others as well as making elderberry syrup. I normally use Rosemary Gladstar's recipe for the syrup (from this book) but this time I decided to try something different and went with this one. The children all agree they like this version better with the cinnamon in it. I think I will try my friend Stephinie's recipe for our next batch (we'll even have echinacea root from our own garden to use).



I also went a little elderberry crazy and decided to try my hand at dyeing a skein of wool yarn with help from this book. Of course I didn't decide this until after I put them in the freezer, which distorts the color a bit. Oh well. I think it came out pretty, still. It was hard to capture but the purple has so much depth to it. C claimed this yarn along with her pink amaranth yarn.

And on that note, I think you probably already know what I am off to do - more processing! 

Foraging

Keep Calm Craft On {crafting on}

The act of creating, in one form or another, preserves my sanity amongst the chaos of life. This explains why I always have more than one project going at a time as well as why my housework tends to fall behind. I enjoy seeing what others are working on and keeping calm with, too. What are you creating? What is keeping you going? Snap a picture or two and share it with the rest of us by leaving your link below.

Milos are one of my favorite go-to knits for good core warmth on children, especially babies and toddlers. As I was digging out the ones I knit for Little L when he was a baby I noticed they were all too big for Baby F yet. So what is a knitting mama to do? Knit more of course! This one will have a cabled tree on the front and then I am imagining one with sheep and another one with foxes. I decided that foxes are just Baby F's thing. His name goes well with fox and his red hair reminds me of a fox so there you have it. Now he needs everything fox!

What are you working on? Happy creating!

An InLinkz Link-up

Keep Calm Craft On {crafting on}

Sheep {and an introvert} on parade

Here they come! Our first day at the festival was a full day of sheep dog trials, and the fair (I shared these in my last post). The second day of the festival was the sheep parade, where the sheep would start there long trek down from the mountains, through town and on to their next destination. This was the day I was most excited for - watching the sheep being guided down the main street of town just like shepherds had done for hundreds of years. I was envisioning a scene like in the book The Shepherd's Life that I had recently read.

We had hopes of arriving in Ketchum early that day so that I could go on the photography walk up in the mountains where the sheep were before they were brought down into town. Alas, we didn't arrive home until very late the night before and ended up oversleeping. We got into the van at the time the walk was starting. It just wasn't meant to be. I think Kevin feared we would be late for the parade too so he rushed us through the mountains a tad bit too quickly. *ahem* Thank you kind officer for giving us a warning instead of a ticket. In the end we made it on time. We watched the parade from the very beginning of the route so that we could see the sheep coming down from the mountains. It was quite an incredible sight! After the parade we chatted with some farmers and then did more wandering around Ketchum.


I failed to mention in my last post that one thing I did not factor in when I dreamed up our matching sheep hats was the response people would have to them. I am perhaps even more withdrawn than your typical introvert so the thought of bringing attention to myself is frightening. Well about every five steps we took at the fair people would come up to give our hats lots of love. We drew quite a bit of attention. It was so nice chatting with other knitters but I think my face was bright red the whole time. Quite a few people asked us if we purchased the hats at the fair. When I told them I knitted them they asked where my booth was or if I had an Etsy shop. That is such a compliment. I told them no and each one responded saying I should. I don't know if I could ever do it though. Maybe. Would any of you ever be interested in hand knits?



Speaking of hand knits - We logged eight hours of driving for the whole trip. It would have been nice to have camped out close to the festival to save ourselves four hours of driving but with our mini-zoo at home that wasn't really a possibility. One of these days we'll get everything we need to bring all of the dogs camping with us but right now we can only bring two at a time. I took advantage of all that driving time and got some knitting done (isn't that the perfect thing to do on your way to a sheep parade?). I knit Baby F a new pilot cap with my leftover hand dyed yarn as well as a milo with leftover scraps from K's Bulle and Little L's birthday sweater. I think he looks pretty cute in them but then again I think he looks cute in anything.

To bring our festivities to an end, I made some good shepherds pie (thank you Lucy for mentioning the perfect name for a vegan shepherd's pie over on Instagram). The recipe is in the new Oh She Glows Everyday cookbook (which I am sure you know I love). My family and I had never tried real shepherd's pie before so we didn't know what to expect but this was pretty good!

Well, I guess that concludes our Trailing of the Sheep fun. I am so glad we got out of the house and went. It couldn't have happened without Kevin and I so appreciate him for it! I hope you all enjoyed the photos and forgive my sleepy typing/storytelling.

Sheep {and an introvert} on parade