Square A Day Blanket

I decided to make the oldest kiddo his own square a day blanket this year. I toyed with the idea of making Alice one too but she's only 2 and her life isn't terribly exciting or eventful. My idea is basically to journal Oliver's year. I'll make 1 granny square per day and on exciting days and holidays I'll make a special applique to attach to it. I think it'll be a cool way to look back on the year. :)

The start day I chose is January 27th since it's a Monday and so the blanket can go Monday-Sunday. I have been working the past few days to catch up with it.

 

I finally got a few days ahead! The past 3 weeks are all made up and sewed together (including a square for sometime next weekish because I had a massive sleepy Mommy wrangling a feisty toddler moment and sewed a square to the wrong side of another square, it happens). I chose the patchwork multi colored look after Oliver had a really cool response to one that I showed him online. And I have to say, I am LOVING it. I haven't added any appliques, I'm going to get on that today. 

 

This week we've also had some really lovely fun with Ollie's class and with some clear, warm weather and park days. My sister and I took the kids to the park and got some awesome photos.

 

 

 



Pretty sure you can tell how in love I am, right? Being a parent is hard but I really have the coolest gig in the world.

Choosing a Paint Color

We are hard at work on our house! We've been trying very hard to update our kitchen in small, affordable ways, planning for fun things in the bedrooms, looking at bedroom furniture for ourselves and choosing paint colors.

Paint. This is a tricky subject for me and the husband because we don't tend to agree on colors. It almost always comes down to I like this one and he likes that one. See what I mean about tricky? We have to find a middle ground a lot of the time.

Currently we are still struggling to find a master bedroom paint color and there's no end in sight. I think we'll be living with paint swatches on our wall for a while, haha.

I decided a few weeks ago that I wanted to repaint our daughter's bedroom. We originally went with a pale purple, because she loooooves purple, but as we've lived here my ideas for the bedrooms for our kids have morphed and changed and grown and I realized that although purple is lovely, a more neutral color would be really awesome. A neutral color that she can grow with, that will work for a baby brother or sister if we have another kid (since she and any future baby would be sharing a room), that doesn't feel 'too girly' because she is definitely not a girly girl all the time. My main thing at this point with wanting to change her room color is that having purple walls holds us back a lot with decorating. You can't layer a whole lot of other colors in there! And I want bright, fun art and furniture.

So we went to the home improvement store and while we were there I basically just grabbed a ton of paint swatches. And then the process begins. It starts with just grabbing whatever looks good at the store. Once we're home we look through those swatches in our home's light and decide what doesn't work for us. We take turns with vetoes. Peter will say 'I don't like that one' and it goes and then I choose a color to go until we are left with just a handful. That handful gets tape to the wall!

The veto process starts again and then we are left with a small amount of choices. Like this.

 

That's usually where we get stuck and each have a favorite and can't decide. This time was no exception. Peter preferred the color on the left and I like the color on the top right the best. So we brought in Miss Mae to help.

 



She was as helpful as a 2 year old can be, haha! Meaning that she loved them all.

And so we compromised. The bottom right color happened to be a pretty good in between of the 2 that we favored, so we went with that one! This weekend the painting process will start and I'm very excited to start over with a blank canvas for her room

The color is called 'April Morning' which is a whole lot of funny to Peter since my name is April Dawn. Very serendipitous!

I'm really excited to get in there and get this done and then start layering in fun, colorful new pieces like the blanket I'm working on for her, bunting, a fun rug, and some really bright art.

Snow and Ice and everything... sort of nice

I'm upfront about the fact that I hate winter. I hate the cold. I am a southern girl at heart and I can't stand seeing my breath, shivering, wearing layers, putting the kids in tons of clothes, keeping track of hats and gloves and scarves, etc. Summer is so much more laid back to me, haha! Minimal dressing, slap on a pair of flip flops to head out the door, done.

That isn't to say I don't find the magic in winter. I love the way ice looks. Good thing too since the south had it's fair share of it this year! We really don't get a lot of ice and such and I think people up North believe that we're insane or crazy because of how all hell breaks loose down here when it snows even a tiny bit, but the fact is that we're just no equipped to deal with it! We don't have plows, we don't know how to drive in that weather, we tend to have rolling power outages from things like ice and it can be quite stressful and scary.

We once again had snow and ice last week. The kids went off to stay with my parents for a couple of days so the husband and I had some romantic snowed in days to ourselves, which was really lovely and cuddly.

It was crazy pretty. Even though I was freezing my buns off.

 

 

We went for a lovely long walk once the ice had melted a bit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love how snow immediately makes perfect light for taking photos.

 

 

 

 

Alice Mae was very impressed with herself for making foot prints. She thought that was the coolest thing ever. Until of course she realized she could use the small lines of ice on the road as a sort of tight rope. Alice Mae walks the line.

 

 







 

As lovely as it was, I am definitely ready for Spring. I see buds on the trees outside and I am planning our first garden at our own home. Dreaming of ripe tomatoes straight off the vine and the kids annual strawberry garden.

Week 2 of Moody Madness, Wetland Weekend Fun

This weekend was lovely and warm and sunny with not a single drop of rain in our area, which was amazing.

Saturday we rested. I was sick from Thursday on (Thursday and Friday being the worst of it), so Saturday the husband let me sleep in late because he is a darling and then we laid around with the kids and were home bodies all day. <3 Love.

Sunday was much of the same except for some crochet work, some blanket work and a long walk in the wetlands.

We are lucky enough to live 10 minutes away from a state park that has an amazing swamp walk. A long boardwalk up on stilts that goes out out out into the wetlands. We discovered it a few months after moving here and it's a fun visit for us every few weeks. The kids love it. Running up and down the board walk, playing red light green light (or in our Doctor Who obsessed house it is a Weeping Angels version of red light green light with a lot of chicken dancing, twerking, funny face making weeping angel fun because hey, we don't actually know what they do when they're moving, right?), gathering giant leaves and pine needles and hiking.

The favorite pastime is snake watching, which isn't very productive in the winter but the kids don't care.

 

They could stay like that forever, just bent over watching for any snakes in the water/sludge/grass. Our first visit we saw 3 different snakes and they have been snake obsessed ever since.

 

 

But they could just as easily run up and down over and over all day.

 

 

More snake watching. The little miss is especially snake obsessed.

 

 



 

This park is really one of the most lovely places in our town. The swamp walk is only a small part of it. There are also ponds, swimming areas, natural water fountains, hiking trails, a huge open area with picnic areas and huge trees covered in Spanish moss. I love how it looks like we're in a melting watercolor. I always have to pause and really enjoy this view.

 

 



At home I worked on some new crochet patterns that I found and that I love and of course I added to my mood blanket. I still have to add yesterday's square but Monday through Saturday looks like this-

 

 

Happy, tired, happy, tired(sick), tired(sick), happy and Sunday will be happy as well. A pretty good week, even on the days that I was tired/sick.

 

 

This week I am focusing on some blankets for the kids which I am very excited about. Trying to pull their rooms together with some home made, love filled accents.

Moody Madness and Door Decorations

Yesterday I shared my mood blanket. I was unsure about the color choices. Basically I just chose what I had on hand and tried to make it work but then I decided that it wasn't what I wanted and if I'm going to work on something every day for a whole year then I want it to be lovely and perfect and feel totally right. So, I rethought it and chose new colors and I'm quite pleased!

The new colors-

Moods and colors from left to righ- turquoise (energetic), gold (anxious), blue (happy/content/comfy), purple (excited!), lavender (tired), gray (sad).

I had to take apart the original blanket and make new squares and put it all back together but I'm so happy with the result. Just need to weave my strings in.

This is the first week, starting last Monday. Happy, happy, excited (snow!), happy, tired, energetic, energetic.

Another item on my to-do list for weeks now has been to spiffy up the little lady's bedroom door. I bought the little wooden goodies weeks ago so it's past due for sure.

I painted her name on the door with pretty turquoise paint and then just added some tape to the back of the decorative pieces and played around with them until I found something I liked and then I glued them on.

Playing around with the design-

Finished!

 

Her response- Oooooooooooooh!! It pwetty!

 

I'll take that as a job well done! 

Finished, WIP, Moody Madness

The weekend was a lot of housework and finishing some pretty projects in our home, which I will talk about some time this week. There was also some fun crocheting happening.

I finally finished the little lady's capelet and it's a big hit. She calls it her 'batman cape'! That child will grow up to be a superhero, I just know it.

 



I'm in love with the colors, with the way it changes from blue to purple to turquoise. I love the pompoms so much and how big they are. I just wrapped yarn around 4 fingers over and over and then tied it off and cut up the sides where the yarn looped to make them. The drape and size is perfect. I wanted it to be slightly big so that she could use it for a few years.

I started a mood blanket! I saw a few people talking about it and I'm a little late to the game but the gist is that you assign colors to moods and every day you make a square of whatever mood and then put them all together. After a year you have a blanket!

 

 

I am not sure that I'm happy with pink so that might change to aqua or a color in that realm. I love the Simply Soft turquoise and grape color that I'm using. I'll have to detail out my mood colors once I get a moment.

 

A cute fleece owl blanket was found

 

 

And I have already cut some of it up and put it to adorable use in a lovey. I have more plans for it. Possibly a fleece ear warmer for the little miss?

 

 

 

I have a few projects to finish up (still working on hooking up some granny squares) and some that I want to start this week (crocheted shelf edging for our kitchen) and some orders to mail out. I'm a happy lady.