A Mother's Day WIP

My mom has been bugging me since Christmas to make her a patchwork bag like I made for my MIL. I've been slowly working up squares every now and then and deciding what size I want it and all of that. My original bag was ginormous because it was meant to be a place for all of my MIL's crap to be stored that she takes to work every day. My mama is a hobbit of a woman so I knew that I wanted her bag to be built around her tiny size. I realized yesterday that mother's day is just around the corner and the perfect gift for Mama would be her bag finally finished off.

I went through all of my squares and chose what I thought would be nice for her. I decided on lighter, springy colors and left out all of my deep red and gold and dark gray squares. Then I just laid them all out on my table and started putting them in groups.

Just trying to keep colors separate and spread it all out nicely. Decided on a 3X3 pattern. So 3 squares up and 3 squares across. :) Also 3 for each side and 3 for the bottom.

I pieced them all together yesterday and made a fun flirty border on top-

 

I'm working on the straps now. I'm thinking white like the border and then maybe 1 or 2 single crochet stripes of some fun colors from the bag. Blue? Green? Still deciding! Then this weekend I'm shopping for some fun fabric to make the lining with and I'll hand sew that in next week. It's a pretty quick project once you have the masses of squares completed, haha. I think Mama will love it. 

Eventful Week

Last week was spring break for the first born, which was really fun. We stayed busy with lovely park visits, walks, sand castle making and cookie baking, trampoline park visiting and cuddling.

 

The biggest, best day of the week was Saturday. Miss Mae's 3rd birthday! She told me a month ago that she wanted an Olaf Frozen party so we honored her wishes and had a really easy, laid back time. I didn't photograph a lot of the stuff but the gist was just a table with a white table cloth and some blue bowls full of goodies like snowballs (powdered donut holes) snowman noses (carrot sticks) snowman arms (honey pretzel twists) and snow dip (ranch dressing). I found some cute free printables online with quotes from the movie and I taped those to the wall and put an Olaf on the front door with a little not of welcome. We had Frozen playing in the background the whole time and it was good stuff! Fun times.

 

 

 

As is our tradition, I made her cake. Just a simple chocolate cake and I gradually dyed the buttercream frosting blue as I went down. Easy peasy! The cake topper is just pompoms glued to pipe cleaners and attached to kebab sticks because they were too floppy to stand upright, haha. Sometimes you have to get inventive!

 

Her birthday was lovely. We had her party and she was spoiled with lovely people and kind words and gifts and all of the sweet things and then we went for a nature walk at the swamp.

 

 

The swamp was just as gorgeous and mosquito-y as always. <3 Look at that though. Isn't that a fun place?

 

 

It's so hard to believe that Al is 3. I had a hard time with, I'm not gonna lie. I had a lot of cries on Friday. At one point I said to husband that I just wasn't ready for her to be 3 and he said 'yeah, but Alice is' and that somehow made it easier. Because she is ready! She has all of these big ideas and dreams. She is all the best of me. All of my fire and none of my fear. What a bittersweet thing, to watch your kids grow up. I want them to grow into themselves and those big thoughts and hearts but I will miss these tender baby days. So long 2 and hello 3.