Hanukkah!

This is my second year celebrating Hanukkah, third year attempting. Year one resulted in my homemade hanukkiyah lighting on fire on day three. We had a great Hanukkah party with delicious rugalach, sufganiyot, and sweet potato latkes and so many other delicious dishes people brought. It was a great success and great fun. and since I've been wanting to make an advent calendar for the past few years but don't really want to do the Christmas thing with it, I made Dale a sweet Hanukkah calendar. It was a lot of fun thinking of little gifts for him and fortunately my work has great hanukkiyah wrapping paper from Waste Not Paper (love 'em). Here's the end result of the calendar and the delicious gluten free rugalach from my new cookbook! A must  have for gluten free people.

Shalom, Chag Sameach, Happy Hanukkah!

Cerise :)

More garden delights

The back porch is in full foliage and lots of plants are in bloom right now. My clematis came back in full force this spring. It's a terrible pink color in person. Last year it was white with splashes of a mellow pink (as pictured on the plant tag) but it went a little crazy this year. I shouldn't complaint too much because it's beautiful and healthy. One of our nurseries also has a lot of sale plants. I've picked up a few here and there and they are all doing really well. My gerber daisies pittled away quite quickly but popped out a new plant soon after. There are also sweet little carnations that are very happy in there new home and a lovely little vining plant with orange flowers that is going to live with the clematis. I obviously don't think about the colors working together or not! I would love to add more but I don't want to have to move or leave behind a bunch of plants in the not too far future if we move. My beautiful ginkgo will definitely go with me everywhere though!

Happy Blooming,
Cerise : )

Clematis

Carnations

Wysteria

Didn't you want garden pics?

I went a whole week without posting and my last post didn't even have pictures of all the delicious and nutritious treats growing in our garden. Dale, his mom, and I worked in the garden last night. We got a lot weeded and I thinned out the beets, daikons, radishes, carrots, and rutabagas. There was also an extreme butter lettuce party that the salad police broke up for lunch today. This morning I used the little baby greens that got thinned out for my green smoothie. Some wonderful little fresh garden strawberries also got to join them in the blender. My green gooey breakfast was delicious! The sun looks like it will be out a lot this week so I hope the garden is happy and continues to grow. Time to plant more already too!

Happy Gardening!
Cerise : )

Oregon Sugar Pod II

Daikon!

Borage with basil, tomatoes, bee balm, and onions in the background.

This is our first companion planting bed!

Garden Sunday

The weather warmed up sooner than last year but the past two weeks have been a bit cooler and damper. Most things are still growing pretty well but our three experimental tomato plants are rather sad. This year, we are trying companion planting. My store has a great book, How to Grow More Vegetables, that discussed the importance of healthy soil, microclimates, and plant relationships among other things. I highly recommend this book to even beginning gardeners. More pictures to follow, but here's how the garden looked a few weeks ago!

Moustache Madness

So, mum decided that moustaches on sticks would be a fun addition for guests at the wedding. Dale helped me perfect the moustache templates and we began tracing a ton onto heavy scrapbook paper. Thankfully we were smart enough to use the first cutout paper to use as a full template for the rest of the papers. Much tracing and cutting later, out come mini shish kabob skewers and my trusty Aleen's clear tacky glue. It took two rounds of gluing sticks on 'staches as my kitchen table was at it's smallest. But they are done! I love them and we've already had a lot of fun playing with them. Dexter really needs a moustache!!

Happy 'staching!
Cerise : )

Wedding Party Favors

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, one of the many things we made for the upcoming wedding in August are wedding favors. Theresa came across some wonderful hot air balloon pins on Etsy. We had been going with a Victorian meets steampunk style theme that included dirigibles. I'm not sure that the dirigibles will be getting tied in very well at this point but the eclectic stuff we have going on fits us quite perfectly. My Cricut die cutter came in handy to make little tags that I then aged with brown eye makeup which looks great but my hands looked like they had a long night out on the club when I was done. The sweet little pins were attached in the middle of the tag and ribbons through the holes. I then painstakingly stamped our initials and the wedding date on each one. It was really fun and a great excuse to buy more neat stamps and stamp pads. It did take forever and Dexter ate about ten of them on evening. Definitely worth the time to make our own favors though!

Wedding Crafting

It's finally happening! In December, Dale and I decided to get married. It's been seven years since we engaged. I'm not unhappy we waited, but it's about darned time! So naturally, most of what's going into decorating for the wedding is hand crafted. Theresa and I have been hard at work sewing bunting (and getting friends to help us out!), making wedding favors, hair pieces for the bridesmaids, adding special touches to my dress, making invitations, and making jewelry, among many other things. Though there is much more to go, I fished hair pieces and invitations labels designing today. This was the first time I've used feathers and vintage millinery flowers and I had a lot of fun working with both together. The hair pieces came out wonderful. The grander scheme of Victorian-styled little hats with feathers and flowers was a bit too much for me to tackle at the moment as research on hat making is going to be a must for a project like that. Dexter even helped me model one. I think the ladies are going to look so lovely in them, don't you?

Happy Crafting!

Cerise : )

Happy Birthday OmMama!

Happy birthday to my beautiful, wonderful, crafty mum! Thanks for being the best!!!

Pattern Published!

Howdy all! It's been FOREVER since we've blog. Please forgive us, we will get blogging more!

I've been a knitting mad woman lately and have even started hosting knit nights at my house every other week. I purchased a bunch of Knit Picks yarn a while back with the intention of creating my own patterns and getting them published through the Independent Designer Program (IDP). One of the yarns I purchased was Capra, a wonderful cashmere blend, that was as wonderful as I could have hoped. I also bought some beautiful lace weight yarn with really great Northwest related names like basalt. The Capra project became a herringbone hat and mitten set. This is my second stranded knitting pattern (hopefully the first one will be published soon!) and it took quite a bit of tweaking, frogging, and re-knitting before I got it just right. I'm happy to say that it was accepted by the IDP at Knit Picks and is now for sale! You can also find it on Ravelry. I haven't sold any copies yet but there are Ravelers who heart it. A big thanks to Knit Picks for their help to get designers started with a publishing program and inexpensive yarn!

Happy Knitting!
Cerise : )

Custom Earring Box

I am so tired of searching for earrings in my jewelry box every morning. If I find one I want to wear, often I can't find a match. I have been carrying around some pieces of plastic sheets that I confiscated from work. They came in with some fashion jewelry sets and were destined for the trash bin. I didn't know what I would use them for at the time. I figured that they might work for my earring project.

First step was to cut the cards and make holes in them for the earrings. They work great! I looked for a box that would work at thrift stores and craft stores, hoping to find something I can finish. I couldn't find anything so the next step is to make my own box.

My dog Bluto is going to help me sew this year!