Prodigy

Now that Elanor can sit up, all sorts of activities are open to her. Including playing the piano with daddy.

Practicing

Trying to get the spoon in her mouth:

Success and blissful gnawing:

Drinking water from the spoon for the first time to try out another form of getting nourishment besides nursing:

Most of the water was dribbled down her front. I think that she's a little dubious of the value of this form of intake.

I'm Saving Them for Later.

Every so often, I get ideas.

Big ideas. Dangerous ideas.

This one involved 100lbs of peaches the week before my brother's wedding. Last year, I had the help of my sisters and my mom (and early pregnancy sickness--which I wouldn't call exactly helpful). This year, I doubled the amount of peaches and did it alone since they were heavily involved in work and preparing for the festivities. Elanor kept me company but I didn't think that she was up for peeling peaches yet. She contributed by only getting up once a night for three days in a row, giving me the rest that I needed to tackle such a huge project and playing mostly happily on the floor in the kitchen.

I dried a batch every day. Pretty and delicious:


The house doubled nicely as a sauna due to the constant boiling of all of the pots on the stove. There are now 41 pints of peach slices in the pantry. Next year, I'm getting quart jars. The rest was turned into spiced peach butter.

Actually, most of these jars are pear butter. Did I mention the 30 lbs of pears? The rest of the pear puree is unspiced and frozen in cubes for when we start solids with Elanor.

Points to those who recognize the reference in the post title.

Big Girl

No, she's not really standing on her own. But she likes being propped up to look at faces or out the window. She's just starting to look around to figure out where I am.

Smiley girl:

Unicorn baby:

Bigger than the Bathtub

Elanor's first swim:



She loved kicking in the water. We will be doing this again!

Beads! Pretty Beads!

Elanor thinks that Grandma's bracelets are fascinating. So many different, tiny parts to look at!

Toes!

Hope Completed

I shared the beginning of this project here.

This piece had its origins in a conversation with some dear friends about where we all were in our lives at that point.
We were in places where what we could see was the dry, dying hardness of the current season of our lives. We had to trust and hope that the spring was coming. The image of a tree in the midst of changing seasons came to represent this place.
There is all sorts of symbolism about trees in Scripture. Ps 1:3 has special significance to us because of the meaning of our name, there are multiple references to a tree of life, culminating in Revelation, the crucifixion on a "tree," etc. I also wanted to show the link between what we see (the withering) and what is true, spiritual reality as well.

People say, with some justification, that the measure of modern art is really how impressive a blurb the artist can write about it. At the risk of receiving that criticism myself, these were my intentions in this design.

The tree is cup shaped, alluding to the cup of communion with Christ and his body. The red threads underlining the tree branches remind of the blood of Christ's sacrifice for us (on the tree) and the reason for hope. The flame-colored threads reference the work of the Holy Spirit in revealing the hope that we have in God and the way that he is working despite the apparent death.
I worked the withered and falling leaves first and then added the different shades of green. I had originally intended to make only a few green leaves and those not actually touching the branches in the way that the dead ones did to show that hope was far off and only hinted at. However, as I worked on it over the course of the last year, the emphasis shifted to call for more of the green as our personal seasons changed. God has brought us better marriages, children, friends and work in ways that we were not able to see at the time of our original conversation. It no longer seemed possible to put so much emphasis on the hard season in the way that the design started.
However, though we are experiencing a spring just now, there will be another winter when we will need to be reminded of hope.

For now, I hope that this piece will be a blessing as it goes on its way with its recipients to their new home.

Goodbye Missy

We said goodbye to Missy last week. She was a faithfully loving cat for 16 years. I don't think that I've ever seen a cat adore a person the way that she did Jonathan.

Look What I Did!

Sitting

Elanor is very close to sitting up on her own. She just needs a little bit of support--more to give her confidence than anything else.

She got very excited about being able to reach her toy in a new position.

Maybe a little too excited. Oops!

Hmm...

I put Elanor down for her nap, peacefully gnawing the pacifier. I came back to check on her 10 minutes later to find this.

Her hands are completely swaddled. I cannot figure out how she did this.

Finished Book

I gave this embroidered book cover to Camille for her college graduation. Then it sat, waiting to be stitched to the purchased book insert.

At long last, I got around to making it up.

I just realized that this picture is upside down...

The stitching is on a remnant piece of dupioni silk. It is backed with fusible interfacing, layered with charcoal gray felt underneath and stitched onto the book with a piece of black satin ribbon for a bookmark. It is a little tight, as shown in the slight wonkiness in the first picture, but should stretch just enough with a bit of use to lay flat. I'm particularly proud of the darning job that needed to be done along one edge where the silk was fraying. It had started to ravel when I started the stitching, but it couldn't be trimmed off without making that side of the end pocket too small. Next time, I'll be more careful to match the positioning of the stitching to what I intend the finished project to be.

Justice's Fiddlehead

After making a sweater in this pattern for Elanor, I decided that her new cousin should have one as well. I picked out the yarn before we knew if the baby was a boy or girl, figuring that this lovely color--like chocolate cherry---would work just fine for either. It is 100% superwash wool fingering and worked up beautifully.


I just missed finishing it in time for their visit this summer but it is on its way.

Note to self, however. Do not use old mailing labels that have lost any of their stickiness. The package ended up back in my mailbox without the recipient's address on it. Thank goodness I had put my return address on the envelope itself!

Shift

Elanor next to the cats then:

and now:


She has begun to show quite a bit more interest in them. As her ability to reach and grasp has improved, she has made quite a few lunges in their direction. We're working on the idea of "pet the kitty nicely!"


The boys had been getting used to her as the squeaky new inhabitant with interesting toys. Now they are a bit more dubious of the benefits of her presence