luxurious wrist warmers

My in-laws went to Peru last summer and brought me some absolutely beautiful baby alpaca. (Their tour guide cautioned them against buying 'maybe alpaca', and I'm grateful!) I have one cream, one brown, and two blue skeins of what's probably the world's softest yarn.

I wanted to make myself some cream wrist warmers. Unfortunately, one skein kept coming up short. Despite frogging the first wrist warmer twice in order to make it shorter, I have ended up with almost two cream wrist warmers.

But after already ripping out this pattern twice, I'm ready to move on to something else. And I've found that if I squint, the brown practically fades into any (brown) outdoor background.

So, any suggestions for two blue skeins and (a little less than) one brown skein? I'm thinking maybe this cowl. (on ravelry here)

** Almost forgot to mention that the wrist warmer pattern is a freebie on ravelry. Find it here.

party bunting

I got on the bunting bandwagon.

We have a small paper-cut banner of sorts that we put up for celebrations, but I wanted something a bit more sturdy and well, bunting-like.

I went after my fabric scraps with pinking shears and now we've got seven yards of bright bunting. Party on.

I know, I know, the silly things have been everywhere. But I don't care. They're cute! Don't they make you want to have a cupcake or a slice of pie?

In case you're interested in all things bunting...
say it with a bunting birthday card
tell guests they're awesome with compliment bunting
or tell them whatever you want with alphabet bunting
icing's out, bunting on cakes is in
paint one on your tablecloth
Easter is coming. make a string of peeps
every nap is worthy of a rainbow bunting baby quilt

a year at our table

Happy New Year!

After Christmas last year, I began compiling recipes and ideas and pictures and came up with the one gift we would give everyone on our list this year: a cookbook of our family's favourite recipes.

It was a project I enjoyed working on all year long. The book ended up with five recipes for each season, lots of pictures of food, and some pics of our kid too.

Thanks to Blurb, it was relatively simple to design what I wanted and the quality of the final book is great. But no thanks to Blurb, the pictures printed a tad dark and I ran into a few bugs in their formatting software. Such is life. I'd still use them again and recommend 'em to anyone looking to do a similar project.