still here.

it's been a busy month, and i keep meaning to post, and it's not that i don't have anything to post about, i just keep forgetting. i guess this is what happens when your plate is maybe a bit too full?

i made our halloween costumes this year which i generally do though i have not made any in a couple years, just recycled the old ones. i have a stash of stuff that can make a pirate wench, a princess, or a gypsy. this year we wanted to do family costumes so there was much discussion regarding what we were going to be. someone in our family is not very creative and kept shooting down all the creative ideas from someone else, who granted is not as clever as this girl. in the end the kiddo ended up being a pumpkin.


of course, after i had purchased the pumpkin costume for hannah, kerry suggested a bunch of cute things. like, brian could be a polar bear, and i could be a penguin, and hannah could be a fish. the food chain! she also suggested that brian and i could be some sort of insects and hannah could be a grub. MY BABY IS NOT A GRUB thank you very much. i thought it would be clever if hannah was a pumpkin, brian was a frog, and i was a witch, but no one else seemed to think that was as amusing as i did. in the end we were just a jack-o-family.


i was not in love with our costumes though i guess they turned out cute. brian said he looked gay in his costume even though he got to be the scary pumpkin. i used felt for everything and after much ribbing from my sister, gave up looking for a pattern and made up one myself. basically they are just pullovers that i copied from old tee shirts, lined with tulle and stuffed with fiberfill with an elastic casing at the bottom. this was also my first attempt at applique-ing anything and i'm happy with the way the faces turned out. i used wonder-under first, i don't know if that is how appliques are usually done but that is how i did it. after i fused the felt face pieces on i zigzagged the edges. i used my walking foot for these costumes and really, i don't know how i've lived my life without it. i use it for so many things now.

i realized too late that we should have dressed hannah up like this (costume borrowed from a friend for a photo):


and brian could have been a gorilla and i could have been a monkey. HANNAH BANANA!! my good ideas always come a day late.

we also had a huge storm a couple weeks ago, the first of the season. it was hugely rainy and impossibly windy and almost all of the trees around here still had their leaves, including the beautiful japanese maple that was in our front yard. (it actually looks rather pathetic in that picture, which must be insanely old too, because the tree was quite a bit bigger than that.) i came home from work that afternoon to find this:


of course, it didn't even touch the pathetic, ugly tree that is also in our front yard, in a strange spot way too close to the rosebushes. i would have been happy to lose that tree. my husband was a champ and cut up the tree into pieces and even dug out the stump, which left us with a giant hole in the yard, two weeks before halloween when tons of children ignore the walkway and tramp up our lawn.


lawsuit, begone!

i don't know what we will do now that halloween is over. probably fill in the hole with some turf builder on top, though there has been talk of putting a pumpkin in it for thanksgiving and a snowman for christmas and making it a theme hole. we are also those people who take their baby to a rock concert. don't you wish we could be YOUR neighbors?

i am now a sahm officially - i quit my job because half of my income was going right back out the door to daycare, which sucks. technically i was let go as my boss changed my quit into a discharge the week before my last day, which is technically legal but in my humble opinion kind of jerk-ish of him, so i'm glad to be out of there.

i have also been working like a crazy girl on the etsy shop. there is a ton of cool stuff up if i do say so myself, go check it out! i am still ridiculously excited about it, and i even made a couple custom halloween costumes. also, i am going to be a vendor! how exciting is that! it's a super-tiny event - mil is a legal secretary, and they always have a couple vendors at their local annual dinner, and she got me a table. there will only be around 30 people in attendance, but the table was free (no vendor fee), and i don't have to share a percentage of my sales, so anything i make from this is gravy. it's in two weeks, and i am ridiculously excited, and we will even have tee shirts, if i can get some iron-on transfer paper that actually works!