Bug's Adventures and a Sashiko-Inspred Sneak Peek

Having a two year old is awesome.  Bug is not-quite-27-months old and is SUCH a personality.  He talks pretty much constantly and has a wicked sense of humor.  It's amazing to see so much of his own personality showing through now that he's voicing his thoughts so very clearly.  (People stop us quite often to ask how old he is because he's been speaking in sentences for awhile now.  It didn't occur to me that that might me odd at his age.)

One of Bug's favorite things to do right now is drive.  Or ask to drive.  Every time we leave the house, he smiles his charming little smile and asks in a hopeeful tone "I want to drive?"  He's not deterred at all by the answer always being some version of "I don't think so".  He always restates the desire when we fet home again.  "I want to drive a little bit."  On our way back into the house, it's generally easier to accomodate the request.  He'll hop into the front seat (keyless, lest anyone thing we're terrible parents), readjust theseat settings, turn the radio and a/c knobs for a little while, flash the lights, open the trunk, and generally have a grand old time.

Today, I stepped away to toss ourbags into the house while he was 'driving'.  I didn't shut the door very well when I stepped back to the car and two of the cats got out.  They're big chickens so this wasn't really a big deal, but it did cut Bug's driving time.  He hopped out to help  me shoo the cats back inside.  Pie, our old man, had been eating grass so we stopped to pick some more grass to take inside for the cats.  Bug very nicely handed a little bit of grass to each cat, then exclaimed "I eating grass!"  And he was.  Ew.

Being the good helper that he is, Bug ran to grab the broom when he was done chowing down on his greens, to clean up the scattered grass bits that the cats had left behind.  I was downloading the camera.  Silly mommy.  The grass wasn't quite enough of a mess for the sweeping to continue a pleasing amount of time...so Bug dumped the cat food bowl and swept that up, too.  I like to think that if I hadn't been distracted the cat foodwould haves stayed in the bowl, but probably not.  And at least he swept it up, right?

Now, to completely change gears...let's talk about sashiko!

I've seen sashiko before and always thought that it was beautiful.  I wasn't terribly inspired to acutally give it a whirl myself until I saw this pillow over at The Purl Bee.  (They have several nice tutorials.  Search for 'sashiko' and take your pick!)  The non-traditonal color choices grabbed me immediately.  I did some reading on the history of sashiko, looked at a bunch of tutorials and a boat-load of pictures (check out Flickr's Sashiko pool for some great photos) before deciding to try it out myself.

Going completely against type, I opted to work on my hand stitching before taking on a huge project.  Once upon a time, I could do really beautiful hand stitching.  But that's a use-it-or-lose it skill, and I haven't done much with it since getting pregnant with Bug.  I pulled out some fabric that I'm not overly fond of, some emboridery thread, and got to work.

Here's a little peek of the peice that I've been working on.


Obviously, the stitching needs some work.  But I'm absolutely thrilled with how it's coming together so far.  And I find it really interesting that while this particular bit of fabric didn't really do anything for me before, I'm kind of falling in love with it now that it's embellished. I'm excited to keep working on it and looking forward to seeing how the project comes together.