'Make Life' Hair Pillow

Once upon a time, I ordered my very first fabric jelly roll.  Make Life.  I loved it and had this vague plan of what I wanted to do with it to make something really nifty for my mom.  I started sewing things together (thank goodness, not cutting anything!) and very quickly realized that I wasn't feeling the project.  It was just kind of wrong.  So I put it aside.

Then my sister was diagnosed with breast cancer and my mom and I discussed using the multi-color text fabric to make her something really awesome for her healing room.  It turned out that the colors she used in there worked perfectly to make something really pretty...but by then no one had any more of that fabric (who was willing to give it up without me signing over my firstborn), so I tried to figure out what else I could do.

When my sister started losing her hair and decided to shave her head, someone said something about a hair pillow.  I was given a little baggie with a handful of my sister's gorgeous auburn hair in it.  When it came time for clean-up, I bagged the rest as well.

Eventually, the Make Life hair pillow was born.

Front:


Back:

Quilting:


Finished!





Two issues with the finished project:

1 - I made it a little too large.  With the way the hair compressed, the finished pillow is plesantly squashy, but a little thin.

2 - The hair pokes out of the pillow!  I'd hoped that the quilting would prevent that, and it does to some extent, but I probably should have put another layer of fabric inside as another barrier.

Prickly or not, I'm thrilled that she really likes it. :)

Erm...

I haven't fallen off the face of the planet, really.  Just a lot going on.  I've written a bunch of posts in my head that will probably never actually get posted on the blog (I MUST remember the draft feature!) and have a bajillion (more or less) photos to sort and resize.  On it... ;)

Conversation from the Backseat

While we were out running errands today...

Bug: "Daddy, what's that?"

Richard (who was driving): "What's what?"

Bug: "That."

Richard: "What's 'that'?"

Bug: "THAT."

Richard: "WHAT 'that'?"

cBug: "THAT! What I'm pointing at!"

100th Post

I'll admit that I've kind of been holding on to posts for a little while of late.  There's been a lot going on, too, but watching those post numbers creeping towards 100 had me wanting to do something to acknowledge what kind of feels like something of a milestone.  Except that I really haven't been able to come up with anything that felt right.

So perhaps the best thing I can do to celebrate hitting 100 posts is to just keep on posting?

frog loves monkey blog

The shop has it's own blog!  froglovesmonkey.blogspot.com

It's still in a fledgling state, but will be growing. :)

Bug on...Bugs

This afternoon as we were digging out the backyard, we uncovered a live grub.  (This was a better find than yesterday's small, dead worm.)  I picked it up and showed it to Bug, who recoiled and declared that he didn't want to see or touch it because it was "too yucky".

I commented that some people eat grubs.  Bug thought this was fascinating and asked if I could cook the grub for him.

Me: "You don't want to touch it because it's too yucky, but you want to eat it?"

Bug: "I want to touch it with my mouth."

Grubs were NOT on the menu for today...  (Though I did find a decent sounding recipe should it come up again.  The idea kind of turns my stomach, but I'd try it if my kids really wanted to.)

Yummiest. Lemonade. Ever.

It went too quickly to get pictures!

Mom and Art went to California to visit his family awhile ago and came back with a LOT of absolutely beautiful Meyer lemons.  (Which I think I have a photo of somewhere...  hrm...)  We've been using them, but not all that quickly and Mom was kind of worried that they were going to end up going bad before they were used.

Richard and Bug to the rescue!

After last weeks orange juice, they were ready to squeeze. :)

Turning the lemon juice into lemonade fell to me.  I was kind of worried about messing up - even though I know that lemonade is basically lemon juice, water and lots of sugar - so I poked around online a little bit and looked over a handful of recipes to see where the similarities were.  It pretty much ended at lemon juice, water and sugar. ;)

Richard and Bug squeezed just shy of two cups of lemon juice.  I boiled two cups of water, dissolved one cup of sugar into that and, AFTER the sugar was dissolved, poured the lemon juice in.  Once that was nicely combined, I added four cups of cold water and decanted into pitchers.

Even though I only used half of the sugar recommended by a large portion of the recipes that I'd seen, it was still REALLY sweet.  Richard ended up watering his down whenever he poured a glass.  I kind of like my sweet. ;)  (As a note, Meyer lemons are sweeter than other varieties, so the 2:2:1 ratio should result in a not-as-sweet lemonade if using different lemons.)

Enjoy and I'll try to get some pictures next time.  We still have lemons!

365 Day 3: January 4

365 Day 2: January 3

365 Day 1: January 2