Seven

Is it just me or do kids age exponentially?  I mean, 7 seems years older than 6, not just 365 days.


6 year old Olivia

So much changes in a year. 


7 year old Olivia

So much stays the same. 

She's still so dramatic, which is good and bad.  She loves to find a corner to play in with a few stuffed animals and you can overhear the tragic and fantastic tales she spins.  But she doesn't even remember her imaginary Grandmother.  Man, I miss those stories.  Grandmudder was awesome.  She is still a little couch potato, although her taste in television has evolved from Maggie and the Ferocious Beast to iCarly. She's interested in music more.  Still sharp as a tack. 

It's nearly impossible to get a picture of her looking like a little girl.  Now she looks like a miniature teenager. 



She loves her doll.  She named her Lilly Blain.  She was pretty sure I had made her a doll (since she did ask for one) and was planning the name on our ride home.  Everything is named Lilly around here.  And everyone's middle name is Blain to them (actually, only Zoe's middle name is Blain, but they can't pronounce Izzy's middle name so they have replaced it... which led to them just assuming it's everyone's middle name).

I finished the legwarmers, but she won't get them until Sunday.  I'll take pictures of them then.  Legwarmers just are better modeled. 

I can't believe my first born is 7.  Such a big number. 

Olivia Grace, Happy Birthday!  It's going to be a great year, I know it.

The Doll

 

I finished Olivia's birthday present last night.  I spent more than three, yes three, hours knotting hair into this doll's head.

You know when you get an idea and think it's a great idea until you are halfway through it and then you realize that it was the stupidest idea ever?  That was me about 2 hours into the hair.  Originally I wanted to crochet corkscrew curls for her hair, but I decided that there would be no way I'd get it done in time.  For once, I was realistic.  But I did want her to have a nice, full head of hair.  Well... she definitely has that.  I used probably more yarn on just her hair than the rest of the doll.  Insanity, I tell you.



But I kind of like it now that I'm not in the process of making a billion knots. And her hair isn't fluffed out or anything, there's just that much of it.  I have pretty thick hair myself and I'm jealous of this doll.

It was a labor of love.  A week and a half of my nights devoted to this doll.  It's a great pattern... I'd never used a chart like that before and I think I kind of prefer it.  In fact, when I am copying a pattern down from the internet (I don't have a printer at home and sometimes I'm too impatient to wait until I get to work to print something), I often abbreviate things down to just stitch counts for a row anyway.  It's not like most amigurumi patterns have complicated stitch patterns.  It's all sc, inc, and dec for the most part.



I did make the shoes, but forgot to put them on.  They won't stay on unless I sew them onto her so they'll be lost in no time anyway.  No big deal, I think she looks fine without them.



I did go off on my own a little bit with the dress.  It's by the pattern for the most part, but I was tired and ended up just lacing up the back and carrying the yarn over to make skinny straps instead of crocheting them and sewing on buttons.  I like it though.  She's a tad goth-looking with the gray and dark red and black.  Working on the Daisy afghan, I'm a little burned out on pastels and I had these colors on hand.  I gotta mix it up.

I've decided I might crochet amigurumi a bit too tight.  I hardly ever use my G hook, but I pulled it out for the dress.  I had last used my G hook on a different (and unfinished) ami project.... and it was warped.  I bent my hook crocheting.  So maybe I go a bit overboard on the tension.  Just a little.

I see two more doll requests in my future, so I'm already scoping out other patterns.  I can't make the same pattern over and over.  Here are two options I'm looking at:

Source: ravelry.com via Jennifer on Pinterest

I'm not overly fond of the head... I might make it rounder.

Source: ravelry.com via Jennifer on Pinterest

She looks like a Lalaloopsy doll =)  And that's the hair I wanted to do...

I still have to finish up the legwarmers.... I have one leg finished and about 1/4 of the other.  I am thinking it might not happen tonight, so she probably won't get them until Sunday when we have our family birthday celebration.  They are also using more yarn than I anticipated, so it's debatable if I even have enough yarn!  I'm a horrible judge of these things.

Awesome weekend

I love October.  After December, it's my favorite month.  We always have so much going on in October that it's hard to fit it all in... the State Fair, pumpkin patch, Liv's birthday, Halloween.  It's usually my biggest photo-taking month. 

This month is looking like it will be no different.  It's only two days into the month and I've snapped over 300 photos, and none of our big events has even happened yet.  I'm so excited to see what the rest of the month will bring.

On Saturday, my best friend invited us to come join his family at the park.  I oh-so-reluctantly abandoned my laundry ;) and threw the girls into the van.  We went to a park we had never been to before.  It was really neat.  It's an older park, with tire swings, lots of slides, tunnels, odd looking swings with handlebars.... the girls were just in awe.



How bizarre is that?  It made me nervous because it was blacktop underneath, but the girls weren't really big enough to get them going so they lost interest quickly.  (Zoe was being pushed in that picture)



Isabelle and Abby... they are three weeks apart, Abby is older.  She's Zoe's size, though.  Little bitty thing.



The tunnels were fun, especially when they wanted to escape us and go to the other side of the park and us adults had to walk the long way around.



They found some sidewalk chalk and started decorating the tunnels.



You know how people always marry off their kids to their friends' kids?  These two are like that.  He's the sweetest kid and they've always been super great friends.  Olivia loves her some Gabe.

Today was our Family Fun Day.  They opened up a new pedestrian bridge this weekend at the Clinton Presidential Library.  I've always wanted to take the girls there because they have the most awesome little park full of steep hills.  So we went to go check out the bridge and do some hill-rolling.



The new bridge is an old railroad bridge that has been renovated and converted into a walking bridge.  There are 4 (I think) pedestrian bridges crossing the river now.  I'm loving them.



View from the bridge... that's downtown Little Rock.  It was a perfect day, if you can't tell. 



Izzy wasn't too keen on crossing the bridge, so I had to promise her a trip to the fountain in front of the library.



And then much rolling....



And belly-sliding on the steeper hills, was had by all (well, the kids anyway).

Little Obsession

There is a potholder pattern that I've been wanting to adapt into a beanie for a good little while now...

Stir Me Up Potholder

The past few days, for some reason it became a little bit of an obsession.  When I'm working on something with a deadline I seem to always need a quick project to break up the monotony.  Plus, I can't work on Olivia's presents while she's awake and I also needed an afghan break.  I love these afghans, but making squares can get a tad boring at times.

So, I dug into my yarn tote and picked out some colors and set to work.


Not entirely thrilled with the color combo, but it was just an experiment.
 
Making swirls is pretty fun.  Starting out is extremely fiddly and I don't have any stitch markers (I use scrap yarn to mark rows in amigurumi), but I managed without them.  Working with four strands of color meant that I had to be really careful to avoid a massive tangle-up and it was kind of annoying when my yellow yarn kept trying to run away from me, but the girls were nice enough to chase the ball and bring it back.  It's was like having a cat!  ;)

I want to make a candy cane colored one for Christmas, and maybe then I'll work up a pattern, but basically all you do is follow the potholder pattern until you feel it's big enough, then stop the increases and keep swirling away until it fits.  It makes me want to find other circular potholder patterns to see if I can turn them into hats.

It worked up really fast, but it's too small for my kids.  It took me a minute to get the math right in my head to figure out where I made my mistake, but I did, so I'll be able to make them one that will fit.  This one will probably go to the children's hospital or some other charity.

Luckily, one of the girls' teddy bears was willing to help me out as a model.


I was told it reminded someone of a hacky sack.
 


Thank you Pink Fuzzy Bear (if the stuffed animals around here have names, no one has let it slip around me) for your assistance.  You have been, by far, the easiest model.

Dented

For the past three nights, I've put in about 2 hours a night into this doll for Olivia.  I have the legs and the body finished.  I'm aiming for a body part a night.  I haven't amigurumi'd since making Wonder Woman for Isabelle in April, so I'm out of the habit of crocheting so tight and I'm feeling it.  My thumb on my right hand is dented from pushing the hook into the tight stitches and my forefinger on my left hand is dented from holding so much tension in the yarn.  It'll be gone by morning, but I'm convinced by the time this doll is finished that I'll have permanent dents.  And carpal tunnel syndrome.  Good thing I know good ortho docs, huh?  LOL

I pulled out the Daisy (formerly known as Zoe's) afghan yesterday and Olivia asked me if that was what I was working on and wanted to know why I wasn't working on her birthday present yet.  She's a harsh task master, that one.  I told her I wasn't going to work on it with her around... it has to be a surprise.  She also actually asked me for legwarmers, too, so I was pretty proud of myself that I've started a pair of those for her also.  I'm working on those at work, and hoping I can get them done in addition to the doll.

Now I have to show you something that has been added to my list that I hope to accomplish by Christmas.  I've mentioned before that my husband's aunt has asked me to make the kids from South Park.  There is a pattern for them, but as I'm working on this doll, I'm more and more convinced that I might be able to figure it out on my own, since they aren't very complicated-looking shape-wise.  She's also requested Michael Myers, which I will have to make up on my own.  That will be a challenge. 

And then I saw this on Pinterest the other day:

Source: blog.craftzine.com via Jennifer on Pinterest

The BeeGees!  My husband loves The BeeGees.  This is knit, of course, so I'd have to make the pattern up on my own, but they have chest hair.  Oh my gracious, I can't handle it.  Seriously, how hilarious would it be to make a doll with chest hair?  My cousins have already put in their requests if I figure it out for their own sets.  I am just dying over here.  Chest hair.  I can make a tutorial:  How to make chest hair for your amigurumi. 

I am losing it, folks. 

Blog Award

Well, lookie there, Sam from  Not Your Gram's Afghan  awarded me The Versatile Blogger award.  Thank you, Sam!

In order to accept the award, I am supposed to tell you 7 interesting things about me and then nominate 15 other blogs for the award.  Well, I'll do the 7 things, but I don't have 15 blogs to nominate.  I mean, a lot of the blogs I read are pretty popular blogs and I interpreted this to be for fairly new or undiscovered blogs.  No biggie.  I'm honored all the same and I will nominate a few blogs because I'm interested in their 7 things.  I'm nosy like that.  =) (and if you don't do them, it won't hurt my feelings... I'm also easy like that)

So... here are 7 possibly interesting things about me:

1)  I was my high school class Valedictorian.  AND I dropped out of college.  I mostly felt that I was racking up student loan debt for no reason because I didn't know then and I still don't know now what I want to be when I grow up. 

2)  Once upon a time I did know what I wanted to be... and that was a fashion designer.  I still have most of my designs.  This was middle school era.  I wanted to go to the Rhode Island School of Design.  Then I decided I needed to be all practical and stuff and you see where that's gotten me.  LOL

3)  I have 6 tattoos, or 10 if you count the symbols individually.  Left ankle:  dragonfly and Kanji symbols for "dream" and "love".  Right ankle:  Pink Twiddlebug.  Right boob: falling star.  Left boob:  little blue flower.  Back:  ugly sun and moon that I'm going to get covered eventually.  Neck:  a stick man and Kanji symbols for "believe" and "happy".  And yes, I do want more.

4)  I hate the word "y'all".   I especially hate it when people say things like this:  "I need y'all's number."  First of all, that's too many apostrophes in one word to possibly be right anyway, and secondly, that just sounds awful.  I'm Southern born and bred, but I just can't handle that word.

5)  I once lived in a haunted house.  That's a really long story, but there is no way you can convince me that it wasn't haunted.

6)  I have never watched, and do not ever plan to ever watch any of the Star Wars movies.  I've seen enough parodies and clips to have a pretty good idea of what it's about and I don't really care to watch them.  In fact, when I worked at Toys R Us, and had to deal with the action figure collectors, I vowed to never watch anything that made people that obnoxious and insane.

7)  I sleepwalk.  My mom said I've done it since I was a kid and I even had friends see me do it during sleepovers.  When Olivia was a baby, we had to move her into our bedroom because I was getting up and walking across the house with her to bring her to our bed and I never woke up.  I thought for the longest time Bill was doing it. I've never tried to leave the house, but I have awakened in the middle of making a mayonnaise and peanut butter sandwich in the middle of the night, so I'm seriously hoping that I don't sleep cook often.  I hope even more I don't eat it if I do.

So, I'm going to give the award to these chickies....

Tabby @ Buzzing Around the Apple Tree
Amanda @ Our "Normal" Family
Amy @ Sitting At Our Kitchen Table
Jen @ Tw-In Stitches

And anyone else that wants to share 7 things, please do.  I love reading about people =)

My Little Soapbox

Flu shot season is speeding towards us quickly, and I wanted to just give out a little PSA...

You have a choice to have a shot, which is a dead virus, or the FluMist, which is a weakened live virus.  If you have contact with someone who has a weakened immune system, please consider getting the shot over the virus.  While the chance is low that you can transmit the live virus from the FluMist, it is possible.  I honestly don't care how low the chance is, the flu can be deadly to people who don't have healthy immune systems and any chance is too much when it comes to people I care about.  Shot suck, trust me, I hate them with a passion and I know how hard it is to inflict them on children, but at least think about it.  Not everyone with immune deficiencies look sickly. 

Here is a link to the CDC information on the immunization:

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/nasalspray.htm