Silent Sunday - His Hand Knit Easter Bunny

Thank you Jessie, for such a beautifully special bunny.

Simple Mama

Simple Beauty

I can already tell the worst part about not being able to use my right hand, other than this silly hunt and peck typing method I'm perfecting, is the inability to create. To make beautiful, fun, original things with my son.

Yesterday we took a walk around the neighborhood. Across the street is an open field where he picked a small spring bouquet of early flowers. When we returned home I made us a lunch of scrambled eggs and toast with homemade raspberry jam. I picked one of the little brown eggs our Light Brahma laid and knocked the top off just a bit with a knife. Rinsed, filled with water, and nestled into a porcelain egg holder it's the perfect little vase for my tiny bouquet.


It's about all the craftiness I'm able to manage right now, but it's perfect for the little handful of flowers he brings me.

I love his sweetness.

Poop on the Patio

Warning - this post contains a gnarly photo. Stop reading if you don't want to see it.

This weekend I had big gardening and outdoor coop plans. Things that included finishing the chicken run so that I can keep the chickens from pooping on my patio. Seriously. I love my girls, but there are few things more gross than cleaning up compost scraps turned poo from under my patio chairs. Unless of course you slip in the poo when it's raining as you're trying to take out a container of slightly expired yogurt for the girls to enjoy. And if, when you slip in the poo, you manage to knock over the barbecue and dump ashes on yourself so that you're now covered in chicken poo and powdered with gray ash, AND if you manage to land on your pinky finger in such a way that when you sit up and look at your hand covered in yuck and ash you notice that it is now bent awkwardly at an unnatural angle and your first thought is, "Crap! I'm covered in sh&t!," closely followed by, "Crap! I think I broke my finger!"

Yep. That's grosser than just cleaning up chicken poo. And not recommended. A trip to the emergency room revealed it was not broken, but it was a severe dislocation.

Gross picture coming up:


Urban homesteading is dangerous. I'm just saying. And the actual finger looked way worse than it does in this photo. I wasn't really up for hand modeling when Super Hubby snapped this shot.

Resetting a bone is painful. It hurt worse than dislocating the finger in the first place. I'm in a splint now for anywhere between 10 days to 4 weeks depending on how I heal. You have NO idea how much you need your pinky until you can't use it.

My little Etsy store is on vacation while I recover. All the Easter crafting I had planned for The Boy and I is being reconsidered. Blogging will be sporadic at best. Gardening?

Sigh.

Maybe La Nina will hold on a few weeks longer and I won't feel as badly about not getting the seedlings out.

I'll be back soon. I pinky promise.

Simple Mama

What Happens When I Procrastinate....

When I procrastinate I usually end up thinking of all the things I have to do in the middle of the night - leading to insomnia.

Remember last year when I had that bought of insomnia?


Yep - It happened again. Only this time I took it to the next level:



I just picked up that sharpie and started doodling all over our brown chicken eggs. (I've been making lots of scrambled eggs in the morning.) Flowers, paisley, scales, stripes. I can't seem to stop.


Obsessed.

Simple Mama

Make It! Easter Egg Wreath

After blowing all those eggs and dyeing them with silk ties, I was left with more than a few that didn't turn out quite as brightly or vibrantly as I would have liked. I have our favorites piled together in an old goldfish bowl...but the light ones? I wasn't sure what to do with them until I ran across some reindeer moss and a wreath frame at the dollar store. Inspiration!


For this project you'll need:

About 1 dozen blown eggs, plain or decorated
1 small wreath frame
2 packages of reindeer moss
Hot glue and glue gun
Hemp twine
1 paper clip
Scotch Tape
Scissors

Let me start by suggesting that you work on a piece of butcher paper, craft paper, etc. Moss is messy, and it's so easy to just sweep the whole mess up into the paper and compost it when you're done.

Begin by dabbing a bit of hot glue onto your frame and placing a bit of moss on it. Work in small sections and work quickly, or your glue will harden before you get the moss applied. Continue working your way around the frame, adding a bit of hot glue and a bit of moss until your frame is completely covered. Once your form is covered in the soft moss, fill in any bald spots. I pressed the moss firmly into the glue, but be careful not to burn yourself doing this.

After your wreath form is completely covered in moss, add a good dollop of hot glue on top of the moss in a small section. Pick out a blown egg and press it down into the hot glue gently, but firmly. Continue adding eggs all the way around the wreath. Leave a small space open at the top to add a hanging ribbon.

Gently turn your wreath over so that it's resting on the eggs. Using a unbent paperclip and a small piece of scotch tape, tape your hemp string to the end of the paper clip. Carefully thread the hemp string through one end of a blown egg and out the other. Tie the hemp in a neat knot at the back of your wreath to help hold each egg in place a little more firmly. Make sure to get the eggs good and tight against the wreath, but use caution not to pull the string too tightly, or you'll break your eggs. I speak from experience. Once all your eggs are firmly tied to the wreath, you can use your scissors to trim any wayward excess hemp string.

Pick a pretty grosgrain ribbon and hang your wreath from a nail or wreath hanger. I love how organic and natural this darling wreath turned out! I plan on making one using plain brown and white eggs as well.

Happy Spring!
Simple Mama

Make It! Twig Vase

After a weekend of yucky colds and general malaise in our home, The Boy and I were ready for a little outdoor time. We took a walk to one of our local neighborhood parks during a rare sunny day and brought along a reusable tote to cart home our treasures.

We filled the tote with pretty stones, acorn caps, lonely leaves left over from autumn, birch bark, and a huge assortment of fallen twigs. I promised The Boy we would make something special with his treasures when we returned home. The tote was set aside as we made our way to the playground to swing in the fresh spring air. It was abandoned on a green park bench when we consulted with the GPS on my phone as we tried geocaching for the first time. We followed the purple path on my phone through a nearby field with knee high grass looking for our geocache treasure. Midway through the field the ground gave way. We both found ourselves calf deep in the cold, dark mud. We gave up on geocaching and squish, squish, squished our way back towards our oilcloth tote full of treasures that were much easier to find.

Later that evening my son asked if we could make something fun. It seemed like more fun to get crafty than make dinner, so I agreed. For this project you'll need:

Twigs - please only use dry twigs found on the ground, unless you're already pruning a plant.
A glass jar, mason jar, recycled bottle, etc.
Pruning shears
Hot glue
Ribbon or Twine

I pulled out the myriad of twigs, grabbed an old pickled asparagus glass jar, a small set of garden shears, and my hot glue gun. I measured a twig against the glass jar and snipped it to the right length. Running a dab of hot glue along one side of the twig, I then set it into place on the jar, carefully making sure to keep it flush with the bottom of the jar so that it wouldn't sit cockeyed.
We worked the twigs all around the glass jar, adding a second layer to cover up the glass as needed. You can see I was lazy and didn't even bother removing the pickled asparagus label. No need, as it was soon going to be covered in beautiful, mossy sticks.

Once all the twigs were in place, I double checked to make sure the bottom was still flush. Using my pruning shears I snipped here and there to adjust length on both the bottom and top of the jar. Then I pulled out an old ball of twine and wrapped it a few times around the jar, tying a bow in the front. I love the rustic charm of this simple vase - that, and the bits of dried moss clinging to the little sticks and twigs we found.
We piled the vase full of some of my favorite springtime flowers, daffodils.

Such a sweetly simple activity, and a beautiful way to showcase our treasured "finds" from our outings. The Boy just beamed when he saw how his little twigs were turned into something beautiful and functional.
We spent some time looking at flowers online today - and he's determined that tulips will be the next flower to go inside his treasure vase. A fine thing indeed, as we plan to head to the tulip festival this weekend.

Enjoying the simple treasures every day.

Simple Mama

Weekending - Around the House

When The Boy started Montessori preschool last week, I didn't even think about the germ infestation he might bring home. But sure enough, he did. And Super Hubby and I both managed to come down with the early spring cold crunk.

All our plans for going out and about in the PDX area sort of fell through the cracks, and we ended up staying pretty close to home. A good thing too, as it turned out we had much to do.

Four cubic yards of 3 way compost mix were delivered to our driveway Saturday morning. We *might* have overestimated our needs slightly. We spent the better half of the morning wheelbarrowing it into the backyard into an unsightly pile. The goal was mostly to get it out of the driveway. Saturday was a dry day - but we knew the rains were coming again. I didn't want all the soil to wash down the driveway into the street. Soil, in case you haven't had the pleasure of purchasing it, is expensive.

We plan on spreading a good portion of it flat in its current area. The yard slopes down here and we're relocating our chickens to this portion of the yard. I'm sick of the chicken poo on our patio. They'll have a new run built, and access to our compost pile. The rest of the compost will fill containers, potato bins, amend current garden beds, etc.

And speaking of garden beds, we also built these new square foot garden beds. They're 4 foot by 4 foot, and located on the south side of our house for optimal sunlight:

We used cardboard boxes as the weed barrier underneath them, and managed to get the new soil and compost mixture into them. We still need to grid them out and put up the vertical climbing wall behind them to trellis peas and beans. Super Hubby is going to create a border around the gardens similar to our current beds and we'll fill in the entire area with wood chips and shavings as mulch. I find mulching the areas around the beds makes the whole garden endeavor easier. If I allow grass to grow right up next to the beds it's a constant struggle to keep it mowed and trimmed and I'm continually pulling grass that manages to grow in the beds. Work smarter. Not harder.

We planned to go this week and pick up some black weed barrier cloth from the hardware store when I found a posting on our local Craigslist for FREE burlap coffee bags. FREE! I immediately contacted the poster expressing my interest and loaded The Boy into the car before someone else came by to stake my claim. The place we ended up was a huge coffee processing plant. It smelled soooo delicious. I've never seen so much coffee in one place at one time. The warehouse was literally the size of an IKEA store with pallets of coffee beans piled up to the ceiling.

And wow, did we get hooked up! The back of my mid-size SUV is filled with burlap bags. Literally 200 of them, and the promise of more if I needed them - and the nice Craigslist guy gave me a bag of beans to grind at home. We'll lay the burlap bags down on the grassy area around the new garden beds as a natural weed barrier and then cover with 3-4 inches of mulch. How awesome is that? I LOVE free Craigslist finds, and I LOVE repurposing something that would otherwise end up in the landfill into something useful. Some of those burlap bags are so cute that I'm going to pull them aside for crafty ideas running through my head. Later. Like at some point when I'm not elbows deep in garden dirt, Etsy projects, and crazy, crazy life.

Loving this life I'm living,
Simple Mama

-18.4

-18.4. Pounds that is. I joined Weight Watchers 10 weeks ago. I haven't blogged about my weight struggles, but I have them. And I have a LOT more weight to lose, but I felt the need to mark this weigh in permanently. It's a big deal to me - and my goal for next week is to hit my 20lb weight loss mark. I'm putting this out there to the universe. I. Am. Proud. Of. Myself.

Shrinking,
Simple Mama

Make It! Egg Carton Wreath

Next to the coffee filter, egg cartons are my favorite recyclable craft item. Rather than compost them, we save them in a stack in our pantry until we have time to craft with them. A few weeks ago I saw a gorgeous egg carton wreath linked on The Crafty Crow. I showed the project to The Boy and he thought it was beautiful.


Last night, after a full day of Etsy crafting, he was itching for mama to do something crafty with him. We set about gathering our egg cartons and deconstructing them. We didn't waste much in this process. The portion that holds the eggs was turned into various flower shapes. Some with rounded petals, others fringed. We cut out some of the pointed in-between pieces for flower centers. We used the flat top and sides of the egg carton to make leaves.


After everything was cut into shapes, I had The Boy sit down with some tempera paint and get busy. I LOVE those beautiful Waldorfy wooden paint boards, but I'm a stickler for frugality and repurposing old objects. We use old cookie sheets as painting boards. The side benefit of the cookie sheets is that they hold water spills beautifully.

Our tempera paint was limited to 5 colors. Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, and White. Using small, resealable paint jars, I helped The Boy mix different variations of those colors to create oranges, purples, and lighter cream colors. Per his instructions we worked out a system. He would paint the inside of a flower, and then hand it off to me to paint the outside so his hands wouldn't "get so messy." That didn't work so well - the not getting messy. But tempera paint is great because it cleans up so well with soap and water.

After our flowers dried a bit, I went in with a finer brush and added just a bit of detailing. While I was doing that, Super Hubby was cutting out a large cardboard circle from an old box. The circle was painted a basic dark green and allowed to dry.

Then came the fun part. We carefully chose where to place each egg carton flower along the cardboard frame. The flowers, when dry from the paint were a bit stiff so in some cases we manhandled them a bit. Other times we simply moved them around until we found the proper configuration. I attached them to the frame with my trusty hot glue gun.

The finished wreath is so stinkin' cute! We hung it on the wall near our front door. Because it's made of cardboard and watercolor paint, I don't recommend hanging it outside in the elements. Best to keep it inside where everyone can enjoy it.
We'll be enjoying this all spring!

Simple Mama

The One Where the Frantic Gardening Starts

Oh boy do I feel like we're behind here. La Niña is wrecking havoc on all my best laid gardening plans. We've been inundated with rain, rain, and more rain. Oh...and cold weather too. I keep crossing my fingers hoping that we don't have a repeat of last season when my tomato plants refused to grow, it rained until June and then decided to start up again in August. Even my CSA had a tough season last summer.

It's been so wet outside that we haven't been able to get out and amend our soil in the raised beds, do much mulching, prepping, well - really to do anything. Sure. I know if we were die hard gardeners, or even true Northwesterners we wouldn't be complaining. We'd be out there come rain or shine getting things ready. But my goodness, we're from the hot, dry states of Idaho and Montana. This ridiculous amount of moisture makes me want to stay curled up on our couch nursing a mug of hot tea. It does not make me want to put on the garden shoes and sink my hands into freezing mud.

Still, summer will come eventually and there are things to be done. Like start our seeds:

They all seem to be on track. I was concerned that a few of our tomatoes wouldn't germinate since some of the packets were 3 years old, but proper storage, a heat mat and a nice garden light seem to have done the trick. And those wildflowers that The Boy planted on the first day of Spring! finally decided to pop up through the dirt in their tiny little egg shell holders.

What has me concerned is this mess of mud and mulch. Our chickens have free ranged in our backyard all winter. We're in the process of sectioning off an area of the yard within which they will have free reign, but you can see for the compacted, muddy soil that they've been digging around in my bed looking for grubs and plants all season. We have 4 cubic yards of soil coming this weekend so the chicken area has to be ready by then, come rain or shine. Those cute little beds are so lovely when they're planted and we're adding two more 4x4 foot squares once the chickens are cordoned off. But we've got to get started on it. Like yesterday.

New to our little backyard homestead is our mason bee home. Super Hubby put it up recently on our back fence. The mason bees will be in shade there, away from the hot mid day sun, protected by the neighbors overhanging tree branches. He doesn't know it yet, but I consider this my first timid step into full fledged honeybee keeping.


And of course, around here there are always the girls to take care of:


Waiting on some sunshine....
Simple Mama

Have Dandelions Ever Been as Sweet?

The Boy picked his first bouquet of the season. He didn't pick the daffodils blooming in our flower bed, or the crocus out front. Nope. It was dandelions of course. Stubby little things, as they haven't had long to grow and take root. We have more than I'd care to admit, since we don't use chemical lawn treatments in our yard, and I was just thinking to myself that I needed to get out there and start digging them up. The Boy beat me to the punch, although there is surely much more digging and pulling to be done.

Without long stems, we weren't sure where to put them. My traditional flower jar, a washed out mason canning jar was simply too big. Even the few shot glasses that I have tucked back far in the dark confines of my cupboard would be too large. (Yeah...they were double shot glasses, but who's telling? I had a different life and a bunch of years in college/grad school under my belt before I started down this parenting road, but I digress.)

Then I threw this together:



And seriously. Have dandelions ever looked as sweet as they do here, in this little blown egg perched cheerfully in an inexpensive egg cup? Invasive weed perfection. Pick away my child. Mama loves this little bouquet.

Growing where I'm planted,
Simple Mama

This Moment - First Day of Montessori Preschool

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. Inspired by Soule Mama.