Halloween Treat Bags

Patchwork Treat Bags for my Favorite Young Girls

Last summer (yes 2012) I stopped at A Verb for Keeping Warm to browse the quilt cottons and the yarn. In the fat quarter box, which often I find cost prohibitive, sat a great-looking skull pattern with teal and purple background peeking thru and gold around many of the bones in the Sugar Skulls. So I bought it with the idea rattling around about Treat Bags for my Littles. Well, October got away from me and I realized this year would be a repeat if I allowed it to happen. No, I vowed, I would sew these up and get them delivered if it took all week.

Well of course it took only a few hours one afternoon and there they were: linen-lined, with a silk strap that goes all the way around the bag so no tearing loose. The skull fabric ranks as the centerpiece six-inch square and then I surrounded with coordinating prints just varying slightly so they can tell them apart and I can still work it as an assembly line type operation. Three inch wide strips only needed to go once around to be the correct size for youngsters.

Ginger (L) and Piper show off their costumes and their treat bags at their Halloween event.
Our favorite dads catch up in the background as the kids have fun.

Jen, more commonly known as Mah-Ma!, and Ginger delight in the treat bag.
Gingin's such a gracious recipient, I love making and giving her gifts.

I am Linking up with Barbs October FO Linky Party and my treat bags are my FO for the month.
I have Barb's button on my sidebar there if you'd like to check out all the cool Finishes for the month.
And you Don't Have to Finish to play-isn't that cool?

Barb's husband, Mike, is in hospital so if you have a spare minute to either drop by her blog at Cat Patches and offer a word of encouragement. We all know how hard it is when our partner is away from home and who on earth wants to be in hospital. Here's to a solid recovery and a trip home soon.

Sweetness that Makes One Weep with Joy

Daughters Do the Most Delightful Things

I read thousands of words a day when I can; I'd rather read than eat or sleep. Blogs are my fodder and I have followed Jen's stories of her four kids for several years-maybe three or four even... Henry's getting bigger alla time !~!

So are the triplets and recently one of them made her mom the happiest woman alive. I had to share with you, my readers, because these gestures, made by kids for the ones they love, send my heart soaring. My faith in the goodness of people restores itself. Do enjoy it for yourself.   

Teeth are Sooo Cute... and Sharp

Oh my, counting teeth could become a seasonal pastime here in LyndaLand.

The Girls Come Visit Once in a While and Fun's on the Menu

 As is macaroni and cheese !~! They love to eat and mac and cheese sells to every kid I have ever cooked for. I don't have pictures of us preparing the feast however we ate it off the picnic ware and sat on the floor as we do and it was lovely for all of us to be together again.

Linen Bowl Holds Embroidery Thread

I put together this linen bowl/open box one afternoon when I wound up with a strip of grey linen that cried out to be folded into an open-topped box. I trimmed it with pink embroidery thread and toss into it the current crop of colors of that same thread for whatever project I have going.

May have to stiffen it somehow as I see it sagging in the photo. What does one use for such an application, I wonder, without losing the lusciousness of the linen ?~! Hmmm, suggestions, sweet readers who have made similar items...

Happy Autumn, may each step we take lead the way to Peace.

Weaving Completed

She's off the loom and looking for a tall spot from which to hang with her mate from last semester. I'm linking up today with Linda in South Africa's blog Natural Suburbia and her weekly regular feature Creative Friday. There are lots of lovely blogs there with a wide range of cool "finishes". Click your way around a bit, you may find a great new blog, or six, that just fall into your interest range and onto your blogroll !~! You never know until you click. (Oops- I see that top piece of driftwood leaned. I must tie it into place.)

Weavings from 2013 classes at Richmond Art Center with Stacy Speyer.

Hanging past the curtain rod and draping over the couch lasted only until Burp got here the next morning and decided that they looked like Fun Toys !~! Yikes, as KarenT would say. Meet Karen, blog readers; she's appeared in these pages before and today takes us with her to swim next to a dolphin during a cruise to the south Caribbean. 

Who is kissing her ?~! Karen meets a dolphin up close.

Karen and I have been soulmates since the late 70s when we met in Key West. At that time Key West was a small artist colony and shrimping port with Treasure Salvors diving for the Atocha and Fantasy Fest just getting underway. We could roll a bowling ball down Duval Street in June and never hit a soul in those days. However, the drinking and drugging atmosphere pervaded; there was so much cocaine money in the Keys in those days that the high school kids had to peel thru the hundred dollar bills looking for something small enough to buy a $3 cheese steak sandwich for lunch.

Between weekends working in the ER at the local hospital and the rest of the time a partying fool, I stayed busy altho not out of trouble. Driving while blacked out under the influence was a near-nightly occurrence and it is only by sheer luck that I am here to tell the stories I don't recall. I should, by all rights, be either dead or in jail for behaving that way. Honored to report that I have been clean and sober for nearly thirty years. 

It was on a flight from here in the Bay Area back to Key West in Feb of 1984, while trying again to remember what I had done the night before that I decided to quit drinking. The steward had already sold me a bottle of vodka and a can of grapefruit juice when it occurred to me that if I didn't do something quickly I may not have a future worth thinking about. Motioning to the same steward who had sold me the untouched bottle, I asked him to take it back. His response: that he was unable to refund my two bucks. The least of my worries at that instant in time. I drank my can of grapefruit juice, silently and solidly waved good-bye to alcohol and began an entire new lifestyle.

Best decision of my life-bar none. I slept thru a lot of my off time in the next few years and continue to use sleep as the therapeutic it is meant to be as well as the escape from situations that would have been riotous in my past. When I am feeling overwhelmed, anxious or tending to out-of-control I find that a nap restores my balances: physical, emotional and psychological better than any other form of treatment. Exercise has its place too and I try to get enough to keep myself limber and toned but I have been blessed with a physique that does not require hours a day of maintenance or long runs in the parks to keep functioning. Yoga has been a life saver for me and the Littles. We practice together and learn how to calm ourselves from the inside outward.

One of the mainstays of my sobriety has been Karen (with that dolphin up there). Never a drinker herself she stood by me thru my recovery and into the decades since. Living on opposite sides of this large continent presents its own problems, but with all the accoutrements of modern living we keep in touch quite closely. Trekking back and forth over the years since I moved here in 2000, we have each seen the Grand Canyon, high desert, Las Vegas, the mighty Mississippi River, Rockie Mountains, wheat and soybean fields, and oil derricks by the thousands over Texas and Oklahoma: much more of the country by air than we will ever be able to see by road in this lifetime. My friend, my sister, my soulmate; I am incredibly fortunate to have a soulmate and a husband-such a rare and wonderful situation.

My Heart Reaches to New York

My sweet friend, Lizzy, is burying her father today. Words are inadequate to express what I feel; so I will borrow: All who go, go too soon. Saying good-bye to fifteen of my friends and family in the last half dozen years has shown me the truth in that statement so clearly. I hold you up, Lizzy, to the Universal Healing Power and hope that time will soothe what reason fails to explain.

 Namaste, father of my friend.

October Cools Off and We Settle Into the Routine

Baby Boy shows off his Kickstarter campaign Nikola Tesla onesie.
He's nearly walking, standing unassisted and crawling SO fast it's unbelievable.
His teeth are giving him fits some days-six in with two more tops trying to push thru.

Ormond bought himself a Honda Reflex scooter to get around in style.

I crocheted in some hand-dyed (with food coloring) roving for a bit of interest in the cowl.

My weaving project is almost finished. I have used silk/bamboo for the warp and more of that with variegated silk for weft. It's looking so cool; the colors delight me over and over as I send the shuttle back and forth.

The Month Slid By...

I have some pictures to share !~!

Piper (L) and Ginger model blanket fashions
and discuss strategy for their next imagination-rich game.

Sequoia twigs held with white linen thread decorated with cotton yarns
brought to me from Holland with Erica, my sister of another mother.

Nearly there with a four-block by four-block 'Diamonds in Corners' knock-off.

Working out a corner diamond. 

My newest cowl in progress using the August mailing of hand-dyed merino wool
from Chandi at Expressions Fiber Arts.

Yummy, what was it? he seems to ask when we feed him from our plates.

Here are two of his current crop of six teeth. The other four are on top.

Savasana at the end of a three-hour run of continuous activity.

Head to toe, bone to skin, my beloved yogi, Ronnie Dubinsky,
 used to say as we rested, feeling every cell buzz.

Wyatt grows so fast and gains new skills each week: cruising while holding the furniture or my pant leg, drinking from a water bottle and a cup, climbing down the doorstep and off the couch without clonking his head nearly as much as a few weeks ago. He uses his budding language skills to get what he needs even tho understandable words are still a bit in the offing. He can crawl nearly as fast as I can walk comfortably which makes evading him harder and harder-not that I resist his pleas, please, to be picked up and loved on. He grabs my face and comes at me with his drooly mouth wide open looking for Kisses; is there anything sweeter in the world than a baby's freely given kiss ?~!

I think not too.

Happiest Autumn and October.

May each step we take lead the way to Peace.