Living in Harmony » Homemade

Toddler Mei Tai

AttachedMama — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 07:44:52 +0000

I have been meaning to make an advent calendar this year, but procrastinating. I finally sat down to do it tonight and realized I didn’t have all the material I need. The fabric store was already closed, but I had all my sewing stuff out and a chance to sew, so on a bit of a whim I decided to make Fiona her own mei tai. Meredith has one that her aunt made her a couple of years ago, and Fiona loves it. She’s started to become really interested in wearing her own baby around. We’ve been improvising, but she needs her own!

So that’s what I did tonight instead of making an advent calendar. I kind of followed this pattern, but also used some of the directions from some larger mei tai tutorials and the dimensions are different. I also had some charm squares and wanted to experiment with making a bit of a patchwork design.

I’m mostly really happy with how it turned out. I will give it to her for Christmas so I don’t know how it will fit (I think it will be really big, but oh well). The straps are much wider than on Meredith’s. I also put the shoulder straps at way too big of an angle sideways, but didn’t really realize it until most of it was sewn together. Next time, I would put the straps much more upwards. I have more material, maybe I’ll have to make another.

It’s reversible. On the other side is another fabric that goes with the blue. It doesn’t match the charm pack at all but I figured since only one side would be showing at a time that wouldn’t matter.

My new hobby

AttachedMama — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 07:13:23 +0000

It has been less than a week of blogging every day and I’ve already had to cheat once and barely made it a couple of times. I don’t think I’ll make it the whole month, but at least it has gotten me back into writing. I do have a whole bunch of posts from over the summer that I would like to publish. Mainly just pictures and comments about our day-to-day life. I may end up just posting those each day.

I thought I’d post a couple of pictures of one of the things that has kept me really busy and away from blogging though. Woodworking! I made Meredith a bed. I used this plan. It really wasn’t as hard as I’d expected it might be and she loves it. I think it looks really nice in her room, though it still needs to be sanded and finished. Once that’s done, we’re going to move it into the smaller den area of her room and turn the bigger room into her play/living space.

Long term, if it holds up well, we’ll likely turn it into the top part of a bunk bed (hence the footboard and headboard being the same height). I also made this which we will hang above the bed once it’s in the smaller room so she can have books readily accessible.

Baby scrapbook

AttachedMama — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 17:03:00 +0000

I have set some goals for myself as far as scrapbooking. Meredith’s is still not done. Neither is my wedding album. I’ve since started digital scrapbooking, which is easier and more realistic with children, because I can sit down for twenty minutes and get a bit done and not have to worry about set up or putting things away. So I’ve been working on Fiona’s which is digital. I actually started it over a year ago.

I would like to finish all three of these, though I’m not sure what a realistic goal is. I can finish a spread in one session of working if I get a good chunk of time, but that doesn’t happen a lot. A full double spread a week is probably realistic, which means over a year to finish what’s left on all three of them. Anyway, here are some of the ones I’ve been working on recently for Fiona’s (click for bigger images).

I might change some of the backgrounds and/or paper still, but I’m just glad to be getting something done! I am using this “My Sweet Baby” collection to do the book and bought a cute scrapbook I’ll eventually put the pages into.

Waldorf Doll

AttachedMama — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 06:20:00 +0000

I plan to make the girls each a Waldorf doll for Christmas. I am ordering the supplies this weekend, and hoping they will get here in time that I can actually get them done for once! I want to also make them wooden furniture for the dolls. A friend of mine recommended trying out this tutorial first to get a feel for doll making, so I tried it out tonight.

I’m pretty happy with the way the doll turned out. I just used scraps I had laying around, so it’s not a “true” Waldorf doll using only natural materials. But it is stuffed with wool and it is soft and cuddly. As soon as Fiona realized it was a doll (as I was getting the head sewn on), she wanted to play with it, so I rushed getting the head sewn on a little bit and it ended up a tad crooked, but otherwise I’m pretty happy with it. I don’t have a long needle for embroidery so the face was a bit tough to do, but I’m happy with how she turned out. Stuffing the head wasn’t as hard as I imagined it might be (though this one is only one layer of “skin” so I didn’t get to try making a nose) and the entire thing start to finish only took me about an hour.

Fiona was so enamored by it that I didn’t get any good pictures, so this side ways, fuzzy one will have to do. She took possession of it as soon as I’d finished sewing on the head (I barely got the needle out of it!) and before I had a chance to do the waist tie, and even nursed to sleep holding tightly to her. Meredith asked if I could make her one, but specifically requested a bigger one. Good thing that is the plan for Christmas! The tricky part will be finding time to make them with no kids around. She also has a handmade doll from her aunt that she used to play with a lot that I think I may dig up again.

Handmade Christmas

AttachedMama — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 18:51:00 +0000

We have been making most of our Christmas gifts the past few years, though we find it hard to get organized in time to do as much as we want to each year. This year, we are broke (thanks new house!) and also don’t have time, so we weren’t sure if we’d manage to get anything done for Christmas at all. We do plan to make each family a scrapbook of the girls, but that won’t happen until the new year now.

Then I heard about a craft event nearby, where you pay $1 for tickets and go around to booths where volunteers help you make crafts. We waited until Fiona was tired, Kris put her in the Beco, and Meredith and I headed out to see what kind of crafts there were.

I forgot to bring my camera with us, but it was actually a great little event. There were tables set up and basically we walked around and chose crafts to try. I let Meredith pick what she was interested in, meaning we ended up with a bit of an eclectic mix.

I let her do most of the work that she could do, so she chose colours, painted, picked beads, etc. I basically just put things together. One of the stations was a cookie making station, where she got chocolate chips, silver balls, and other assorted things to stick into shaped cookie dough and then they baked it for us. But that got eaten before this picture was taken. (And you can probably see that most of the gingerbread house candy has already been worked on too!)

I really like the salt dough ornaments, and we have since started more to give out as gifts to grandparents and aunts and uncles. It seems like a good snowy day activity.

My favourite though (and Meredith’s favourite as well) is this reindeer. The line for it was long, but she waited very patiently for her turn and was very particular in picking out the perfect head, body, antlers, eyes, nose, etc. She wants to keep him, so I think he’ll go on our mantle in the new house.

Baby Scrapbook

AttachedMama — Sun, 30 May 2010 05:09:28 +0000

Kris took Meredith to see Shrek 4 in theatres today, so I got a bit of time by myself. Fiona ended up falling asleep in one arm, so I decided to just take advantage and relax and ended up starting her baby book. I’ve decided to do hers completely digitally. There are a few things still that need to be changed or tweaked (for example, I apparently don’t have the non-watermarked versions of the professional pictures on my computer so I’ll need to get my disk and switch out those pictures), but overall I’m pretty happy with them so far. The shadows look very pronounced for some reason in the web versions, they will be much more subtle when printed. Click on the pictures to see them bigger.

I may use this picture instead (though in a sepia tone, not stark black and white, I just have to get it off the disk):

Then here is the next page. I may switch around the order of some of the pictures, but otherwise I’m pretty happy with it.

I haven’t left room for margins. I won’t be printing them as a book, I’ll have individual 12×12 pages printed and then put them in an album that way, I just like how that looks better for some reason. I’ve heard that way a lot less ends up cropped off the edges, so I hope that’s true. I’m trying to find some place that would let me print out one or two as samples to check, but with shipping it often ends up being pretty expensive to just print out one or two pages. I guess it would be cheaper than printing out an entire album and discovering I don’t like something about it though!

The next page will be all the professional pregnancy pictures we had done, and then I’ll work on the labour and delivery page. I still haven’t finished Meredith’s scrapbook either, but hers is all paper scrapbooking and it’s so much harder to just spend 20 minutes at a time working on it because I have to get everything out and then put it away again. I have a big 6 foot craft table upstairs now though that has all my sewing stuff on it. I think I may clear off the sewing stuff and use it to try to finish Meredith’s book (and, uh, my wedding album lol).

Thanksgiving

AttachedMama — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:28:17 +0000

We had a busy Thanksgiving weekend here. My twin sisters came to visit from Calgary. One of them has only visited once, and it was four or five years ago. The other has never been out here. So it was really neat to see them. I really haven’t spent much time alone with them in a long time. When I moved away from home, they were only thirteen. They are twenty-one now. Even though intellectually I know that they’re older and more mature, they’re still my baby sisters. It was neat to see just how mature and, well, adult, they are. We had a ton of fun. Meredith called them Bob or Baba (Melissa) and Kaw-wee (Kayley). She can be a bit shy and quiet around people she doesn’t know well, but she adored them from about two minutes after they got here.

My sisters have a friend who was in town just for the weekend who is spending the semester in Bamfield. She brought someone with her from Bamfield, and one of their friends flew up from Calgary to visit her. Since they had no where to go for Thanksgiving dinner, we invited them over, along with a good friend of ours who moved out here with me eight years ago and has no family here. All in all, we had eight people for Thanksgiving. I’ve never really cooked for more than four or five. (I grew up in a family of six, but I made one mistake once while cooking for them and after that my mom decided I was a terrible cook and I never had to cook for the whole family again, besides helping out with stuff they were doing.)

I was a bit nervous, but did a lot of prep work Saturday and made what I could ahead of time. So Saturday I made stock, mushroom gravy, cranberry sauce, and cranberry relish. I also cut up what veggies I wasn’t worried about going brown overnight and prepped a few other dishes.

Sunday morning my sisters arrived, and they were a huge help in tidying, prepping, and cooking. Everything ended up working out really well and was timed almost perfectly. The turkey ended up being done early, but we just turned the oven down and continued basting it a lot and it was fine. I forgot about the buns while they were rising, so they rose a little too long but still tasted delicious. My two crockpots came in really handy.

In the end, we had buns, green salad, avocado and asparagus salad, garlic herb turkey, stuffing, ham, apple sauce, mushroom gravy, cranberry sauce, cranberry relish, broccoli and cauliflower in cheese sauce, scalloped potatoes, and yam and apple casserole. There weren’t as many left overs as I’d expected there might be. Most of the side dishes were gone that night or the next day for lunch. I actually had a lot of fun, and can definitely see myself doing something like that again in the future.

Unfortunately, though I got pictures of some of the prep and the centerpiece my sister put together out of stuff from my garden, I forgot to take pictures of us actually enjoying the food! Oh well, I did remember to get pictures of everyone afterwards.

For supper the next day, we mashed up the rest of the scalloped potatoes, made some glazed carrots, and used the rest of the stuffing, some turkey, cranberry sauce, and gravy to make a Thanksgiving shepherd’s pie. That was really delicious too and something we’ll keep in mind for next time too.

I’ll likely post some of these recipes in the next little while, as some were from a magazine borrowed from a friend, and others were found on the internet, and I want to be able to find them again later.

Salmon Dog Treats

AttachedMama — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 22:31:36 +0000

We ran out of the treats I normally use for our dog classes, and since I’d been planning on trying to make my own at some point anyway I decided now was as good a time as ever. I wanted a soft treat since I use them for training. Most of the recipes for soft treats use baby food. I found a recipe for salmon bars for dogs, which described the final result as a fudgy, brownie-like texture. It sounded good for what I wanted, though the pieces would have been too big, so I adapted it a little bit. The flour could be substituted with oats or a different type of flour, but since we raw feed and she doesn’t get any grains or wheat otherwise, it doesn’t bother me in treats. Especially homemade ones.

12-14oz canned salmon, not drained or deboned (unsalted is best)
1 1/2 cup of flour
1 tsp garlic
2 eggs
a pinch to a small handful of parmesan (optional)

Either dump it all in a food processor and blend it up well, or just use a fork and add the ingredients one at a time and mash them up well each time. Flatten it out on a baking tray. The texture shouldn’t be runny at all, so I used a baking sheet bigger than I really needed and just flattened it to the thickness I wanted.

Bake at 350° for about 15 minutes, but keep an eye out on it as if you bake it too long it could get crunchy. You basically just want the egg to cook enough to hold it all together well. Use a pizza cutter to cut pieces to the size you want to use, and voila! They’re really stinky, so don’t do this when you’re expecting guests over.

These got a big thumbs up from Sorcha, Sebastian, and Meredith. Yes, Meredith loves these. I give her ones without bones but I can’t get one out for the dog or cat without handing one (or more!) to Meredith as well. Who knew?

Homemade Deodorant

AttachedMama — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:14:50 +0000

Being just about out of deodorant, I once again started a search for a natural deodorant that really works. Maybe I just have stinky pits or something, but most of the ones I have tried don’t work or, if they do, seem to lose effectiveness pretty quickly. So I often resort to regular grocery store ones or rotate a natural one with a grocery store one, especially in the hot summer months. I still try and stick to ones with the lowest ratings I can find according to the Skin Deep Database though.

This time, I came across a site for homemade deodorant. I was pretty skeptical, though to be honest I’m not sure why I would be, since my homemade cleaners and bug sprays seem to work as well if not better than any chemicals from the store. But I was. However, after reading the reviews I decided to give it a try. The aluminum in most deodorants has been linked to Alzheimer’s, and since my grandmother has it, I’d like to do whatever I can to lessen the probability of me getting it too. If that means making my own deodorant, so be it. If it saves me money in the process (and it does, even using organic ingredients), even better. It took me all of five minutes to make, using ingredients I always have in the house anyway, so for me it was quicker than running out to the store too.

Natural Deodorant

5 TB coconut oil (I used extra-virgin, cold-pressed, organic)
1/4 cup baking soda
1/4 cup corn starch
essential oil

Melt the coconut oil on low heat. Coconut oil has a very low melting point so it won’t take long. Remove from heat and add the baking soda and corn starch. Stir until smooth.

Add a few drops of essential oil depending on your preferences. I put five drops of tea tree oil for it’s antibacterial and antifungal properties, and orange because I love the smell. Next time, I might also add a couple of drops of lavender. Once it has cooled somewhat, give it another stir to prevent the oils from settling.

The only thing I forgot to do was figure out a container to put it in once it was done. All I had in the house were plastic, two-cup rubbermaid containers. It didn’t even fill one of those halfway. I like the idea of reusing an old deodorant container, except that coconut oil has such a low melting point that I would be worried about it leaking. It would have to be somewhere upright and it wouldn’t work for traveling. I think next time I will see if I can find some squat glass containers to use.

So far, it seems to work as well as any store-bought ones I have tried. The true test will be to see how it holds up over time though.

Etsy's Mothering Street Team Spring Fling Give Away

AttachedMama — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 05:11:42 +0000

I adore handmade items, and Etsy’s Mothering Street Team is hosting a giveaway of a big bundle of handmade items for mothers. I’m posting here for my own chance to win.