One year can sure go by really, really fast.

Then: 9lbs 9oz, 23 inches long

Now: 26lbs 1oz, 32 inches long.

These two poor clueless people had no idea what had just hit them.

This became very apparent at 1:30am on the night Griff was born, when he started crying inconsolably, and we hit the nurse call button in a panic because nothing we did seemed to help. He was four hours old, and so were his parents, really.

Luckily, he survived his first year, despite our total bumbling ineptitude. And I think we’ve gotten a little bit better at cheering him up since then!

For example, these birthday carrot cupcakes with cream cheese frosting nutritious vegetable breakfast muffins with calcium-packed dairy-based topping seemed to put him in a good mood!

And there’s nothing like a little sock-waving to start the day right.

Griff even tolerated his birthday crown for upwards of 5 minutes while opening a few of his gifts. (The rest will wait til this weekend when his grandparents and Aunt Beanie come visit.)

(Yes, I now realize that the birthday crown makes him look kinda like a bishop. Next year I’ll design something a tad less unintentionally episcopal. )

Of course, the wrapping is fun to play with, too.

It’s also fun to landscape the yard. (Definitely more fun than 3 injections and a finger stick at the doctor’s office.)

Rake Boy is determined!

After a good Irish dinner of corned beef and cabbage (that’s Mommy’s, er, “special” beverage)…

…it’s time for some birthday ice cream, and then bed.

Happy First Birthday, little guy!

We headed out to Little River Park this morning to enjoy the sunshine, and ended up having the playground area completely to ourselves the entire time. Griff had a blast.

There was lots of sliding, slide-climbing, and mulch-digging.

After a test slide with mommy, Griff was ready to slide on his own.

Afterwards, we took a little stroll on the paved path. Wouldn’t you know it, Griff found a stick!

Ok, it wasn’t so much a stroll as sit-and-play-with-stuff sessions punctuated by brief distracted walks down the path to look for more stuff. But it was still fun.

Today’s first topic is frogs. Griff loves his froggy pull toy. He was a little “meh” about it as a pre-walker back in December, but he started becoming interested in pushing it around the floor, and once he began to walk, he discovered that he could drag it along behind him! Here he is doing a tour of the living room and getting a refreshing drink after his long journey. (The diaper on the floor is clean, he grabbed it out of the laundry basket and has been playing with it ever since.)

Given all the Griff froggy-love, I decided to try a frog motif for my first attempt at glue batik. Basically, glue batik involves using Elmer’s school glue gel as a resist instead of the usual hot wax. The gel glue is thicker than normal white glue and holds a design better. Since you can’t soak the shirt in the dye bath (which would dissolve the dried glue), you can either spray, brush or spoon it on. The glue worked very well as a resist, but I wish the applicator on the bottle was a bit finer for better detail. Still, I’ll be doing this again!

I’ve done a few more recent tie dye projects for Griff. This orange one was my favorite.

This blue one came out well, but I liked the back better than the front.

I tried taking a few pictures of the back, but getting a clear image of a mobile baby’s back is not easy.

Hrm.

Let’s try again…

Ok, I give up.

I made this green one with the leftover dye from the frog shirt. Not sure about this one; I may overdye it later.

Since someone’s first birthday is rapidly approaching, and because we’re kinda broke on a budget, I’ve been working on a few things for the occasion. Here’s a first birthday shirt for the little man, done with fabric paints and a freezer paper stencil.

I’ve been admiring the cloth buntings featured on mommy craft blogs for some time now, so I decided to whip up a few of my own. This is just a bunch of 6.5″ triangles; I sewed them in pairs around 2 sides, turned inside out and pressed, and sewed the raw edges into some double-fold bias tape. I got to use up a lot of bright fat quarters that have been languishing in my quilting stash.

And I got to use one of my “fancy” sewing machine stitches, whee.

Here it is all festive in the dining room. The bias tape comes in 9-foot lengths, which seems like a lot until you go to hang something up.

Griff has an amazing capacity to make toys out of just about anything. He recently grabbed my rolling pin off the kitchen island and stomped around the house with it for a good half hour.

Here he is playing with the new outside ball we got for him. And, of course, a stick.

Some evil person decided to put his newborn hat on him as a joke. Griff responded with the most teenager-y expression ever. I guess we can look forward to seeing this nonstop from about the age of, what, 11?

It’s been a whirlwind of a weekend, but a good one. On Friday, Jag took the day off to give me some time to work on some crafting projects that I normally find impossible to do while having my hands full with Griffin. Dyeing is one of those activities you just don’t want a baby getting into; aside from the mess, the chemicals I use for dyeing wool and cotton are just not the healthiest for a little one to be ingesting.

We bought Griff a pack of size 2-3T undershirts at Target recently, and I decided to dye them up for him to wear now that the weather has been getting warmer. The good news is that they came out pretty great (IMO). The bad news is that they’re almost too small for him already! Jenn, if you’re reading this, Braed will be getting some gently used tie-dyed shirts in a very few months!

I used the Dharma Procion dyes as usual, and got some nifty results. This blue and purple swirl one is my absolute favorite:

This was a fun one to do. Blue dye in one bowl. green dye in another, and I spooned both dyes into the middle of the shirt until the white was gone before wrapping it up in plastic to cure overnight. I want to try it again with the colors going across the shirt, or maybe diagonally.

I think these two monochrome ones are very pretty, too.

I had a bunch of dye bath left over, so I rummaged around in my dresser drawers and found an old v-neck t-shirt that I never wear because it’s white (me wearing white has never been a smart idea). Please to be ignoring my stupid expression.

The back has a bunch of purple. Yay purple!

The unexpected warm weather meant that Griff had nothing to wear but long pants, so I went into overdrive this morning and made him a pair of Big Butt Baby Shorts out of an old pair of my Dockers. I like that they’re long enough to give some protection to his poor knees. He’s falling down frequently while trotting around outside these days, and his little shins are getting all bruised. I’ll need to get my butt in gear and churn out a bunch more of these in the next few weeks!

I had a very productive day today for some reason (probably because Griff helpfully decided to take two good naps). I got a ton of housework and laundry (four loads!) done, went grocery shopping, and finally finished the scrappy pyramid quilt top I’ve been working on.

The top measures approximately 70″ by 54″. It’s too small to be a bed quilt even for a single bed, but I’ve decided that I like it too much to use it as a picnic blanket. I’m thinking that maybe I can give it to Griff to use as an extra blanket once we convert his crib to a bed sometime in the next year, or we can use it on the couch or something. Now I need to decide what to back it with; maybe some nice soft flannel. I’d love to hand-quilt it, but since I’d like for it to actually be finished sometime this decade, I’ll probably just get some nice poofy batting and tie it.

I seem to be going longer and longer between blog posts these days. What have I been up to over the past few weeks?

Let’s see. I got it into my head to make a heart-themed pizza for Valentine’s Day this year. After some thought, I decided not to make the entire pizza heart-shaped, since that would make it cook unevenly, not to mention that the slices would look ridiculous and end up in weird-shaped pieces. Instead, I ended up creating heart-shaped pepperoni to adorn my Pizza of Love. This was easier said than done with a pair of dull kitchen shears and a pile of greasy pepperoni, but I succeeded in making enough vaguely heart-shaped bits to cover the pizza. I discovered that I could cut two pepperoni slices at once, but three was right out.

The scraps, as well as the failed hearts, had to be consumed. Urp.

Here’s the pizza with just the cheese and pepperoni. You can still see the hearts in this shot.

Not so much after adding the red onion and bell pepper and baking it, though.

Here’s the one heart that was still discernable after the pizza was baked. I think I’ll skip this little exercise in futility next year. 🙂

I’ve managed to finish a couple knitting and sewing projects for myself this month.

First up, a knitted and felted purse to replace the tattered $10 Target number I’ve been lugging around for the past 3 years or so. I used the free It Felt Random Bag pattern as a guide. I’m extremely pleased at how this turned out. I knitted this on and off for probably 9 months, using random scraps of yarn left over from other projects and varying the stripe colors as the mood struck me. It felted up beautifully, and when I pounded in the metal grommets to reinforce the holes for the straps, I only smashed my thumb once, which I consider to be a triumph. I hate pounding grommets.

Since I had a new purse with no built-in credit card slots like my old one, I needed a wallet. I poked around online and found this great tutorial for a cloth wallet. I managed to quickly sew this up during Griff’s naptime on Friday morning, and again, I’m really pleased at how it turned out. I even got to use one of my sewing machine’s fancy embroidery stitches, woohoo.

The outside:

And the inside, with my three most important cards showing: my debit card, my driver’s license, and my cabin-fever-relieving NC Life + Science Museum membership card.

I also finished up my first colorwork mitten and cast on for the second one. Whether I’ll get to wear these before next winter is anyone’s guess.

You can still see the waste yarn on the palm where I’ll create the opening to make these “flip-top” mittens. I’ll do them both at once, at the end.

Now that the weather has warmed up, we’ve been taking Griff outside at every opportunity. One mistake we made during a recent trip to Little River Park was bringing the stroller out onto the field with us. Griff was totally obsessed with it and spent the entire time pushing it around on the grass. Sigh.

Today he discovered a nasty old broom that was leaning against the house and insisted on dragging it around the deck, up and down the deck stairs, and all over the yard. (He’s surprisingly strong for his age, it seems like.) When we finally had to pry it out of his hand to go inside, you’d have thought we were torturing the poor kid. All we can figure is that he’s been reading Harry Potter books in his crib overnight and wants to play quidditch. A Nimbus 2000, this ain’t.

It doesn’t seem possible, but today Griff is one short month away from being A YEAR OLD.

He’s walking better and better in his new shoes, and is learning about this obstacle course called “outside”, which is filled with things like “rocks” and “hills” and “holes in the ground”.

Oh, and “sticks”. He’s very, very into sticks.

Sticks are good for digging.

Or just gazing upon in wonder.

If one stick is good, two sticks are even better! The best stick is at least two times as tall as you are.

If anyone’s going to lose an eye here, it’s going to be Mommy.

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. Both Griff and I have been sick on and off for about 3 weeks straight with various miserable colds and stomach viruses, so January and early February have just really sucked. I’ve never been this constantly sick in my life. In fact, I seem to have caught yet ANOTHER cold as of today, and I’m sure Griff will be a snotty mess in no time.

Griff continues to be cute, which is a good thing.

Let’s see what I’ve been up to. I decided to knit myself some mittens to match my new Calorimetry headband, and picked out a pattern for flip-top convertible mittens that involves stranded knitting, which I’ve never done before.

I have to say, I’m a bit disappointed. Basic colorwork is easy. Really, really easy. I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe that I’d to have to sit in a corner surrounded by candles and photographs of the Shetland Islands, channeling Alice Starmore. Once I figured out what I needed to do to keep the two strands from tangling (I’m knitting English style and dropping and picking up the yarns as needed, not knitting with both hands), things started going very smoothly. The project is going slowly because I’m knitting in the 10-minute increments when Griff is asleep AND I don’t have anything else that I should be doing, but it’s going. Hopefully I’ll get to wear them before May.

Griff’s ailing tummy has meant we’ve had to spend a lot of time at home lately, which had at least one happy result: I got to do some spinning. This is some Fat Cat Knits Polworth fiber that was a gift from Jag. I decided to use it to try my first Navajo plying, and I ended up with a nice fat, squishy 3-ply. It’s about 175 yards of worsted to chunky weight yarn.

On the food front, I’ve been searching for the perfect overnight cinnamon roll recipe over the past few months, and I think I found it here!

Most cinnamon roll recipes call for 2 rises (it’s annoying to wait through a first rise when you really just want to shape the *&@^#@%$ rolls and go to bed), and for brushing the dough with melted butter, then sprinkling on a cinnamon sugar mixture (which is a pain and a mess). This recipe just does a 10-minute rest of the dough, and has you mix softened butter, flour, spices and brown sugar into a paste, which you then spread over the dough before rolling it up. Perfect!

The rolls came out enormous, and we were unable to eat more than one and a half each at a sitting. I made a cream cheese frosting instead of using the glaze from the recipe. They were totally delicious.

Waving the world’s largest Terrible Towel!

Ever since I saw Alton do it on “Good Eats” a few years ago, I’ve wanted to try making oatmeal overnight in the slow cooker. Yesterday I got around to buying some steel-cut oats (you must use steel-cut oats, not rolled oats, for this), and looked up some recipes.

I ended up doing a blend of Alton’s recipe and this one, which involves cooking the oatmeal in a bowl inside the water-filled slow cooker crock, using a double-boiler kind of setup. I like to use at least half milk when I make oatmeal (especially now that Griff eats it with us), but I wasn’t sure how safe that would be in this overnight setup. Alton uses a half cup of half & half in his recipe, so I figured using 1 cup of whole milk and 3 cups of water would be ok. I also threw in a diced apple, about 1/2 cup of raisins, and around 1/3 cup of dark brown sugar. Oh, and some sprinkles of cinnamon and nutmeg. I used a Pyrex bowl and filled the crock with enough hot tap water to come a little above the level of the bowl contents. We set it on LOW at 9pm and just let it go til breakfast, around 10 hours later.

Here’s how it looked when I opened the lid this morning.

And here it is in my breakfast bowl.

I think it turned out great! It’s a very smooth porridge consistency, so if you prefer your steel-cut oats chewy, stick with the stovetop. For a weekday breakfast, you cannot beat the convenience. Cleanup was very easy, too, since you just have to clean out the bowl, not the big heavy crock.

If I made any changes, I would probably decrease the total liquid to 3.5 cups to make the oatmeal thicker, and then I could add extra milk without making it too runny. There are plenty of leftovers, and those will thicken in the fridge and make it necessary to add milk to thin them out, which is fine with me! I actually think oatmeal tastes better the second day, but I’m weird like that. I might also sub in apple juice or cider for some of the water for a stronger apple taste.