Busy Hands Homestead

Previous birthdays we invited all our our friends.  We had potlucks. We sipped beers and chatted while the hoard of children played in the background.  I anxiously eyed the weather forecast.  Her birthday day yo-yo-ing between sunshine and rain.  Our home is not suited to squeezing large groups of folks into, and this year it seemed the focus should be on the birthday girl. So I narrowed the list down based on her friends rather than mine..  hoped we would have sunshine and that everyone would understand...  and made invitations. Ivory is five. This birthday, more than previous birthdays, feels like a rite of passage. Suddenly she is school aged. She is enrolled in kindergarden and after this summer I will be dropping her off into the care of another for hours each weekday.  This is a change I can hardly fathom.  While I stitch the seams of her new touch-the floor-princess dress I worry about back packs, school lunches and if she will fe...

"Look!  A Crawdad!"   I  was scrolling through the photographs taken last weekend and this is one of the only pictures that we took of the 30 Hour Birthday Feast.   The other photograph is of me kneading that evening's third batch of pizza dough to be shaped, topped and baked in the out door cob oven. These are the only photographs that commemorate the amazing weekend filled with friends and food, a float trip and pit roasted lamb that began my last year of my twenties.  And while I have a mental list of things I would like to do before I am thirty, I had a much more pressing issue to tackle this last week. Remember all of those capes I made last week for Camp Deep Creek? Well, I had an even larger pile of t-shirt scraps sitting in my living room that I just couldn't bear to throw away.  So puttering around in my living room alone, while my husband worked away in the wood shop out back, it occurred to me that I could use thes...

 Thursday: I spent the afternoon turning T-shirts into capes.  A lot of capes. Capes to be turned into creatures real and imaginary.  Friday:  With bits of lace, felt and feathers the older kids turned their capes into a sloth, a mountain lion and a blue bird. The boys went off to patrol the borders of their animal kingdoms, while Ivory continued to add little bits and pieces to her cape, that started out as a blue bird.  Soon the blue bird was joined by a balloon and a multitude of flowers.  So, for all of the Deep Creek Campers that were not present this Friday and would like to make your own cape, this is what you need:  a T- shirt heat bonded Velcro an iron with a steam setting scissors and the instructions from this tutorial I left my sewing machine firmly in its case for this one, and I don't own a hot glue gun.  So for the Velcro closure around the neck I used heat bonded Velcro tabs...