And Yet, I’m planning a pretty big knitting project! What can I say, I can’t help myself! There is a very special honorary “sibling” of mine currently planning a springtime garden wedding party for 2013. This means I have roughly a year to knit this for her:

Wedding Bells Shawl by Caroline Levandar <- Ravelry Link!

I love all the meaning that inspired this one, the bells and hearts border, the diamonds in the main part. Swoon, so pretty! I think this will be a challenge, so it’s a good thing I have a year to get it together. I just received the yarn for it this week, I got Rown Kidsilk Haze in cream:

Oh, so soft and fluffy! Hope I can start on it soon!!

Unfortunately, in my disaster of a house there is no room to dig out the sewing machine and I have many more home projects of higher priority. Still….this is an organizational tool! I NEED it to help with my mission of getting organized this year! A place for everything and everything in its place and all that!

Enter one of my fav websites, Etsy. I thought, if I don’t have time to make this for myself, I can support a homemaker. Certainly people make these kinds of things all the time! After one quick search I found so many variations on the basic crochet hook organizer it could make your head spin! I was extra happy when I found one I really liked and saw that the seller is local to me in New England! YAY for supporting local small business! Now this little puppy is on its snowy short trek to me:

I was so impressed with the quality of the items, I also ordered a business card holder for my new snazzy business cards that just arrived last week:

I can’t wait for it all to arrive! So, the moral to this story? Many thanks to all the writers of the wonderfully detailed DIY tutorials out there! But if you just don’t have the time or skill necessary to finish the task, that doesn’t mean you can’t have what you want! With the economy the way it is these days, take pride in supporting a local/small business!

The big purge update: our purging and organizing is still underway folks! While I don’t have any completed projects to share yet, I can definitely say there is some exciting progress in the works!!

I decided to start with my ‘products’ in the bathroom. Now I typically don’t consider myself a high maintenance kind of girl, but you wouldn’t know that to look at my product stash. So here is the armful of stuff I grabbed from the bathroom to purge/organize:

Don't you want to take a picture of ME?

Evidently, Jasper wanted to help

Straight from the tiny bathroom....

Now this is really NOT a fair before picture. This was the first round of stuff I pulled out. While organizing I kept remembering…’Wait, I have hair stuff upstairs!’ or ‘Wait, I have more makeup in my travel bag….still packed from Christmas…’ etc etc. And so the project grew….

But nevertheless, here is what I tossed in the trash:

Le Gar-bage Pile

I followed all appropriate rules, any makeup over 6 months, GONE! Hair products I haven’t touch in forever, GONE! Many many travel totes, bags, organizational tools into which things go never to emerge again, GONE!

Here’s the results:

Hair accessories basket

Makeup basket

These baskets now live on the shelf of our bathroom cabinet. I also started cleaning out the medicine cabinet and bathroom cabinet but I don’t have pictures of that yet because it’s still a bit in progress AND (most exciting!) my hubby spent a good part of the weekend spackling, sanding and painting some spots on the wall in need of repair. Look for final bathroom org pics to come!

Also this weekend I started a new knitting project! It is a shawl called Multnomah. It is another meager start, but a start! This shawl is intended for a Mardi Gras swap package I’ll be putting together for my super-secret partner in the Ravelry Odd Ducks group. I love the green, purple and gold yarn, which I purchased on Etsy, GORGEUS!!

Mardi Gras Multnomah

So there you have it, my productive weekend! Happy organizing to all!

• We’ve painted the dining room walls, trim and ceiling (which was quite a project with the angled/vaulted ceiling)
• We found out we’re pregnant, YAY! This means I’ve spent a LOT of time sitting or sleeping on the couch and ignoring all house projects. Now that I’m headed into my 2nd trimester I’m really hoping to experience that ‘surge of energy’ I’ve heard so much about!
• We drove home for Christmas with the two dogs. Yep, 25 hours each way from Boston to NOLA. The puppies were very good in the car. Let’s just say we’re working on them behaving in hotel rooms.

Amazingly, that’s about it. But this is a new year, which comes with resolutions and fresh starts! So, what’s on the to-do list for 2011?

LOTS of purging, cleaning and organizing! We don’t have a lot of storage space in our small Cape Cod style home. What we do have, I don’t feel like we utilize very efficiently. And, well……we have a lot of ‘stuff’.

So, making room for baby has given us the push we need to really tackle some purging of useless stuff and reorganizing what we have. My ‘office/craft’ room which has become somewhat a ‘junk’ room lately, will become the baby room. This means a MASSIVE re-org of my craft supplies, which are quite numerous (don’t judge).

But the good news is, I HAVE A PLAN!!!! And this plan encompasses the whole house, not just the baby room-to-be. I’m hoping that YOU my friends will help keep me accountable! Expect updates! Ask for pictures! I plan to start very soon….like this week/weekend.

For now, here’s a picture of the cleanup I worked on today……

Jan 2011 New England Blizzard

Not exactly what I had in mind…..but it counts!

Anyone who has been with me a while knows that I have dreamed of a front porch. You can take a girl out of the South, but she will still want to sit on the porch, drink tea and chat with the neighbors!!

I first posted about my porch ideas just over a year ago here.

Just for perspective, here’s our house just after purchase last year:

I LOVE my house!!!! But, I didn’t love the ancient overgrown shrubs out front, including the awkward square guy right in front (I called it the brownie bush, because it’s totally square and flat like those box-o-brownies you can get at Sam’s or Costco and cut up to serve). It was also kind of awkward that the front door opened into the dining room. That basically meant no entryway and a squished dining table that the door almost bumped into!

So, we went through the craziness of getting a billion variances approved from the city (ok, not a billion, but it felt like it sometimes!), got a contractor, save up our pennies and now we have a porch!!!

Porch addition, pre-new door installation

Back of the house minus siding

New siding!

We are so excited to have new vinyl siding! We choose ‘oxford blue’ as the color and plan to add shutters, probably in the spring after we have time to shutter-shop.

We got to go shopping for a new front door, which was super exciting! There’s a lot to consider when buying a door that you don’t really think about until you have to shop for one. Seriously, I think it took us an hour to pick out new handle/locks! We went with the Blakely door from Jewlden:

Blakely door

It’s decorative, but not froo-froo. Perfect!

And all that got finished up just in time for us to do some super-last minute Halloween decorating yesterday!

First, we dug out the stump of the brownie bush (cut down by our contractor), and found something spooky:

Remnants of the brownie bush!

Then, we outlined a pathway to the door, since we don’t have a new sidewalk yet:

Walkway to the front door

And we couldn’t help but add some creepiness to that new door:

Hope you had fun decorating for Halloween, I sure did!!!!!

I’ve been extra absent lately and that is because of the preparation, whirlwind tour and recovery from my fabulous vacation to Germany!! While pictures are forthcoming from my photographer hubby (don’t worry Facebook friends, I promise they will appear one day!) I did manage to snag a few, BWA-HA-HA! Hence the title of this post, refering to Oktoberfest!!!

Did you know:

• Oktoberfest is the world’s largest fair?
• The celebration is watched over by the statue of Bavaria?
• Oktoberfest is an anniversary celebration?

I sure didn’t, at least not until I went! And this year is extra special because it’s the 200th anniversary of the marraige of Crown Prince Ludwig (later King Ludwig I) and Princess Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen (namesake of the Theresienwiese festival grounds). Well there you have it.

It just so happened that DH and I were in Munich for one last hurrah (after visiting the Bavarian Alps and Prague!) before our flight back to the US. It also just so happened to be the opening day of Oktoberfest! What luck?!

View from the ferris wheel

One of the gorgeus horse-drawn beer wagons

Enjoying a coffee at the end of the day

Terry had one too

And, of course I couldn’t go on vacation without a travel yarn project! This time I packed up some crochet hooks (they tend to get through the airports a tad easier than the pointy metal sticks knitting needles) and worked on a cardigan:

The sleeves are being a pain, so I’m currently considering making this more of a vest. It is asymmetrical (I’m sure you noticed….) and I plan to attach a pair of ties at the top. I’ll also be adding more edging to the front because right now it doesn’t close (size small = 36-in bust my booty! I totally should have made a medium, or even a large for a big floppy sweater, but alas, we’ll go for mini-cropped cardi).

I’ve also been working on my handmade item for the tea/coffee swap I’m currently participating in. For that I embroidered these flour sack towels and embellished them with vintage plastic buttons. LOVE how they came out!

So that is the update here! Hopefully now that things have settled down again you’ll hear from me a little more often!!!

I came across some doggie-centric projects I just had to share! I may even attempt some of these one day, but for now I will just oogle the creativity of other dog lovers out there.

(Each picture links to the appropriate Ravelry design/project page!  Thanks to all the designers who make their patterns available on-line!)

Yorkie & Puppy Dog Pattern:

Henry the Amigurumi Hound Dog:

Wendy, The Cocker Puppy – Amigurumi Pattern:

Schnauzer:

Blue’s Clues amigurumi doll:

Pug Dog with Sweater:

(I had to include this one for Kim!! Doesn’t it look like Lola?!)

I could really go on and on but I’ll stop here. There are so many more I could include!!

Lesson of the week: Find inspiration in what you love!!! The results will be amazing!

Until recently that is. This is a ‘before’ picture. We decided our sad garden needed some attention. Ok, that’s a lie, we knew this for a while so I guess you could say we decided it was bad enough we couldn’t ignore it. We made a plan for a super quick cleanup/update and headed to Home Depot. While standing in the garden center, we promptly tossed that plan and winged it, going with our inspiration. A few hours later, the Home Depot truck had been rented, used, and returned. By the end of the day, we were midway with this amount of progress:

Wow, what a difference! By then end of the weekend, we were done and left with this:

Quite the improvement! Of course I couldn’t walk normal for a few days, but it was worth it!  Believe it or not, that’s about $400 right there. Goes fast, doesn’t it? Of course we have a few leftover supplies (landscape fabric, stones, a bag or two of paving sand, etc) for future projects. I declare the effort a success and several weeks later I’m proud today, it still looks like that

Mickey enjoyed some loving while snuggling on my pillow:

Of course Jasper didn’t miss the action either…..

What you can’t see is me totally passed out behind Jasper!

While I didn’t get a ton of crafting done this week with the wacky schedule, I’m happy to say I finished my crochet market bag last weekend and got it all blocked and ready to use:

I also started a new scarf with the Serenity Garden yarn I was gifted in the recent Firefly swap:

I’m excited about this one! It will go perfectly with my chocolate brown and pink Converse! They look like this, but low-tops:

I know what you’re thinking. Who pairs a gorgeus lace scarf with Chucks? Evidently I do and I can’t wait to wear them!!!!!!!