Iris

Here's my second 18" doll. She's getting donated to Sprout City Farm's "2014 Sprout Down" silent auction. I think Iris is a little freckled farm girl who likes feeding her chickens and going barefoot in the dirt. Hopefully, she makes a little money for our little urban community farm. I am thrilled with how much better she turned out than Josie (my first 18"). Her head doesn't wobble even a little and her neck and shoulder seams turned out nice and smooth on the first try. 

She's stuffed with wool and has cotton interlock doll skin. Even though her hair is sewn into ponytails, I really like crocheting a cap and then individually knotting in the hair strands. I think it gives a fuller head of hair and it's impossible to get gaps of scalp visible.

All of her clothes are "upcycled" from old garments I had in my supplies stash.

 Pants from a discarded twill shirt. (I'm happy with the little hem embroidery detail from my lovely old sewing machine.)

 Sweater and shoes from a felted thrift wool sweater (and a button reclaimed from something that I assume I made into rags years ago).

 Tee shirt from some thrift store fabric

 Underwear made from an old slip.

(Love the little lace insert panel salvaged from the slip's hem edge.)

Before she got tucked away, Iris got a little tea party with Willow and Josie. Wil has a rule that each doll I make has to get a snuggle and some little girl love before "mama's doll" gets put away.

2013 Crafting Album

I've been really bad about documenting any of my crafting for the last year. I'm trying to get better about it again because I've found it useful to be able to look back sometimes. Hopefully, things are settling into a rhythm where I can update again more frequently. I've got about 4 or 5 posts in my head that I want to do. We'll see. Anyway, here's the highlights of 2013.

January

Bamboo newborn sweater and booties for a friend's baby shower. Both patterns (Ruby Slippers and Matinee Jacket - my favorite girl sweater pattern) are in Vintage Knits for Modern Babies by Hadley Fierlinger.

February

 Stone carving class at the February Regional Waldorf Teacher's Conference at Shining Mountain School in Boulder. (It's an owl.)

March

 A baby quilt for Clarity, my first experience with crazy quilt foundation piecing on muslin and with free motion machine quilting

 During the worrying about Clarity time I knit this headband, a knit hat, and two pairs of booties. (Which she eventually wore a couple months later)

  

 

 Baby sweater and stuffed alligator (upcycled from an old sweater) for our newest nephew, born in April.

Hopefully, I'll get the sweater pattern posted at some point.

April

April was the month with no projects that needed to be made so I just used up leftovers.

 Modern Baby Bonnet from the Vintage Knits book (leftovers from the baby sweater)

Vintage Pixie Hat and Matinee Jacket (sized up to a 2/3T) from, you guessed it, Vintage Knits for Modern Babies. (sport weight Lamb's Pride Superwash left from Quentin's sweater)

May through August - busy having baby

September

Quick knit on the drive up to Mitchell, NE and back one day with Mom and the girls to go to the Brown Sheep Fiber Festival. It has turned out to be Willow's favorite hat and I've made several more to sell with leftover bulky yarns.

October

I quickly made a whole bunch of things in October for the annual boutique (1st weekend of November) because Mom had been worried that she didn't have enough stuff made. Apparently, she had spent the last four months watching her dear granddaughters as a help to their mother. :)

 The ubiquitous Matinee Jacket

Upcycling wool sweaters to make dragons!

November

First foray into doll making. Mom started commissioning me to make these little bunting babies for the extra large quiet books she makes.

.December

Clarity's stocking

Willow's 18" dressing doll, Josie

Willow slippers (upcycled sweater and pre-made sheepskin/suede soles)

Dad's handmade journal

Hat and cuddle doll for cousin Emmett (Wil had to model the hat.)

Cloth storage bins for Andy and Aimee (with some canned goods)

Knit shawl for Aunt Debbie (Q made the shawl pin and I'll post the pattern soon)

Clarity's 5 Month Update

Whoa, I'm how old?!

Little Miss Clarity is exactly 5 months old today and she had her big visit to get an echocardiogram and visit the pulmonary clinic at Children's Hospital. The pulmonary clinic is kind of the CDH clinic where they address all of the questions we and the pediatrician come up with that are rather unique to her condition so we've been counting down the days. Our last visit was almost exactly 2 months ago, when they said we could take her off her oxygen.

The great news is that her echo looked great with almost no indication of pulmonary hypertension, big news to confirm that she's doing great off of oxygen. To officially get off oxygen at night (although she doesn't wear it very often anyway, although she's hooked up to a pulse oximeter all night to I can administer it as needed) we're going to have an overnight room air test soon. The bring a special pulse ox that records the data all night.

They also got an xray and did a couple of blood labs just to get some more current results for her, partially to track progress and partially to have a healthy "before" snapshot in case she gets sick this winter and we need to compare her lung situation to what is normal for her. Knock on wood that we make it through winter without getting sick. She got approved through insurance for the insanely expensive RSV shots from November through March and will get her flu shots. The girls and I live in fairly quiet self-imposed exile at the house so, fingers crossed. The longer we go in her life before she gets a respiratory virus, it will be that much less likely to require hospitalization. We're praying for 2-3 winters ideally.

The big question we were bringing to her appointment was feeding. 

• She miserably failed a gastric emptying test about a month ago and spits up A LOT. 
• Her stomach is basically always full to capacity as we strive to get enough calories in her, even with her breastmilk fortified to 26 calories (from 20), which is really as dense as they like to get or it puts too much strain on her intestines. She has been gaining weight but only at 3-4 oz. a week and I couldn't foresee any way to get more food in her as she's been getting bigger. 
• The gastric emptying test also showed that she's having severe reflux quite a ways up her esophagus, suggesting that her Nissen isn't really doing anything. This could be a good thing with her slow gastic emptying because she could have been in a lot more discomfort if her stomach isn't emptying into her intestines and a tight Nissen was preventing the excess food from coming up. That would have been a lot of pressure in that little tummy. 
• Some of you also know that she apparently retched enough last week that she got a tear in her esophagus, known as a Mallory Weiss tear, resulting in a trip to urgent care because she was spitting up dried blood and had a whole bunch coming out of her g-tube as well. It hasn't happened again and they put her on Prevacid to hopefully protect her esophagus by making her stomach contents less acidic.

Before we look into a more invasive option, like replacing her g-tube with a gj-tube to deliver some food directly to her small intestines, we've decided to try continuous feeds. She had been getting 3oz. over the course of about 50 minutes (rate of 110ml/hr) every 3 hours. She's now getting 30ml/hr for 20 hours a day with 4 hours off. If that goes well for a couple days, we're going to up it to 35ml/hr; about 23.5oz/day. I need to talk to the feeding therapist to figure out an oral feeding practice schedule with no defined "mealtimes". It's a step farther away from eating like a "normal" baby but if we can keep her growing and not constantly spitting up it's a pretty great trade off.

Oh, the joys of CDH. It's a birth defect that just keeps on giving in so many varied ways. We're awfully lucky though. She's clearly smart as a whip, always looking alertly around her and soaking it all in. Her therapists are also thrilled that she's pretty much meeting her developmental milestones, especially if you consider her adjusted age (born 1 month prematurely). We are so, so thankful. Everything else along the way is small stuff.

Harvest is Done (followed by a bunch of pictures of the girls because they're awesome)

Today was the first light snow and tonight is the first forecast hard freeze so I rescued the last of the garden. It seems like a fitting time to post the final pantry pictures.

 We got a nice little onion harvest that I think will get us close to through spring. I let them cure on a grate in the garage for a couple of weeks before storing them in one of Grandma's delightful old egg baskets, which Mom was kind enough to loan.

 The pumpkins (6) and jumbo pink banana squash (3) - one of each has already been eaten. The squash pictured are each almost exactly Clarity's size right now, just over 10lbs. and about 21" long.

 I have mentioned before how much I adore our pantry, right? Here's a picture of the food wall, all ready for winter (or a zombie apocalypse). Admittedly, some of the stuff is carryover from last year (if it's a good peach year, you can lots of peaches) but it was significantly added to this season (as you can see from the previous post).

Mom was kind enough to give me some Concord grape juice from her vines and some rhubarb. Raspberries were on a really good sale at the grocery store. 5 pints of raspberry jam, 5 pints of grape jelly, and 3 pints of Rhubarb Vanilla with Earl Gray jam. (The last, once again from Food in Jars, and extremely good.)

We got 4 watermelons out of the garden and they are very good.

 Matching hats

 Willow "ironing" after she watched Mama doing it. She also loved having me iron her doll blanket and getting it back all snuggly warm.

 Tomato crushing and eating with some of the last harvest.

 Eating hazelnut butter and jelly at Children's after Clarity's gastric emptying test. (She failed; stuff for a different post once we decide what needs to be done.)

 Looking at a river in Silverthorne on the way back down from a weekend in Beaver Creek.

Preserving Season 2013

I was surprised but not surprised when I noticed that it has been exactly a month since I posted an update. It has been that frenetic end of summer harvesting/preserving chaos. Even out of our relatively modest garden, we have gotten an amazing amount of bounty this year. Our tomato plants (7 Roma and 2 cherry) have produced well over 100lbs. by my best reckoning. The pepper plants (5 green bell, 1 ancho, and 1 jalapeno) were covered.

The preserving was made more extensive when a Facebook friend posted this link (Can-o-Rama 2013 from Northwest Edible) to my wall with a note about "don't you wish you had the time to do this". What she doesn't realize is that for people with my disorder (if only it had a name...) just make up the time and this post ended up having three dangerous links. One, I ended up using her "almost free tomato sauce idea" to make food out of the tomato skins that I've always wasted when I can diced tomatoes every year. Two, she linked to a dill pickle relish recipe only a day after I'd been wishing I knew of a reliable one. Three, and most deadly, she introduced me to a book - Food in Jars by Marisa McClellan. I went out and bought the book and immediately discovered it has 15 canning recipes that are on my must try list. This is not practical but again, my disorder compelled me, although physical amounts of time have somewhat tempered the damage. I went totally crazy, including a day of cleaning frozen berries and fruit out of the freezer to make things I wanted to try. So far cantaloupe vanilla jam (surprisingly delicious), strawberry vanilla jam, cranberry syrup, rhubarb syrup, ketchup, and roasted corn salsa have been attempted. They are all really really good. Everybody, please go out and get this book then make your own ketchup. Seriously, I don't think we can go back to store bought now. This book, and the blog it is a companion to, are truly delightful.

Canning yielded 

• 18 qts. dill pickles
• 14 qts. diced tomatoes (hopefully 7 more this week) 
• 14 pts. roasted corn salsa
• 6 pts. strawberry vanilla jam
• 5 pts. ketchup
• 6 half-pts. dill pickle relish
• 1+ pt. cantaloupe vanilla jam
• 1+ pt. cranberry syrup
• about 1c. of rhubarb syrup

(All cucumbers, tomatoes, green and hot peppers, onions, and cantaloupe were from the garden. Everything else was from the freezer or purchased.)

Unpreserved, there are/were 6 pumpkins, 7 individual cantaloupe, 4 watermelon, 2 eggplants, and about 2lbs. of carrots. 

Frozen, there are two gallon bags of diced beets, one gallon of broccoli, one gallon of edamame beans, 24 oz. of tomato sauce, and marinara sauce (15 pints and 7 "pizza portions").

Quentin bought me these. I tried them on the strawberry vanilla jam and only had 2 of 5 seal. I'm going to have to do some reading up on tricks people have for being successful.

Cranberry syrup is yummy in sparkling water and in vodka drinks. I wish it was a little tarter though. Less sugar next time.

There was a bag of frozen bananas that had been there long enough that they had to be used. The day before my freezer clean out, I had dead bananas on the counter, found a muffin recipe, made it, loved it, then realized that I hadn't really followed it. I'd forgotten the egg, replaced the butter with applesauce, decreased the sugar, added more banana and decreased the flour. Heehee. I wrote down "my" recipe and made three dozen muffins with the freezer bananas, froze 2 dozen and we ate 1 dozen fresh.

"My" recipe, which yields about 18 muffins, is below, bake at 350 for 18-22ish minutes.

4 very ripe mashed bananas

1/3 c applesauce

1/4 c brown sugar

1/4 c white sugar

1/2 t salt

1 t baking powder

1 t baking soda

1 1/2 c flour

Willow helped all day one day, building long trains and tall towers of blocks and rearranging pumpkins. For some reason she believed that a pumpkin needed to sit squarely in the middle of each doorway. Wish I knew what goes through her head.