The winter brings snow play, baking and other making

January 22, 2016 by tam

The new year has brought bread making with sprouted flour (a real hit in our home!), a gingerbread house completely made from scratch being finally finished *yay! and yum!*, and finishing up of the healing salve (and giving some away :)).

Snowfalls of late gave way to sledding and cave digging where the workout required kept them warm outside in frigid and windy temperatures!

Handiwork and project making led to quiet, focused time. I love the ‘non-sound’ of it all.

It’s been a full few weeks of lovely, wonderfully, juuuuust right moments!

Hello! It’s been too long!

November 20, 2015 by tam

Yes, I see the last time I posted over here was in July. My goodness!

Truth is that I hate editing photos and I would rather being doing other things. But, one of the main reason I have this blog is for family that lives in other places and for us, as a keepsake. So today I grabbed some photos from the past month to show what we have been up to.

I have a bunch of photos to edit from our summer vacation but they are on my big camera (my real camera as I call it!) and it’s just a matter of sitting down and editing. It’s always hard when you try to edit your own pics and decide what to show when you want to show it all! Maybe later this week–it’s only been four months after all!

We got back into the swing of lessons and some winter prep with herbal concoctions. Plus I got some time to do a bit of other things with the boys and for myself.

There are a lot of photos:

Busy with herbs. Tis the season!Love our sunsets! Happy!The season for knitting!We have spent many a day outside enjoying the fall weather.Pretzel making!The Lunar Eclipse was a big deal for us. The boys stayed up late to watch. Totally worth it!
The moon the morning after the eclipse.Lessons!More fun outside.Love all of the colours!Trying to catch the leaves as they fall.
Chipmunk!
Feeding the chickadees is a favourite pastime of ours. It never gets old!We love the hemlocks at our local park. So big and beautiful!We went to a friend’s house and picked cranberries in her back yard! How cool is that! Thanks, Dawn! xx Love Dawn’s yard. There is always many a treasure to be found.My bit of time to make some fun art. (more on my blog)Birthday Lego making together. 🙂New socks!More outdoor fun!Halloween fun!Splatoon Inklings! I had to take a quick pic as they rushed from house to house!Brains! Who doesn’t love Pop Rocks?!Weekday mornings. Someone always end up getting rolled up in the yoga mat – yoga sushi!Minecraft Lego table making!It’s always a lot of fun outside. The boys loved raking the leaves and even went out to do it of their own accord. This may be why…it’s fun to bag them…or fun to play with the bag!They also decided to whittle the hammers they made a while ago so that the handles were rounds and then filed smooth. Love this stuff.With all the leaves we collected I decided to frame them. I love how they look. Nighttimes consist of games of all kinds. 🙂Home made bread. Oh man, that’s good.
Eek! The Eyes of Cthulhu!One of our bridges is being completely redone without closing it down. Amazing, right? He loves tamari almonds and loves making them almost as much!
These are a couple of big camera pics – as in the real thing and not my phone. Love these guys.

Hope you’ve had just as wonderful a fall season as we have. Yesterday we got our first taste of snow. It was a quick one and nothing stayed on the ground but still exciting and beautiful.

Our week in review | July 11 pt1

July 12, 2015 by tam

This week was all about bugs for us as we are joining along in the Mud Puddles Summer Nature Camp! The camp is spread over a month and each week there is a different focus. This first week was all about bugs! It’s always fun to hit the outdoors and see what we can find!

The boys really got into drawing and labeling bug parts after reading about bug anatomy in the Summer Camp pdf.
Later in the we learned about making a bug hotel! There were some great ideas posted onto the Mud Puddles Pinterest board. The boys had a great time hunting around for bit of bark, twigs, pine bundles and dead leaves.We had a great time with the first week of the Nature Camp and the boys were excitedly asking what we would be doing for the next week!

Other goings-on: I have had a pile of my husband’s old t-shirts laying around waiting to be repurposed into a rug. This was one of my tasks for this week and the boys helped me with the prep. Well, they kind of helped! Ha! I cut up strips of t-shirt and they pulled on the strips until they curled in on themselves and then rolled them into a ball – or onto each other. Fun! I wish I had counted how many t’s I had before cutting them up. It would have been nice to be able to gauge how many t-shirts it takes to make a certain size rug. I’m guessing there were about 12-15. And so it begins! I will post the final rug next week. Xman was interested in learning to crochet as he sat next to me watching. He caught on quickly and will be helping me finish the rug. 🙂 While mowing the lawn this week I happened upon some little mushrooms as we have a lot of shade in our yard. I decided to pick a couple and make some mushroom prints. I wasn’t sure which colour of spores these wee ones would have so I used a sheet of black and a sheet of white paper.

We also spotted these love bugs…on our hike yesterday. Amazing colours! Wow!

To see more from our hike go to part 2!

Happy week everyone!

Our week in review | July 4

July 5, 2015 by tam

Stephen was waiting for his new Merrill running shoes. He got a hole in the sole early on and Merrill helped him into a new pair – awesome customer service! He was like a child waiting for Christmas day: he kept checking the tracking on the package and when the day came for them to arrive he was looking out the window more often than not in hopes of seeing Joyce, our postal deliverer (she’s awesome!). When Joyce did arrive she joked with him saying she expected to see him in a moment running in his shoes on the next street over!

Arriving a Cleveland Beach with some friends. The best sunscreen. 😉
Okay, so Xman and I found this mushroom and it’s for sure the best find in a long time! Look how big it is! On returning home I found it in our mushroom book as being a fly agaric, it’s poisonous/hallucinogenic. How ironic since I had commented on it being a very Alice in Wonderland ‘shroom that the caterpillar would love! 😉 Seriously, the coolest! I love the rocks, the seaweed, the coral, the shells and more. Always good finds at Cleveland Beach. …and good friends make it even better! 🙂 <3 Dawn and L found this awesome jellyfish on the beach. They are called comb jellies or Sea Gooseberries. I found an interesting article here about them here. When we first made our way to the beach we all had on sweaters or hoodies but once there the sky opened and the weather was beautiful. F found a crab with eggs. Geez she find the coolest things!Fun in the water!
Saying goodbye to the mushroom. It was like a beacon along the path. Thank you, Mushroom! Another morning, making the most of the weather: enjoying a bit of breakfast with my basket of things and my bullet journal while listening to the birds sing. At one point I got up to survey the garden and saw a spider’s web alight in a neighbour’s tree. At another angle I wouldn’t have seen it!

Car wash!Fun with Dixie Cups!

The boys are getting used to their new bikes and the best place near us (since we live on a narrow street with rushing cars!) is the nearby parking lot. The day went from sun to rain quickly but the boys were having too much fun to stop and the rain was warm. The pavement had been hot from the day’s sun so when the rain came it started to condensate on contact. Very cool! My witchy Willow ordered from the local comic book store. The boys love Lumberjanes so we are in there on a regular basis. If you haven’t heard of this comic book series you should check it out. It’s great for kids (I laugh my head off!) and all about the girls! We visited a friend at work and the boys got to test out a demo toy to see how well they could understand the directions and construct it before it went out to stores. Very cool stuff! Plus, she showed us their cool 3-D printer! A relaxing evening at home. Love. Happy Canada Day fireworks! It’s hard to see but just to the left of the fireworks is a white dot in the sky – that’s Jupiter. Venus is hiding behind it all. Some hopscotch fun at the local ToysRUs… …a little Pikachu drawing…

…and more hopscotch.

We had a great week and we hope you did too! Again, if you’d like to share post your link in the comments!

Here’s to the week ahead! 🙂

Earth Day

April 24, 2015 by tam

For Earth Day we were planning on collecting bits and pieces of stuff to make some nesting balls for the birdies but the rainy weather and a cold coming on for myself and Xman nixed that idea. We do still plan on making the balls but perhaps instead filling them with suet!

Instead the boys decided to make a spider’s web in the living room. Apparently, a spider starts with a ‘y’ shape and moves on from there. It took some shoo-ing of Gypsy, our curious and string-eating cat before she realized her teeth were not welcome in this scenario! The boys were well aware that the web would have to be dismantled before bed or we would end up with a very belly-achey kitty the next day!

Gee, imagine making another web the next day and the next? I don’t know how spiders do it!

Hope you had a good Earth Day! What did you do to celebrate?

Rain Sticks

April 21, 2015 by tam

What do you do on a very rainy day? Make rain sticks, of course!

Xman was a little reluctant at first but when we arrived at our friend’s house and he saw he would be using a hammer and nails, well, he got right to it like the rest of the boys. Good fun!

After all that fun creating the boys needed a quiet break. How many times does it take to get good pic of four boys? 😉

Mild days, birthdays and Easter

April 5, 2015 by tam

This past week has been filled with milder weather to the extent that we were outside in t-shirts shovelling snow off of the back porch and sweating a bit! It was very welcome weather. That being said there is still a ton of snow around and some of the banks are very high like the one pictured here after my birthday breakfast at Cora’s (the best breakfasts ever!). Wow! That’s a lot of snow. My birthday consisted of a greek salad and suishi. I didn’t want a cake. Gee, I must be getting old! 😉

Just yesterday, L finished his first knitted hat! He was very excited and wanted to try it out so he decided to continue the clearing of the back deck. It’s just ice left so it was hard work to crack. Our shovel broke a couple weeks back and the stores only carry spring items now so he used the car window scraper. Tough job but he got some ice free and loves his hat!

The boys were so excited for Easter and although we don’t do a lot of treats, just a good quality chocolate bar each and a bag of chips, the boys love it. I also made them each a Totoro (Amanda has a great Totoro tutorial here) as he is after all, a forest spirit, so a good welcoming for Spring! The boys love them!

If you are interested in how this season was originally celebrated check out these links below. Both are a great read and to me, make this holiday even more meaningful. So enjoy the sun, the season and the treats! xx

http://www.thesacredscience.com/blog1/the-pagan-roots-of-easter

http://worldtruth.tv/pagan-origin-of-easter/

Happy Spring Easter!

Tinker Crate for March – Hydraulics

March 4, 2015 by tam

This month’s Tinker Crate is all about hydraulics! Is that not super-cool or what? The boys certainly think so and I have to agree. They have had a great timing making some cool stuff. The Tinkerzine shows a bunch of cool links and ideas, plus some background on hydraulics.

Here’s a glimpse…

These monthly kits from Tinker Crate are so wonderful and they are something that gets the boys completely absorbed in a project where there is no planning or help needed on my part. Perfect! and a break for me. 😉 Plus, I love watching and listening to them problem solving together and learning the coolness of tinkering.

Hand made hand cream

February 26, 2015 by tam

Say that five times fast! 😉

I’ve been wanting to make hand cream for months and even had all of the ingredients. I just needed to do it. When I finally ran out of store-bought cream and the skin on my hands was like sandpaper, well, that was my motivation to get to it.

I used the recipe that’s been tagged for like forever it seems from Amanda Soule’s The Rhythm of Family Book. I do love her stuff and it calms me to read. I have to make some more felted bowls too. There will always be something to put into felted bowls!

The boys used the marble mortar and pestle that I’d bought eons ago. It looks so pretty sitting there on the shelf above the sink, hanging out with the wine and saké glasses. This is the lavender being bruised and wafting its scent so wonderfully throughout the kitchen.

I showed the boys how to zero out the scale and then measure the ingredients. Xman helped me grate the beeswax. I tried cutting it first but I don’t have a great history with knives and cutting only the things that need cutting, if you know what I mean. I find grating beeswax fairly laborious as far as ingredients go but Xman was determined to do it so I held my hands on the lower end, his on top of the block as we grated. No skin lost. Whew.Lavender buds steeping like tea.Melting, melting.
We ended up with a lot of hand cream. Gotta say the oil mixed rather easily with the water (lavender) even with my cheaply purchased hand mixer. The motor did get a wee bit hot at the end.I think I am going to have to buy more containers!
The cream is wonderful and my hands are happy again! Take that, Winter!

Snow day!

February 13, 2015 by tam

It was so good to get outside yesterday and with good friends! We tried a new-to-all-of-us trail. The day was ‘mild’, coming in around -6C – add on windchill but we didn’t really feel it being in the trees. It was fresh and clear. The sky was blue. The kids ran around on the trail and slid on the snow. Xman and I made animal prints and looked for the real ones. We saw an eagle that L spotted which is always so amazing to me. I feel so, so blessed when I see one. We also saw another bird of prey, perhaps an osprey but not sure, followed by a crow. We spotted a beautiful robin all tuffed out, seeming to show of his wonderful red belly. (he was too far away for me to take a pic with my phone. should have brought my actual camera but I wanted to pack light). And F heard the tap tap tap of a woodpecker, once spotted, to be a Downy.

Our hand-made tracks.Real tracks. I love them!

Slide!

Poor dude was so tired by this time, the bundling of clothing is not his favourite feeling. But making animal tracks, finding the real ones, and sliding certainly lifted his spirit. 🙂

Today, as the snow comes down in droves, it makes me want to relax my shoulders and grab a book, a blanket, and my knitting with my new Furls bowl (eek! love!) and my art. Yes, even on these snow days when I feel I can let things go a bit I still want to create create create! I will throw some yoga in there to balance it all out!

We may watch some videos today on the history of Canada to go along with our studies. But, I think for the most part it will be a Minecraft day and Erector set day (thanks for the goodies, Dawn and kids!) for the boys. I may just be persuaded to play a little MC too. Gotta say I do love it!

I may even get out my macro and take some snowflake pictures! Gee, this day must have more than 24 hours for what I want to fit in. Oh, I do have clothing to fix too… I’m so deluded! 😉

the shards

Category Archives: art/craft