hope

"Hope is one of the most important virtues that can be instilled in our soul. Many people think that hope has to do with the future, when in reality it has to do with the past. We develop hope as we experience pain transformed into comfort. When this happens enough, we begin to have faith that our pain will not do us in and that comfort is on its way." 

Cloud & Townsend

 

 Busy mornings and afternoons run into jamb-packed evenings spent with baby and husband. The kitchen sink is overflowing with pots and pans and weeds are peeking up beneath the straw in the garden - but all is well!

 

 Strawberries are appearing too, and tiny bean sprouts that the bunnies like to nibble on. Ten percent of all my garden plants either get trampled by the dog as she gallops for her frisbee or munched on by rabbits in the wee morning hours. That's a pretty good harvest. 

The peonies have blown, but they were gorgeous and fragrant for a stretch of ten days as May turned into June. Pretty rings of colorful fabric are appearing on bed in my studio. Now I need to find a backing and pick out the binding for this little quilt. 

I started a new little sweater made from my mom's yarn. The pattern is: Little Coffee Bean, so far it's an easy and fun knit. The aqua stripes really pop. 

I read this quote on hope earlier this week and it really struck me. It's so very true. 

xo Jill

sewn together

Another blessed weekend around here. We really don't do much. We sleep in, drink coffee, sit out on the back porch and contemplate the garden. We try to come up with a game plan. We scrap the game plan and do what makes us feel happy.

The baby laughs. He cries. He takes a nap. We take a nap. The grill gets pulled out. We find something to eat between the freezer and the fridge. It feels like a miracle, because we really need to go food shopping, but somehow we pull off (what feels like in our opinion) a gourmet meal.

The moon rises the sun sets. We take a walk at twilight, pushing the baby in the stroller. The dog prances along beside us. She barks at little dogs but keeps her nose down when a big dog strolls past.

In the in between moments I tiptoe up to my attic studio and madly cut out fabric shapes. Sew them together. I'm not much for perfection these days, just production and it feels so good to sew two pretty fabrics together and watch their patterns collide and interact.

The baby squawks from his crib and I cock an ear. It's a one in four chance he'll go back to sleep. The odds are in his favor. I set down my scissors and ramble down the stairs. Baby is awake. The dog wants her frisbee thrown. The neighbors are out digging in their yard. The baby is smiling at my husband. My husband smiles at me. 

Simple things. Miraculous things. Our family.

Hope you are feeling the blessings too.

xo Jill

P.S. Joining Nicole at Frontier Dreams for Keep Calm and Keep Crafting.

knitting interlude (for more knitting)

This past Sunday my husband had to do some school work, so I stayed home with the baby and stared chopping, mixing and sauteing in the kitchen. This is a recipe that I've had pinned on my recipe board for a few weeks - red lentil soup. I subbed sweet potatoes for the regular potatoes, otherwise I pretty much followed the recipe. It called for smoke paprika, cumin and fresh ginger. Really yummy.

My knitting interlude is this little baby cap. This is my third one. I just love the pattern, it's so simple once you get the hang of it. Just increases and decreases and it looks so cool once you've knit a few inches. The white yarn is some fingering weight yarn of my mom's and the variegated yarn is something I picked up a few years ago for the barn raising blanket that I'm slowly making out of all of my leftover sock yarn. (The third photo from the top shows how that yarn knit up into one of the squares for my blanket.)

I love the contrasting stripes in the baby cap. I'm giving this one away so the next one I knit will have to be for Logan, because it's really striking.

I'm hosting book club this month, so that means I really need to read the book we selected. It's got a sheep on the cover, so that's a good start :) :) So far I'm liking the narrator, he has a humorous voice. The book seems to be part memoir, part travel writing (set in Spain), part mystery. It's also about artisan cheese, so I'll be learning something new. I think this is going to inspire my cooking and make me want to have a good piece of cheese and a nice glass of wine.

Hope you are all having a good week. The outdoor photos are from a walk that my husband, Logan and myself took with my mom (Grandma Julie) when she came down to visit us this weekend. The temperatures were in the 50s on Saturday.

I felt like I'd been turned loose after being confined to the house with a newborn since late November. I forgot there was an outdoors. The air smelled beautiful and the sun felt great.

Looking forward to more mild days.

xo Jill

ginger, jalepeno + bay leaf

It started as a sniffle and cascaded into a flurry of sneezes: I have a head cold. I caught it from the baby. He's been happily sneezing in my face all week. (But his sniffles are so cute!) Now I know how the little guy has been feeling.

I've got a pot of chicken noodle soup simmering on the stove. I put a small mountain of fresh ginger and some jalapenos into the broth. I find that's the perfect combination for healing whenever I start to feel sick. Hope it does the trick this time.

Lots of knits in process right now. I'm sewing in all of the loose ends on my mittens. They don't match, but I'm okay with that. I have another skein of this yarn that I'm eyeing up for another project. I knit the baby sweater this past summer. It's been hard to find an occasion for him to wear it. We keep the house so warm that I end up peeling him out of all the layers I've got him dressed in just moments after I have him dressed up. Oh well!

I used some black fingering weight sock yarn for the body of the sweater and some of our own hand-painted sock yarn for the accents. My husband had his doubts if it would work for a little boy, but I think he looks great. (He can't complain at this age anyway.)

I've been knitting on the little baby blanket for about a month. The yarn is Lion Brand Heartland Tweed. It's the first time I've knit with this, but this is going to be a gift for my friend's first child so I want it to be machine washable. I hope it washes up nice. We shall have to see.

Happy weekend everyone! Hope you are avoiding the sniffles!

Jill

wool + zinnias

Lots of wool around here - and flowers. 

I picked up a hank of some hand spun yarn that I made a few years ago and knit a pair of ankle socks. I Navajo plied this yarn so it was a bit twisty in some places. I also noticed that the size of the yarn changed from sport weight on the first sock to worsted/chunky on the second. The extra twist in this yarn should make the socks I made more durable, that's why I chose to make socks with this yarn. I only had a few yards left over when I cast off the last stitches. I will enjoy wearing these socks this winter.

You will be seeing a lot of blue yarn in my upcoming posts because we found out we're having a boy. I couldn't be more excited and I've already got a small mountain of boy appropriate yarn in my knitting basket. The little sweater I posted above has been a real stash buster. I need to find the perfect buttons.

This summer has been a dream come true. I feel so grateful to get the chance to knit a sweater for the baby that I'm carrying. I really didn't know if I would ever get this opportunity. I may be going a bit overboard, but I don't care. There has been a lot of wool piling up around here over the years, also a lot of hopes that have finally been answered.

Thanks for reading.

Jill