CRAZINESS!

marching band is over! I can have my life back!!!!

our last game was friday night, followed by a great day at state festival on saturday (we brought home a 1! first time in 3 years!)

my life officially started back up today, instead of sunday, because mother and i spent ALL DAY sewing fleece sleepers for the preemie project. we also brought along hats and booties to be donated, just in time for those late-october babies... pumpkin hats!!

and little green booties to match (except the picture is muy sucky)... hopefully you get the idea.

to celebrate my first day of having a life again, i cooked supper, albeit at 8:30 pm (future-hubby has to work the night shift for a few days). i made these pear-and-prosciutto cups with croissant dough, brie, and mozzarella... i also made them on sunday, but i used phyllo dough, which by the way i hate. i still don't have the cups right for these... phyllo is too thin and difficult to cook evenly, croissant dough is tasty but too heavy....

amd as a side dish i whipped up a sweet potato casserole, minus marshmallows. we used golden sweet potatoes and mashed them with a little butter, spread ricotta on top and the sprinkled frosted flakes doused in more butter on top. baked it 'til the flakes were crispy, et voila!

i finally uploaded my shrug and a hat i just finished, but now i can't seem to find them on my computer. it's time for bed anyways, before i pass out in front of my computer.
life is good.

i'm back... whew....

after a much-needed hiatus, i have returned with crafty goodness!

The first batch of pickles came out, and apparently i didn't sterilize a few of the jars properly cuz two out of the original eight had some sort of weird sediment in the bottom of the jar.... yeah... i didn't eat those. the other ones were good though. especially the spicy pickles. yum yum yum.

tomorrow i'm making butternut squash soup so i'll let you know how that goes.

on the crochet front, i finished a shrug out of noro garden yarn, and i'm, well, mostly pleased with it. it's my first item EVER with sleeves, but i left it in my office where i was covertly working on it in-between classes, so i'll have to post pictures later.

i also started a hat with the last of my bernat cashmere, some fuzzy curly white yarn (recylced!), and the yarn pauraniente and i dyed with kool-aid last winter. i don't have pictures of that either, but i will when it's done.

but i do have pictures. i finally got bit by the dotee bug. nobody seems to know exactly what they are. i mean, objectively, yes, they are relatively palm-sized dolls, usually with a round face, a hanger, not much distinction in the way of body parts... but what, exactly, are they?

i almost think of them as little prayer dolls, or little goddess dolls, but i guess sometimes you could just have silly ones.

like my Nessa. she's my first dotee! i had just finished reading "alone in the kitchen with an eggplant" and i happened to mention it to my fiance when we were riding in the car. he thought it sounded "quite sinister" and before we knew it, we were making up stories about a vengeful eggplant, in a british accent, with her "jaunty green cap."

so, here's nessa, my murderous eggplant.
she's made of felt with beaded accents and a sculpy knife. oh! and she has a friend, her pet spider leroy.

and here's a shot of her "jaunty green cap." ha, sometimes i crack myself up.

i don't think i'm done with her yet though. i want to add a bit more embroidery to the bottom, in-between the green beads, and also some more embroidery leaf detail on her cap. i have a word bead that says "green," and i'd like to try embroidery the "jaunty cap" phrase on the back, but i already tried once, got halfway through the word jaunty and tore it out because i mostly suck at embroidery.

tomorrow, along with butternut squash, we'll have the triplets, charlie, chelsea, and chester pea.