We went out this weekend and found some new chairs for the backyard

which I totally love, they remind me so much of the Sunset cover I fell for.

and Andrew surprised me with flowers

to match those sandals I found last week!

Orange has been a total pick-me-up for me lately. I’ve been wearing the sandals a ton with the new retro shift dress I sewed — the combination is perfect for summer. I added a few tweaks and variations to Christine’s original idea and I just love it, I’ve already found the fabric for my next one.

I’m writing a review of Chic & Simple Sewing this week now that I’ve had a chance to sew from it, with lots of pictures from my project (which, believe it or not, isn’t orange and neither is the next one I’m planning — but I did get some of this at Cool Cottons to make a skirt!).

I wanted to mention over here that the lovely and talented Jennifer Perkins has posted a book review and giveaway for Button It Up, plus an interview she did with me about button shopping, button-stash organizing, crafting with a Pearl in tow, and some of my favorite recent projects.

You can enter to win a copy of the book by next Tuesday right here… thanks so much, Jennifer!

The other big news around here is that we’ve already started eating greens out of the garden! I wish I had some good photos to show, but we always eat dinner so late that the light is scarce and nothing looks that great. Maybe this weekend I can make something cool during the day. My five-year-old self would be shocked that I am voluntarily eating (and growing!) collard greens, after the much-hated three bites I always had to have at holiday dinners, but they are so good. I really didn’t like collards at all until I was 24 years old, I still remember the amazing dinner that converted me.

Also exciting (to me at least) is that I joined Ravelry and found some button groups to hang out in! I have exactly two finished objects to my name (which is susanstars, if anyone wants to be crafty buddies over there) and maybe three more I haven’t taken photos of. Yes, I’ve been knitting for nine years, why do you ask?

…except that I like both of them, I guess.

Our garden is kind of freaking out, in the best way. The combination of nice steady south-side sun, decent rain now and then, and some plain good luck has turned our formerly teeny snap peas, Red Russian kale and collard greens into giants! I took this photo on Friday right after I put in the tomatoes and peppers (at the back), exactly four weeks after I planted these little guys.

Day 1:

Day 28:

kale:

collards:

Yay! We’re really happy about it. I’ve had a gray thumb (that’s a charitable description, actually) for years and it’s really fun to see the garden come along after last year’s in the back yard didn’t really like us much (probably something to do with the late planting, unexpectedly crappy soil, over-shadiness, and total amateur approach in general). We’re going to pick some greens for the first time today!

On a totally different front, I just did a jewelry project for CraftStylish that I wanted to share over here.

I haven’t had time to make much jewelry lately (nor wear any, with my quick-grabbing toddler on the case) so this was fun — I took apart an old necklace I never wore and turned it into a necklace and earrings set.

Maybe I’ll wear it while we’re eating our fresh greens…

p.s. thanks for the nice comments and emails, I am going to whip up some teeny terrarium kits and offer them up later this week!

Pearl’s first birthday is this week and the Western Garden Book gave me an idea for something cool to celebrate. After calling everywhere I knew of here in Portland with no luck, I found exactly what I hoped for at Van Veen Nursery, an incredible place for azaleas and rhododendrons.

They have thousands of varieties in dozens of greenhouses,

and Ms. Van Veen herself took the time to help me find the one and only baby Pink Pearl rhododendron they had — and for only $5. It was an amazing experience and I am eager to go back soon!

So we planted our Pink Pearl this week! It’s tiny now, but we have it on good authority that it will get big. It’s already started blossoming in just a few days outside.

And our garden has been happy too! It went from this

to this in just three weeks!

The little kale starts I had in recycled can mini-planters love it out there. I’ve already had to rearrange the rows to give them more space. They have grown from the size of this one (in the middle, maybe two or three inches tall)

to at least five times as big — this one has happily taken over the corner of an 8 x 4 raised bed.

And speaking of recycled-can planters, I made some more to decorate our backyard for Pearl’s birthday, too!

This time I used industrial-sized cans instead of teeny-tiny ones and made simple hanging flower baskets. I filled them with trailing ivy geranium starts (which are on sale for 50¢ each at Fred Meyer if you’re also in the Northwest) in three shades of pink.

I left them totally plain except for some sparkly beads mixed into the wires, which I thought looked nice peeking out from behind the leaves and flowers. You could also paint them or embellish them with beads, buttons, or anything else you like!

If you want to make some too, my tutorial is over here. The set of 4 cost $6 to make total, for the flowers (not including things I had around the house — cans, wire, potting soil, beads, and a hammer and nail). After imagining spending $30 apiece for the pretty hanging baskets I keep seeing around, I was really happy with how mine turned out for just $1.50 each. I’ve already gone back to Fred’s to get more ivy geraniums to make a set of three more for our front porch, too!

I just snapped up Diane’s FANTASTIC new e-book, Making a Great Blog, and I am happily reading it. And I just got to a very sweet surprise, a mention of Bead Simple, among all the other fabulous bits and pieces decorating Diane’s clear, thoughtful and inspiring advice — she works in so many lovely things, from vintage buttons to necktie quilts, as examples and colorful flourishes within her information-packed chapters.

Yay Diane! Find out more in Rachel’s thorough review post, and get your own copy here.

Rachel also wrote a wonderful post this week highlighting some of the amazing things up for grabs as part of the new online auction to benefit Baby Ike…

so be sure to check out the whole vast and varied collection of over a hundred items if you’re interested. People have been so generous in donating and I love the mix of crafty pieces, vacations, cupcakes, massages, candles and even an Obama quilt (!) among many, many other great things.

And around here I am happy that we planted our first mini-round of vegetables this week!

I put in Red Russian kale, snap peas (with trellis in progress, made from old yardsticks), collard greens, and cabbage so far. And I moved all of our herbs in containers from their spots far and wide to one friendly hangout right next door.

And of course we have the

playoff games to look forward to, too!

Artisan bread in 5 minutes a day!

Blazers in the playoffs!

And

a

raised

bed!

Pearl and I headed to an estate sale on Saturday morning, just ten blocks up the street. I was pretty tired from button-ing and on day three of solo-sick-baby-wrangling, and I almost just stayed home with her. But I’m so glad I didn’t.

I’ll post some more pictures of my other finds tomorrow, but for now I’ll just mention the seven vintage mason jars that were out in the garage for 50¢. Yay! I loved Jenny’s CRAFT: tutorial last week on making mini-terrariums, and suddenly I had jars galore for just such a project. So I invited Diane over, and we had an actual Sunday together… involving crafting for fun instead of a deadline or project. And it was magical.

We washed all the jars, checked the lids, and walked over to Urban Flora to grab the rest of the stuff we needed — terrarium-supplies heaven right here in 97202. The super-friendly woman there pointed us to the charcoal, soil, and pebbles, mentioning that she was also a terrarium enthusiast, and we were home again pouring pebbles into jars in minutes!

Pearl obligingly went down for a nap and we were off and running.

One of the (many) wonderful things about living in western Oregon is that it is so green here. I love it, it’s well worth the rain (and hail, and snow, and more rain) to have all these lush, beautiful plants and trees everywhere you look. So finding moss and a few interesting stray plants in the yard was kind of like the easiest, most fun scavenger hunt ever devised.

A few months ago, I also happened to fall in love with the same Bake It Pretty cupcake topper set that Jenny had, so we mixed in plenty of deer, rabbits, mushrooms, and trees, along with a little vintage frog I’ve had forever.

I’m not sure what this pretty curving, curling plant is but it looks like it’s having a good time in there so far…

These two bunnies look very happy together too.

I mentioned last week that my grandparents had a huge, beautiful terrarium in their living room and I loved hanging out and gazing at it when I was a kid. I was so excited to make this little one — it’s so much smaller and the shape is totally different — but the color is just the same and looking at it makes me happy.

Naturally Diane made some gorgeous ones. Here, the pet rabbit she’s always wanted eyes a mushroom with interest.

And the same estate sale yielded these two hula-ers, perfect for a tiki-rarium to go with Diane and Katin’s bar!

Anyway, if you have a few minutes to spare I wholeheartedly recommend this craft. It is such an instant gratification pick-me-up and effortlessly fun, and the results are so charming! I now have five terrariums scattered around the house making me happy when I look at them, and Diane and I are both plotting to make some nephew-friendly terrarium-kits to spread the craft far and wide. Not to mention trying to figure out how we can quit our freelance jobs to devote our lives to making terrariums instead.

Some Oregon-style modifications we did: you can use fresh moss right out of the yard or the park instead of dried, layer a thinner stripe of potting soil (since the fresh moss will have its own dirt underlayer), and spray the dirt with water before putting the moss down so that it’s dampened first, instead of waiting til the end as you might with dried moss.

A huge thank-you to Jenny and CRAFT: for the idea and step-by-step instructions to transform an ordinary Sunday into something so nice!

I got a few more pieces of Orla Kiely’s housewares stuff yesterday and I just love it. As a bonus, it inspired me to clean the dining room — it’s deteriorated into a piles-of-mail and stroller-debris world for the last while, and that stuff is not nearly as fun to look at as pears are.

While I would love to have the whole line to hang out with, in my crafty dreams at least, some of it (like the pear canisters, which I think are adorable) is not really Andrew’s thing, and it’s his house too. So I’ll be admiring everything pretty in the Orla Kiely pool instead. Half of it was gone from my Target by the time I got there anyway, so it’s cool to see what other people snapped up.

I’m getting super excited about some new sewing projects, just in time for some really lovely craft books coming out… so I wanted to give a heads up that I’ll be doing a little review and giveaway at CraftStylish next month for two of my brand-new favorites, Jenny Ryan’s Sew Darn Cute

and Kathy Cano-Murillo’s Crafty Chica’s Guide to Artful Sewing!

They are both fantastic collections — super-inspiring and filled with handy tips and extras along with the very cool projects. I’m looking forward to the interviews!

Speaking of sewing, I’m in the middle of making something for myself to wear (for the first time since before I was pregnant, I think, so that’s 18 months at least… wow). Here’s a sneak peek — I’m hoping to be done and wearing it out and about in the next few days.

I edged it with folded twill tape, and it gave me an idea for some sewing-room organizing. Until this morning, I kept all my bias tape in a huge jar, jammed in there so that I couldn’t really see what I had unless I dragged it all out. I recently did a little upcycling project to convert a plain can to a beaded scissors-holder, so I thought I’d do something similar with my bias tape menagerie…

I divided it into two groups: workhorse (plain/solid colors) and fun (patterns, lacy edges, tiny baby-width for cute projects) and put each set in an industrial-sized tin can like the one I used for the scissors.

Then I cut two lengths of bias tape in colors I had a bunch of and hot-glued it on in horizontal stripes. The whole project took about five minutes, counting the hot glue gun heating up, and now the cans are hanging out with my jars of ribbon and cup of sewing tools, ready to go.

I also reorganized some of my other craft shelves and now (with a few more Orla pieces from Target) I like it all so much more! Much easier to find what I’m looking for and easier on the eyes, too.

Now, I’m waiting out Pearl’s next naptime so I can get back to that tantalizing sewing project…

I went to Target this week for some household necessities but what I was really looking for was the new Orla Kiely home collection… and yay, there it was! If you’re in Portland, I had luck at the 205 location. It’s all on an endcap near the ironing boards upstairs, and they had a pretty good mix of the tan and brown colorways (no blue pieces when I went, bummer). I got two hanging bags, a desk tray, and a small tapered tote, which are all holding various craft supplies I especially love.

I wrote up more about the crafty storage end of things at CraftStylish, but I thought I’d post the photos over here too. I also got a laundry bag in the same pattern as the desk tray, which I haven’t adapted for crafty misuse yet.

If you are also an Orla fan, have you seen this flickr group? There is some gorgeous stuff of hers in there! I am eager to see the kitchen + entertaining line in person (I’ve seen a sneak peek at trays, aprons, and some other cool pieces) — that apparently will come out in mid-February. There’s a lot of it up on eBay already too, tempting…