With titles like that its no won­der I am not get­ting any traf­fic thanks to SEO (search engine optimization).

Its the truth though, I will attempt just about any­thing. You wont find me hid­ing in a cor­ner, bit­ing my fin­gers about how I will be ter­ri­ble at some­thing. I may very well be ter­ri­ble at it, but I will at least give it a go and find out for myself. Call me a skep­tic, thats me.

So awhile ago when Mr.Blab jok­ingly asked me to cut his hair, cause he was too lazy to go to the hair­dresser, I said „Sure, dude, have a seat and hand me those meat scis­sors over there”.  I said it jok­ingly too, but he turned out to be even cra­zier than me, because he handed his mane to my com­pletely lost for words hands and the rest is history.

I have had my hair cut, I have watched other peo­ple do it, many times; I knew the proper tech­nique to hold the hair, and who doesnt know how to use scis­sors?! It cant be that hard. And the truth is that even after I was done with him, he was safe for pub­lic view­ing and didnt miss a day off work, to both of our surprise.

I still have no clear idea what I am doing when I grab the scis­sors, which now are proper hair-cutting ones and I even have thin­ning blades to com­plete my pro­fes­sional tool set.

Yours truly is now the offi­cial fam­ily hair­dresser, which not only makes  my man unap­peal­ing to other females, but also saves us not a neg­li­gi­ble amount of money. (The kids get good doos, because of the blood connection)

My prob­lem is that after every time I cut Mr.Blab’s hair, I for­get how hard it is and next time he asks me, which is usu­ally right before he looks like Big Foot, I agree to do it. And as soon as I stand there with my comb and scis­sors and try to moisten that moun­tain of hair, I feel half of my life run past me. The dread over­comes me, because ladies and gen­tle­men, he has way too much hair; I am cer­tain, in fact, that he is the rea­son so many other men are bаld around the world.

I snap with the scis­sors and noth­ing seems to change. I have no idea what I am doing is what comes out of my mouth every once in a while with a ner­vous laugh. Its ok, as long as I have some hair — calmly responds my client and we usu­ally laugh a lot. He pre­tends to be scared some­times and is not appre­cia­tive of my assistant/s, which might be spray­ing him with a bot­tle or pil­ing his cut hair on his pants, for exam­ple — what is this place?!

Oh, no worry, mis­tur, its all in bill…oups, that your ear?

By the end of it, my hands are falling off, and I am sure I patch up the last bits barely, barely. But he is always happy, bless his lazy heart.

Dodman, approved my work too.

And that is all that mat­ters sometimes.

And then he is put to work.

I won­der who can make a blan­ket from all of that cut hair.

Or two.

Here are the things that have kept me busy the last week or so. Miss Fab and I have been cre­ative to bits, work­ing on mak­ing some sur­prises for Little B’s birth­day. It has been fun and I have learned a few new things too. So I will share, cause I am nice that way.

I will start with KravA-pA! This is the name the birth­day girl gave to one of the dolls in my hand­made toys book. Not just that. The girls would say the name, after look­ing at the page, and then crack up like there is noth­ing fun­nier out there. And then again…KravA-pA! Muahahahaha.

So, I had to make her.

Big sis­ter joined in too. She weaved two friend­ship bracelets.

She made these two lovely fel­las.
She chose the fab­rics, the colours. She stitched up on the machine and did the hand stitch on the faces too.

The pack­ag­ing too, of course.

I have been dis­cov­er­ing cro­chet­ing. I have never done it before, even though it seemed inter­est­ing and I think I enjoyed the idea of  its ver­sa­til­ity. I don tknow why, but I thought it will be a good idea to delve into it now.

It was not hard at all. In a night I had a grasp of it. And the sec­ond night I cro­cheted half a hat. Not planned that way, but my wool ran out, so it ended up a tiny lit­tle hat. I fin­ished it up with a han­dle, cause I thought it will look nice as a soft bas­ket of some kind. Then I left it around until I fig­ure out if I want to keep it or not.

Next I was ready to fol­low a pat­tern. You think there is noth­ing to it, but I beg to dif­fer. Patterns look like alien lan­guage in code and then scram­bled with eggs.

But yours truly did it with­out a hitch. Thank you, thank you:

What am I doing with this beauty? With these won­der­fully fancy stitches?
I am elim­i­nat­ing them, thats what I am doing.

I am felt­ing, babeeey!

I stitched two of those squares and a big thread and the whole thing went in the wash­ing machine.

And then I had a beau­ti­ful fluffy puffy bag (and the gift wrap­ping for it)

I was hooked!

Hooked I tell ya. Even Mr.Blab was impressed.

My eyes were scan­ning any­thing in my field of vision that will be suit­able for felting.

Voila! My half hat turns into a basket:

This one went into  a sim­ple paper wrap, but I made a cus­tom bow for it.

Those are won­der­ful. Next time I will try the recy­cling ver­sion
(if you are keen, get the instruc­tions from How About Orange)

Just in case our newly five year old is not impressed with our hand­i­crafts, we had Mr.Blab get her a scooter and he ordered her a bunch of „Lego guys”, the lat­est being the favorite play bud­dies lately.

Now to the most antic­i­pated part — the cake.

The order went some­thing like that:
Chocolate cake with hmmm…white top…colorful, rain­bow frosting!

Right.

Luckily I had some vol­un­teer­ing help:

I admit, I was not excited when she expressed enthu­si­asm to „help” me, but I handed her the tools and held my breath. Maybe even my eyes were closed, I am not sure.

She did the flowers.

She did not dis­ap­point. Not even a bit.

The swoosh is just a defect in the way the cake baked. It is a wonky cake.

At first I thought we will make a hilly cake, then while we were work­ing, we thought we will make a path in the big crack…then Miss Fab sug­gested bushes. I did bushes and then decided to just fill it up with grass.

And we ended up with 5 fairies somehow.

Couldnt have been more perfect.

Ok, I am tired now.

And I am get­ting a cold.

And we are off to cel­e­brate a birthday…

This has noth­ing to do with dia­per poops and gifts of the kind. Well, maybe it does, but not in a direct kind of way. This is about a friend that started mak­ing cloth dia­pers, some­thing I have been mean­ing to do for awhile now, but just dont get to it, so I am quite jeal­ous in a way, there is a bit of envy in me, a bit of grind­ing of the teeth, a bit of „I wish I had done this”..well, you get the pic­ture, but she actu­ally did it. And not only that, but now she is try­ing a lit­tle busi­ness going, as her kids cant take any more dia­pers, even if she stuffs them in their clothes as safety padding.

And because she had so many and she has one of those warm kind hearts, can you frikin believe it, she sent me not one, but two absolutely free dia­pers for Caramel Popcorn. Yeah, she even paid the ship­ping from the other end of the world. So I am get­ting this pack­age, and the two jew­els pop out and melt in my hands. Only other cloth dia­per freaks can appre­ci­ate this, so dont shake your head in dis­be­lief if you are not one of them.

Sofness, squishi­ness, warmth and fluffiness.

Mmmm.…

So, I thought the least I could do is give her some blog props and show off her won­der­ful work and if any of you are in search of a cloth dia­per check her out. I dont know how they will stand up over time, but my ini­tial reac­tion is glee. Hurry, before she gets big and her prices get unrea­son­able, cause isnt that what always seems to happen.

KatyBird Diapers

Thank you, my friend!
And good luck.

I wanna get off. This train is not tak­ing me any­where nice. Feels like its run­ning in cir­cles and we are see­ing the same scenery over and over and over and over…OH! And over.

Our feet are on the way out, dan­gling over the edge of the door, being cooled down by the gen­tle breeze of the free­dom beyond the train. But I want more. We want more. We are dream­ing of build­ing our own house by our­selves. Not your aver­age main­stream house…our own. Earth and human friendly, non toxic, ran­dom and imper­fect, but touched with love and atten­tion only the way one can do them­selves. Wild and free, beau­ti­ful and friendly…a place where all the things inside are mean­ing­ful and trea­sured, no cheap dis­pos­able plas­tic and stuff that exists only because some­one some­where wants to pay their mort­gage and own a yacht.

Oh, the dreams.

But back to the topic — stuff.

Recently I stum­bled upon a lit­tle fun pre­sen­ta­tion called „The Story of Stuff”. A won­der­ful suc­cinct way of describ­ing why the con­sumerism cul­ture is not as good as we have been led to believe.

Watch it:
Its own web­site
OR
Youtube

Can you see through the empti­ness of the things that sur­round you? Or do they really bring you the hap­pi­ness and joy that was promised when they were sold to you? I am curi­ous to hear your views, not just fish­ing for some com­ments

I have been get­ting a few ques­tions about this, so here is the scoop.

Cloth nap­pies are not your grandma’s nap­pies any­more. The choices are wide and var­ied — small, big, easy, organic, in pieces and not, with fold­ing and not, quick dry­ing and not so, with cover or with­out… some­thing for everyone.

In short though, a nappy needs two things: absorbency and water­proof­ing and here are the main types accord­ing to the way those two points are taken care of:

(more…)

Spinning from the pre­vi­ous post, here is what I found in my search for a bag.

First a few words on plas­tic bags — a com­plete and utterly unnecessery waste that makes a mess of one’s house and worst (and if you care), of our envi­ron­ment.
Coming home with just a few bags and not hav­ing to work through a pile of crumbly, noisy pile of bags is like a breath of fresh air. Eliminating the plas­tic in your gro­cery shop­ping is easy and now it can be trendy too.

(more…)