2013 Advent Calendar DIY Ideas

WAAAY late getting this year's advent calendar together. And as far as keeping up with posting, well I'm not even going there. But what with the epic Gatsby party that has taken up so much of November, I am down to one week to get at least three calendars together to post. I spent last night going over the pinterest board that I compiled last year, adding some new bits and then throwing it all on a brand spanking NEW board, aptly titled THINGS TO PUT IN THE ADVENT CALENDARS. You know, so I don't get lost. So behold.... the pinterest board that will be the beginning of this week's making of things. If you have a craft that you think is AWESOME and should be included, just comment and I'll add it.

I have to apologize as per usual for my computer being (again) at the cleaners, with all the photos from last year's crafts and such... I really DID take photos. Really GOOD ones actually. The nice man says it will be fixed soon, so if the calendar isn't your thing but December crafting IS, then I'll post those when I get it back with tutorials. In the meantime, we begin with ideas for this year's calendar.

Lavender Hot Chocolate

Now that there is no denying the cold that has befallen us, I am open to trying new things in the world of hot chocolate. Because, well... I might just have to make this a few times to perfect it, right? My new obsession is Lavender Hot Chocolate. Mmmmm...

Go here for the recipe...

Today's French Lesson...

Internet issues yesterday. Sorry for the lack of post. So I thought I would throw up something quick, but seriously adorable. I hear all the time how fascinating (yet completely incomprehensible) the French language is to people south of the border :) so I thought I would share a little "lesson" with you today in the form of a sweet, wide eyed story about a "tremendously very bad mammoth" and a suicidal hippo. You don't have to understand a word, it's helpfully translated for you :)

I am off to make a bunch of goodies for the first slew of craft fairs and art shows of the Christmas season. I shall tote my camera and hopefully produce images worthy of your time tomorrow :)

Ugh... They're Coming!

I am not entirely sure where the computer gremlins keep getting my URL from... or perhaps they are finding their way in whilst looking for crumbs in the keyboard... either way, my computer is simply refusing to load photos at a rate faster than thirty minutes per. Grrrrr! I swear, they are coming... just reeeeeaaaallllly slowly! Sometime next century perhaps. That is IF I don't throw this one out the window after the last. You think the threat of hitting the tree outside would get this hard drive sorted... but apparently not. Just letting you know that I haven't forgotten about you... AND that if you wanted to take a peek, the ones for the other blog are already (finally) up! So feel free to take a gander over at Tapestri.

Amy Stuart Strikes Again... With BUGS... eeeeewwwww!

I love this wee film Amy Stuart is using to promote her new book (due out in May) called Wicked Bugs! My kids are divided... Liam already has creepy crawly issues and I have inadvertently just created more months years of  having to remove every single teeny bug out of his presence. Rowan loves it. I got a good laugh and thought I would share it with you all :)

I loved her book on Wicked Plants, but I think I will personally have to leave the reading of this one to Rowan.

Sunday Thoughts: The Call Of the Chickadee...

I recently took my two boys on a virtual tour of my childhood via Google Streetview. I was Facebook chatting away with a girl whom I have never met but who inspires me on a regular basis with her posts on everything from hazelnut butter-cream icing, to Kiss Me in the Park parties, to her latest published piece on fun wedding ideas. Anyhow, she seems worlds apart from my life, and yet not. She had noticed that my FB profile was updated to show where I grew up, and it turns out she grew up in the same neighbourhood. Well, she corrected, a smaller community quite close to that neighbourhood... and from there we had one of those "...really? Me too!" conversations where we realized that we had actually lived down the street from each other as teens (OK, I was a teen, she was probably a toddler). She said her house had been demolished in the development frenzy that has plagued the area over the last decade, and I had to laugh because the house that was built in its stead is one that my father (who now rents out the home I lived in) refers to as the bane of the neighbourhood because it has a tower with what looks like plaster bum reliefs around the top. It definitely stands out. Well, of course I had to then show my sons the house I was laughing about... which led to a cross-BC Streetview Tour of my life.

the "Bum House"

Crescent Parish

What is funny about having children, is that you find the same things coming out of your face as you heard when you were young. Except now instead of being without context, they make absolutely perfect sense and come with weighted meaning that you know is falling on deaf ears. I tried in vain to draw a visual picture of what "life was like" growing up in a beach town with tidal pools for playgrounds and knowing every single neighbour right up to the bakery six blocks away. I was immediately taken back to the world where my mother had already been informed of my daily excursions before I was even off my bike and walking through the door for dinner... and if I was in the bakery, she was most likely on the phone with "Carol" letting her know that she should remind me to pick up the bread as well as the fritter that I was after. They enjoyed the stories, but relating to them was a different thing entirely.

Crescent Beach had the best sunsets

Something happened though when we got to the view of the home I was a child in. It looks the same, nearly, although some moron went and stuccoed over the cedar siding that had covered the entire house and in my day the paved area in front was actually two massive cedars that were homes to bats and squirrels. At the end of the seventies, when my father built it (and I do mean that he built it, not that he had it built,) it was absolutely the best of the best, with beams running throughout that were pretty much entire trees... the brickwork was painstakingly done around the stove and oven... and I remember how proud he was of the marble countertops and the RED sink and dishwasher that my mother had asked for. Nothing makes me more proud than when I talk about that house and the attention to detail that he put into it. (Disclaimer: my children are, of course, exempt from this particular sentence.) I know he was not an easy man to live with, I inherited his bizarre need for perfection in the strangest places, but lack of interest in areas that most people find important. The first thing that that house means to me though, is that it was his way of expressing his love for his family. That house was everything he thought a father, the provider, was meant to be, and he tried as hard as he could to make it perfect. It ended up shaping much of who I am today, and I can trace back so many of my interests and values directly to things I learned both while it was being built, and also how we lived in it.

My (slightly altered) childhood home.

The second, and more important thing that that house meant to me, as beautiful as it was, was that it was truly a home. There was a feeling of lightness and security that came with being a child there. We had the beach out front and the most amazing forested hill in the back that was home to bald eagles, ringneck pheasants who nested right outside the back window, and a family of raccoons that would come down the hill whenever we had a barbeque. The house was literally built into the grade so when you looked out the back windows, you were nose to beak with the pheasants and stellar jays, and there was a dead tree at the top that I liked to think was the tower to some sort of fairy castle.

My sister and I shared a large room at the front of the house that had a bubble skylight big enough to sit in and feel like we were at the top of the world looking down on the teeny people on the road. When I was lucky enough to earn my own bedroom at the back of the house, I inherited a small triangle shaped window that let in the glow of the Christmas lights during winter months and when it snowed (which it used to do back then) the glow would be reflected throughout the room. What I loved most about my childhood was found in that bedroom. Spring and summer mornings would greet me with dappled sun filtering through the huge leaves of the many maples that would reach out from the hill and the most beautiful sound in the world (other than perhaps the laughter of children), the orchestra of the songbirds would be the first thing I heard every morning. To this day, the sound of the chickadees singing brings me a feeling of peace and serenity that I don't find anywhere else. It makes me ponder what kind of life I am giving to my own children and most importantly, how they see things vs how I, as an adult see them.

It could be argued that I had a certain degree of turmoil in my childhood. My mother was discovering her strength as a woman and didn't like the role of homemaker. My father, a traditionalist wanted her at home baking cookies and tending her brood. They didn't fight often, but looking back it is easy to see the tension that was found in daily life there. I was raised "properly". I took ballet, happily wore black patent shoes, and knew which fork was used for which dish, was best in my french classes and had very good grades as a child. I was polite and I knew right from wrong... and none of that seems to matter now. Of course I am a better person for it, I know that. My point is though, that the things we are teaching our children, the things that we deem important as adults, should of course be taught. Just don't expect those things to be the most important things in their lives and their thoughts. My boys suddenly tuned in when I started to talk about the leaves, and the birds, and making forts in the ravine. The tidal pools were far more interesting to them when it was the anemones we spoke about, not the importance of protecting natural spaces and how they just aren't the same anymore because of all the pollution yadda yadda...

The protection of natural spaces is so important to me because I spent my childhood immersed in them instead of watching TV. Detail is important to me because I was able to experience the end result of hard work and love of process. Etiquette is important to me because I experienced what it was like to attend the symphony in my black patent shoes and I got a feel for what it is like to be involved in a cultural event where rude is simply not involved, and polite was part of the whole. Of course my father would go into his spiel of "I don't want to see any blah blah blah" every single time. But once I had seen what was meant by it, he didn't have to repeat himself. Not often at least.

I was very lucky to have the childhood I had. I have been very lucky to live the life I have led. And the most important thing I think that I can now teach my boys in an age of such craziness is to just keep it all in perspective. Sometimes life is tough, but there is always something to be thankful for. I think it all boils down to stopping to smell the lilacs, dipping your toes into the tidal pools when you come across them... and of course, Zen-ing out to the chickadees.

This post is part of my involvement in a Blog-O-Sphere Think Tank... we all visit the same topic and post on it on the 20th of each month. Please visit the other participants blogs and spread the blog love in comments!

Andes Cruz: www.andescruz.wordpress.com
Beth Cyr: http://bcyrjewelry.blogspot.com/
Brad Severtson http://hammeringoutaliving.blogspot.com/
Kirsten Skiles http://www.kaskiles.com/
Kathleen Krucoff:   http://mysticalmythicalmetalwork.wordpress.com/
Wendy Kelly: http://www.wendykianakelly.com/
Natsuko Hanks: http://jewelrybynatsuko.blogspot.com/
Susan Moloney:  http://susarto.blogspot.com/
Pal Gooz: http://pmgart.blogspot.com/
Stephanie Clark: http://thethinkingsofacoldweathergirl.blogspot.com/
Shaun Young: http://shaunyoung.ca/

How to Throw A UFO Space Cowboy Alien Party... Kinda

Note to self: 5pm on a Sunday that played host to a boy's fourth birthday is not the time to discover that you are out of pain killers.

Yes. Party. Yes. Headache. But not till well after everyone was gone. It's funny how your body knows to put things like a migraine on hold when your house is overrun with four 4 year olds, two 5 years, three 7/8 year olds and their parents, your parents, their dad's mother, and aunts and uncles. In my family, you smell cake and your instincts guide you.  Zero complaints. It was a blast! No really, I am not making that up... completely randomly put together and as my eldest says "this is the BEST birthday I have ever had!". Just wait till his birthday. Thank goodness I have a few months for that yet!

Rowan (who is seven) was more excited about planning this shindig than anyone. He comes up with such brilliant ideas, and if we had a mansion, a dozen minions and a pot of gold, he could throw a brilliant soiree. He was content to be in charge of making the invitations however.

The body opens to reveal the info...

This past couple of weeks, the toughest part of getting ready for the party was getting the birthday boy on side! First the only person he wanted to invite was a twelve year old girl who is in his brother's play. She plays the evil Queen, and somehow that seems a foreboding indication of the years ahead. We went and invited children anyway. Which I think was a good idea. The next issue was that he wanted to have a Space Cowboy party, but he also wanted the whole thing to be pink, orange and purple. He is very set on that colour combo. We went through site after site on the computer looking for space decor (not much out there that isn't NASA) and while this was a PERFECT opportunity for me to get creative, we were pretty much nil on funds and time... so I was stifled. Nothing at all got his attention. Except bunting! The only thing he got the least bit excited about was orange bunting. For a Space Cowboy party. Hmmm...

Well, the one thing that I (and my inner Martha) have learned to live with (her not so much, but she is working on it) is that sometimes the only thing you can do is listen to the little anklebiter. While I work very hard at making most things far more complicated than they need to be, often I have found that the kids are just happy to have had you listen to them. So bunting was made.

You know what? I love it. Don't look closely, it is the fastest bunting ever sewn together and it's a mess...

...but I love how happy it makes the living room look :) (Also don't look at the lamp... I hate it, it came with the house and hasn't been replaced yet...)

The only other thing that Liam specified was a purple UFO Birthday Cake... with eyeballs. Of course...

Grandma Berta to the rescue...

 So we ordered one from the Unidentified Food Organization.

And Auntie Ingy :)

 Ha ha. Just kidding, the cake was made by my family (group effort) and was the hit of the party... My mother phoned to tell me that she had discovered fondant and was going to try to cover the cake in that. (Snigger) I was really impressed that she was going to all that effort, and didn't think to tell her that my attempts at fondant have been complete disasters because, well, she is my mom and she totally rocks in the kitchen. I do not. 

And Grandpa Jim made a wicked stand for it! 

Aunty Ingy (her name is Lindsay, she adopted Ingy because she was the first person Rowan learned to say the name of and it has stuck,) says that the story is that the aliens had to leave their planet together because they fought constantly (they are brother and sister) and by the time they get to earth they have been forced to be in each company for so long, they get along famously. You know, sorta like human siblings :)

I did some wrestling with decorations beyond the bunting and the colour scheme as I usually have balloons on hand that have been re-used over and over (most have been rescued from elsewhere) but I refuse to buy new ones. Balloons are one of those things that are really nasty environmentally and don't actually serve much of a purpose. I knew I could do festive beyond what the "normal" party decor list generally calls for, so I got out some leftover tissue paper and made some of those balls that are everywhere right now. Martha has a tutorial on her site... they seem really frustrating when you are pulling them apart, but then they look great when done. The bunting is everywhere too but super straightforward. I recommend actually making some effort at it, and not trying to put it together at T minus zero, as it would be nice if I didn't cringe every time I looked at it. Pretty from afar, but I will be hanging mine as high as possible :) Those things and some stuff we had lying about the house that were sparkley made the place quite fabulous. I will be making up some butterfly garlands and a couple more strings of bunting for my own birthday party in spring!

The last word on kids birthdays? Have your tickle trunk out. We just let them go at it and ended up with a Space Cowboy / Batman / Wicked Witch / Oscar Diva Party. We didn't have to interrupt them at all, we just put in our built in earplugs (those ones that develop throughout parenthood) and gathered in the kitchen to chat. I recommend having dress-up stuff for both boys and girls, even if you only have only sons or only daughters. Although really, they are pretty good at improvising!

Most of all, HAVE FUN!

(Oh, and for the record, do NOT handcuff one of your nicest guests right before her cab comes... just sayin'!)

Linked to:  http://todayscreativeblog.net

Aesthetic Dominion: Cartolina's Latest

I have been a fan of Cartolina for years. I am a bit of a stalker on Fiona's site, I visit hers probably more than any other blog on the net and never EVER find it to be dull. Always inspiring, sometimes to the point of ridiculousness... ever to the point of distraction. I actually live in the same town as she does, which is the sweetest little arts town in North America, so I feel very lucky to have her as a neighbour! Such talent we have here in the Koots :)


Fiona has been a busy little bee the past year... well, truth be told, I don't think she ever rests. She and her husband were the ones who opened my favourite place to have chai and a muffin, The Dominion Cafe, and although they haven't owned it for a few years it is almost the same today as it was then, which shows you that she has a good eye, excellent taste, and knows what she is doing in business. These days she is putting all of that talent into evolving her "pretty things" business, Cartolina. And by "evolve" I pretty much mean world domination.



I am not one who would jump at the first chance to marry art with something high tech, because, well I am not high tech and really don't understand any of it. I don't have a cell phone... yeeesssss... that's right, I don't own one. I had one years ago, I have gone through two actually. I never used them. I either can't keep the bloody thing charged or I have forgotten to get more time for it (the first one I got a three year plan and used it maybe ten times) and it is generally taking up space in my bag for literally no reason. If I DID have a cell phone, I would be grabbing that app I mentioned on Valentine's day. I love the idea of sending something so gorgeous in such a simple way. I love that Cartolina has taken these images that are inspired so obviously by vintage artwork and created something so modern, not only in an aesthetic sense, but also in the way they are used.


I purchased my first Cartolina card eons ago in a Nelson boutique. I didn't realize they were a local company and felt that I needed to buy it in case I couldn't find them again. I bought it solely to frame. I am delighted that she has recently made framable prints for sale in a Cartolina etsy shop. Her first etsy store! They would make gorgeous housewarming or wedding gifts.


Most recently, she teamed up with Lief, Leuk & Eigen to create the most adorable Baby Collection of announcements. They are customizable with regards to names and dates etc., and most importantly, are not the typical cutesy thing that most baby products have going on.


I adore these! They are available online at Leif, Leuk & Eigen's site.

Of course around here it goes without saying that my favourite part of the Cartolina way of doing things is making something so beautiful without losing touch with the importance of our planet. Cartolina cards are printed on recycled paper that comes with the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certification. The FSC represents products produced from well-managed forests, controlled sources and recycled wood. The cards are printed with vegetable based inks and their printer was named Most Environmentally Progresive Printer in Canada for the last 5 years at the Environmental Printing Awards. Brilliant all around.

Love and Affection: DIY Valentine's Day Ideas

Tom Banwell mask

OK! It's Valentine's month, and although for years and years I went around all self-righteously and pledged non-allegiance to the fact that North Americans had set aside only one day to spread the love, I am now a convert. Well, I still believe that we should spend much more time telling people how much we like each other, how much we appreciate the things others do for us, and do things for others as well... but MOST OF ALL... I am a huge fan of leaving little tokens of affection randomly for the people in our lives to find, if only so that it brightens their day.

the French Mouse

I also love a good excuse to pull out all the crafting supplies in the house and set to work. Having kids gave me call to raise the bar for valentines givers everywhere. I spend days waiting for inspiration to hit right about the beginning of February and usually by the time the big day rolls around we have an army of crazy creations to hand out to all our friends. This year's batch includes individualized patches off the embroidery machine...


One year I bought a bunch of black heavy paper and a silver pen, expropriated a baggie of little rubber lizards from a previous birthday party, and glue-gunned a lizard to the top of each card with my son who put lizard tracks across the front and spelled IGUANA Be Your Valentine inside with a piece of candy taped to it. I don't know how many kids at his school even got it, but we had so much fun making them that I kept going and made one for all my friends as well. The very first black valentines I have come across :)

Does this not say LOVE to you?

Last year, the valentines we gave out were red felt hearts that Rowan sewed pockets into on the sewing machine (supervised) with a simple zig zag stitch, and we put a lollipop or chocolate in each. We used sparkle glue to write the person's name across the front. Not my favourite aesthetically, but he absolutely LOVED making them, and they were adorable when he was done. I have let go of a lot of my Martha tendencies for perfection having two young boys in my life :) It has been very good for my stress level. Sort of balances out the stress that comes from, say, stepping on LEGO pieces, or cleaning toothpaste off every bathroom surface possible.

This is very similar to the idea we used last year... the tutorial for this bag can be found on Momtastic here.

I have found a few really nifty ideas from around webville with Valentine's in mind and thought I'd share...

Of course my first visit for a project is always to How About Orange...

This is an awesome idea from Bloesem Kids, which I admittedly have not tried yet, but if perfected could become a household staple for invites etc. I LOVE this!

Design*Sponge has some pretty darn sweet ideas!




And of course there was a visit to Martha, but I was quite surprised that it was hard to find a new idea. I think Martha's crew must be the best recyclers (of ideas) in the craft world... and there is a place there for you to upload your own cards so they are probably fishing... :)
HOWEVER, I adore quilling, and this reminds me that it has been awhile... and the seed packets are always one of my favourites, as it is a nice reminder that spring is just around the corner AND the more flowers growing in this world, the better. Look for locally grown organic seeds for best results. And switch up the packaging, I don't know why seed packets have become so darn ugly, but it is worth making up some pretty little envelopes and transferring the seeds. Also, if you visit a nursery, you can get a sweet discount on buying the seeds in a bulk size package and dividing them up yourself!


Whichever you choose, be sure you love sending the love!