Pajama Pants

It's all about balance.

As the mother of six children (three boys & three girls; how cool is that!), Christmas can be a tremendous balancing act! Sometimes I balance across all six children, and sometimes I just have to make sure the boys balance (or just the girls).

Enter a pair of pajama pants.

Really, I promise it will all make sense.

You see, I knitted a dragon scarf for one boy. And a handmade gift for one boy means the other two need something handmade...and Christmas was drawing ever closer! I finished a pair of fingerless gloves (see my boys' gifts here). Then I was out of time!!

In a desperate search for something to make up the difference, I came across some delightful "Toy Story" flannel, and a pair of pajama pants was born!

Boy #3 looks happy, don't you think??

And look....he balances!!

Featured!

My cedar chest (one of them, anyway) has been featured on Remodelaholic!

See it here!

My other hobby

When the snow started to fly, I gave up on the furniture refinishing for a little while, and moved indoors. That gave me a chance to pick up my other hobby, which is....

knitting!!

I learned to knit about four or five years ago. I taught myself to crochet from an instructional book, but knitting was different. I just didn't get it until I could watch someone do it. I walked into a yarn store in Ogden Utah (The Needlepoint Joint, if you're in the area), and one of the nice employees sat down with me and taught me what to do with those pointy sticks! I have been a fan ever since.

So here are some of my wintertime projects!

My baby turned three years old a couple of weeks ago. I finished her sweater about 1 a.m. on the morning of! That is, if you don't count the buttons! (I don't.)

Pattern: Tuckernuck by Elinor Brown

Then there was a Dragon Scarf for one son:

Pattern: Enchanted Dragon by Mary Triplett

And a pair of fingerless gloves for another son (suitable for playing basketball!). Please notice the tough-guy poses!

No particular pattern

These last fingerless gloves are on their way to a new owner as of tomorrow. They weren't exactly a Christmas present, but I did finish them on Christmas Eve! My daughter gets to be the hand model.

Pattern: Fetching by Cheryl Niamath

If you also knit, I am RedHen6 on Ravelry!

		http://redhenhome.blogspot.com/2010/12/pajama-pants.html

“There is no better time than now,
this very Christmas season,
for all of us to rededicate ourselves
to the principles taught by Jesus the Christ.”

Thomas S. Monson

Family Tree

Some houses have elegant, themed trees.

Some houses have "family" trees.

Mine is definitely in the latter category.

It's the way I grew up...we always had a live tree, and each child had a box of ornaments that had been collected over the years, and then there was a box of family ornaments to put up as well. Then there was tinsel...remember tinsel?

My mother started the tradition of giving each grandchild a new ornament for Christmas. There is no rhyme or reason to it...it just happens to be whatever caught her eye at the after-Christmas sales! My kids love opening their ornament boxes each year and seeing old friends! Then there are the ornaments I have collected, and I love seeing them emerge every year as well.

There's a little bit of everything... from the Precious Moments "new baby" ornaments I have for each child (and these I also claim as mine, along with their stockings)...


To the paper reindeer my daughter made from her handprints...


And for now...I wouldn't have it any other way!

My Christmas Home

Oh, my poor neglected blog.

I have been absolutely swamped the past couple of weeks! You see, I have two December birthdays at my house, in addition to Christmas, so it's just party-party-party all the time! No time to blog! But tonight...with the second birthday celebration behind me by an hour or so (whew!) I wanted to take a few minutes to share a little bit of Christmas at my house.

Remember the window that now hangs in my kitchen? It got dressed up with the advent calendar I made several years ago, along with some pinecone garland and some snowflakes cut out of metal flashing! Here's what it looked like at the beginning of the month (wasn't that yesterday?)...


And here's today (actually I think it's yesterday).


Santa's holding a little tree that gets a new ornament every day until Christmas. With six kids, they each get to pick an ornament four times. It's filling up...frighteningly fast!

Next up is my snowman shelf. This hangs right inside my front door, and usually it can hold a coat or two for guests. In December...the hooks hold mine and my husband's Christmas stockings! (These ones I didn't make; they were given to us on our first Christmas.) Everything snowman-themed rests on this shelf. There's a plate my mother painted, some boxes, an various figurines.


My "rouge's gallery" wall gets a few wreaths for the season. I found that sewing pins hold them up beautifully, and they leave holes too small to be noticed the rest of the year. I love having my little entry table under the pictures...which explains why it mysteriously never sold during the summer....


I love to dress up my triple cabinets in my front room. My husband and I have begun collecting various reindeer figures, and this is their domain.


The two silvery ones on the rights were our first. They look like old metal, but they're not! I love the pair of them. They sit close to a hurricane I brought home from my Mom's house. The bonus with helping her decorate is that lots of times I get to take decorations off of her hands! This one is filled with red berry sprigs, large jingle bells, and pine cones.


The red glittery star was a post-Christmas purchase last year. Have I mentioned (lately) that I love all things glittery??

My (current) favorite reindeer sits behind a glittery "Merry Christmas" (also a post-holiday bargain). I picked him up after Christmas at Pier 1. He's brown, and wood, and filigree-d. I'm sure they have another wonderful reindeer waiting for me there...but I am staying away until next week!


My sheet music wreath has never moved from it's original spot. It grew on me there. It gets dressed up with a German-glass-glitter "Noel" banner. The letters are just hot-glued to twine, and the twine is tucked in between the cones (nothing permanent).


I love the whole look. Each shelf gets a little dressing as well--a glass pine tree here, a quartet of penguins there. Maybe even a red cardinal or two.


Next up...a true "family" tree!

In hopes of St. Nicholas

I don't have a fireplace...so I don't have a mantle to decorate.

Yes, it's very, very sad!

Luckily, however, I do have a gorgeous buffet that I bought of off KSL.com for $80 a year ago (and I was in Montana at the time, so I made my sister drop everything and go get it for me!).

In my house, it substitutes as a mantle to decorate! So here it is...my lovely buffet.


Usually I save my favorite things for last, but this time I'm going to show them first! And my favorites are...the stockings!

When my first baby was born, my craftiness came out in counted-cross stitch (look here for two big Santa pictures I made for my mother). I found a darling stocking kit, and I made it up for her first Christmas. Of course, then I could do no less for the subsequent children!


I eventually had to resort to eBay to buy more stocking kits. I wanted them all to be the same size, you see...and face the same direction.


Some stockings had to "wait their turn" until I was expecting a baby of the appropriate gender! But it all worked out perfectly in the end.



There are hours and hours of work in these stockings. I have told my children that they don't really belong to them...they are mine for always! They are far and away my favorite handmade Christmas decoration.

I also made a custom board to hang and display all the stockings. "In Hopes of St. Nicholas" is a line from "'Twas the Night Before Christmas," and I used six different knobs as the stocking hangers. I love to bring it out every year!


On my buffet sits a little ceramic tree that has been a part of my Christmases for about as long as I can remember. It was made by a sweet neighbor who lived across the street from us, and my mother used to display it on her sideboard (shown here), opposite of one my grandmother made. Alas, my mother's collection of Christmas decorations has outstripped her storage capacity, so last year this little tree came home with ME! It may not be hip, or chic, or Pottery Barn...but it's home.


In keeping with all things glass and sparkly, next I have these pretty hand-made-in-Montana glass dishes (and I promise the color is much prettier in person), which hold ornaments and jingle bells for now, but Christmas candy when I get around to making some... (same for the glass boxes)



And last the candle holders, which repeat the bright green and red and hold glitter-covered candles!


Who needs a mantle anyway??