Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too....

Hello There!
I hope everyone had a good weekend. I had a rather lazy one, to tell the truth. I knitted a lot and watched lots of Psych... it was very nice. :) So, last week's project was to write a poem every day.... and.... I only wrote two. I KNOW I'M A TERRIBLE PERSON! But I'm also a terrible poet. You have no idea. So, instead of sharing my (terrible) poems with you, I will share with you one of my favorite Shel Silverstein poems. Drumroll please..............


(ahem)
Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me Too

Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me too
Went for a ride in a flying shoe.
"Hooray!"
"What fun!"
"It's time we flew!"
Said Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me too.

Ickle was captain, and Pickle was crew,
And Tickle served coffee and mulligan stew
As higher
And higher
And higher they flew,
Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me too.

Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me too,
Over the sun and beyond the blue.
"Hold on!"
"Stay in!"
"I hope we do!"
Cried Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me too.

Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me too
Never returned to the world they knew,
And nobody
Knows what's
Happened to
Dear Ickle Me, Pickle Me, Tickle Me too.

- Shel Silverstein

Isn't that a great poem? Sooooooo much better than I ever could have come up with. That is why I have no desire to be a poet when I grow up. Anyway, my poems aren't funny. So there you have it! A fantastical poem not written by me. :)

Now, my project this week is: knit a rainbow dishcloth (R, O, Y, G, B, P). I have knitted lots of dishcloths, but I've never done a rainbow one, and I look forward to it. I will definitely post pictures of it when it's finished!

Happy Poems!

Maddy


P.S.
If I were to do a tutorial on this blog, would you rather it be 1. How to make quick bread (a FANTASTIC recipe!) or, 2. How to crochet a flower dishcloth (like the one I made last week with my lighthouse one). Please comment and tell me, because I would love to do a tutorial :)

I ♥ Knitting, Friends, and Cooking

So, it's the end of the first week of my big project. Actually, it's Monday, so I'm a day late. :/ Sorry about that.... Sunday was a nice little lazy day. Anyway, last week's project was: Try a new knitting or crochet pattern. I tried two new dishcloth patterns, one knitted and one crocheted. Here is how they turned out!

This is the one I knitted. It has a lighthouse pattern on it and it turned out even better than I thought it would! I was very happy about that. :) I gave it to my mom, since she likes the knitted dishcloths better than the ones from the store.

This one I crocheted from a little pattern booklet that I got with some Sugar n' Cream yarn. It's such a cute pattern, and very easy. :)

Didn't they turn out well? I was quite happy.

Now, my project for this week is........ Write a poem every day for the week! Isn't that fun? I like poems. In fact, I wrote a poem quite a while ago that I will share with you:

If I could fill my house with books,
You'd never see the door.
And you wouldn't see the ceiling either,
Nor even see the floor.

How do you like it? Hehehe do you get the feeling that I sort of like books? ;) Anyway, at the end of the week I will share all of my poems with you.

Over the weekend I went to my wonderful friend Kenzie's house, where we played Super Monkey Ball, ping pong, took pictures, talked, and made dinner! Now, you may be thinking, "Is this the same friend she cooked with in the other blog post?", and the answer would be yes! Although, sadly, this time Cam wasn't there. Oh yeah, if you are confused by mentions of my friends, there are only two of them, so I'm sure you will get their names down. :) We made a yummy dinner of spaghetti, caesar salad, pork chops, and (or course!) homemade bread. I had a great time.

Before we cooked dinner, though, we went outside and had a little photoshoot. It was very fun! It was surprisingly nice outside, about 40 (okay, it was nice weather for MT), but by the time we were done, we could hardly feel our fingers. :) Here are a couple of my favorite pictures of Kenzie from our photoshoot...

There is another one that I really like, but it is sideways when I try to put it on Blogger.... Oh well. You can take my word for it. :)

Well, I had a wonderful time. I am blessed with the greatest friends! Maybe in my next post I will do a recipe or something.... that sounds yummy! If I did a dessert then I would even have an excuse to make one. ;) In the meantime.....

Happy January!

Maddy

Hello there!!!

I hope everyone has had a great holiday. We have done so much that I hope I remember everything! Well, I'll start with Christmas, I suppose. :) My friends and I like to see each other open our presents (from one another), so we got together at my house and had a tiny Christmas party. We had dinner, opened presents, danced, spilled water ALL over (on accident), and of course, played Monopoly until 1:30 in the morning. It was craaaaazy. But definitely worth it, because I have the best two friends ever :)

Of course, that party wasn't actually on Christmas. For Christmas we drove all the long way to Seattle to stay with my Uncle Tom! It was so fun, I really love Seattle. We walked a verrrrrry long way, but it's so worth it when you get a perfect cappuccino or a delicious pastry to walk around with. It was a very relaxed, quiet holiday, and I loved it. :) Kyra also had the opportunity to take some really cool pictures of some other place than Bozeman, and they turned out very well.

It was just a very great trip! :)

After we got back, I stayed home for just one day and then left to stay with my friend and her family at a house in the mountains for New Years. I had a wonderful time with my friend, and I even got to learn how to play a new board game! I really like to play board games :). But the best part of the trip by far, is the sledding! This isn't just normal sledding, where you go on a hill with a little, gentle slope. Ohhhh no. This sledding is (as Cam says) black diamond sledding. It is the best. We even have to hike to get to one of the hills, which is really tiring when you're hiking through the snow dragging a sled. All of the hills get (at one point) steep enough for you to have to drag your feet to gain some control of where you go. It's so fun! Truly, though, I can't describe it. The house we stayed at is near Big Sky, so we got to watch the amazing New Year's fireworks from the village. It was a great holiday!

Now, lots of other things have happened, and one of those things is very large. My brother got a call from my Uncle Mike, offering him a job and a place to live down in Texas. And Shelby accepted! I'm very excited for him, but I'm going to miss him sooooo much. He leaves in just a couple of weeks. I'm so lucky to have such a wonderful brother, and now he can go have a job he likes and he can go dirtbiking all year round!

Now, I have another little(ish) project. It's sort of my New Years resolution... Every week, for the year of 2012, I am going to choose a project off of a list that I made! 52 projects in all, and for the first week I chose this one: Try a new knitting or crochet pattern. I know, I know, not a very big project to start with, but I like trying new patterns. :) So every week I'm going to write in a little journal what my project is and how it turned out. I will be sure to take lots of pictures and to do a blog post every week!!! I'm very excited!!!!

I hope everyone had as good of a holiday as I did!

Happy 2012!

Maddy

Art Class at the Emerson

Every Wednesday I go to art class with my wonderful friend Cam. Sometimes we just do a little project for fun and sometimes we learn lots of things in one lesson. I love my teacher, Loretta Domasewski, and I definitely recommend her as a teacher. I have had lots of weeks of classes by now, and I thought I'd show you the art I have done so far.

This one is a winter-y one. We drew wreath things in oil pastel.

A bowl of fruit, done in charcoal.

Loretta taught us to draw spheres....

We did frog collages, we painted the background then drew the frog. Mine is slightly ironic because my frog is a tree frog and it's on the ground. :)

I have to say, this is one of my favorites so far. It's actually my latest one and I had fun doing it. :)

This one is also one of my favorites, done in watercolor pencils, which are one of my favorite mediums.

For those of you who have been to the Museum of the Rockies, you might recognize that this is Big Mike, the giant T-Rex statue outside of the museum. We went there to draw him and learn how to do figures.

This one we did for Mother's Day. Everyone's painting was different.

This one is a fun collage that we did in watercolor and oil pastels for Thanksgiving.

Once again, we went to the Museum of the Rockies when they had a frog exhibit there. We all spread out and drew frogs. The one I chose to draw was a tomato frog.

I drew both of these at one class. The second one was more of a practice to get used to the charcoals that we were using, and the top one I went outside to draw. Everyone in the class chose a different tree to draw.

This is from the class when we learned to draw wooden figures, and it turns out, they are one of my favorite things to draw! I love how many cool poses you can draw them in. :)

In this project we drew on plastic with sharpie over a picture, then we freehanded the same picture with white on black paper.

I always have lots of fun at class and I have such a good time doing what I love. :)

Happy December!

Maddy

Believe me when I say I've wanted to do a blog post since the first day of September. For some reason, I just don't know what to say sometimes :) Oh well, now I'm doing a post, so who cares? Besides, I'm really good at procrastinating :) Let's see... what has happened in my blogging absence? Well, I visited my wonderful family in Nebraska, baked LOTS of cookies, re-read the whole Harry Potter series, hung out with my amazing friend, sewed a pear shaped purse (it is as adorable as it sounds!), witnessed the year's first snow (which made me quite happy), and did lots of other everyday things.

I had the best time in Nebraska, where I got to be with my (wonderful) aunt Patti and uncle Brian, and my fun cousins :) I did lots of crafting and cookie decorating with my aunt Patti, and pretty much just had a great time.

Ready to decorate cookies :)

This isn't even NEARLY all the cookies we decorated! I had lots of fun.

Now onto a recent project! My mom found an old cabinet door that she painted light blue and sanded slightly, then my dad glued cork into it, and this is how it turned out!

I lost no time in pinning lots of memories and pictures onto it :) I really love how it turned out! (Thanks, mom!)

The pear shaped purse that I made actually came in a kit that I won from a blog called Craft Passion. I love how it turned out, and one of the fabrics it is made of is the blogger's own design! It is adorable, and I plan on making more someday.

The only problem is, I don't know what to carry in it :)

Sadly, the year's first snow is melting, but I have NO doubts it will come back soon :) Luckily, Kyra got some really awesome snowy pictures! They are just too good to not share :)

So there you have it! A few of the things from my everyday life; crafts, winter, and family.... though, admittedly, going to Nebraska isn't part of my everyday life :)

Happy November!

Maddy

A new day, a new project...

I love to embroider. It is one of my favorite things to do, and it is so versatile. As you saw in my last post, I like to embroider the pincushions I make. I also happen to like embroidering bookmarks, they turn out very cute :) But I really do like embroidering adorable designs! They make it more fun, and it's more exciting to see how your project will turn out.... Anyway, today I'm starting a new embroidery project, and I just wanted to share it with you :) Here it is:

Isn't that a cute pattern? Sadly, I didn't come up with that pattern myself. But I still love it :) Anyway, that is the pattern I'm going to embroider! Here are the rest of my supplies:

I've already got my pattern copied onto the fabric, and we just got the lovely colors needed for the pattern :) Here are the embroidery floss colors if you want to get them:

They are DMC colors 3862, 928, 166, 349, and 352.

I'll keep you posted on the project as it goes along! I'm excited to see how it turns out...

Until then,

Happy stitching and crafting!

Maddy

Pincushions... How Cute Thou Art...

So, I am a very inconsistent blogger. I apologize for that. It doesn't mean I haven't done any crafting though.... because I have. Quite a lot of crafting, actually. So, in my blogging absence, these are some of the many things I have created......

You might be wondering what these are.... Or maybe not, because I already told you what they are in the title of this post. But, yes, these are PINCUSHIONS!!!!!! I have an awesome book called Doodle Stitching, and it came with a pattern to make a pincushion that looked like a tree stump. I LOVE that pattern. The first one I made I actually gave to my good friend, Cam, because she likes to sew, and if I have a reason to give gifts, I will. (Seriously, though, I already have a list of things I plan to give people for Christmas...)

Anyway, so the tree stump pincushion is made from a pattern. The heart pincushion I made up on my own. I was worried it wouldn't turn out, because hearts are very tricky to work with, but it did! Although it turned out fatter than I expected it to :) And last, but DEFINITELY not least, my favorite (and latest) pincushion!!! The rainbow pincushion!!!!!!!!!!!!! Can you tell that I love it? I made it without a pattern and just went crazy-embroidery-lady....

So here's the tree stump one..... For the one I gave my friend, I made some cute leaf pins to go with her pincushion; made out of a pin, air dry clay, and some paint.... They turned out quite well.

And, of course, this is the heart pincushion :) The stitch on the side is called a threaded running stitch, and I love how it turned out. The stitch on the top is called a scallop stitch, and it was my first time stacking it instead of using it as a border or something....

DON'T YOU LOVE IT?????????? I do! It's my fave. I used the backstitch and the scallop stitch on the top, for the rainbow, and french knots on the side of the pincushion.... I am just so happy with how it turned out :)

So there you have it. Proof that when I do not do a blog post, I am not just sitting and reading all the time. Actually, that would be hard to do, since I am required to do schoolwork in the mornings. But, sometimes I think it is good for you to just sit with a cozy blanket and read a book and drink hot tea.... Or, if you're me, think of Christmas gifts :)

Thank you for being patient!

Happy Crafting and Tea Drinking :)

Maddy