baby brother's ripple: dunzo

I spent some time in August finishing up this little ripple for my youngest sister's new baby boy! He's due THIS MONTH! In just a couple of weeks!!!

When I made baby #1's blanket a couple of years ago, I also included little fleece brown bear booties.

This time around I picked out some fox booties. Now, look... I know foxes are passe, like many other twee trends from ten-plus years ago. Like moustaches and portraits of animals in big Buddy Holly glasses. I'd say foxes had their day in 2010 or so. But that means they're gonna be back soon, right? I'll just claim that baby #2 was ahead of the fashion cycle!

Baby was originally due in early October, and that's one of the reasons I went with an autumnal (but not Halloween-y) sort of color scheme for his blankie. Sis is now being induced earlier than that -- enough that baby will be a Virgo and not a Libra! That's a whole other Zodiac sign!! But mid-September is basically still summer these days. Baked and bleached grasses. I think it still works as a late-summer kind of blanket.

When I was putting the border on this blanket, I had to refer back to my own blog post to see how in the heck I'd done the border on big brother's blanket. It's just treble crochet but I put two stitches in each row to bulk it up, which I didn't remember at all. It's times like these I'm grateful I took pictures and posted them somewhere easy-to-find.

I wish I had more fun projects to report or pictures to share of late. I really don't; I'm virtually crushed under the wheel of band stuff right now, pinned there. I tried to take last week off by not attending, and I was still doing so much work, despite attempting a break. It boggles the mind. How can I ever actually get my battery recharged? How can I ever have time for other hobbies? I'm burned out, and I feel like only getting in creative activities will make it feel any better. But I don't have the spoons.

For my own posterity, I will end this post with a little gratitude list.

STUFF THAT'S KEEPING ME GOING RIGHT NOW:

• baby updates from sister -- lots of scans and in-utero pictures coming in right now!
• discovering new-to-me Dolly Parton songs
• forcibly scraping out time to do a lo-lite cover
• Pokemon Sun with L
• saw a really super duper cute opossum in our backyard!

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stand stickers

It's burning hot out, y'all. Today it was 103 and yet my band still met up and played, but even I was flagging by 3 PM. Been sorta swamped by band junk lately...

The tiniest little thing I've been enjoying lately is populating my music stand with stickers. My bandmate brought us all stickers from Muscle Schoals (the "Muscle Schoals sound" is a thing!) and I said, "Oh, I'll put it on my music stand!" And since I slapped on that one, I've been slowly adding to the conglomeration, as I find worthy stickers either in my long-held stash or in stores.

I have a warm color scheme going -- although, composing this post just now and looking at my blog's colors, I went, "Hmm. Okay. I matched my music stand to my blog."

The "girly pop" sticker I found at Five Below (it was $2) but the others are just from my stash, such as the Pompompurin one. The triple flower one I bought from Etsy years back, but I tried to find the shop to link here, and it's closed down.

But speaking of Etsy, because I'm extra, and why not, I got some custom lo-lite stickers!!! ("lo-lite" being what I am calling my lofi bedroom covers project. I'm sure you remember!)

I got the stickers from HomeGiftsTX on Etsy. I just found them while doing a general search for vinyl stickers on Etsy, and the design immediately called out to me. I got 3-inch ones, which are a bit smaller than I expected. But I love 'em! Any bigger might have felt like a bumper sticker. The vintage style is super cute and vibey and I like the color variations offered.

I'm sure no one here is in need of a music stand review. However: The stand pictured is one I got off Amazon and I really like it. It's super sturdy. It has a little attachment you can use to make it into a table-top stand, which I've used a few times and have found to be handy. I actually use it as a camera tripod as well, because the small cameras I use to record band videos have magnets on the back, and they stick right to the stands and since the stands are sturdy, they make a good base.

OH! I also added stickers to my Omnichord's power adapters, of which I have three total, but I added stickers to the two that are 6-foot. (I use the 4-foot one less.) These make them very easy to tell apart from other adapters/power supplies. This is important because the Omnichord requires a negative polarity adapter. If you plug in the wrong kind you could just kill your Omnichord. So it's really important for me to be able to visually separate my particular adapter from other adapters that litter our band room floor.

What better than a sticker of Badtz-Maru slapping his own butt?

Anyway, this is suuuch a small thing. It feels very silly to blog about. I don't really even have proper blog tags for something like this. But I mostly just have small things keeping me going right now.

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My Favorite Things tea

Yesterday my mom, grandma, little sister, and I got together for a tea. We haven't really done this in a while, for a lot of reasons, but we used to it with some regularity! It's a phenomenon that predates my blog, even. I'm sure we've been doing it for at least twenty years at this point. (I think I have only posted pictures of a tea once and that was almost ten years ago.) It's really an excuse for my mom and grandma to set a pretty table, which they adore! And of course we get to have little treats!

Any excuse for a tea will do. It doesn't have to have a theme. But you bet we have had Valentine's teas and Halloween teas and have had some very specific themes, such as the old Disney cartoon, The Reluctant Dragon. Our theme for this tea was The Sound of Music, specifically the song "My Favorite Things."

I inivted myself to use two of my Blythes as a centerpiece! As you can see, Olive and Tiphanie are the "girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes," and they happen to have "snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes!" There are some flakes I punched out with one of those decorative paper punches that I stuck onto their faces and hair with small shreds of washi tape, and there are also tiny jewels I pressed on here and there, for additional effect! My mom made place cards that are "brown paper packages tied up with strings." And, I found some old fake roses that I've had for eons and stuck some of those itty bitty blingies to them, for "raindrops on roses."

This is the kind of theme we could have gone overboard with, trying to represent everything mentioned in the song. But we came up with the idea only a few days before the tea, so we just did what we had time to do!

My grandma hosted the tea in her tiny and very dark dining room, so mostly, my pictures didn't come out. I didn't take too many, either. I felt self-conscious making people move aside for me and stuff, and of course I had a heavy bias towards mostly just wanting to take pictures of my dolls, hahaha. I did not get any good pictures of the food; they just didn't turn out at all! The following couple of pictures are from my mom's phone:

The treats were pretty! There were petit fours from a bakery, tiny cinnamon rolls, cheese on wheat crackers, a few varities of tea sandwiches, scones (blueberry and cranberry orange), and fruit skewers. I don't drink tea so I had some cranberry juice, haha. And it was so hot that nobody wanted hot tea. Iced tea was served instead.

After the tea, we four ladies sat in the cool living room and had a family sing-along. So von Trapp. I know y'all are not surprised that we do this with regularity. While it does depend on who's present for the sing-along and who knows what songs, as to what gets sung, it's very often folk songs from the 60s ("Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and "Teach Your Children" and such) that older members of the family know, or other songs that at least a couple of us know and can sing through. And family songs, you know? For us, a family song would be "The Ugly Bug Ball" from Summer Magic. A beloved staple for us, but maybe not well-known to most.

You better believe we sang "Edelweiss," "My Favorite Things," and "Do-Re-Mi."

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