Frost Fields comments: 35

Oh, hello! How are you? I've been doing almost nothing but making dolls, doll dresses, doll stockings, doll capes, doll hair, doll sweaters, doll blouses, doll skirts, doll collars, and doll hats, and then remaking them trying to get them how I want them. It is so much fun. I have so many ideas. I'm thinking about all the details quite a lot. I dream about them at night and wake up with potential solutions in the morning. Then I try to work them out that night. Yesterday we forgot Amelia's ballet slippers and had to borrow some from the ballet mistress. She asked me what size slippers Amelia wore. I told her I wasn't sure, but said I knew what size my doll's feet were (16 sts around on size US5's in sport weight yarn). Everyone in the foyer laughed nervously. The teacher turned and asked Amelia. Amelia said she was size 11. I knew that!!! Sheepish.

Did you have a nice Thanksgiving weekend here in the U.S.? We sure did. My family came and squeezed around our table and it was great. My sister Susie stayed on afterwards and made me laugh for hours with her work stories. Me, in nightgown, falling asleep: "Good lord, this story is taking forever!" Her: "Dude, I told you, I work 12-hour shifts! A lot of stuff happens!!!" On Friday I hung my two new prints that I got for my birthday last year from the English artist Jo Grundy. I had wanted these forever and I am so glad that I got them (for Andy to give to me [wink]). They inspired my mantel decoration this year, which is a frosty-winter-fields theme. Andy worked on Saturday and Amelia and I went out to Craft Warehouse and got some new little things: the lighted willow garland and a couple of little resin birds and her absolute favorite, the snowy owl. Believe it or not, I had almost everything else already, and a lot of it came from Craft Warehouse (a local indie craft store here in the Portland area) over the past few years. The little wooden plinths and the woolly trees and the metal houses (not sure where those were from, actually) and the cottonwood wreath I already had. Andy's grandfather carved the tall Santa many years ago. We bought a spray of fake frosted fern leaves and cut them off and scattered them around, along with a couple of little bottlebrush trees and juniper sprigs. The teapot was from Goodwill for $3. The snowflake garland I've had for years and years, and the stockings are from Etsy. We couldn't find Amelia's bunny stocking but I think it's in with the Christmas ornaments; we're getting our tree this weekend and I'm sure we'll find it when we open those boxes. Speaking of, Andy brought up everything seasonally related from the basement — Christmas stuff, other fake-foliage stuff for spring and fall that makes Andy insane, wreathes and such. We went through it all on Sunday and that was sort of an exhausting exercise. At some point while Andy was still cleaning I tried to pluck Amelia from the fray and took a bath while she played on the side of the tub. This is one of our favorite winter activities. I love winter baths and I never cease to give thanks for them, and for hot water. Afterwards, when everything in the living room was clean and pretty, Andy put on carols and made us some hot chocolate and it felt like the perfect start to this lovely (my favorite) season. Winter is here. I wish you peace and warmth and kind shelter and love in the days ahead. XOX

Wild Week comments: 62

Good morning, my friends. Hello, hello. I hope you are well! We've been well and buuuusy! Which I like, but now I'm tired. I didn't even take any pictures this week. But we have all of the First Snow pre-orders out and on their ways to you. The downloadable PDF-only version of the design is now available here. (And yes, the kit is still available, no problem — it is here.) I hope you like this pattern and kit. I wound up doing all of the shipping myself — Stacey was in Japan and is now back but will be taking more classes in January and won't have time to work with me anymore (tears). Andy and I wound up doing everything on this kit together. He pulled all the floss and cut all the fabric. I stuffed all the kits and did the shipping. But it was quite an excellent experience for me to do all of the shipping myself again. It's been a long time since I've done it. I found it very poignant, and got a little bit emotional. I love seeing everyone's names, and your addresses, and your streets and towns and cities and countries. I recognized sooooo many names from over so many years of doing this. It made me think of all the years, and all of our conversations, and all of your comments and your sweet notes and just . . . I don't know. How much I love all of this and how lucky I am to do it and how, when I was a little girl I think I actually always wanted to do this. My parents were into mail order and they had a few little businesses throughout the years. I had my first mail order business when I was thirteen. It was called Autumnbrook Farm and I made model-horse blankets and saddle pads and little stuff like that. I made enough money to buy a pair of really pretty dark-brown suede chaps at Hinsdale Tack Shop and I wanted to write a tearful letter of gratitude to the readers of Just About Horses magazine (where I advertised), thanking them for their orders of tiny horse halters and for making my greatest dream (chaps) come true. I did love those chaps so much. I guess I thought better of it then and did not submit that particular letter to the editor, but I feel the same surge of emotion every time I get orders and every time I ship. Thank you. You'll notice that my handwriting on your postcards looks deranged. Sorry about that. I don't really write by hand anymore ever. Do you? Compared to how much you used to? It's so weird! I was speed-writing, admittedly. But I can usually write much more nicely, FYI.

Anyway, so, thank you for everything you do here and for all of your kindness and support. I means more to me than I regularly say. XOXOXOXO

I've spent the last few days working on a new doll design based on my animal patterns. She will have the same body shape and size and will be able to wear all of the same clothes. The idea for her sort of exploded out of me the minute I was finished shipping everything. I actually do get a lot of ideas in the shower. It's really cliched but true. It's the only time I'm just sitting there not doing anything else at all. I think I had thought about doing a girl doll for a long time but I didn't really know it. I started cutting and sewing in every little spare minute, littering the living room with needles and felt and floss and yarn in a way that I haven't done in a while. My first animal patterns came out maybe in . . . 2013? It's been a few years. Maybe it was 2014. People ask me about whether we'll make more of those kits (there are five animals total). And no, we won't. There will now be these new doll kits sometime this spring, though. I've been thinking relentlessly of all the ways to do it. Andy cracks up when I have the making-fever. I read him the list of all of the clothes I had planned for the doll: new blouse, new skirt, and cable sweater, cardigan sweater, beret, flounce-collar blouse, cape, cable cowl, knitted skirt, bloomers, pixie bonnet, detachable collar, lace legwarmers. Your basic insanity. He gets me. Right now the doll prototype looks mildly feral. This is possibly no coincidence. I've turned into a wild animal.

I made a pattern for a Santa Lucia (which is December 13) crown with hellebore flowers, mistletoe, and holly for you. My model was freezing when I took her picture in her nightgown on top of Mt. Tabor on the only not-raining (though totally freezing) day we had a couple of weeks ago. She is part Viking-descendant but she doesn't like the cold. I love her.

The pattern is free and you can download it here: A Flow'ret Bright Winter Crown Sewing Pattern. The candles are removable, so you could take them out and just wear the crown. It's adjustable in the back (elastic) so you can make it any size you want. I hope you like it.

It's Thanksgiving week here in the U.S. We're having Thanksgiving here at our house and I expect we'll get our Christmas tree this weekend, and maybe start decorating. We usually do, anyway. I'll be back to show you next week. Until then, I wish you all a wonderful, wonderful week of peace and joy and slowing as we enter the holiday season. I'm very grateful for all of the love and kindness and deep thoughts and un-deep thoughts and humor and joy you share with me constantly. It helps me understand the world and understand myself so much better than I would otherwise. You all bring light to our days here and for that I sincerely thank you. Thank you. XOXOXO

Full Swing comments: 38

We're in it, here: full fall swing. Halloween came and went in a frenzy of costume-sewing/meowing/negotiating for candy. Kids are so obsessed with candy!!! Amelia says she wants one piece of candy after dinner after she accomplishes her "chores." The things she considers her "chores" include: setting up the pillows on the couch in a nice way and propping up various stuffed animals at charming angles to greet me when I come back downstairs after putting her to bed; putting her eighteen pairs of shoes and boots back in her baskets instead of leaving them in the middle of the floor; hanging up her coat instead of dropping it in the middle of the floor; putting away her scarf and hat instead of dropping them in the middle of the floor; climbing on all manner of furniture to reach the wood blinds to pull them down and close them before she goes up to bed; remembering to wash her hands without being told after going to the bathroom. Hrmmmmmmm. . . . Good deal for her, eh? These are all the things she is supposed to do anyway. . . . Maybe it's really a good deal for me. Now she does all of them in lightning speed while singing the clean-up song and then comes skidding to a halt in front of me, smiling and holding her cupped hands out to receive her treat. I don't bribe with sugar under normal circumstances, but hellity hell it really works! Good thing she only has three pieces of candy left. This is too easy. . . .

THANK YOU for the discussion on working from home vs. renting a remote space. That was really fascinating and I truly appreciate so many of you taking the time to share your experience and thoughts with me. I really needed to hear all of that and I am so appreciative of the perspectives. I would only be going to an off-property space during the time that Amelia is in school, and I would still probably keep my sewing stuff here, but honestly, I really am now thinking it's probably too complicated and too expensive to consider. I think I have fantasies of having a really cool, big, shared, white-washed space where other people would be hanging out doing creative things, and I could have room to store my stuff and still have it all within reach, and also not have it anywhere in the living space. Like, embroidery floss, for instance. When we work on kits, we have a palette of probably sixty? seventy? different colors that I routinely use in my designs. Each color has a big, fat 500g cone of floss. For kits, we break down the big cone by winding it onto several different smaller cones, depending on how many strands of that color you need in a kit. So in First Snow, for instance, we have over thirty colors and over fifty separate lengths of floss. Each length needs its own cone since we pull all the floss at the same time. So that's a lot of cones sitting in the office over the weeks that we are working on this. It's just not realistic to be schlepping them up and down from the basement every day. Felt and fabric, too — they take up a lot of space. Welllllll, you get it. But honestly, I took every single comment truly to heart and you gave me so much to think about. And I think the obvious conclusion Andy and I came to was that we need to clean out the basement thoroughly, and think of more creative storage solutions right here on our property. We have a pretty small basement, as half of the house only has a crawl space underneath it. We do have attic storage, although it's truly just storage, not standing room, and you have to use a ladder to get up into it through the ceiling in the hallway. But these are all just details I need to think through more thoroughly, and I think I can do that, especially when I have more time to think. As I said, I definitely have time to decide, as we wouldn't be doing anything (except reorganizing here) until the year after next. But just reading through everything you wrote gave me a more hefty appreciation for all of the great things about working from home, and that was really helpful, so thank you.

It's about the most blustery, Winnie-the-Poohish day you could imagine here today. The trees are whipping around outside my rain-spattered window, and the wind is howling. I keep hearing things thwack against the house and the porch. Tonight is our school lantern walk, and I don't know how those little lanterns are going to stay lit in this gale. I've been cooking and baking lately. I made a frittata like Megan's with roasted delicata squash, sauteed mushrooms, fresh spinach, and chevre, and it was delicious. I made the NYT's curried cauliflower soup and it was really nice, especially with the famous but no-less-delicious-for-that Dutch oven no-knead bread. I did Mark Bittman's speedy version as well as the long version, and quite honestly, there was no appreciable difference that I could taste or tell, so it's Version Speedy for us from now on, and bread in 4.5 hours. That bread is so good. I mean, what in the world? How is it even possible to get something that tastes like this out of a regular kitchen, with so little effort? I can't even deal with it. I don't even like bread that much (unless it's really, really good) but that thing is amazing. I've made it probably ten times over the past few years and it works every time. I also made Mark Bittman's Everyday Pancakes and those were very good. I've totally been getting my money's worth out of my New York Times Cooking subscription and highly recommend it. Everything I've made from it has been great. I love surfing it on my iPad for relaxation. The photos are beautiful. I don't know. I needed some cooking inspiration, and this has been good for me. I seem to need a lot of hand-holding in the kitchen. I love to cook but even after all of these years of cooking I absolutely need recipes. I cannot think of a single thing that I know how to cook by heart. Not one single thing! I'm also kind of a picky eater, so, in all honesty, a lot of cookbooks don't really work that well for me as anything other than inspiration or eye candy, because I find that I might make one thing out of the whole book. Maybe two. I keep the books because they're beautiful. But they aren't that practical for the way I cook. I totally cherry pick, and I like the "search" function. Anyway, this isn't an ad — I mean, I guess it is, but it's unintentional — I have just been happy with that subscription and it's getting me out of my cooking shell, or rather my non-cooking shell, and Andy and I are both happy about that. Maybe it's also just the season of cooking for me. I love fall and winter food so much more than summer.

I've also been knitting hats and gloves and cowls. I don't have any photos of any of them, apparently, but I will take some. I'm using this pattern and have bought lots of colors of Worsted Twist yarn in many of the same colors they show to make us a bunch of stuff that we need for cold weather, and I'm really enjoying this kind of knitting — lots of stockinette, lots of knitting in the round, nothing very complicated, small things that go quickly and feel soft and warm and utterly practical. I seem to need a lot of direction lately. It's kind of a wonderful relief, I have to say.