Wishing you all wonderful holidays!

LOVE AND LIGHT FROM OUR FAMILY TO YOURS!

We woke to find the Child of Light on the Advent table with an angel overhead.

The stable I made for Lo's Buntspechte animals. Huz helped quite a bit in the building-we cranked most of it out on Christmas eve. Thanks hunny!!!!!

Dea with the canvas lightscape that I made her

I edited and converted to b&W these pictures that Dea took on her trip to Europe. Printed them on canvas paper and mounted them on artist canvases.

Huz made Lo that great painting board for watercolors.

Dea made Lo this nice tray

Soldiers remembered and a fabulous Memorial Day was had by all!

The weather is still most GLORIOUS!!!! Our Memorial Day was so full and spent reveling in the warmth and sunshine. This family is SO blessed to have each other and so fortunate to be living together embraced in this incredible place.

We chopped and stacked some fresh cut wood given to us by friends, planted strawberries and "Croc pots", Huz and I went for a 1 1/2 hr run on the South Fork trail-phenomenal, and I finished my new additions to the polar bear family. Dea and her best friend, K, with Lo in tow, decided to capitalize on the heavy holiday traffic at the trail head and ran a lemonade/baked goods stand. Our rockin' dinner consisted of skirt steak and veggies on the grill. Root beer floats for dessert-hey, we earned it! And after Lo went to bed, Boyz in the Hood.

Someone didn't like her seating arrangement!

But all was well after a root beer float

To our soldiers past and present, THANK YOU for your bravery and service....

Save the TOYS!!!!!!!

CPSIA Grinches are trying to OUTLAW handmade toys and goods for children!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HELP!!!!!! SANTA?!?!?!?!

The issue:

In 2007, large toy manufacturers who outsource their production to China and other developing countries violated the public's trust. They were selling toys with dangerously high lead content, toys with unsafe small part, toys with improperly secured and easily swallowed small magnets, and toys made from chemicals that made kids sick. Almost every problem toy in 2007 was made in China.
The United States Congress rightly recognized that the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) lacked the authority and staffing to prevent dangerous toys from being imported into the US. So, they passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA) in August, 2008. Among other things, the CPSIA bans lead and phthalates in toys, mandates third-party testing and certification for all toys and requires toy makers to permanently label each toy with a date and batch number.
All of these changes will be fairly easy for large, multinational toy manufacturers to comply with. Large manufacturers who make thousands of units of each toy have very little incremental cost to pay for testing and update their molds to include batch labels.
For small American, Canadian, and European toymakers and manufacturers of children's products, however, the costs of mandatory testing will likely drive them out of business:

~A toymaker, for example, who makes wooden cars in his garage in Maine to supplement his income cannot afford the $4,000 fee per toy that testing labs are charging to assure compliance with the CPSIA

~A work at home mom in Minnesota who makes cloth diapers to sell online must choose either to violate the law or cease operations.

~A small toy retailer in Vermont who imports wooden toys from Europe, which has long had stringent toy safety standards, must now pay for testing on every toy they import.

~And even the handful of larger toy makers who still employ workers in the United States face increased costs to comply with the CPSIA, even though American-made toys had nothing to do with the toy safety problems of 2007.

The CPSIA simply forgot to exclude the class of children's goods that have earned and kept the public's trust: Toys, clothes, and accessories made in the US, Canada, and Europe. The result, unless the law is modified, is that handmade children's products will no longer be legal in the US.If this law had been applied to the food industry, every farmers market in the country would be forced to close while Kraft and Dole prospered.


How You can Help:Please write to your United States Congress Person and Senator to request changes in the CPSIA to save handmade toys and children's products. Use our sample letter or write your own. You can find your Congress Person here and Senator here.

~from HANDMADETOYALLIANCE.ORG

Dollhouse-made by RUNNINL8

Knitted food-made by WALDORF MAMA(her photo)

Fabulous Wood Castle- made by HEARTWOODARTS.COM

SILKIES!!!!! I LOVE 'em!

Number one in my Top 3 Best Toys for kids? Besides a box and sticks? SILKIES! A staple of Waldorf play, these simple squares of colored silk are the most versatile, open ended, creativity-sparking toys on this green earth! Silk is such a dreamy floaty fabric so conducive to the delicate state of young children who are still hovering in the spiritual. As ethereal as it looks, silk is quite a strong material and lends itself so well to active use. The endless possibilities for transforming silkies with ones imagination include: a cape, a baby blanket, a curtain for a puppet show, draped wings or skirt, baby sling, a tent for small dolls, and dress-ups. You can use them with play stands or decorate your nature table with the coming season's hues reflecting the magical changes to nature. Placing rosie colored silkies over a baby's bassinet or draping them across their window has a soothing effect. Then you have Lo's take on silkies: She's used them as clothes for her stuffed animals, dancing, hammocks for dolls, "slidey-shoes"(tie them on your feet and slide around the floor!), gift wrap, food-green for salad and brown for porridge, lakes and meadows for her castles, and even fire for campfires and as the fire for her dragon(see Random pic post!) The possibilities of silkies are only limited by the imagination!

One of the cleverest ideas that Lo has had with her silkies was to make a basic doll with a hooded cape over it's head! She figured out that she could ball up a couple of silks in the middle of a third as a head and secure it with one of her hair ties. She then placed another silky around the doll's head and secured it with another tie in the same spot.

(Knot the corners to make hands and feet!)

She had a bunch going at a time-they were all over the house! This doll idea turned out to be a great simple gift idea for Lo's friend. I ordered 4 white silks from Dharma Trading. Lo and I then dyed 1 of them pink using Kool-Aid. Lo made the doll and used the pink silk as the hooded cape. We left the other silks white so that Lo's friend could dye them if she wanted to! I was SO surprised and touched by how much this little girl loved her silkie doll! One of the most popular gifts we have given and just so easy to make!

Another great place to buy play silks is A Toy Garden. Their silks are made of high quality 8mm Habotai silk, are home-dyed in the US. And I've found they are much sturdier and longer lasting than Sarah's Silks.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of joining some moms and teachers in silk dyeing over at our Waldorf school. It was tons of fun and quite EASY! All the materials were, again, ordered from Dharma Trading. I was so inspired and am thinking of investing in some bulk silk and natural dyes to make silkies for my future ETSY shop.

Hint, Hint, nudge, nudge...Silkies make ROCKIN,' simple, yet such versatile gifts for the Holidays.

For our silkie disaster, read HERE!

Whoops. I seem to have a habit of occasionally creating posts and then forgetting to publish them. This one was meant for Sunday. It was quite the productive day. It started off with this early morning shot of the first hint of the sunrise beyond the horizon just starting to touch the wispy clouds over Bear Pass. It came out orange-y in the picture but when I saw it out the window after going to the bathroom, it looked kind of blueish and I thought it might be the aurora. It was 5 degrees outside so I went back into my nice warm bed to spoon my toasty hunny. But then I thought,"Man. Am I gonna let this rare chance to photograph the aurora reaching horizontally across Orion slip by cuz I'm being a pussy and going back to bed?!?!"

Of course, as I stood outside the door neckid but for my robe and snow boots, I realized it was just clouds when the picture came up on the display. Back to bed with me-but it was worth the shot!

The rest of the day saw much activity with bread baking, dollhouse making, homebrew bottling("First Snow IPA"), pumpkin carving, pumpkin seed roasting(I made a KILLER batch! Hold me back!), and movie watching with skirt steak and potatah eating.

I'll post the results of our labors tomorrow.

SUNSHINE AND PRODUCTIVITY

Blue sky…not a cloud in it…slight wind still trying to tether us to winter. But the snow is gone. The green is bursting, and the sky is glorious. It was downright WARM when the breeze would subside. Warm sun on my skin in my tank top….then the breeze, and the fleece goes back on!
We just set up a blanket outside on the deck and got stuff done. Little things but lots of them. We made some pretty fairy jingles out of some wood letter “o”s that I got from the store a while back. I just sanded the edges till smooth so Lo would have a nice comfortable grip and then used a beeswax and lavender finish on them to bring out the grain and protect.

Man that stuff smells good. You can put it on your lips, too!
I ‘ve been thinking of different woodworking projects to try out and came up with a great template for an intarsia puzzle. Actually, my head has been just spinning the last couple of weeks with ideas for so many things. Toy making, kid clothes design, photography, garden art, painting, writing, and so on. My ADD brain just jumps from one thing to the next. Things are only half planned out and then I’m on to the next thing. At some point I come back to everything with the cycle staring again-all the while adding MORE ideas. Wheeeeeeeeeeee!! It can be an all consuming Bacchanalia, relentless and overwhelming. It can also be a fun, exciting, and very satisfying ride if I can just harness the thoughts and the time-keep everything “filed and organized” so that I don’t just shut down and do NOTHING…

Let’s see, the load of branches I hauled up our property from the neighbor a couple doors down.

They slashed a ton of their alder(grows like gangbusters up here-skinny and stunted) and twas mine for the taking! This pile will become:

a trellis for the “entrance” to the play garden, walking sticks, a “spirit stick” or two, and a few sets of tree blocks.

The greenhouse! We have plans for beatification. Huz and I mounted some chimes, I mounted Lo’s birdhouse as well, finally cleaned all the speckles of paint off the greenhouse door, planted some sugar snap peas to grow up the sides

and drew out an idea for the painting we’re going to paint on the door. I envision a stained glass look, colorful and transparent . The kids can go nuts with the trim if they like.

Ugh. As I sit here trying to think of what else I got done today…I can’t. I HATE that. I would have to wear a little pad and pen around my neck like a mute to document everything. Oh! I painted my toenails To Dive For Pink and had time to blog.

Then there’s Lo. Playin’ and doin’ life during all my inner mayhem. Here she is cuddling in the sun with her rock “baby”, Annie,-inspired by the story, Elizabetti’s Doll.

And later, her set up of little dolls feasting.

Off to the Huz with me. We need our “adult time” at the end of the day. Helps to turn down the volume in my brain.
Nighty night.