Onestitchshort

Okay, so I haven’t actually used this yet, but I came up with a plan for menu planning (heh) that I thought I’d share in case it helps someone else out.  I have recently discovered Evernote (thanks to Mary-Heather) and have been using it for recipes and shopping lists.  It was so handy over the holidays because it syncs to my phone and my iPad so I could always have the recipes I needed handy depending on which device I could find at the moment.  I’ve been reading about people making menu planning binders and such, but that seemed like a lot of work to me, so this is my version of a menu planning binder.

Step One – Gather Recipes

I get most of my recipes online, so I’m clipping all of my commonly used and some newly discovered recipes into Evernote.  I’ve set up a few categories for the recipes.  When I use the little elephant clipper button that is loaded into my browser, I find it easier with many recipes to highlight them first.  Then, I don’t get all of the commentary, I just get the ingredients and instructions.  Also, If you drag and drop two Evernote notebooks together, it will put them under the same heading that you can rename (I renamed mine menu planning) making it very easy to find everything you need.

Beside each menu item, I put the points amount as I’ll be doing Weight Watchers in January (along with the rest of the world with new years resolutions to eat better) so that’s what the numbers there represent.  You can see I added in a couple of leftovers days and also put the slow cooking day on the night C1 has swim lessons as I know I won’t have time to cook that evening.

I’ll keep you posted on how this goes for me.  Let me know if you try something like this and have any tips as I’m just figuring this out as I go along. 

After coming back from Thanksgiving and the Arkansas Fiber Extravaganza (which I’ll blog on the Ravelry blog this week), I was greeted by a note from C1′s teacher written prior to Thanksgiving which we obviously did not see.  She asked me if I could make a Santa suit.  I responded by asking her for who and how complex because, really, my sewing skills are just intermediate at this point.  She told me it was for C1 to wear for the holiday program.

I asked C1 about this and he said that they were singing “Here Comes Santa Claus” and he’d get to be Santa while his classmates were the reindeer.  That sounded entirely too cute and he was very excited about the whole process of making a suit so I had to do it.

For the jacket and pants I used the pajama pattern from Sewing for Boys as a base and went from there.  We picked out a red corduroy fabric and some white fluff and off I went.  I closed the front of the jacket with large hook and eye closures.  He wore his cowboy boots to complete the look.

He got a little shy during the performance.  When they gave him the microphone to say “ho ho ho” he froze, though he had been running around the house saying it all week.  But, overall, he did a great job and he looked pretty darn cute, too.

When I was pregnant with Cameron, I made him a blanket.  He has since used it at home, at school and everywhere in between.  He loves it and four years later, he still uses it.  So, I decided it was worth making one for C2 when I was pregnant with him.  My big criteria, no pieces to sew together!  At Stitches West in February, I met the designer of this blanket and saw one of the versions she did of it for her kiddo.  I fell in love and immediately began purchasing yarn to make a version of my own.  I knew I wanted it bright and with the help of my yarn purchasing gurus, Jess & Mary-Heather, I picked out the colors from Miss Babs and Alpenglow.  When choosing how to lay them out, I realized I had the whole rainbow represented, so I did the color progression in rainbow order.

I brought the blanket with me to take a few pictures of it with Carson when Shauna did his newborn pictures.  As it turns out, we did all of them with it and I love them.  Two little things that I had a big part in making in one photo.  I hope he will cherish this blanket and use it as much as his big brother does his.

You can see another picture from our photo shoot on Shauna’s blog.  She’s amazingly talented and I’m so grateful to have her as a friend and to have her capture our family every year as the boys grow.