baby booties

I have a couple of friends who are having babies soon (actually, I have a lot of friends who have either just had a baby or will have one soon, but two of them are in my small group, and our small group is throwing us a joint shower next weekend).

One is having a girl, and the other a boy, so I thought it would be fun to make them some cute baby booties. So I found a couple of free patterns online (for mary janes and for sneakers) and made these. I made up the leaf embellishments for the mary janes, but otherwise just followed the patterns. They were both pretty quick to whip up since they're so small, so they were a fun project.

Chris wants me to make cowboy boots for Zeke, and I actually have a friend who has this pattern book with the cowboy boots pattern, so I will probably do that at some point, too. Man... never thought I'd be the "crocheting baby booties" kind of gal. How things change.

march finance update

So since I talked last month about how Chris and I were doing with being better stewards of our money, I thought I should keep it up and give a report on March. I won't be as long-winded, though.

Basically, we didn't manage to stay under budget, but we came really close. Chris had to get some cavities filled, so that was an unexpected expense, but the upside is that he walked in the door from his dentist appointment with both his bill in hand, and the mail - and in the mail was a check for freelance work I'd done the month before, for very close to the amount that the dentist bill came to. It was kind of depressing for me that I had done that extra work just to see the money flow right back out, but at least we had it! God is good. We went about $12 over our food budget, which isn't too bad considering we had people over to eat 5 or 6 times, including Pi Day, featuring fancy things like gluten-free pi(e)s and homemade frozen yogurt. And Chris had to go out of town for a weekend for a wedding, and we still only spent about $20 all month on eating out.

So there you have it.

glass mug cozy

Okay, this is actually a really long explanation for a pretty simple item. So our church offers free coffee and snacks in the mornings, right? Only a while back I decided to start bringing my own mug because I felt really wasteful using a paper cup each week, when I KNEW I was going to get coffee when I got there. Then when I was trying to get more calcium, I started bringing milk in my mug so that I was all prepared with my milk to add coffee to it. The cup holder in our car is really small though, so the only thing that fits in there are those glass POM tea jars, and they have a lid to go with them. The problem is that these POM glasses don't have a handle, so it was hard to hold once I put hot coffee in it. So one day Chris suggested a crochet a cozy for it so I didn't burn my hands, so one morning I finally grabbed some yarn on the way to church and made a cozy for it on the way there (our drive to church is 40 minutes long, so I was finishing it up just about the time we got there). I didn't get the handle on it for the first day, but after testing it out decided what I needed for a handle, and made that later in the week. I've been using it ever since, and I love it because it's super handy for my purposes.

I also kept getting lots of compliments on it, so I thought it might be fun to make a few more and try to sell them on Etsy, but for the purposes of keeping shipping manageable, tell people to buy their own POM tea to put it on. Imagine my dismay when I looked up the POM website, only to find that they've switched to a different sized, plastic bottle!

Alas, I got Chris to take a good photo of it anyways, so I figured I'd share.

I'm thinking of making cozies for Ball Mason jars, though, since I use those a ton to bring coffee to work and stuff... so might still try the etsy thing, but with Ball jars instead. Who knows. It's not like I don't have a thousand other things that take precedence on my to-do list or anything.

First Etsy Sale!

I just made my first Etsy sale! Some fabulous etsy customer bought my Sea Creature Mobile pattern. I was starting to think the whole crochet pattern writing experiment was a big waste of time (and it still may be, who knows, if I only sell the pattern a couple of times it certainly won't have been a profitable endeavor... that thing took forever between designing, writing, creating the layout, and testing it!) but it's pretty exciting still to have my first sale. Huzzah!