Acorn Child

Fall, where are you? I keep waiting patiently for the cooler weather. I really am!

I made another sweet fall child to speed up the process. Here is a sweet Acorn Child. She doesn't have a name yet. Do you know a child who is very impatient and likes to climb trees?


Dresses won't stop her! Catch her if you can!

The wind was kicking up as I was trying to take the photos. But this doll is fearless. She quickly scaled one of the top branches of our sweet cherry tree. Too bad the cherries are all gone....

Introducing: Daily Doll Deal

Every day I will offer one item in my Etsyshop at a deeply discounted price.  I will call this my "Daily Doll Deal".

Today I am offering the sweet fall baby doll I created for a great price. I normally sell these at $150.

So if you are looking for a sweet affordable handmade doll keep snatch her up. Deal lasts one day only!

Lunchbox Letters

Soon the children will go back to school. Make sure you send them back with a healthy lunch and a good dose of love for the day!

My little ones are the perfect companion for lunching at school. They are best served wrapped in a loveletter.

Dreaming of Fall

it's been a rough weekend. the heat in our town has been sweltering. it's hard to get any work done because of the heat and the depressing news of the movie theatre shooting.

you know, our daughter was supposed to go to a speech conference in Denver. because we couldn't come up with the bucks to pay for it after our Europe adventure we stayed home. it was suggested to me that I sent her alone. that she could bunk with one of the other kids.
well, guess what? turns out that some kids from that conference, a group of 12 kids, happened to be in that movie theatre. one teenager was shot by the gunman. from what i understand this kid is doing okay in the hospital.
imagine that. if i had sent my child to Denver alone this weekend. i would have freaked out.

it's really strange to me how these events keep hitting so close to home. why Colorado? why Denver?

I remember helping at my daugther's school a couple of years ago. all of a sudden the teacher was notified that the police had ordered a school lockdown. we locked the classroom doors and closed the windows and blinds. we huddled with the children behind bookshelves.

turned out that the police saw some kids playing with airsoft guns in the neighborhood. we were safe. it was one of scariest moments in my life.

how can we prevent this terror from happening? i know people keep saying it has nothing to do with the ready availability of guns in this nation. all I know is, if I lived in Germany with my family I would not have to worry about these things as much...

maybe if people watched out more for each other, had more compassion for their neighbor, someone would have noticed that something went terribly wrong in "the suspect's" life?

"Each of us must come to care about everyone else's children. We must recognize that the welfare of our children is intimately linked to the welfare of all other people's children." Lilian Katz

there seem to be no easy answers. just more questions. to stay sane we have to keep going and do regular things. despite the heat i cleaned my house from top to bottom this weekend. i organized my sewing room. i finished my little fall baby doll.

i am dreaming of fall and the better cooler days to come...

No Words...

No words can describe the pain caused in Colorado this Friday. Today I wanted to crawl in a hole and not look at our daily paper. I wanted to hide it from the children - so they may not see what monsters live in this world. How do we keep our children safe?

Please pray for the people affected by this terrible tragedy. Going to the movies will never be the same for me.

Baby loves to Read

And here is baby sitting on her fine new tush enjoying a good read. I had to take a photo of her and her book. Reading is so important. We need to teach the children early. Best when they are babies. Always have lots of books, magazines, and newspapers around. I came across this great quote by Nora Ephron the other day. Since Nora Ephron recently passed away this quote has been pasted all over the internet.

It's such a great quote it cannot be repeated enough:

“Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

I guess what I would like to add to this great quote is: Don't limit yourself to certain type of media. Read a wide variety of materials including newspapers.

A friend of mine told me recently about a study her twin girls are part of. She had to fill out a survey on reading habits in the household. The mom was supposed to check off what reading materials her family kept around the house. Guess what? Newspapers weren't even on the list. So my friend took a pencil and added it as an option to the survey. Obviously the person who wrote the survey does not get a daily newspaper. The idea of reading a paper was so remote to them it didn't even make it on the list.

Will newspapers be able to survive? My husband and I do get the Denver Post. Like generations before them, our kids started their newspaper journey with Sunday cartoons . Now my 13-year-old always gets up and looks for the sports section first thing in the morning. My 11-year-old loves to read out loud to us dramatic stories about car accidents and wildfires. Some days I want to hide the paper from her...

Do you still get a daily paper and encourage your children to read the paper? Are my and I dinosaurs because we still get a paper?

A bum for my dolls...

I have been "bummed" out about this problem for years: How come my dolls never sit so well? It is a fact that traditional waldorf style patterned dolls have trouble sitting nicely. The original waldorfy pattern does not allow for a real bottom. The doll has a rectangular box-type of shape. The legs fold out from under that box. If you try to sit the doll on a smooth surface - even when you lean it agains a wall - the doll tends to slide down and lay flat. This is especially true when the doll is in the nude and sitting down on a smooth surface.

It's very frustrating for the dollmaker and seller when trying to take photos. It has been bothering me even more lately. So since I am in the process of freshening up my shop and going back to the drawing board I decided to add a "butt" panel to my original doll pattern design.

I took an oval piece of fabric and added it to where I normally just insert the legs. This way the doll gets a more cylindrical shape. I was quite intrigued by the results. The doll can sit nicely on her bottoms without having to lean against an object. From now on dolls will be able to listen to lectures from me about putting on their best smile during photo shoots. I love it!

I think many a doll collector and doll mama will be happier too that their dolls won't keep sliding down when they are trying to pose them on a chair or a bookshelf.

I am very please with how the first prototype doll turned out. Unfortunately I didn't get very good pictures during the process of making this first one. It was too dark in my studio. When it's 100 degrees outside I close all the blinds...Otherwise I'd perish in my little studio that is surrounded by windows.

So the photos here just demonstrate that it is possible to sew some sense into a little dolly. After years you can still improve and tweak a pattern you thought was quite perfect and make it even more so...