Refashion - Men's Shirt to Girls Dress

I've been really anxious to sew.  My stuff was all packed in the garage, but I finally got it out/organized.  However my free time is very limited so I wanted a project to do that was quick and didn't take too much thought.  I saw the shirt dress in blog land a while back and Google turned up this shirt dress tutorial for me which worked perfectly.

The shirt was a gift from a student to Floyd.  Not exactly his style, but it is silk and pretty.  I thought it would be very nice for Selena.

Here is the before:

And here is the after:

Now the only problem is laundering a silk play dress. ;)  The project was very easy.  My only comment is a reminder to pay attention to where the buttons lie when placing the pattern.  I put the edge too close to a button so when I went to fold it over to make the casing the button was in the way.  So I had to pick off the button and move it down.  

Wild Berries in the Puget Sound (Thimbleberry, Blackberry, and Blackcap Raspberry)

This is a continuation on my posts on wild berries.

First Post (Red Huckleberry, Salmonberry, and Salal) 

Red Huckleberries and Salmonberries - Mostly redundant of first post, but some additional info.

to come Oregon Grape, Indian Plum, Salal, more blackberries, wild rose and poisonous berries.

Thimbleberries

These are my new favorite berry.  They are kind of tart, but I think they taste so good.  If I am out running and spot some I will stop to gobble them up.  These red berries are kind of fuzzy and are very squishy.  Sometimes they fall apart when you pick them.  They start off as white and get red when they are ripe.  The plant has big kind of furry maple looking leaves.  There are no thorns and most of the plants I've seen are about 4' to 5' tall.   Each plant doesn't have a lot of berries and they are kind of hard to put in a bucket because they mush each other so I think this is one you pretty much just eat right off the bush.

Blackcap Raspberry

So far I've only come across one of these bushes.  In the top picture the raspberries aren't ripe yet.  (I ate all the ripe ones earlier in the day when I was out running.)  In the second picture the one on bottom right is ripe.  The bush has small prickles on it.  The berries go from green to plum (like in the picture) to black when ripe.  The couple berries I ate were pretty sweet.  These ripen from July to August.  You can tell they aren't blackberries because the globules are smaller and not as fragile and when you pick the berry the center receptacle stays on the stem. 

Blackberries

In Western Washington blackberries are everywhere.  What you may not know is that most of the blackberries you see are an invasive species and are not native.  But the trailing blackberry, seen above, is native.  It grows low to the ground (not in a gigantic bush) or climbs over fallen logs.  Some say that this is the best tasting of the three types of wild blackberries.  This blackberry isn't quite as prickly and the berries start ripening in mid July.  I'll do the other two species of blackberry in a few weeks when they get ripe.

Wild Berries in the Pacific Northwest (Huckleberry and Salmonberry)

This is a series about wild berries in the Pacific Northwest.  I decided to separate the berries in their own posts.  Here is my first post that has mostly duplicate information as this one.  Here is info on Thimbleberry, Blackcap Raspberry, and Blackberry.

Red Huckleberries

Sorry the picture isn't that great.  I'll try to get a better one.  Red huckleberries like to grow out of nurse logs.  So sometimes the bushes can be way up high.  The bushes I have seen range from about 2 feet to 10 feet tall.  They have small red berries that progress in ripeness from white to green to pink to red.  They are supposed to be ripe from late July - October but there were some ripe ones near my home in late June early July.  The early ripened berries were pretty sour, but I have tasted some sweeter ones that ripened in mid July.  Both my girls have loved them. They tasted delicious in muffins and this scone recipe.  You have to do a lot of picking to get a decent amount.

Salmonberries

I'm a little confused on the salmonberries.  There are supposedly yellow ones and red ones.  But around here I've been seeing both on the same bush.  So I'm not sure if they are both growing on the same bush or if the berries turn from yellow to red and the yellow ones aren't really ripe yet. (It seems to me that the red ones and yellow ones were growing on the same bush and they were both ripe.)  The ones that ripened in late June were pretty sour.  When I tried them a few weeks later they taste pretty plain and didn't have a whole lot of flavor.  This article said to avoid red ones, but I have no idea why.  The berry book just said there were two different kinds.  The bushes can be really tall.  Lots of the berries have been way over my head.  The bushes don't produce a whole lot of berries.  They supposedly ripen mid July to mid August, but there were ripe ones at my house in late June early July.  The ones I managed to hide from Allie ended up in ice cream and tasted good.

The Babe

Selena's given Allie a new nickname.  She calls her babe.  It's cute.

Allie's been learning new words.  Some new words are shoes, and banana.  Usually when I ask her a question if she agrees she makes happy noises, and if she disagrees she makes whiny noises, but the other day I asked her if she wanted something and she simply replied, "No", very clearly.  When she does something she's proud of she says, "da" in the tone of "tada".  She pretty much understands everything I say.  I can ask her to get things, or go find someone.

She continues to amaze me at her mobility.  She's been following her sister climbing everywhere.  At the playground I'll turn around and she'll be on the second or third rung of a ladder.  Eek.  If the playground has even half way manageable steps she can get to the top and go down the slide (feet first on her tummy) by herself.  She can easily run/walk down a hill and stop at the bottom without falling.  She thinks its hilarious to run away mid diaper change.  She takes off giggling with glee.  (Sound familiar?  Dyna and Selena both love/loved to run away from me).

Sleep.  The constant challenge.  Maybe partly to blame on my philosophical thoughts about it.  She has now become hard to put down for a nap.  I used to turn on the TV for Selena while I put Allie down, but now Allie likes to watch TV, or at least the intro music for Super Why.  She gets all excited and dances.  Stomping her feet and twirling in circles.  Night time has also become hard.  She does not want to be left out.  She wants to be involved when Floyd reads books to Selena.  Unfortunately most of the time that is by sitting on the books.  If I say the word sleep she starts screaming.  Some nights it is fine, she'll come to me, crawl in my lap and nurse to sleep.  But other nights if I try to take her into the bedroom, she freaks out.  Some nights she has cried for an hour.  Nothing consoles her.  If I try to hold her she'll jump out of my arms.  If I let her leave the bedroom she goes to the corner and cries.  We've seemed to have adopted a long summer night schedule and have been staying up late and sleeping in.  I guess that's ok.

She's been potty training herself.  (Well not really)  Every time I or Selena uses the toilet.  She wants to as well.  Sometimes I take off her diaper, other times I just set her up there with it on.  Then she gets off and gets some toilet paper.  Pretends to wipe and then drops it in the toilet and flushes.  Granted she has never actually gone in the potty, but its cute just the same.  Except when she uses it as an excuse to not go to bed.  One night I tried to put her to bed and she got mad.  When I let her out of the room she went to the bathroom and asked to sit on the toilet.  Well I have to admit it was kind of cute.  After she went potty then she wanted a drink of water.

She can use a fork and spoon pretty easily now.  She doesn't seem to have a real favorite food at the moment.  Except maybe berries.  We've been doing a lot of berry picking and she devours the berries as quickly as she can.  She is very good at spotting berries and picking them herself.  She also keeps on picking the unripe blueberries in our back yard.  She still eats dog food on occasion.  She likes sitting in my lap and eating the beans and berries off my salad.  She also likes feeding you.  She tries to stuff food in my mouth faster than I can chew.

She likes animals.  She always points out dogs and crows when she sees them.  She loves our trips to the zoo and pays more attention to the animals than Selena does.  She's been playing with Legos a lot lately and she can fit them together and pull them apart by herself.

I'm a Cat

Selena has been doing great.  I'm not sure if its coincidence or not, but I've been using some gentle discipline techniques and since I've started Selena's behavior in general has been great.  She has been patient with her sister.  She has been saying sorry when she makes a mistake, and overall has been fairly helpful.   It is wonderful.  It wasn't that long ago that she would run off in the blink of an eye.  But she doesn't do that any more (well almost) and even more she attempts to keep Allie from doing it.  

Lately she's been into climbing.  We have tons of playgrounds near our new house and we've been exploring all of them.  She has also learned how to slide down poles.  Which she loves.  She has also been practicing the monkey bars and if they aren't too far apart and have a slight decline she can do them 95% on her own.  

We got a membership to the Everett Children's Museum and her favorite part was the construction room.  They have these really cool toys that you can build child size cars and houses out of.  They have special screws, bolts and wrenches to put them together.  So she strapped on her tool belt and grabs her wrench and shouts, "Righty tighty, Lefty Loosey" and starts building.  We spent at least an hour in that room the first day, and we had to go back the next day and she spent another 45 minutes.  When we left the first day I told her we needed to take apart her creation and she got excited and said, "Now I can do lefty loosey!"  

We've visited my new nephew a few times and she absolutely loves him.  She always wants to hold him and she carries on about how cute he is, and how much she loves him.  

Her and Allie have been getting along pretty well.  She carries on about how cute Allie is as well.  When Allie is upset she tries to make her happy.  Selena loves to snuggle and Allie has started snuggling with her more often and Selena likes that.  She does not like the baby slobber kisses Allie likes to plant on her however.  

I think Halloween is one of her favorite holidays because she seems to remember it well, even when she was only one.  Floyd asked her if she was going to be a cat this year and she looked at him with a puzzled expression and as if he was crazy and said, "I'm already a cat."  The fourth of July was fun.  Last year the smoke bombs were her favorite, this year she could care less about them.  This year she liked the pop-its, the sparklers, and the parachute guy.  

She got a book at the library about Arthur losing a tooth, and there was an episode in her new favorite show, Super Why, on the tooth fairy so she is very excited about her and Allie losing their teeth.  

She likes doing the "make a word" games on starfall.com and she is getting pretty good at them.   She knew all her letters at a pretty young age, before she was two, but I'm not sure if she still knows them all.  When she has to pick the letter that fills in the blank sometimes she says the letter name, but sometimes she doesn't.  

Berry Picking - Wild Berries in Western Washington

Right before we moved, on our last visit to Northwest Trek (love that place) I actually spent some time reading all the signs labeling the plants along the path between exhibits.  I found out that lots of the plants growing were edible and some of the signs even contained recipes on them.  Those signs got me thinking about plants that I would like to have growing around my new home.  I figure if they are native they are probably pretty easy to maintain.  Then I found that King county has a website on planting native plants and I searched for edible ones and found the nurseries in the area where you can buy them.  So I went off to Molbaks in search of wild strawberries and huckleberries.

While I didn't find the strawberry plant I was looking for I did find a huckleberry plant.  I took it home and then looked to see how I should plant it.  I learned that huckleberries like to grow in nurse logs (trees that fall down) so to grow one you need to replicate a nurse log with sawdust, bark, etc in a big mound. But then I thought that maybe it would be better to actually plant the bush in a real nurse log.

Our new house has miles of trails around it and we've been exploring them and running on them (it is wonderful).  So I kept on the lookout for a potential nurse log to guerrilla plant my huckleberry, but what I found was that we already had tons of huckleberries growing all around us.  I also saw salmonberries, raspberries (maybe), blackberries (of course), salal, and maybe some blue elderberry (for sure red elderberry but it is debatably editable).  So I kept an eye out on the berries and amazingly some of them already started to ripen.  I also went to the library and checked out The Pacific Northwest Berry Book and then I took the girls out to pick berries.

They loved it!  We've gone out almost every day the past week.  We found a real nice patch of huckleberries on the trail right behind our house.  On one trip Selena said, completely unprompted from me, "Picking berries is fun.  It is better than Halloween when we go and get candy from our neighbors."  How cute is that!  Allie has become a berry picking fiend.  She gobbles the berries faster than I can pick them and if we are lucky and find a bush that has some low berries she climbs right into the brush and snaps them off straight into her mouth.

Here is Allie stealing all the salmonberries we did manage to collect and gobbling them up before we could take them home and try to make something from them.

Allie is snagging them even when I'm trying to photograph them.

Red Huckleberries

Sorry the picture isn't that great.  I'll try to get a better one.  Red huckleberries like to grow out of nurse logs.  So sometimes the bushes can be way up high.  The bushes I have seen range from about 2 feet to 10 feet tall.  They have small red berries that progress in ripeness from white to green to pink to red.  They are supposed to be ripe from late July - October but there are some ripe ones right now.  So far all the ones I've eaten have been pretty sour, but the girls like them.  They tasted delicious in muffins.  You have to do a lot of picking to get a decent amount.

Salmonberries

I'm a little confused on the salmonberries.  There are supposedly yellow ones and red ones.  But around here I've been seeing both on the same bush.  So I'm not sure if they are both growing on the same bush or if the berries turn from yellow to red and the yellow ones aren't really ripe yet.  The yellow ones seem pretty sour while the red ones don't seem to have a whole lot of flavor.  I've also seen some red berries on totally different looking bushes and am not sure if they are also salmonberries or if they are wild raspberries.  This article said to avoid red ones, but I have no idea why.  The berry book just said there were two different kinds.  The bushes can be really tall.  Lots of the berries have been way over my head.  The bushes don't produce a whole lot of berries.  They supposedly ripen mid July to mid August, but there seem to be some ripe ones now.  The ones I managed to hide from Allie ended up in ice cream and tasted good.

Salal

I haven't tried this one yet since the berries are just now forming.  Salal starts out with little tiny white flowers that will eventually turn into blue berries.  It is a ground covering bush so it doesn't grow very tall.  We'll be on the lookout for these when they ripen.