Womanly Craft: A House of Love

Back in December, I discovered these adorable paper houses created by the fabulous, creative Anna at twelve22.  They really spoke to me, probably because I have been hurt and disappointed many times by gingerbread houses gone awry.  Forgetting that I hate clutter of all sorts, I began dreaming of a whole paper cottage village.  By the time all my other Christmas decorations found homes, I realized I did not have a spare surface for my little houses, so I filed the patterns away in my pile of deferred craft dreams.
Today, I got the chance to resurrect one of them! 
A friend called me this morning, sad because she was feeling weighed down by existential pressure, dealing with a quarter life crisis, as John Meyer might say.  We chatted for quite a while and tried to figure it all out, but were not were not very successful.  I decided to go visit her at work and take a little present to cheer her up.  What to take though?  Then I remembered the little Christmas cottages!  The pre made ones were a little too Christmas-y for the occasion, but the fabulous, creative Anna made a blank template to decorate however I want!  I "borrowed" quite a few elements from the original, but managed to create something adorable and special, just like my dear friend!

"Borrowing" details from Anna's house.  I can't believe her attention to even the tiniest details!

A woman-skill kind of day: baking AND knitting

First of all, let me address the elephant in the room.  In my last post, I promised to try to stop doing things like licking walls full of other people's gum.  I've got to be real; that's probably not going to happen.  In ninth grade, my lips were pretty badly burnt when I kissed my parents' lit fireplace during a game of truth-or-dare.  If burns and the aftermath of weeks with chapped, peeling lips did not deter me from putting my mouth in odd places, the botulism, or whatever diseases were lurking on that wall, probably won't either.

Until today, I was confident that I had mastered the important woman skill, baking chocolate chip cookies.  I know to add a little extra vanilla and more brown sugar than white sugar.  And a tip I recently learned, drop the cookie sheets right after you take them out of the oven to knock the air out of the cookies and keep them chewy.  Unfortunately, I am not immune to burning them. It was crazy; they went from raw to burned in seconds.  It was especially embarrassing because I was baking them for my womanly friends who came over to knit tonight.

Luckily, knitting turned out much better.  I taught two ladies to knit, one successfully, one "creatively," and worked on a scarf I started making for my brother's eighteenth birthday...hopefully it will be finished by his nineteenth birthday, next Sunday.  I had a lovely evening, chatting and knitting and laughing at my friends' attempts to knit.