Resolutions and Holiday Craftiness

It's 2012 and I haven't posted anything since August. Mostly because that's when this started:

Two toddlers who learned how to walk within a week of each other + two parents = no sitting.

As a rule I stink at resolutions, but I am hoping to post a little more regularly this year. Just in case I try to use the lack of sitting excuse, I looked back at some of the projects I was able to finish before the holidays.

I'll try not to remind myself of how little I slept for two months :)

First we had to tackle the walkers. The girls are sharing a twin mattress on the floor. The idea is that they can get in and out of bed on their own to play when they wake up. However, they are still too little to use blankets, and it gets cold at night when you have no insulation in your 90 year old walls. We had cozy fleece sleep sacks for the girls but they have no feet, resulting in lots of this:

Not safe. I dreamed up an idea where I put holes in the bottom of the sack for their feet and I tried out the alteration:

Once I figured this all out I realized that Halo, who make the sleep sacks, make something similar for older kids. But I was still able to alter the two I had and make 4 more from scratch for less than the price of one. Score! Plus they don't make them in such fun colors:

Another thing that two toddlers in day care will do is use up all your money! We didn't have a huge gift budget this year so I tried to get creative. I had bought the yarn and pattern for this throw blanket years ago when I started knitting, but I had given up on it once I realized that the color changing blocks were a little beyond my skill level. It was always supposed to be a gift for my parents. Now that I am more experienced I dug out the supplies and got to work. I figured that since I had already made almost half of the squares, it would be easy to finish. Except when I looked up pattern corrections it turns out that some of the squares used different gauge needles, so I wound up knitting 16 squares instead of 11. Still, I finished it just in time to get it in the mail!

Plus I made a water bottle cover from some of the original squares I couldn't use:

For the girls and their cousin, I made these puzzle balls. They are made up of 3 rings of four wedges, which you put together to form a ball.

I also finished these sock monkies for them two days early!

Christmas Eve I made hats for the monkies. You can see them sitting by the fireplace. I also finally made their stockings - I never got to it last year.

 So far in the New Year, I have even been able to check a few things off my long term to do list. So maybe I will be able to keep up with the blog... 

 ...or not!