When I was down beside the sea
A wooden spade they gave to me
     To dig the sandy shore.

My holes were empty like a cup.
In every hole the sea came up,
     Till it could come no more.

-Robert Louis Stevenson

Having a daughter turn ten is a very happy thing. Ten is a good year to be, plus as a parent you get to celebrate a decade of having done pretty well, actually. And then, ten is the beginning of being a tween. Of course, they didn't call it "tween" when I was that age, but I remember it being a time that was as aggravating as it was fun. Beebs is still very much a little girl at this point, but this quilt is for the coming years and all their hard spots. If the girls at school are mean, or the boys ignore her, or she thinks her parents are particularly wrong, and she feels quite alone, I hope maybe that she'll look at this and realize that she's not.

Yes, it's a bit of a heavy-handed birthday present. Whatever, it needs to be said. Hopefully, the Denyse Schmidt prints in her favorite colors lighten it up. (Thank you Erin.) Plus, you should imagine the words being said in a bit of a sing-song voice, like on the Juno soundtrack. I had originally thought I'd do the same words in cross-stitch, but I couldn't get excited about it. Then the Proverbial Quilt that Melissa has been working on, plus the more free-form lettering of cauchy09 in this quilt, lead my do do it in fabric. I used the same tutorial as the flickr quilt for the lettering. It more fun than I thought it would be.

My little girl is 10 today. Ten? Wow! On Friday we hosted a crazy mad science sleepover complete with color-changing dry ice experiments, glow in the dark algae, moving plants, and grotesque snacks, all augmented by the kind of silliness only possessed by girls of a certain age. Scientist dad really came through with the activities on this one.

I just spent the last hour catching up on blog reading, and it made me so excited! Lord, there is just so much out there. I want to use up my yardage, and finish quilts, and buy yarn in California, and make really cute things to wear this summer, and I want to do it all right now. Ah, internets, you have me again!

These are the purl bee's felt rosettes (rosette barrettes!). I did them as part of "Art to Wear" with my Girl Scouts. No surprises—I am enjoying that badge quite a bit. It is taking us some time to work through though, because I chose ambitious projects. Someone who is handy with a needle and thread could whip up a rosette barrette in 15 minutes, but it naturally takes a bit longer if you're learning some stitching basics at the same time. It may have taken time, but I'm glad we did this project because in the end, they all looked good. We all know how it feels to make something that looks good v. something that looks like we had to make it in art.

The troop and I also used bleach pens for this badge, making patterns a la angry chicken or stitch in dye. Each girl got a plain green, square bandanna and went to town. Now that was a successful project.

I'm almost certain that when Andrew Bird wrote "I was the cartographer of the tangles in your hair," he was not thinking about mothers and their relationships with their daughters and the daily ritual of the hairdo. But, this is just where my mind goes every time. It's is such a beautiful, intimate line—to know someone so well that you know where each snarl is likely to crop up. It brings to mind morning sunlight and the process of tracing all the golden hairs from Eva's head and trying to get them to lay smooth and look brushed.

Of course, most mornings are not that beautiful. They are rushed—we are trying to get out the door to school and work. Most days Eva's hair is braided is one or two very long braids, and there is little time for experimentation. It is more likely to be a time where we feel cross with each other for all the pulling and yanking that those knots require. Seldom do I stand behind Eva with a comb and think that I am privileged to be able to groom this individual. But every so often, this song, Armchairs comes into my head and I take a breath and remember that it won't be much longer until she doesn't want or need me to do her hair, and I braid with a little more intention.

The hat is Eva's Christmas present from me. It was intended to be a beret, but it ended up being a hat. The hat covers her ears, which is important. I used Palette yarn left over from my tulip socks, and Sock Pixie's La Parisenne Beret pattern.

Also, Andrew Bird comes to town every year. Why have I never been?

Dang, it's cold here! Elie just half-jokingly offered to use some of my felted crafting sweaters for weatherstripping and door wadding.

This weekend was all about two things: relaxing and doing chores that you'd rather put off. The relaxing was awesome and the chores were even fine because now they are done. Remember how I made Eva a beautiful redwork quilt? I put off washing it forever (if you look up the date of the post where I shared it, I will be shamed) because I knew I was facing bleed issues. This was my first quilt, and it was red and white, and I didn't prewash my fabrics. Gasp! I didn't realize how bad I had been until a rainstorm poured into Eva's bedroom window and soaked one little corner of the redwork quilt. Oh, did it bleed. It looked like melted blow-pop, and it was enough to shock me into very bad laundry practices.

This weekend Eva asked me if I would please wash the quilt. It had gone to far. I suppose there's no time like the new year for this sort of thing, so I bit the bullet and washed years of hand quilting and embroidery work with white right next to red. I started it off in my bathtub using cold water and a gallon of vinegar along with a cup or two of salt. My science is fuzzy, but maybe this is supposed to set the dye? I read it online and I thought it couldn't hurt. I also added 3 shout color catchers. It made the tub water so pink. After some agitation I squeezed it out then threw it in a laundry basket a whisked it down to the basement to the waiting washer filled with cold water, soap, and 3 more color catchers. The water was still bright pink on the second rinse cycle. It came out OK. The white is not pure and there's a general pinky glow, but I'm sure it's not as bad as it could have been

The Beebs was home sick today (feeling much better now), so we spent a good amount of time sitting on the couch knitting. She's knitting too. She temporarily rediscovered the fun of knitting and her scarf project from last year. It's fun to knit with her and to hear her say things like, "Mom! I can even do it if I close my eyes and don't look at it--for a few stitches." Yup, me too, just for a few stitches, otherwise we get all kinds of hell.

Lunch was sick-at-home chicken soup, which means pasta boiled in broth from a tetra pack plus carrots and dried thyme. It's somewhere between for-real chicken soup and ramen, and generally, it's about what I'm good for.

I am nearly, nearly done with sock number one. I had to unravel it to the colorwork at some point in the gusset because I had to admit it had canckles. I added some wonky decreases, but it fits now.

We are just overflowing with sweetness over here. Today we celebrated Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, and ate many, many sweet things in hopes of a very sweet coming year. Also, they taste good. I made honey cake, and my mother-in-law's awesome kugel, and challah. These are the same things we've made every year since we moved here five years ago, so I guess it's officially a tradition. Poof—tradition! It's fun to be a tradition maker and a tradition embracer. I was thinking a lot about this today as I kneaded and stirred. I think that one of the reasons that Jewish holidays are so much fun for me to celebrate is that I'm not trying to reach back and recreate a glorious childhood memory. I find myself doing this with the Christian holidays that I celebrated growing up—I want my daughter's holiday experience to be as rich, and oddly, often to be just the same as mine was. I'm a lot more reasonable about the rest of her life being her own, so what is up with holidays? Maybe I'll try to make a point to cut this out. It's a lot of fun to celebrate a holiday without too may ideas about how it should be.

Real Fall is a good month and a half away, but yesterday the air was cool, so let's allow ourselves the Fall Preview.

Socks! I finished the pair. The toes are quite messed up, and I think they really would fit Eva better, but I love em.

Pickles! The pickles came out tasting like pickles. We made real canned pickles and refrigerator pickles. I like the refrigerator ones better, but I also added extra unnecessary salt the canned ones. You know, for good measure. It's a bit much

Pulling up carrots! Our garden carrots never really took off, possibly because we never thinned them and due to a gardening miscommunication, radishes were planted directly on top of the carrots. Elie pulled up what we had. It's not bad though—two quarts of baby carrots. Ridiculous.

"Harvesting" the corn! A squirrel planed squirrel corn in our yard and we let it grow. Isn't it creepy-looking?

Cat fest! Wearing a cat shirt and reading a cat book with a real cat on your lap.

My little girl had a little birthday. I won't get too sentimental (at least not now), but I will say that she is now halfway to 18. If the second half goes anywhere near as quickly as the first, I am in big trouble.

Nine is a funny age for parties. You still need some structure, but little kid party games aren't going to cut it. I asked Eva if she wanted to play Hot Potato at her party, and she almost died of embarrassment at the thought. I can't say I blame her. I mean, really? Hot Potato? And yet, Simon Says is still OK. Where is a parent to draw the line?

We did a craft—gluing eyes and beaks on to pom pom chicks and putting them in eggshells. We may have mostly done them because I wanted to make the pom poms. It's not entirely on me though, because this was supposed to be a Nature and Chicken themed party, and I did not invent the theme.

I used the party as a good opportunity to use the Martha Stewart test tube containers I got on sale post-Halloween two years ago. They are way cute filled with "magic" jelly beans. However, I did get chided by the resident scientist for buying plastic test tubes when real glass ones could have been had from the lab. Hmmm, don't know about that one.

Buying the jelly beans was even more fun that I thought it would be. I went to the mall on my lunch hour and filled a bag with all the light green and light blue Jelly Bellys that come in flavors we like. It was like a mini version of picking quilt fabrics—a little happy for the middle of the day. I also stopped at Gap kids and picked up a few summery sale things for Eva (two tops and some leggings). The jellybeans cost as much as the clothes. What does that mean?