Year: 2020

gift & crafting ideas for the holidays Wk. 48/49

Thanksgiving week kept us pretty busy. We cooked a lot and did lots of dishes. How was your Thanksgiving? Do you celebrate this holiday? I also worked on my Tawny pullover, which is almost finished. This post was supposed to go up yesterday, so we’ll have to change the format a bit. This works, because now I have more time to prepare next week’s idea roundup. Here are some things that caught my eye this week: 1) I cannot get enough of Anthropologie’s holiday decor. The ornaments of a cute tiger skiing and a poodle wearing glasses jumped out at me as something to collect. I love, love things made of wool and these felted animals are SUPER CUTE! It’s making me want to get this book about felting to give it a try. How fun! 2) A holiday tradition I’ve always loved, but haven’t always practiced at home, is baking and decorating gingerbread houses. This year, however, it is one thing I really want to do with the kids. I found a great tutorial …

overhead shot of mashed potatoes, stuffing and cranberry sauce

Thanksgiving at Our House for the Very First Time

I hadn’t realized I was stressed out about Thanksgiving dinner this year until around three in the morning on Thursday when thoughts of all the different recipes we would have to prepare to pull off the meal interrupted my sleep abruptly. In 20-plus years, Patrick and I had yet to cook a whole Thanksgiving feast on our own. Can you believe our kids (14 and 16) had never had Thanksgiving at home? This year was going to be “a first,” and I wanted it to be super special. I still had to go to the store in the morning to get the apples for the pie and the ingredients for the salad I would be making. (They wouldn’t run out of apples in the middle of autumn, would they?) I had followed Samin Nosrat’s recipe for her famous buttermilk turkey to a T and was crossing my fingers that we’d all love it. To get my mind off of dinner, I grabbed some yarn and needles. I decided to learn how to knit a miniature …