Straw colored Layette set

Last summer we had a few friends die in a plane crash. All three men left behind wives and children and unborn babies.
As each baby has been born, I have made a special one-of-a-kind item for that child. This is the last baby of those wonderful men. There have been two little girls and one little boy. This is for the second little girl; she is now 3 months old. This set fits 3 months to 6 months old.

The top picture is of the complete 4-piece set. The next three are of the jacket, close up of the jacket buttons and rose on sleeves. The last three are of the booties, bonnet, and a close up of bonnet detail. Click on pictures for bigger image.
The items below are what the other babies received as gifts as they arrived. I really enjoyed this labor of love making these items for our friends. I hope that they will in time be cherished items in these families and passed down for many generations to come. The blue items below and the blanket went to the only boy in the group.
This is the dress and bonnet that went to the other little baby girl in the group.

Part 2: Rock show eggs and other items

Since Easter just happened I thought this was fitting to show today. This is an egg display at the rock show.

I thought this was a lovely array of eggs. I especially like the lamp work ones and the snowflake obsidian.

There was another lovely display of carved stone. This other one was of carved elephants.

The glowing rocks were real neat; it took me awhile to figure out how to take good pictures in the dark that were not blurry since I didn't bring a tri-pod. So I held the camera up to the glass to steady it for the long exposure; I think they came out well. These are all under black light.
There were lots of other displays as well, like this miniature train display. To see how small this is, that is a 5 year old's finger in the bottom picture.Also, there were petrified wood and carved and polished metamorphic rocks, geodes, petrified turtles (fossil), and rocks carved into spheres.Lastly, the thing I don't think I will ever understand, and it is gross to me, is stones bladed into knives with animal jawbones for the handle. Impractical as you could never hold it comfortably and absolutely discusting to me.

Happy Easter

Chocolate Cookie House

I was at a local grocery store, Smith's, a few days ago when I saw this. You can never make enough gingerbread houses or, in this case, chocolate cookie houses. This was our family fun for Monday night activities. The pictures to the right here are the ones from the packaging.

This is a pretty neat kit; it came with four types of candies, two colors of meringue frosting (just add water), and four cookie bunnies to live in the house, plus the house walls and roof, of course. It is amazing how much time this saves. I have made houses the old way; it is fun, but boy does it take a real long time. The interesting thing about this house that I didn't realize 'till after I bought it was that it has a plastic base so you can set the house up real easy. This is the house for the person who has no idea how to build a house or is just in a hurry. With three kids, I am the last.

If I was the Easter bunny I would want to live in a house like this. The only problem would be I would eat myself out of house and home, literally. Then boy, oh boy, would I have the dentist bills. You know, I don't know if I had ever seen an Easter house before. I have made haunted Halloween ones and the traditional Christmas ones but never an Easter one.

Funny thing about our kit is that the lavender frosting looked brown to us. That was fine it was just odd as the box looks lavender. The box read that you should have purple frosting and the package of frosting tells you it is mauve but it sure looks brown and nothing like any shade of purple.