save those coffee tins!

And by Fall you can fill your porch with these beauties! That is, if you drink as much coffee as we do. If you have more restraint and less caffeine dependence than the two humans living in my house, aim for spring. Or ask your neighbors to send over their empty coffee tins! Or fill your winter nights with them if you live somewhere that doesn't freeze all winter... ah, the possibilities are vast and endless, yes?

I am thinking they would serve an aesthetic as well as practical purpose with citronella candles.

Find the tutuorial here and the author here.

gifts from abroad

Recently, I almost broke my neck on my way out the front door.

An unexpected package with a strange stamp was on the porch, and I should have known it could only have been from one person:

My friend Merm!

(Actually, it's Miriam. But somehow it became Merm over the 15+ years I have known her.)

Merm is a rare sort of friend. She was my study abroad companion in Italy and has been my "book-and-words friend" since high school. She's been abroad in the UK for the last four years working on a Masters in Creative Writing, a Masters in Publishing, and now a PhD in Creative Writing. She's good stuff. Very generous, frank, reflective, creative, funny, adventurous and ever-striving in an inspiring way.


She's still traveling the word on weekends, living the life of academia continually...
and I must admit I am a bit envious. In the photo above, she's in Dubai with a Camel Crossing sign.

However, there's one thing I have that she doesn't: a better sense of GRAMMAR and PUNCTUATION. (NOTE: I didn't say perfect; just better by comparison!) She knows she's bad, so she sends her work (including a novel I'm in the process of proofreading) to me. It's such an honor that after all those fancy degrees she still sends her work to lil' ole me for critique!

So, what was in the package?


An old book.



But not just any old book.

A book from 1864 that smells of dust, time, ink, human hands, cozy homes and crisp, yellowed pages.



I love the marbleized cover pages. I bet it was considered very elegant in 1864.
It's such a work of art and such a fascinating, enigmatic emblem of an era and will sit on my shelf as just that: Art and History.



The stained pages, dotted and smudged with years far before me,

The cracked binding, separating from a century-and-a-half of being in existence,

The lovely, bent and torn corners,

Thank you, Merm! I consider this gift a rare treasure.

(And I will be stopping by its new nook periodically to smell the pages!)

Welcome to the world of Hoot Baby!

knot tunic sets from Indian Summer collection

I'm so delighted to be here on Scattering Lupines today-- thank you so much for the invitation! I'm Melissa Tarleton, from The World More Beautiful, fellow lover of Miss Rumphius and the face behind the children's brand Hoot Baby. Hoot Baby was born not long after my second son, John-Harper, in early 2009. We're a small company dedicated to creating delightful clothing for little girls and boys, with extra-special attention to comfort and a big dose of colorful style thrown in.

Chinoiserie float set from Picnic collection

When my oldest son, Grady, was very small, I discovered the wonderful world of European children's clothing. The soft fabrics, bright colors and simple, child-like embellishments were so different from much of what was offered in my local chain stores, and I was smitten. I have always loved to create-- and I was bitten hard by the bug of creating for my child. It was so much fun to design tiny outfits for my son using some of the aspects I admired in my favorite brands-- sophisticated colors, classic shapes, and a lack of "frou-frou" that could get in the way of his movement and play. I played around with different methods of seaming-- my goal was to eliminate the itchy, bulky and (to me) unattractive serged seams that hold most children's clothing together.

Peek a Pop of Daisy Dress from Indian Summer

I began to make clothing to give to friends with little girls-- there was so much wonderful fabric to choose from! Pretty soon, people began to ask if they could buy things I made. Well, OK. As I got more and more requests to sew up "whatever you think will look good"-- and began to have lots of smiling customers-- the idea took shape that maybe I should put together a group of clothing for sale. (My background is in Creative Writing-- I have an MFA-- and Montessori education-- I was a Primary teacher for many years-- so this was a big step in a different direction for me.) I spent a few very busy months (when my youngest son was just a couple months old-- thank GOODNESS for the invention of the Moby Wrap!) learning to draft patterns, choosing fabrics, designing, sampling and photographing a small (about 20 piece) collection for girls, called Indian Summer. This was quickly followed by another, larger collection for girls and boys, Schoolkids in Paris.

New School Schoolgirl smock from Schoolkids in Paris

I couldn't believe how much FUN it all was. I was very lucky that shortly after launching my website, Gabrielle Blair, of the amazing blog DesignMom, did a feature on Hoot Baby. This wonderful exposure led to a lot of other great opportunities for me, and Hoot Baby began selling through in-home Trunk Shows in the fall of 2009, as well as through our website. We are slowly moving into retail sales, and hopefully you'll be able to find Hoot Baby in a store near you very soon!

Vroom Vroom Vespa Tee and Old-Fashioned Bike Pants from Schoolkids in Paris

One of the things I'm most proud of about Hoot Baby is how our clothing is manufactured. It's very much a collaborative effort between me and a small group of local folks in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina. Our area is one that's taken a huge hit as textile, furniture, and apparel manufacturers have taken their business overseas. My idea was to start small-- and very close to home-- putting one of these skilled tradespeople at a time back to work. I still cut out every single pattern for manufacture, and I spend a fair amount of time behind my own sewing machine producing all of the hand-appliqued clothing in our boys' collection. The rest of the sewing is done by talented sewers in their own homes-- it's very much a cottage industry approach to production. I am proud of our sewers, whose attention to quality and detail show in every piece, and I'm proud to support members of my community through fair wages and sustainable production.

Picnic Shirtwaist from Picnic collection

Our newest collection, Picnic, is arriving right now, and will be available for purchse in the next few days. Thanks so much for taking a peek at Hoot Baby! As an extra special thank-you to Scattering Lupines readers, we'd like to offer you a coupon code to use on any non-sale items you'd like to purchase between now and March 15. Just enter the code lupines at checkout! Please feel free to contact us with any questions at contact@hootbabydesigns.com. We're currently booking our Trunk Shows, which will begin in March, and we'd love to offer our discounted prices and a special thank-you discount to all of our hostesses!

All of our outdoor photography is courtesy of the oh-so-talented Cophia Lee.

for me, it's certainly the commercials

Husband is a big football fan, and (as you probably know by now) I like witty advertisements, so Super Bowl Sunday is the bees knees in our book.

However, we spent the first three quarters at a party, where we saw most of the game but everyone talked and re-filled appetizer plates and wine glasses during the commercials. Ah me, as Julia Child would say. Or, carry on, as Kurt Vonnegut might say.

Since we came home for the 4th quarter, I did see a few. Of those, this was my favorite:

And Husband managed to catch this preview early on in the game, and he is counting down the days till this comes to theaters in May:

Any favorite Super Bowl commercials?

water music revealed... and a few other tidbits

(1)

Husband's Dog-loo was still standing as of yesterday afternoon.

It's turned to a structure of solid ice. We now see why this was considered a formidable-enough structure for Eskimos' dwellings.

(2)

I found the MOST AMAZING website. Very helpful indeed.

You can search most personal and household care products and find not only customer reviews BUT ALSO environmental and health ratings. It will tell you what, if any, harmful ingredients lurk in your favorite products. For example, I discovered that my daytime moisturizer (which doubles as my "makeup") contains a cancer-causing agent-- oh and and I am really struggling. I love my moisturizer and it's taken me years to find one that I love. So now I am trying to decide if I should risk developing cancer or launch my search for the perfect moisturizer yet again. It's a toss-up, I tell ya.

I also discovered that my environmentally safe dish detergent is not altogether environmentally safe, due to the fact that the company who manufactures it is terrible at water and energy conservation. Good to know. So, the search continues in that department as well.

It's a good site to search your products' ratings, for whichever fields concern you most.

(3)

Do you have any subscriptions to magazines that actually require you to sit down and read informative, in-depth articles rather than merely flip through and admire lovely photos and tab tasty recipes?

We do. We like to subscribe to one of those kind per year. This year, it's the Smithsonian. It seems they show up in our mailbox before we're half-way through the previous issue. It's a rat race to keep up.

In catching up on my December Smithsonian reading, I read an article about Handel's music and learned that, "He wrote The Water Music [...] for George I, to be performed for the monarch as His Majesty's barge navigated through a London canal on a summer evening."

Like this or this:

"Ah-ha!" thought I when reading this and considering how I've always wondered at that lovely title: The Water Music. That explains it!

it's all about the little things...

I'm very thankful the wretchedly cold spell is over...

for now.

I took this while driving-- see my camera in the windshield reflection?

So,
I was thinking after yesterday's post,

"How much better is cloth, really?"

Aren't we also being called to conserve water usage and supplies? If everything I do is cloth, I'm washing twice the loads of laundry, and I run the dishwasher every two days-- for only two people (and Khan) in a household. Hmmm....

Drat, now I am confused!

Then, Yada Yadah's (aka MyStoryofHiStory's) comment on yesterday's post got me thinking even more...

I like her mantra and I am using it:

REDUCE, Reuse, Recycle,

in that order, she says.

So, on that line of thinking,

What are you going to do with all of your leftover candy canes?

You can put them in your coffee, which I learned from my mother and am doing right now,



Or,



Here's another hint! Use them for VALENTINE'S DAY instead of buying ALL NEW treats!

Find the heart lollipop tutorial here

And two other surprising things you can do with these peppermint hearts here.
(Hint: think heart wreath and edible cupcake liners filled with ice cream! OK, maybe that was more than a mere hint :) )

If you enjoy wine, here's another way to make your purchases keep on giving:


Try drinking charity wine!

We tried their Cabernet Sauvignon, and it was quite good for charity-based wine!

I think it's pretty amazing that anyone donates 50% of profits to anything. That's a big hunk 'o' profit!

Find out which states are involved and how you can buy if you're not in those states here.

I'm still looking for how to reuse those wine bottles after the wine has been consumed, since you can only have so many wine bottle oil lamps sitting around and the people we rent from would perhaps not want me to install a wine bottle chandelier in their ceiling.

Do you have a unique way of reusing glass bottles?
We usually just recycle them all.