Crochet Me Crazy

Another crazy stunt I pulled today! Alison has a homeschool 'tween meeting tomorrow where they are supposed to bring a pre-assembled gingerbread house to decorate. This is what my poor child will be bringing! LOL...just kidding. We don't have the money to spend buying one so we made our first attempt on a gingerbread house today. I think it will be just fine once it has all the goodies and candies glued on! I can't say that I would consider this fun to do! I'd rather do gingerbread men cookies.

We did it! We actually made 114 tamales this weekend! It was a lot of work and I think I will be pretty stingy with my tamales but it was worth it for the amount of tamales we got. They taste great though! We'll freeze these guys and be eating on these for some time.

Here is the recipe we used with step by step instructions; however, we ended up with WAY more tamales than the recipe said we would get. That's not a bad thing though. We just kept making them until we ran out of meat and corn shucks. I have some extra masa left over that I put in the freezer.

Three of the goody bags for Alison's birthday party are finished.





Then, I got a little distracted...Yesterday we lost all sanity and went to the mall!
I have no idea why since we have no money...I told the family I just wanted to get out and see what was going on in the world. I don't know...sometimes it just feels good to walk around all that "stuff" and not buy a single thing. Well, I did NEED to buy one thing and that was a winter coat for Alison. She has the same coat she has had for the past 3 years which was given to her by a friend and was real roomy on her when we got it. The zipper finally broke. Apparently, because of the cold snap everyone else had the same idea to buy a new coat too because there wasn't much to pick from and we didn't have much luck. Too bad we don't need a bathing suit...they had plenty of those! She decided she doesn't like the mall yesterday! Yay! She hates the styles and all the annoying, rude people. Everyone else in the family had already figured that out but she was the last one to come along so now its unanimous. Now we won't have to go to the mall until next Christmas! I asked my kids if they would like me to drop him off down there to go "hang out" like the rest of teens but they said "No Way!" Gee, they are such strange kids. So my kids are telling me...well, mom you wanted to see what was going on the world and we wasted our day. No we didn't....we learned that we don't need anything at the mall and sometimes I just need a reminder at what great and awesome kids I have! Then, just before we went home and were lamenting that its not looking too good for Alison to get a coat this year...Michael mentioned Burlington Coat Factory. Oh, was he sorry....we loved his great idea! Our family went into to Burlington Coat Factory for the first time that I remember. We found Alison a very reasonably priced, nice, very warm coat there that she liked. It's going to be much warmer than her last one.

Anyway.....another worthwhile thing about going out yesterday was that I saw some really pretty scarves in a department store selling for $18 each....no hats, just scarves. I loved the puff stitch so I cam home and made this hat. The scarf is on the hook now. I don't think I'm done with this pattern though. I want to make it again using vertical stripes of color. The solid colors with show off the pattern of the stich more.

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The pattern for the hat can be found here:
Puff Stitch Hat

Although it did snow today, it was a bit of a disappointment from what we were expecting here at our house today. It came down quite hard at time and quickly melted. Alison was getting her hopes all up watching the news this week in anticipation of some actual real snow. No snowmen or snow angels were made at our house today :(
It was very pretty to watch though!


It's a pretty sad testament that my children are out in the snow and neither one of them are wearing my crocheted scarves or hats!

I got three of the crochet party goody bags finished. I started on them yesterday so I should be able to get all 7 of them all finished in few days. Pictures coming tomorrow!