Whenever I’m going on a road trip, even if it’s a short one, I bring crocheting with me. I can’t read and be social at the same time, but it’s easy to crochet and talk. And if I have to put my crocheting down for a minute to help Annalie with something or look at the map for Troy, I don’t get annoyed like I do when I’m deep into a book.

When we left San Diego, I was actually close to finishing a big crochet project: a blanket for my friend Angela, whose baby girl is due to be born next month. I thought for sure I’d finish the blanket halfway through the trip, so I brought along a second bag of assorted yarn and some stuffing. I figured it didn’t hurt to be prepared in case I needed something else to do once I finished the blanket.

Funny thing is, though, I didn’t touch the blanket once we were on the road. Maybe because I’d been working on it nonstop for a few weeks, I just needed a break. Or maybe I just felt like making potholders.

I made whatever came to mind—headbands, potholders, balls, baskets—with whatever yarn I felt like using. I wasn’t even making anything with anyone specific in mind.

Except these three headbands, which I crocheted at Amanda’s request. (Amanda, I’ll get these in my Etsy shop for you soon, honest!)

And I made these hearts for Bex and Jo, so I’d have a little gift for them when we met up in Alabama.

These Easter baskest are similar to the ones I made a couple of years ago. If anyone out there wants them, let me know. I’d be happy to list them in my Etsy shop for you.

I guess I crocheted one more thing with a specific person in mind. I made the coffee-cup sleeve on the right for Troy, so he wouldn’t have to use one of my girly ones each time we stopped at Starbucks. I liked it so much I crocheted another brown and green one.

And then I crocheted a brown and pink one (which I’ve been using) and a brown and cream one. If anyone wants one of these, let me know, Etsy shop, etc.

In house news, I put up a bunch of photos on Flickr, mostly ones I took the day we moved in. Go have a look!

I painted this with Katrina when I was in Omaha, on Day 1 of 7 Days last month. I had hoped that the colors would be even more muted, but oh well. I still like it. Michelle saw the photo on Flickr and she liked it too, so we met her in Encinitas for lunch.

Michelle has been one of my best Etsy customers for a long time, and she happens to live in SoCal. I suggested that she could save on the cost of shipping if we met for lunch and I just brought the mug to her, so that’s what we did. It was great to finally meet her!

Heather painted this mug when we all went painting when Lauren was in town, and I love how it turned out. It fascinates me how everyone’s dottery is unique. We’re all using the wrong end of the paintbrush, yet each person’s patterns are slightly different. Very cool how that works.

Okay, my inner geek is showing. The story behind this mug is kind of long. You can read more about it here; it helps if you’re a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan.

Captain Picard on ST:TNG used to order tea from the replicator all the time by barking out, “Tea, Earl Grey. Hot.” Wil Wheaton, who played Wesley Crusher on the show, is a famous blogger now and is selling mugs with this on them to promote a podcast he’s doing with commentaries/reviews of early ST:TNG episodes. Lauren told me about all this, and said she wanted to paint her own version of the mug. I thought it was a brilliant idea and wanted one too, except I hate Earl Grey tea. So I changed the last word on mine to “not.”

Here is the mug Lauren painted. I especially love the little Star Trek symbol she drew above her signature on the bottom.

I just realized I never got a photo of the first two dishes Lauren painted. Something was weird about the bisque or the glaze, and they turned a strange green color in the kiln. The pottery studio gave her a credit for the cost of the dishes and she painted these three to replace them. The one in the middle is for Lauren’s Japanese sister-in-law; I believe that’s her name on there. The other two are for Lauren and her mum.

Lauren had the idea for a mug that said, “I knit so I don’t kill people,” but she was so busy with her Earl Grey mug and the dotty dishes that she hadn’t even started painting it by the time Brenda finished her plate and had nothing to do. When she asked if anyone had something for her to do, Lauren asked if she wanted to paint this mug for her. Brenda painted all of it except the last part of the scarf. Her hand got tired so I finished the scarf, including painting it into the inside of the mug and adding the tassels.

Good thing I enjoyed crocheting all those rainballs for Bug’s party, because Claire H. saw them, remembered that she’d intended to order some snowballs from me last year, and asked if would like to crochet her some of each. I said I’d love to, since it gave me a reason to watch a few episodes of Dr. Who on Netflix Instant, both of which I’m loving. Thanks for that, Claire! Your snowballs and rainballs are in my shop whenever you’re ready

Last weekend was Bug’s 4th birthday, and there was a party to celebrate, of course. Being the unique kid that she is, Bug had a unique theme in mind: rainbows and seeds. Brenda, although she is the queen of themes and is crazy about planning parties, had pretty much the same reaction you probably just did. I believe the technical term for that reaction is, Huh?

But after some sketching and thinking and researching, Brenda figured out a way to do the rainbow-seed theme that made both her and Bug happy.

One of the party activities was planting seeds in small terracotta pots, which the kids then got to take home as their party favors.

Another activity was making mosaics on paper plates with a variety of dried beans, AKA seeds.

Incorporating seeds into the food was easy. Brenda served a variety of nuts, a two-bean salad, hummus (made from chickpeas!), and sesame-seed bagels with peanut butter and Nutella. To go with the other part of the theme, there were fruits and veggies in a rainbow of colors…and a rainbow candy bar! You can’t really see it that well in any of the photos I took, but there was a line of jars at the back of the food table filled with Skittles, colorful chocolate-coated sunflower seeds, Jolly Ranchers, and Pixy Stix.

Needless to say, the candy bar was a BIG hit. Annalie kept asking me who was going to eat the giant rainbow lollipops that Brenda had stuck in a vase as a colorful centerpiece. I told her that they were as big as her head, and no one was going to eat them. But the rest of the candy definitely got sampled. Especially the chocolate-covered sunflower seeds and the Pixy Stix! The kids could not get enough of those.

Did you know, by the way, that Pixy Stix were originally marketed as a fruit drink mix under a different name? And that the powder in Pixy Stix is the same powder in Lik-M-Aid pouches? And that SweeTarts are a compressed form of Pixy Stix powder, originally invented because moms were complaining about the sticky, gritty powder? I learned all that just now from the Wikipedia page about Pixy Stix when I did a quick Google search for the correct spelling of the candy name.

Brenda performed some magic with paper and her sewing machine to make these fantastic rainbow-cirle dingle-dangle decorations. (She details how she made them in her post about Bug’s party, if you’re interested.) Then at the end of the day she took them down, folded them up, and gave each party guest one to take home.

That’s Brenda’s secret to having an uncluttered home, by the way: she gives most of her art projects away. I currently have about 37 different wreaths, mobiles, cardboard ghosts and Christmas trees, and milk-jug angels that Brenda made and gave to us that Annalie will NOT let me throw out. I think some of that stuff is going to get “lost in the move.” That is why my home isn’t more cluttered than it is: every time we move we have to unpack a zillion boxes. That is a great incentive for getting rid of a bunch of stuff, so we won’t have to unpack so much the next time! And it’s easy to get rid of stuff as you’re unpacking boxes. I actually look forward to that part of moving.

Brenda also made coloring sheets, and I should really have a picture of Annalie’s sheet to show you, but I don’t. Normally she’s not that into coloring and does a pretty haphazard job. That day for some reason she took her time and the end result was great. Maybe it was because Superchic was there coloring with her, and she was taking her time and making her picture look pretty. Annalie does respond well to competition, which is totally foreign to me because I don’t. Give me a little competition and usually I will back away and go find something else to do, just out of stubbornness.

My main contributions to the party, as you may have figured out from the title of this post, were cupcakes and crocheted rainbow balls. Brenda came up with the fun name rainballs, which I like because it kinda matches the snowballs I also crochet.

I was originally going to make a 6-layer cake with each layer a different color of the rainbow, but at the last minute Brenda got these cute little rainbow lollipops and decided they’d make great cupcake toppers. The rainbow cake would have been fun to make, but I love cupcakes so the last-minute change was fine by me. I made the same Lemon Cupcakes with Lemon Cream that I made for my birthday last year, with lemon cream cheese frosting (a couple of teaspoons of lemon zest added to my favorite cream cheese frosting recipe).

A note about the cupcake recipe: The original recipe said it would make four cupcakes. (Jen’s reaction to that was an incredulous, “Why? Why on earth would anyone want to only make FOUR cupcakes!?”) I wanted to make 24, so I multiplied each of the ingredients by six. That resulted in a recipe with 4 1/2 cups of flour, 3 cups of sugar, 12 eggs, and 3 sticks of butter. That’s an entire package of eggs and a whole cup and a half of butter, people. I knew, just from looking at the amounts, that this recipe would not make a mere 24 cupcakes. I was going to get at least 36 cupcakes out of it. But I figured it was better to be safe than sorry and it’s not like the extra cupcakes were going to go to waste, so I forged ahead. In the end, I made 36 largeish cupcakes and eight mini-cupcakes.

The moral of my story is, if you make this recipe you’re going to get more cupcakes than you were promised. But you really won’t mind because they are delicious. In fact, I think I’ll go get one of the extra cupcakes out of my fridge right now.

We used the rainballs for a ball-toss game. Brenda told the kids they’d get a piece of candy for a prize when they got a ball through, so at random times throughout the party kids would walk over to the game, shove a ball through one of the holes, then run over to their moms and ask if they could have a prize. It was pretty funny, but at least they were working a little bit for their sugar. And then at the end of the party, each kid got to pick one rainball to take home.

The rainballs were originally going to be part of the flowerpot party favors, but for reasons it would take too long to explain, the plan changed. I’m glad I made them anyway, because the ball-toss game was fun and the kids all loved the colorful, soft balls. I was already thinking of making more when someone emailed to request a custom order of five rainballs and five snowballs.

Even though I roll my eyes a lot at Brenda when she’s in party-planning mode, I have to admit that I’ve really come to enjoy her particular brand of crazy when it comes to themes and parties. I will never be as detailed as she is, but I have learned a few tricks from planning a few parties with her. I think I might even use those tricks for future parties. In any case, Brenda is only an email away if I need help.

Thanks for inviting us to your 4th birthday party, Bug! We’re so glad we were still here to be a part of it. We hope you had as fantastic a time as we did.