It Started With A Button....

And a very fine pair of buttons, even if I do say so myself! They are a little darker purple than the picture shows. You see, I love, love, LOVE! vintage buttons. These two appear to me to be from the 70's. (my favorite ones are bakelite) I sometimes, when I'm feeling stressed, go to my button drawer and sort buttons. I know it sounds odd to some people, but it is relaxing to me. Sort of like working on a puzzle for some people. I buy a pound of vintage buttons here and then there and then look to see if there any are matches. Its like a puzzle for me. And then my clemites vine started blooming.
And it got me all hooked into purple again! Purples were my mom's favorite colors. So I'm looking at this vine and wanting to do something with purple in it. It seems that every year I do something with purple in it at this time of year because of this flower! Flowers can be very inspiring. I found some silk throwsters in that shade of purple and I started adding it to Emmee's brown fleece and start spinning.

While I was spinning, I started thinking of a little girls vest pattern. Girls love purple, don't they! I found a pattern on Ravelry in their database called 'Alise'. It called for
2 buttons! I like to buy patterns that have been published because I believe you need to respect their work. I had no problem paying the $4 for the pattern. However, I tried to buy it on two consecutive days and it wouldn't go through. Maybe the pattern was old? I don't know. But now I was vested (no pun intended) in making this. So...I made up a pattern myself.  Here are my notes
as I went along. I only ripped it out once to start over. I will keep
this paper and put it in my project folder with others I have.

I spun the yarn and as you can see, I only had maybe 6 inches of yarn left! Boy! did that work out well for me! lol

Here is a picture of the back of the vest and the lovely Ava, modeling it. She likes to wear it! Yeah!! It is very gratifying for me when I get a 'wild hair' about a project and it comes together as nicely as this one did. Being creative feeds my soul. Does it yours, too?

And now for an update on the bluebirds. The babies have flown the coop! The best picture I could get was of two together out of the three that were raised. The babies are already almost the size of the parents and they still sit around waiting for mom and dad to bring them food. They have some speckles on their breasts to help tell them apart from the adults. I loaded them up with mealworms this past week trying to use up the last of the 3,000 I had for them. Another successful bluebird season!

Talk to you soon,  Tammy