On most days, the boy eats about half of the one sandwich I give him as a school snack. He doesn’t need much, he has lunch and an afternoon snack at school, but he should eat something during the morning. So I decided to offer him a wider variety of snacks to find out what he actually will eat.

Today I made homemade granola bars – they still have a lot of sugar, as the caramelized sugar holds the dry ingredients together, but at least I know there are no artificial flavours in there or artificial sweeteners. And I can vary the ingredients with every batch, this time I used rolled oats, corn flakes, chopped hazel nuts, sunflower seeds and dried cranberries. I’ve already tasted them, they are great. If the boy doesn’t like them, I’ll just eat them myself then. The good thing about the granola bars is that they keep for a while, so I can prepare a larger batch when I have time and just grab one every morning to add to his snack box.

Next on the list were bacon and cheese muffins – they won’t keep that long, but I can freeze them and defrost over night when I want to add one to Philipp’s snack box. Again, we’ll see how he likes them. Mark and I like them, even if they could have a bit more cheese – next time perhaps.

Besides the things I can prepare in advance, I’m going to add babybel cheese and mini-sausages with a few crackers or pretzels and some carrots or cucumber from time to time, so he won’t have the same snack every day. I hope that will work, I hate to throw away food.

If you have any more ideas about suitable snacks that can be prepared ahead of time, please leave me a comment. I’m not a morning person, so making a sandwich is the most I do for a snack in the morning, but if I can prepare things in the evening that’s fine. Or probably you know a few more things that will keep for a while or freeze well, I’m always open for suggestions

I have decided to donate part of my sales this week to Doctors Without Borders for their help after the events in Japan. 10 % of yarn and stitchmarker sales will be donated, as well as 50 % of all pattern sales – of course I’ll gladly accept custom orders as well. I hope that with your help I’ll be able to make a much more generous donation than I would be able to do otherwise.

Here is a little preview of what you can find in my store at the moment

It’s carnival here this weekend and they celebrate today at school with fancy dress. When I asked Philipp what he wants to be, he told me he wants to be a Clone Trooper. So I had a look at available costumes…

This thing, consisting of a cheap plastic mask and a printed overall was supposed to cost about € 30 – no way am I paying that much on something that’s not well made and will only fit for a very short while. And after seeing one of them worn at school today I’m so glad I put my foot down even when my parents offered to pay for the costume. It’s not an issue of money, I just don’t like to pay money on things that are made from cheap materials and look horrible.

After a bit of discussion, I convinced Philipp that I’d make the costume myself and he wanted to be Anakin Skywalker.

We had several option to chose from – adult Anakin, Padawan Anakin, or Anakin as a slave boy. I couldn’t find the right fabric and fake leather to make any of the first two, so Philipp agreed to the latter – but he insisted that he should be allowed to use his light saber. It’s a carnival costume, not cosplay, and he’s 6 years old – so why shouldn’t he carry his light saber.

Sewing took me a bit time, I had never made trousers before, but I’m quite proud of the results:

Philipp loves it and I think it looks way better than the store bought ones. I will have to re-make the tunic though, we want to go to FedCon in costume and it is already a bit tight – somehow my math was off when I made the pattern. But it’s okay for today, for FedCon in May I will make a bigger one and add a few details. I’ve got almost two months, that should be more than enough time to finish this.

I have decided to bake more this year to keep the man from spending too much money at the bakery for cake and donuts and other sweet things. He didn’t like the chocolate muffins I made last week because he doesn’t like chocolate – can you believe that? Someone who doesn’t like chocolate at all? Anyway, I asked him what he would like me to bake next and he requested cookies.

So I grabbed my very old book with baking recipes, one that I got from my mom when I first moved out and she had been using it for years already. I found a recipe for oatmeal cookies that sounded good and just added a few dried cranberries to it. You can see the result below, and believe me, they taste as good as they look. Of course I didn’t make them alone, Philipp helped me a lot.

On Philipp’s request, we made sugar cookies as well, he wanted to make something using cookie cutters. The recipe is from the same book – Dr. Oetker – Backen macht Freude – and we used his new Captain Sharky cookie cutters. Captain Sharky is a little pirate with a shark instead of skull and crossbones on his flag.

And of course we decorated the cookies with sugar icing, a bit of white chocolate and whatever else we could find. Below you can see Captain Sharky and his pirate ship.

But a real pirate of course has a parrot too. And as you can see, we used a few other cookie cutters as well – Philipp was a bit territorial and didn’t want to share his cookie cutters with me, so I had to use other ones.

Here you can see the sharks, I unfortunately forgot to turn them into pirate sharks with an eye patch as they are meant to be. The boy likes them anyway, so it’s no big deal.

Now we have two boxes full of cookies and when they are gone I’ll have to bake something else again. I’m open for suggestions what kind of cake, pie or cookies to make, preferably with little chocolate (chocolate chips or a chocolate coating are fine, as long as that’s the only chocolate). I’m planning to make a Boston Cream Pie soon, but that’s all I have planned so far.

I have so many single skeins and leftovers from bigger projects, I really didn’t know what to do with them until I found a KAL and CAL for chemo hats on Ravelry. But as I didn’t want to send my hats to the US, I searched the web for some place in Germany to donate them to. I found Chemohut macht Mut and was told they are especially in need of hats for men and children at the moment. All hats shown here are made with KnitPicks Shine Worsted, a super soft cotton/rayon blend.

This is a Hurricane Hat by Andrea Goutier, a fast and easy knit. The hat turned out a bit on the bigger side, but heads come in all sizes so it should fit someone – at least I hope so. That’s the only knit hat I made, the rest are all crochet, that’s faster for me.

I made the pattern for this one up, it’s worked in spiral rounds with double crochet, the stitches are worked in the back loop only to create the spiralling ridges.

Enough adult hats, here are the ones for kids… first is a Visor Beanie by Suzanne Steiger, a fun pattern. I had to improvise a bit for the visor as I ran out of green yarn, but I think it looks just as good in two colours.

And a last one for little girls, just a basic beanie with a shell edge and a flower on the side. I made the stripes up as I went, just had one skein of the aqua yarn so I added some leftovers of the grey. The result was a bit boring for a girly hat, so I added a flower to it and rather like the result.

I’ll probably make more hats for them, but right now I’m busy with other projects. The hats are small projects, so I’m sure I can fit one in every once in a while.