Author: Amy O'Neill Houck

Today was James’ birthday, and he asked for carrot cake. I spent part of the afternoon browsing through recipes and came up with a mish-mash of things I wanted to try. I was inspired by this recipe here, among others.

When I was a teenager, we had a Danish exchange student stay at our house. He brought some fun Christmas traditions, and he taught us how to make danish paper hearts. When I was a junior in college, and living

Ellen Bloom is one of the rock stars of crochet. I love her style, her obsession with Noro, granny squares, and her love for LA which is all documented beautifully and with humor on her blog, LA is my Beat.

Ok–I still haven’t figured out how to fit photo shoots into these short days very well. So I may have to have a big ornament shoot on Saturday when I’m not getting kids to school, running around planning Christmas pageants,

One of the fun things about this project is finding out about new blogs and web sites that I haven’t seen before. I found out about today’s snowflake ornament from someone on Twitter. She pointed me to the blog, Attic24–written

Surprise! I made something that’s not a hat. Last night I finished Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) a winner. That means I wrote over 50,000 words on my novel in the month of November. I got very close to actually

Elizabeth Zimmerman named this hat “Ganomy” after the funny way that someone in her family pronounced “Gnome.” It does really have an elfish look to it, and if I wasn’t already a fan of the silly hat, I probably wouldn’t

A few folks on Facebook took issue with me calling this dish “meatloaf.” (They were not vegetarian, ironically). I usually call it meatloaf because then people know what I’m talking about, and “veggie loaf” just doesn’t sound very appetizing. (Have you noticed that loaf is one of those words that starts to look strange after you stare at it for a while?) You can decide for yourself what to call it. My family called it delicious-even Jay who usually sticks to eating PB&J or spaghetti enjoyed dipping bits of it into ketchup. I made it because I was walking by The Cordova Café and saw a sign advertising “Cold Meatloaf Sandwich,” and that sounded so good.

I recently made a châtelaine. Dotty at The Net Loft had a class on pattern darning, and this was the project we worked on. I had never heard of this great little tool, a belt, of sorts that you wear

Sitto, (my mom’s mother) was a big fan of smock-style aprons. I like them too–they have pockets, and cover the whole front of you. I have a small collection of my Sitto’s aprons, and my mom does too. I find