I crocheted this little baby dress for my friend. Well, technically, it's for her baby! haha I've made this dress before, actually, and I wish I hadn't. I mean, that friend LOVES this dress, and I'm really happy about that. Her baby wore it as a dress and then over jeans. She's been wearing it for just about a year already! So that's all good.

The problem is, this dress is perfect for my other friend's baby. It's got this earthy, hippie tip that completely suits her! I'm not good at photographing projects, so you may have to trust me that the colors are great. Everybody went nuts for this when they saw me working on it. (I worked on it in an airport, and on a plane, this last weekend.) I really went back and forth on whether to make it, because the point of handmade is to give a one-of-a-kind gift, not a two-of-a-kind gift! In the end, I had to do it. It's just too perfect for her. But you see? Do you see why I wish I had made it for her, and her alone? I like the dress, but if I make it again, no matter who it's for, it will be different colors. Definitely.

Spring is really here! I can tell because today I officially dried three loads of laundry in one day! Just a few days ago, I had to hustle out there and get the clothes up before 10am so maybe ~ maybe! ~ they'd be dry by dinnertime.

My Grandma Dot always had a clothesline, which ran across her lawn between two huge pine trees. My mom is currently "punishing" my dad by refusing to use the electric dryer until he fixes the floor in her laundry room. Yeah, so, I've tried to point out that perhaps he wasn't suffering enough under the current system, but she doesn't actually care. I think she'd rather hang her clothes in the sun.

So, three generations of laundry lines. I have been hanging on the line in fits and starts for the last year or so. Like a lot of things that are a part of 'living simply', it started out very complicated for me. Where to hang it? Do I buy an umbrella style clothesline for $40? But then I'd have to buy a $70 stand too! Ugh. I finally put two lines up in the backyard, on opposite ends (shed to fence post on one side; weird random pole to roof access near the play-yard on the other side). Total cost: $3.99 for the line, which I cut. It's worked out great, and I'm finally in a groove of hanging clothes every day. It takes very little time to hang an entire load (definitely under 10 minutes) and even less time to take them down. Just a minute or two, and I usually have my little Scotty helper, who likes to pull them down while I scamper around trying to stay ahead of him releasing the clothespins so they don't snap and break when he wrangles them. I fold them as we take the clothes down, so that's a time saver.

When I was comparing it to just bending over and shoving all the wet clothes into the dryer, it hardly seemed "simpler"! But simple also means deliberate. Of doing small things with intention. It is only a few minutes, after all, and it saves electricity, wear and tear on clothes, and you can't beat the smell (and that extra special "crunch"!) of line-dried clothes and linens!

It cracks me up to see Scotty's underpants on the line, because they have Cars or Superman pasted across the butt. There's a trail behind our house that runs through parks land, and there's a pretty steady stream of hikers and dog walkers with just a barbed-wire fence separating them from our backyard. I was giggling this afternoon, thinking about that army of underroos flapping at them in the breeze!