Erica’s Blog

So, what do you do when you have a really small budget for a wedding shower gift?  Well, you gather up a couple of items you’ve aready purchased, knit up “a week of dishcloths” with cotton from your existing stash, buy a nice bowl and a pair of lacy underwear at Marshalls, and you put together a Sex Begins in the Kitchen gift like so:

Dishcloth patterns:

• Basic dishcloth.  (I didn’t use a pattern, but this one of Bev’s is essentially the same.)
• Mason-Dixon wash cloth.
• Pinwheel adapted from center of Mason-Dixon pinwheel rug.
• Garterlac dishcloth.
• Round dishcloth.
• Mitered dishcloth.
• No-pattern parallelogram cloth.

Oh, and that body oil is Neutrogena Body Oil, “light sesame formula”.  Fabulous stuff, known around our house as “liquid gold” (mille grazie Terry for giving me some at my lingerie shower eleven years ago).

Click on “Read More” to see the individual dish cloths….

EDITED TO ADD:  She liked it!  SO glad I asked Adri about Tina’s favorite colors b/c the bowl is the same color green Tina has in her kitchen, and the two other colors are yellow and turquoise.  The shower was great — 18 tons of food (highlights for moi = Velia’s ceviche/shrimp cocktail, Tammy’s chocolate-dipped strawberries, and the Mexican wedding cookies).  She had a “support the honeymoon” raffle with cool prizes (I won some Mary Kay eye stuff; I’m terrified of the eyelash curler).  The games were a lot of fun, too (and YES, I would say that even if I hadn’t won one of them!).  She didn’t get any sheets or towels, but she got lots of beautiful, sexy lingerie, so Frankie won’t mind not having the other stuff. 

Oh, yeah.  THIS is the other reason Wednesday was stressful.

This picture was actually taken AFTER the worst of it, when the plumber had already been here a while.  Earlier, there was, well, really disgusting brown water in the tub.  See the line?  That’s how deep it was.  VERY gross.  After the guy left (took him nearly FOUR HOURS to fix it all, but the work is guaranteed for two years), I had to clean, then disinfect the bathroom with a 10% bleach solution.  What fun!  The bathmat and scrubby got thrown out.

Wednesday was the first day of school.  Much excitement.  Much busyness, what with getting both Things ready & out the door, setting up the kindergarten parents’ reception and the teachers’ lunch, and my pre-op appointment at the hospital.  B/c of all this, I actually missed seeing and videotaping Thing Two walk into her classroom (she was the first one in!), get her nametag, find her cubbyhole, etc.  The second kid always gets the short end of the deal, hunh?  Oh, well.

Here’s a highlight.  The rest of the pictures (what few there are) are here.