Category Archives: Sewing

Spring Has Sprung

I love Spring. My favorite months of the year are March, April and May. My birthday was in March and it was a good one as usual, but the whole month just flew by like every one of the others have done lately. The flowers are appearing. We have daffodils all over our yard and the peonies are peeping up out of the ground and will be beautiful if Lucy and Sugar don’t dig them all up. They have already dug up a few of my flowers this year, but as I have always said, our back yard belongs to the dogs, I cannot complain when they do what dogs do. One hole was so deep, if I had fallen in it I would have probably broken something or landed in China!

All the flowering trees and bushes are ready to burst out and if we have a few warm days, they will. And I must get out and enjoy every minute because their beauty won’t last long. As for beauty……..

My Christmas cactus has surprised me and bloomed once again and has a few more buds on it.

Behind the cactus is the poinsettia I almost killed by forgetting to water, but now it’s got new leaves and I’m going to transplant both plants into larger pots with new soil in hopes that by next Christmas they will be beautiful again.

I spend many hours of most of my days in my shop sewing for my Christmas sale. I keep thinking of more and more things I want to make. And the fabric I ordered way before Christmas finally arrived. David had told me he would buy fabric for me for Christmas, so I pre-ordered some and it’s finally here.

I must have really loved this because I ordered four yards. It will make nice aprons.

I am going to make pillows for my sofa that sets in a room I sit in and do handwork and I am redecorating the whole room this year. We are going to paint it a pale green and I’m covering the sofa and a chair with white duck slipcovers. I was going to buy a new sofa this year as our old one is over twenty-five years old, but it is still in good condition and it’s cheaper to slipcover right now. I bought a new rug also. I hope we can get everything done before hot weather when I want to be outdoors swimming and playing with the dogs.

Anyway, back to fabric..

More aprons will be make from this.

I love this, but haven’t a clue what to do with it yet.

I love all things British and this is the first fabric like this I’ve seen for a while. I’ll find a good use for it.

This is more Christmas material I will use as backing on small quilts.

This I will use to make a skirt if I can find the time.

Anything with chickens on it, I love. This is the cutest fabric I’ve seen in a long time. I just wish I had bought more of it.

This is coordinating fabric. More chickens. I never thought I’d become a chicken lady, but I have in the past few years. My daddy raised hundreds of chickens when I was growing up. They provided us with lots of eggs that my mother cooked with and also sold to a little grocery store near us. We would have big baskets of eggs sitting in the kitchen waiting to be washed. The chickens also provided us our Sunday dinners. I would watch my daddy wring off the chicken’s head, yes, wring off, it’s a technique, and the hen body would flop all over. Me, being a very curious and rather devilish child, found this rather funny. Not so much for the chicken. After the chicken was dead, I would help my daddy pluck the feathers off and he would then take it to my mother to cut up and prepare it to fry the next day. In later years, my mother taught me how to dress a chicken. It really isn’t hard and I found it very interesting too. My mother usually prepared two chickens each Sunday. She would get up early and fry the chicken, go to church and come home and finish preparing the meal. I want to tell you, that was the best fried chicken I have ever eaten in my entire life. Was it because the meat was so fresh or the way my mother prepared it, I don’t know. But it was so good everyone wanted to sit at her table and eat it.

Back to fabric..

I REALLY wish I had bought four yards of this. I love it.

More sewing fabric. Quilting fabric started to be big back in the 80’s and 90’s. When I first started sewing quilts in the 70’s, it wasn’t easy finding good quality quilt fabric. We had a fabric store and we sold lots of fabric, but the industry seems to have grown by leaps and bounds since then. It seems ideas for fabric have not run out and more and more cute fabric is being produced. The new designers have really outdone themselves. I use to know who all the fabric designers were as I bought the fabric for our store, but there are some really talented men and women producing some beautiful fabrics now.

I use to make these little rabbits and sell them.

I still use them in my Easter displays.

This tray holds some of the toys my children received in their Easter baskets back in the 70’s and 80’s. Antiques now! Ha!

I wrote that I would show you some things I am making for my sale. But I will only show you little bits and pieces right now.

Pieces of something I am working on. I have a bed piled high with things I have already made since last Christmas. I sew three or four hours every day and I have gotten a lot of things made. This is all I will show you right now, but be assured, there are lots of other things I’ve made or will make before December 3rd, 2022.

Do any of you watch Home Town? It’s a show where a young couple redo and restore old houses in Laurel, Mississippi and it’s become one of my favorite shows. You can find it on HGTV. Anyway, on one of the show, they were demolishing a kitchen and on one of the cabinet doors, Erin, one of the stars of the show, found some recipes taped and she saved them and had one of the cakes baked from a recipe. It was called Miss Dot’s Pound Cake. She contacted Miss Dot and Miss Dot baked one for her. It looked so good. The pound cake and Miss Dot have become rather famous. You can look up Miss Dot and the recipe online.

I made Miss Dot’s pound cake the other day and it did not disappoint.

The recipe makes a very dense and delicious cake that needs no icing although you could ice it if you want to. It didn’t last long.

And because David and I love our desserts, I made a pineapple upside down cake a few days later.

It, too, did not last long.

Today David and I went antiquing with some good friends, but I will share that with you another day.

Happy Spring. Bye.

A Time to Celebrate

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After my last post perhaps you wonder if I’m still around. After having my leg banged by the pups, it looked pretty bad for a few days, but now it’s healing well and I never had any pain. David’s arm is doing better. Today he shoveled out the chicken house, so I guess he feels okay to do it.

This is my birthday week so we are celebrating. David made me some more flower boxes since I just ordered 21 packages of flower seeds. Yes, I went overboard, as usual and I always am looking for places to plant flowers. I had a really nice flower garden in raised beds last year and this year I will have more!

So I’m going to make this short today. My days are so busy sewing, sewing, sewing with my Christmas show and sale in December which seems like a long way away, but with the way this year has already gone, it will be here before we know it. I don’t sew as much in warmer months as I like to be outside so I’m trying to get as much done as I can before it warms up. I’ve made about fifteen pillows, a couple of small quilts, a table runner, a few pot holders and twenty or so pin cushions and that’s just a start of what I want to make. I have aprons, more quilts, more pot holders and mug warmers in mind. I just make what sounds like fun to me. I will be giving sneak peaks through the coming months at what will be for sale.

So I will see you on the other side of my birthday. We are going out for the day and then dinner and Tiramisu, one of my favorite desserts will be on the menu. Bye.

What I Made and a wonderful Christmas

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I hope your Christmas was as wonderful as mine. It’s always good to have family around and eat good food and open presents.

I worked up to the day before finishing presents. It was a work of love, for sure, and I enjoyed every moment of it.

First of all, the socks. These are a few of the socks I have knitted this year. I hang some of them on the mantle and let people pick out the pair they want. This year I knit over twenty pair of socks and had some left over. I have already started next year’s batch.

I made this pillow for our daughter. My mother made the Dresden plate many years ago out of her old dresses and aprons and one of my dresses.

The purple fabric is from a dress I wore when I was little. I remember that dress well. I loved it and hated when I outgrew it.

I made patchwork pillowcases for some.

Another pillow I made.

A small quilt with four barns on it with four different quilt patterns in the door.

I made several pillows from this pattern from a book I got from Country Threads.

I love this one with the moon where the star should be. I have already got a request for another one.

I also did one in Christmas colors. These were so much fun to make, I could not stop making them.

My daughter got a new kitty before Christmas. She lost one of her sweet dogs and the kitty helped her so I made her this quilt. I had this quilt pieced for years and never finished it, but when I saw her new kitty, I knew that I would have to finish it for her. The fabric was in my mother’s stash that I received after she died.

This was the backing. You know how sometime you make something to give away and you hate to give it away? This quilt was one of those.

This isn’t all the things I made, but I haven’t given away some things so I can’t show you. It was fun making everything and I have ideas for next year, but first, I am going to work on things for a sale I want to have next October or November. I plan to make lots of pillows, small quilts, socks and other things to sell in my shop. Kind of a one woman Christmas bazaar. I will see what I can get done and whether I will make enough to have the sale.

David made picket fences and birdhouses for everyone and they were pleased to get them I used the one he made for me as decoration on our front porch with garland and lights on it.

Went to the eye doctor and he said my eye was doing very well, but he wanted to see me again in six months. I asked him if I was going to have to see him every six months forever and he asked me, “Don’t you like us!” Ha. I like them, but that doesn’t mean I want to go there every six months. It’s a forty-five minute drive and several hours wait for a five minute checkup so no, I don’t like seeing them!

We had a very nice Christmas with the grandchildren. We gave them these balls that fly and return to them, among other things, and they were a hit. Balls were flying everywhere! I gave our granddaughter a quilt I made several years ago and got a blue ribbon at the county fair. I told her at the time that when I died she would get it, but I got to thinking maybe she may not get it after I died, so I gave it to her for Christmas. I took lots of pictures of it and I will show you my next post. It’s a Little Garden Girls quilt. Another gift it was hard to give away, but I’m glad I did. I know she will cherish it and take care of it, maybe for her daughter one day.

Here’s to Christmases past and present and may we always have a reason to celebrate because we do. Bye.

Color, Texture and Pattern

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From as long as I can remember, I have been interested in fabric and sewing and in recent years, knitting socks, also. My earliest remembrance of trying to design something was when I was three years old. My mother was outside hanging up clothes to dry and I was outside with her, when suddenly she noticed I was missing. She began a frantic search all around the outside of our house and barnyard and up to our neighbor’s looking for me. I can imagine how terrified she was that she could not find me. She went into the house to call the town sheriff and there I was, sitting in my little chair behind the stove carefully drawing on the face of my favorite rag doll with lipstick. She had no idea I could reach the handle on the door to get into the house. I don’t remember if she was angry or just happy to find me, but I remember that doll, how it was dressed in a pink dress with brown braided yarn hair and to my mind, now looked even better with lipstick. My mother gave me an old sock and told me to make a sock doll and I did, painstakingly sewing its arms and legs and drawing a face on it. I still have that doll and if I can find it in the bowels of this house, I will show you. I have so many things tucked away that I have no idea where they are. My love of sewing and fabric had begun.

I remember clothes and textures from long ago. I always noticed what people wore. Years later when my mother and I would go to the JC Penney store in the city and we would go to the fabric department, I remember loving walking through the rows of fabric, feeling each one and thinking about things to sew. I couldn’t sew then, but my mother could and she made my clothes for years. I remember in particular a white dotted swiss dress with red polka dots and with a full skirt and a red velvet sash. I felt so pretty in that dress. I wore it to the Ruth Lyons’ 50-50 club, a tv show out of Cincinnati. It was one of the first colorized tv shows in the area and my mother wanted my dress to show up well on camera. The audience would be filmed waving and I’m sure I was on tv that day.

When I took Home Ec. in junior high, I made a suit from kelly green cotton. A short jacket and a straight skirt with a matching green and white print blouse. I modeled it in the Home Ec. style show that was held every year. I was a good seamstress by that time.

In the sixties and seventies, polyester knits were in vogue. I was married at the time and I made David a polyester suit, jacket, pants and all. When we look at pictures of him in that suit now, we laugh because I had placed the belt loops on the jacket too high and the jacket was belted almost up around David’s chest. But he wore that suit proudly. I have a picture of him in it that is precious to me.

Many clothes passed through my sewing machine while my children were young. I made all three clothes. One of my sons told me his teacher didn’t believe I had made a shirt and pants he wore to school, but I had. We went to a wedding in Detroit, Michigan when our boys were young and I made theirs and my outfits we wore to the wedding. I use to sew clothes for display at JoAnn’s fabrics when a friend of mine worked there.

Fast forward years later and we had a quilt fabric store and my love of making quilts took hold and I’ve been making quilts ever since. I still love fabrics, but now I look at them online in most cases and order them sent to my home which I think is pretty wonderful.

This past Spring I backordered some Autumn and Halloween fabrics and I just got them in the last couple of weeks. It was like Christmas. Let me show you some of the fabrics.

These cat eyes look like they glow, but they really don’t. Just how they turned out in the picture. Kind of spooky.

All the things of Autumn I love on one quilt panel.

I love harlequin fabric. A little of it in a quilt really looks nice.

Makes me want to make Halloween sugar cookies.

I am going to make a skirt out of this fabric. It looks like just about any top would go with it.

I finished a quilt I started years ago. That is what I do. Start one quilt, put it aside, start another and then years later finish the first one. This one had been in a box for a long time until I found it again and finally finished it.

Not sure what this pattern is called. I do remember it was fun to make and I found the perfect backing for it.

An old quilt I either bought at an auction or at an antique store. The colors on this old quilt went perfectly with the quilt on the front.

And I loved the fabrics the quilt maker used in her quilt top. I hope she would be glad her quilt is finished, even if it is the backing of another one.

She had a wonderful eye for fabric placement.

I love the old fabrics. Many look like they could have been aprons at one time.

She wasn’t afraid to use plaids.

Or indigos.

She must have had a large stash of fabric because there are so many different ones in this quilt. Not sure what year she may have made this, but I would say some of the fabrics are from the forties and fifties. This quilt could be reversible as I think the back is just a as pretty as the front.

I’m in love with the textures and colors of yarn too. Almost as much as I love fabric.

One company had yarn named after national parks. This one is called Zion National Park. I have already knit the socks from this and they are beautiful.

This is Grand Canyon. Having been to the Grand Canyon twice, I can see the colors of the cliffs and the river below.

Just loved all these colors.

I don’t think I will ever tire of fabrics and yarn. I’m hoping textures, colors and patterns will be a part of my life until I die. I found my love very early in life and am so glad I did.

Here’s to the joy of doing something you love. Bye.

Happy Valentine’s Day or How Being Sick for Three Days Really messed up the Amour

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It’s Valentine’s Day. The day for lovers. The day you send special greetings to the one you love. Flower and candy companies make a killing.

David and I have been sick since Sunday. The full blown flu with body aches chills, temperatures, coughing a lung out and just general malaise. I’m not sure where we picked it up. At the doctor’s office or at church or at a restaurant where a little girl in the booth beside us was coughing so hard I thought she would hurt herself. Wherever we got it, we got it good. I spent two full days in bed trying to stay warm with the heated matress pad set on high, a heating pad at my feet and three blankets covering me. David actually took a day off work, something he NEVER does no matter how he feels. I didn’t think he should have gone back today. but he did. Our daughter just called and her whole family has been down with the flu. Our oldest son was in the hospital with high blood pressure. Yes, we are a sickly family right now. Today I feel halfway to normal and hopefully the worst has passed.

The really sad thing was the first day I started to feel poorly, I went out to feed and water my chickens and Shannon, my big, beautiful, white Brahma was lying dead in the yard and all the other hens were cowering in their nests three to a nest. I knew something very traumatic had happened in the coop, but since they couldn’t tell me, I will never know. But Shannon had been murdered that was quite evident. I really felt so sad because she was the one who was always afraid and I hate to think what her last few seconds of life were like. I am wondering if it was a hawk. It doesn’t matter how many times I find a dead chicken, I always get a sick feeling in my stomach and a feeling of loss. I still have ten hens left.

I came downstairs today to find this.

Roses and a card. David wrote some really romantic things on the card that I won’t share here. Just know I didn’t think he could be so romantic! It was a nice start to Valentine’s day. I decided, despite how I felt, he deserved a home cooked meal. I haven’t cooked for a week. I made fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, peas and cranberry sauce. David was very happy. He’s been living on leftovers, cold meat and frozen food for days.

I have been working on some little projects for Valentine’s decorations.

Little felt hearts. These were so fun to make while I watched tv.

Then I made this with them.

A heart garland. I have to make the other half to cover the entire fireplace mantle.

The postman brought me a treat.

More sock yarn. And then a few days later….

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More sock yarn. I am seriously loving this yarn. David wanted a pair of socks from it, so that is what I am doing.

Really loving how this is knitting up.

And look at this wonderful yarn. I have enough new yarn for seven more pairs plus I can use the leftover yarn to make patchwork socks like I have done with these….

Three or four different leftover balls of yarn to make these socks. I’m loving these, too.

And this was some self striping yarn I had to make these socks.

And a while back I wrote about some Christmas socks I wanted to make with this particular yarn.

It wasn’t as Christmassy as I thought it would be. Too much pink so I ordered some new yarn that does look like Christmas colors.

I sit in my knitting chair and look before me at all the wonderful yarns to work with and I am loving it. There is my Christmas yarn on the left. I know, we just got done with Christmas, but it is always on my mind since I do tend to make a lot of presents.

I do a lot of online shopping and order almost all my clothes online as I don’t like to shop and am an impulse buyer. I have found I save money ordering online because I don’t buy a lot of stuff that I don’t need. Well, I ordered this denim jacket and it is my favorite all time purchase online ever. I put it on when it arrived, wore it all day, wore it out to the store and kept it on all evening. It will look good with just about any top I have and it is so comfortable. Great jacket for Spring. Plus I love all things with flowers on it. There are flowers on the front and back of this jacket. I wrote a great review for it at the online store.

I hope you are having a wonderful Valentine’s Day. No one buy you a Valentine? Buy yourself one. You deserve it. Just know I love you all that are reading this today and I really think about you and your lives and hope with all my heart that life is treating you well. Hugs and love. Bye.

The Week Between

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Santa has hung up his hat for another year.

There really ought to be a name for the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I mean, you just spent weeks in a wild scramble to decorate, buy gifts, wrap the gifts, plan a special meal, attend a Christmas cantanta, do some partying if you are so inclined and then Christmas comes and all the gifts are opened, the family comes, the family goes and in a few hours, it’s over. I spent the day after coming down from a complete high. Nothing to hurry to get done. No cleaning to do. No where to go. Ahh, sweet, sweet nothingness. Sleep in, read, knit just for the enjoyment. Work on a new little project I was chomping at the bits to start before Christmas. But I still felt a little lost. Like something was missing. The week of nothingness. I just wish Christmas had lasted longer. And all the tv has is reruns. Glad we have Netflix, but we finished the final show in the series of Longmire, which had quickly become my favorite show on television. I understand there will be a sixth season of it so will have to wait until it comes on Netflix. If you haven’t seen it and like good stories, good acting, handsome men and the west, you will love it. Lou Diamond Phillips is in it and he’s a hunk and the star, Robert Taylor isn’t bad either. (Hope David doesn’t read this!) If we didn’t have Netflix, we probably would not watch much tv. I am trying to cut back and do more reading. I’ve put several books on my Kindle. Does anyone else who has Kindle feel like they read faster than when reading from a book? I feel like I fly through books now. I got Kindle Unlimited because I was buying so many books. Now I can read as many as I want for the price of one book. There is an author I discovered, George Mahood, who has written books about things he has done like bicycle from the bottom tip of England to the top tip of Scotland with no money, no bicycle and no clothes, except the shorts he had on. No bicycle, you ask? You will have to read the book. He and a friend did it in three weeks with absolutely no money in their pockets. He wrote a book about a trip he took through the United States which was really good and made me love my country even more. That book was called, “Not Tonight, Josephine.” You will have to read it to find out who Josephine is. It’s nice when someone from another country says so many nice things about my country. Another book he wrote was about different holidays no one has ever heard of before and he tried to celebrate one each day of the year. Did you know that January 2 is cats’ new year? It’s called Happy Mew Year. If you want to laugh out loud, read one of his books.

We are the grandparents of four brand new golden retriever puppies. Our daughter’s dog had them on my grandson’s, her son’s birthday. What a gift. We haven’t seen them yet, but hope to see them this week. I will get some pictures to show you.

Now that the new year is here, I am planning. One of the things that makes life worth living, is to have something to look forward to. I read that somewhere. Someone to love, something to do and something to look forward to. I have been blest all my life with all three. I am always planning. I have known friends who were still making plans on their deathbed. I think that is the human condition. We make plans. Of course, life almost never goes as we plan it which is what makes it so interesting.

This Christmas almost everyone got socks that I had hand knitted. It became a running joke as each person opened a package and there were socks. My youngest grandson looked at me with a worried look and said, “Grandma, I hope I’m not getting socks!” He didn’t. All the younger boys got train sets this year. And Nerf guns with plenty of Nerf bullets.

Here is a picture of those who got socks this Christmas, or at least their feet.

From the leftover yarn I am knitting patchwork socks. I already have a pair ready for next Christmas!

Yes, it was a sock year.

Once you have worn hand knitted sock, you never want to go back to store bought. They are warm and comfy and stretchy. One year I bought a couple of pair of socks from the Ralph Lauren store that were really cute, but when I got them home, they had absolutely no stretch in them. I could barely get them over my heels. Sad, too, because they were really, really cute. I have no trouble getting hand knit socks on and off. I hope they last longer than store bought socks also.

Not to say we have been doing nothing this week. I made a big pot of potato soup with jalapeno and cheese sausages.

David and I spent a quiet New Year’s Eve. We went to an Italian restaurant and ate dinner. That night while watching one of the New Year’s shows I suddenly got hungry for pancakes. “I’ll make some, ” David said. And he did.

With strawberry preserves and whipped topping. Yum. What better way to end one year and start the next. I just said we were having breakfast extra early.

The project I have worked on this week were these little trees Patchwork pines. Tattered Trees. They are the creation of Ann Wood, a blogger I just discovered who makes the cutest things out of used things, paper machine and anything she can find. She provided the pattern for these for free. I, of course, could not make just one and ended up with a little forest of them.

Then I put them with little houses my daddy had made years ago and made a little village on our mantle.

With kissing Grandpa and Grandma, of course. Ha.

Besides all the other things going on, we had three birthdays in December and on Christmas day we celebrated our youngest grandson’s eighth birthday. It’s hard for me to think he is already this old. Just seems he was born and he’s half grown almost.

I made him a cake with a banner with his name on it.

He seemed happy with it.

And just because we have nothing else to do, David and I started a puzzle this week.

I ordered this from the Current catalog months ago and we said we’d wait until after Christmas to start it. It is really a fun and interesting puzzle to do. Not sure about the marijuana leaves on it, but some states have legalized it. Even though I was a teen and a college student in the sixties, I can honestly say I have never tried marijuana and don’t plan to start. I have always been careful about the drugs that go into my body. I don’t like taking aspirins too well, but will if necessary.

This is a pretty big puzzle. I like how the light is shining on it right now.

Spread out on two tables. David is really the puzzle maker in our house. I get impatient and frustrated after a while and have to leave. David will sit for hours working on it and he is not intimidated by all the white pieces in this puzzle.

Well, we don’t know what this year will bring. Just living it one day at a time and trying to enjoy every moment. I hope January goes really slow. We will have a presidential inauguration and David’s birthday on the same day. That will be fun.

This is the year I am going to start walking again I was up to five miles a day a couple of years ago and then I hurt both my legs at different times and it was hard to walk a mile without pain, so, this is the year I am going to try to get back to walking again. I will start slow with a mile or so and work up from there. I will keep you posted and maybe you would like to start this journey with me. After all, a journey begins with just one step. Bye.

Flower Child

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I was a flower child long before it became popular. Not the kind of flower child who did drugs or danced naked in the fields at Woodstock. My mother grew beautiful flowers in her garden and every year I helped her gather the seeds for next year’s flowers. She also loved African violets and my father made her a little window greenhouse in the kitchen where she grew some of the most beautiful African violets. She could have won prizes for her flowers, but she grew them just because she loved them.

In the Summer my daddy would put me in the car with a few buckets and a shovel and we would drive down to the river where daddy would dig up sand and put it in the buckets to take back home to put in my sand pile. While he was doing that, I was pulling up flowers(weeds) to take home and plant in my sand pile. They didn’t last long, of course, but for a short time I had my very own garden. I was always looking at the flower catalogs Mother would get. I would go with her to the greenhouse where she purchased flowers for her porch boxes. The man who owned the greenhouse knew my mother by name as she was a regular customer and came back every year. I loved walking down the rows of flowers and choosing the ones I liked in my mind. My Mother would buy a flat of flowers and bring them home and plant her porch boxes. I can’t remember a time she didn’t have porch boxes planted when I lived at home.

Now I have gardens of my own and can plant whatever I want. I still love going to a greenhouse and looking at all the flowers. I love the smell inside a greenhouse. The smell of fresh dirt and flowers is the best scent in the world. Wish they could make a perfume of it. I probably already smell like that about every day in the Spring when I am outdoors planting and digging and dividing the flower clumps. Today I finally got everything planted, I think, although I did see a corner in my kitchen garden that has only one flower planted there. We cut down a redbud tree last year and I haven’t filled in the space yet, evidently. Time to buy more flowers!

So, come into my garden and see just a few of the flowers that are growing there.

Irises! One of my favorite flowers because you can’t kill them and they multiply year after year without you doing anything at all. I told a friend of mine I even mowed my irises down in the Autumn and she thought I was crazy. But, I do, and every year, they come up bigger and better than ever.

One of my favorites. One day a couple of years ago, a man stopped by our house and asked if he could have a start of these irises, so I dug up one for him and asked him if he had any flowers he would like to share. He did! He brought me some lilac bushes and I planted them and one of them is doing well.

These are becoming one of my favorite flowers now. Digitalis or Foxgloves. They reseed themselves and are biennials so I should have some every year. I have planted their seed everywhere and bought more plants, too. You see, I am making my garden self sustaining so that one day, when or if I cannot plant or work in it anymore, the flowers will take care of themselves.

One of David’s mother’s rosebushes. It is doing so well now. For a while, I thought I had killed it, but with loving care, it has come back and has a lot of blooms. The roses smell just like roses should smell. I have two of these bushes. I feel so blessed. Another reason I can never leave this house. I have too many flowers from family members that grow all around my garden. I think of those people every year when the flowers bloom. Flowers like David’s grandmother’s sixty year old clematis, her snowball bushes, my mother’s day lilies and these roses. It’s a family garden for sure.

These poppies were started from Grandma Henley’s( David’s grandma) garden. She had a beautiful garden behind her house and these grew profusely. I remember her squatting in her garden, her knees up to her ears, weeding the flowers until she was almost ninety years old. She also grew the best rhubarb behind her outhouse!

I planted two new Asiatic lilies. I have ordered more Irises and peonies to be planted in the Autumn. Nope, can’t have enough flowers.

Speaking of peonies, they are starting to bloom now. They are my very favorite flower. They are beautiful and smell wonderful. The only thing is, they just don’t last long enough.

I have them in red, white, pink and pink and white.

Flowers are not the only things that have been on my mind. You remember my sock journey?

I have become obsessed with sock knitting now that I kind of understand the process. I still don’t like the double pointed needles at the end when decreasing the toe. That is when everything goes all wrong all at once if I don’t pay special care or I get interrupted. Which is why I only try to knit them when David is at work. I am trying to figure out another way to decrease the toes. Every sock has been an experiment in knitting.

I do have a finished pair now. My grey socks.

I got a little carried away with the second sock and it’s a tad longer than the first one, but no one will notice when I have them on as they are slouchy and loose. Made out of wool and acrylic, they will be warm to wear next Winter.

I have purchased several circular needles so that I could have different socks going at all times. I just ordered more needles and sock blockers. This hobby is becoming expensive! Now, I drool over yarn like I have drooled over fabric for years. There are so many yarn companies and so many beautiful yarns to choose from.

I really love this yarn. It isn’t exactly a stripe, but there are variegated partial stripes throughout the sock.

Ready for the dreaded toe decrease on another sock.

This winter I plan to have a lot of different socks to wear and I am going to try to knit socks for family members if I can figure out how to make them smaller and larger.

It isn’t true that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks because I am living proof you can. I never thought in a million years I could learn to knit socks, but I persevered and finally accomplished it.

I hadn’t been in my shop for weeks because of the sock making, but today I went out and started a new purse. I wish I could tell you where I got this pattern. I got it online and I have made so many purses from this pattern. Several people carry my purses. I call this one my garden purse.

I have this fabric that has country words on it, so I cut out some of the words and sewed it on my purse.

I’m really loving making this purse. I’ve done some embroidery on it and will soon have it completed. Just give me an afternoon.

Hope you are enjoying these wonderful May days. They are going by so quickly. I wish I could wrap one day up and take it out in the middle of the Winter and enjoy it once again.

Here’s to flower children and those who love them. Bye.

The Needle Arts

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From the day that my mother first handed me a needle and an old sock and told me to make a doll, I have been interested in the needle arts. I still have that sock doll somewhere. From sewing machines needles to knitting needles to quilting needles I have been interested in making things with needles. My year started out with my trying my hand at knitting socks. I have made three false starts and now I am once again trying to knit a sock.

I purchased this book in hopes it would walk me through the dreaded heel. I have not started the heel yet and to tell you the truth, I am very worried about it.

I’m practicing on a sock with inexpensive wool. I am liking how it looks so far.

I ordered this beautiful yarn from this place…

It’s so beautiful, I am almost afraid to use it. But won’t these make wonderful socks?

I have never ordered wool like this and I have never rolled balls of yarn before and it took a village to get it done. If I had tried to figure out how to find the end of the yarn in these skeins, I would have been left with a knotted up mess, but David helped me and we ended up with this..

You know how in some of those old movies you would see the husband holding the yarn in both hands while the wife wound the ball? That is what David and I did. One skein down, four more to go. One skein is suppose to knit up a pair of socks.

Remember the socks I was knitting a few days ago and ripped out?

Now they are a scarf, but I would much rather have had a pair of socks to show you. Someone will be getting a scarf for Christmas next year. Ha. I can do scarves with my eyes closed. Maybe that is what I am doing wrong. Not closing my eyes while I knit socks. What a catastrophe that would be!

I’m not the only one who can ply a needle.

I wanted to learn how to crochet and David found me one of his crochet hooks and started casting on and before we both knew it, he had crocheted this….

He used up some of my old yarn and wore this to work. He got several compliments on it. At least one of us is good with the needle. I still haven’t learned how to crochet. But it’s on my bucket list.

I licked my wounds after the sock debacle and went back to what I knew I could do. Quilting. This first week of January I have already completed two quilts.

This is one I started a couple of years ago and wanted to finish it before Valentine’s Day this year and I did! This is made with Pamkitty Love fabric which I love.

Love the look of old fashioned Valentines.

Another quilt I completed was made from the book, Little Quilts All Through the House. A book I had had for several years and lost and just last week I ordered it on Amazon for under ten dollars and am so glad I did. I have made so many little quilts from this particular book in the past years and this week I made another one.

Another quilt for Valentine’s Day. This one made up so fast and I absolutely love it.

I love fabric with words upon it and this is the border to this particular quilt.

Has a French look about it. Anyway, I feel a little better that I completed a project once again as I have been rather discouraged about all the sock knitting failures. I will knit socks. I won’t give up.

This is part of a new project I just started this week also. It’s going to have quilting, embroidering, and applique on it. I am making this to wear for Valentine’s Day. I am so excited because it is my own creation and no one will have anything like it when I am completed. All these ideas just creep into my mind and suddenly I just have to create. I put everything else aside when the creative juices start flowing. Must be like the feelings Picasso, Monet and other artists must have felt like when they created their great art, not that anything I make is great art, but it’s my art and I love it. I will be showing my creation as soon as I get it completed.

Alas, the day came to take down the Christmas tree. It’s never as exciting as putting it up although I do enjoy having more room again, but I sure will miss the bright lights and cheer the tree brought into our home.

Putting away all our much loved ornaments. We didn’t put as many decorations on the tree this year, but it was just right and looked really pretty.

I will look forward to seeing these again next Christmas.

All my snow people watched with interest as we stored all the Christmas paraphernalia away. They seemed to be saying, “Phew, we get to stay out another month or two because we are snow people.”

This little guy joined the others this year.

A friend gave me this wonderful Jim Shore snowman several years ago. He is my favorite snowperson. Shhhh, don’t tell the others.

This little lady joined my Jim Shore collection this Christmas as a gift to me and she stands on a shelf in the kitchen. The person who gave her to me said it was me with all the cooking and baking I do. I took that as a compliment. I love her.

This is my new exercise ball my daughter and son-in-law gave to me for Christmas. Every time I went to their house I would bounce on my daughter’s exercise ball and say, ” I would love to have one of these,” and she listened to me. It’s good for core exercise and balance. My daughter has MS and uses it to help her balance. I love bouncing on it. Feel like a kid again!

I got this really great poster of butterflies last Fall when we were in Fredricksburg, Texas at Wildseed Farms. Don’t know how I am going to display it yet, but I love looking at it and reading about all the different butterflies. So many beautiful ones.

I’ve seen a few of these in our garden.

And last but not least, I bought a couple of inexpensive journals at JoAnn’s the other day. I love writing in journals when I am not writing here. There is something about putting words on paper. I go back to some of my old journals that tell about some of our trips, family gatherings and other things and find it such a joy to read about the good times and even some of the not so joyful times because none of us gets to live a life free of pain or sorrow. But, all in all, we have lived a pretty good life, Dave and I and I hope I can fill many more journals.

Hope you will be creative this year. If not, I hope you get to enjoy something from a creative person. Here’s to needles and yarn and thread and creative juices. Bye.

Fabric Love

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I love fabric. The feel of it. The different textures. Sewing on it. Ironing it. I love everything about fabric. I especially love when I order fabric and it arrives in a brown box just waiting to be opened like a Christmas present. I got some fabric in the mail the other day.

Yummy colors.

Beautiful colors.

I played with the fabric, putting it into a pretty bowl a friend had given me. The fabrics coordinated with the bowl almost like it was planned.

Folded and unfolded and folded again. Such a simple pleasure. You fabric fanatics know exactly what I am talking about. Those who don’t, think I’m nuts.

Launder the fabric and let it set on the ironing board for a few days so I can look at it. Looking forward to ironing it. Haven’t a clue what I will make with it yet, except for one yard of it, but that’s the fun of it.

I’m leaning toward pastels and lighter colors lately.

Vintage looking fabrics.

I have plans for this cute little crab fabric.

I always love fabric with words upon it.

Remember when I did this to the ceiling of my shop?

I painted over a hundred 2 by 2 boards to be nailed onto the ceiling.

I have been painting barn quilts to put on the front of our house. This is one of them.

Did you watch the lunar eclipse this week? It was amazing. It was also the blood moon. We got some good pictures of it as it was happening.

Amazing and almost spiritual in its beauty and wonder.

Who could see this and say there is no God? I stand amazed.

And God made two great lights.; the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night: He made the stars also.

And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from darkness: and God saw that it was good. Genesis 1:16-18. It is good. Bye.

Knee Deep in Summer

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I love Summer. Always have. My first memories of Summer is playing with my brothers in the yard on the swing set I believe Daddy had built. It was made of wood which is why I believe he built it. I would sit in a swing on that swing set waiting for the school bus to bring my brothers and sister home from school. Under the big walnut tree, swinging back and forth and watching for the yellow school bus. Then when I got to go to school, I looked forward to Summers and all the freedom we had as children on the farm to play and explore and help Daddy and Mother with chores and gardening.

I remember one Summer strolling down the gravel road to my sister’s , who lived just about a quarter of a mile from our house, singing “June is Busting Out All Over” from the musical State Fair. Dogs walking beside me about half way and then they would turn back and go home. We always had dogs which is why I think I love dogs so much. Mother did not have to worry about anything happening to me with the dogs along. My sister lived across from a big woods and anytime I went to visit her, I always made sure I was home before it got dark because the woods spooked my at night. I just knew something or someone would run out of them and catch me.

Summer was picking strawberries in the garden, gathering eggs, helping Daddy with the hay bailing by helping put the bales in the big red barn. He would drive the tractor and wagon stacked with hay bales in through the big center doors of the barn and my brothers would throw the bales up into the hayloft. I would help by dragging the bales to where they were to be stacked using a kind of hook to grab the bales. Summer was hours of badminton, weeding in the garden, playing with new kittens in the barn, playing baseball in the barnyard and taking hikes with my brothers. It was time for swinging in the porch swing kicking it back and forth as I read a library book. Playing hide and go seek and kick the can and battle stations( a game my brothers made up where we ran every time we saw a car coming down our road.) Oh, Summers were wonderful. It was catching lightening bugs in jars and taking the jar to my bedroom at night and watching them flicker off and on. It was swimming in the little pond my brothers made by damming up a little stream that ran through my Daddy’s woods. I never thought of snakes or anything else in the water, it just was fun to play in it. It was playing Davy Crockett at an old cabin behind Daddy’s farm where my brothers and their friends threw walnuts at each other as I hid in the cabin pretending they were Davy Crockett fighting the Indians.

My mother was a gardener and I got the gardening gene from her. I love the flowers of Summer.

We have had so much rain the flowers have grown big and blowzy all over the back yard. See the new fence David is building to keep Molly Marshmallow out of the garden? It almost disappears with all the flowers around it

Bonnie stays near the water bucket on these hot Summer days. She is twelve years old this Summer. Seems like we just got her as a pup.

And what does Miss Molly Marshmallow have in her mouth? I hope it isn’t another baby rabbit. She keeps all wildlife out of our backyard which probably is a good thing with all the flowers and vegetables growing there.

It’s pretty big, isn’t it?

It’s her chew bone that weighs about two pounds and she carries it around like it was nothing, but as long as she is chewing on it, she isn’t chewing on something she mustn’t.

Because it has been raining so much, I have had some time in my shop working on a few projects.

This barn quilt.

A chicken in the barn door.

Chickens marching across my shop.

And more chickens.

I especially love this polka dot chicken. Everyone needs a polka dot chicken.

Or two.

I bought a retractable clothes line, they call it a dryer. Ha. Just have to find some place to hang it now. I have yearned for the smell of sheets fresh off the line on our bed for a long time. I will just have to hang them where Molly Marshmallow cannot get to them.

I baked bread the other day in tiny loaves. Six of them. Three were regular bread and the other three were these….

Cinnamon bread. Yum, yum and yum. It didn’t last long around here with David’s sweet tooth, or mine for that matter. I plan to bake again this Saturday.

I will leave you with a picture of a big spider web that was built at the top of our back door. Big enough for David to walk into. And a poem.

COBWEBS

By E.L.M. King

Between me and the rising sun,

This way and that the cobwebs run;

Their myriad wavering lines of light

Dance up the hill and out of sight.

There is no land possesses half

So many lines of telegraph

As those the spider-elves have spun

Between me and the rising sun.

Bye.

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30

Snicklefritz

So glad you came. Come sit a spell and read about the tale of my life.

Category Archives: Sewing

Spring Has Sprung

A Time to Celebrate

What I Made and a wonderful Christmas

Color, Texture and Pattern

Happy Valentine’s Day or How Being Sick for Three Days Really messed up the Amour

The Week Between

Flower Child

The Needle Arts

Fabric Love

Knee Deep in Summer