Monthly Archives: April 2022

Glorious Spring

Leave a reply

Spring is like youth. It’s beautiful and fleeting. When you are young, you spend all your time trying to be older and then when you are really old, you wonder where the years went.  Youth is wasted on the young, one famous person once said.  Maybe not wasted, but we don’t appreciate being young while we are.

Spring is so like that. It comes  and goes so quickly, you hardly have a chance to enjoy it.  Right now everything is in its glory.

The Viburnum is especially pretty this year.

The Daffodils have been so pretty, but their days are almost over for another year.

I love PInk Flowering Almond.

The Redbud. One of the first harbingers of Spring. And they grow wild here in Indiana. Aren’t we blessed?  I did plant this one which came up in our back yard years ago.

Our Jeep goes right along with all the Spring colors!   By the way, the Jeep’s color is called Snazzleberry.

Our neighbors’ lilac is so lovely and we get to enjoy it, too.

I’m preparing my little garden outside my shop.  I find that if I plant things here, they won’t be dug up by pups.  They dug up three of the peonies in the back yard. We did replant them and put a fence around them, but peonies don’t like being moved, so it might be a few years before they do any good.

We went to Lowes yesterday and I bought two more large flower pots, some pansies and three other plants that I can’t remember their names at the present, but I will show you once they are planted.   One is a low growing, spreading grass and I don’t know where we will plant that yet.

Easter came and went so fast I can hardly believe we celebrated it. Our church choir sang a cantata which was lovely and then we had dinner with nine family members.

Our granddaughter and her husband(I still find that funny to say) were here. They have almost been married for a year already.

Our daughter and her family.  These are our “youngest” grandchildren now.

Our son and his wife and son were here as well. We didn’t get their pictures for some reason.  I always mean to get pictures of everyone and I always leave out someone.

David picked Daffodils for the table.

The Christmas cactus bloomed for Easter, too.

Our son and his wife had visited a nursery the day before and was I surprised when they gifted me with some presents.

This is the top of the garden stand.  Looks like angel wings, doesn’t it?   I could put birdseed in it, but it’s too pretty to have birds pooping all over it so I will probably just set it in the garden where I can enjoy it.

 O

Our son thought he got the best present for me, though.

A rooster windmill.   Yes, I do love it.

It’s been given a real workout with the windy days we’ve been having.

They also brought me a Russian Sage to plant. Or, as my son calls it, a Ukranian Sage.  He even printed it on the tag.  Our son, by the way is a Russian linguist and said he wishes he could go back into the military to help fight.  I’m glad he can’t because I worried enough about him while he was serving in the Air Force.

Miss Honey Sugar Dumpling,   Sugar, for short. She is such a sweet dog.

Cocoa Lucy Belle or Lucy for short is always and I mean always wanting to play. In fact, as soon as I finish this post I’m going outside and throwing her some balls.

It’s been a special time and now we are getting ready for all the work planting gardens and keeping the yard entails.  I’m also busy sewing for my Christmas sale. I know it seems far, far away, but the time goes so fast, it will be here before we know it.  I also got more fabric.  I don’t think I have enough. Ha!

Hope you are enjoying Spring or maybe it’s Fall where you live. Sometimes I can’t get my mind around the fact that when I am in snow, others are in Summer and when I am in Summer others are freezing.  Enjoy every day of Spring. I know I plan to. Bye.

 

 

 

A Day Out and Antiquing

Leave a reply

One day last week our daughter-in-love and her husband came to visit and take David and me to lunch. She is my son’s ex-wife, but we are still friends and she is the mother of my grandchildren so we keep in touch.   Anyway, they wanted to take us out to eat and asked where we wanted to go. I didn’t hesitate to say Cracker Barrel.  I don’t eat breakfast or lunch most days and usually am not hungry until mid afternoon, but I can eat at Cracker Barrel anytime because I can get French toast, which I love.

So off we went to Cracker Barrel.  I could not eat all my French toast, so I gave the last slice to David.  Then our friend could not eat all his bacon so he gave it to David.  David can eat a lot of food and still stays skinny. He ate his breakfast and parts of others’.  I just sit amazed that he can eat like that.

While on the way home we mentioned an antique store that would be interesting to go to so we went there next.  At this particular store, a lady has a booth where she sells fabric and other sewing things.  I always find some fabric there and I did that day.  I also found some other goodies.

I got these jars with what was inside them for under ten dollars. There are so many spools of perle cotton in the one jar it more than paid for me to get them.  The old clothespins will be used and I got the other jar because of the cute jar holder it sat in.

I bought this fabric which I will use to make bears.

I got this just because it was red and I am doing a lot of Christmas sewing right now.

David has been collecting buttons for years. He as thousands of them.  Jars full of them sit in my shop.  He found three more to add to his collection.

I enjoyed sorting through them to see what was there.  I needed eyes and button noses for my bears.  Did you ever sort through buttons when you were a child?  It was one of my favorite things to do. My mother had a button jar and I loved getting them out and sorting them.  I wish I had that jar today.  If you have children, give them a pile of buttons and some string and they will entertain themselves for a while.

I collect old books, mostly for children, and I found this very interesting one.  Written in the early 1900’s  what boys did then compared to what boys do now is astounding.

One chapter told boys how to build a log cabin from scratch.

Another showed how to make costumes for Halloween.

Or how to dress up like the “goblin man.”

There was a chapter on how to create your own circus.

And how to make the animals for the circus.

It is a very interesting book, but it makes me wonder how many boys today would want to or could make these things shown.  Boys leisure hours today seem to be spent on their cellphones or being in some sport or watching television.  I hope I’m wrong.

It was a fun outing and I hope we can do it again sometime.

I will see you on the other side of Easter.  Remember it’s not all about the bunny and the eggs, but about the risen Savior who died for every single one of us on the cross so that one day we all could be with Him in Heaven.    He arose the third day and that is what we are celebrating.  A happy and blessed Easter to you all. Bye.

 

 

Spring Has Sprung

Leave a reply

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.