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.

 

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