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    Garden beauty

    Before my garage sale I made some flags from scraps to put up by the street so people would know the sale was here. As it turned out, we had so much stuff the flags weren’t needed. They’ve sat on my sewing machine case until today. I decided to pretty up the garden a bit.

    Incidentally…the garden is doing very well. I have green tomatoes on all the plants and a couple yellow pepper on one plant. I’ve been harvesting herbs nearly daily. The lettuce is looking pretty poor but I’m going to try and let it dry out a little more. I think it’s not well enough drained.

    I picked up a small stoneware pitcher from a garage sale last week. The lady didn’t want to bargain much with me because she said it was made by a famous MN potter named Robert Briscoe. I’d never heard of him but looked it up when I got home. I paid $5 for it…she said she paid over $30.
    Last evening, I went around the yard and picked a pretty bouquet for my new pitcher.

  • Blog

    Little bits of this and that


    I’ve been working on random projects as time permits since it’s summer break for the kids.

    I made another cork board. An 8×10 version this time. I tried out cutting the long “stem” off the champagne corks. This posed more of a challenge in the layout. I still have a bag of corks from the giant fish bowl…amazing how many were in there.

    Four cartons of fire starters made from sawdust and leftover candles for our chimenea.They work really slick. Just break off one section and it adds enough fuel to get the fire going really good. Great way to use up those candle bits that won’t burn anymore.


    This time I had quite a bit of extra wax due mostly to a couple of really poor candles I bought a while back. They were both the jarred variety and kept drowning the wick in the puddled wax. Frustrating!

    I decided to try a citronella candle for the deck once I found the wicking and citronella oil in my candle making box. I reused one of those old candle glass jar for this experiment.

    PS…what do you think of my new signature?

  • Blog

    May Dress

    I’m almost there!! One more dress and I’ll be caught up with the rest of the Dress-up Project participants.

    This dress I wanted to be kind of sassy. Maybe prom dress like.
    First I adhered a scrap hand dyed fabric from my stash to the cereal box form.
    Next I got out a couple silk flower arrangements likely from the 80’s or early 90’s judging by the color. I pulled them apart and stapled the folded flowers in layers to form the skirt flounces.
    The pearl and lace ribbon was used to cover the staples. See you’d have never known my secret had I not spilled the beans!!

    My only issue with the dress is how to hang it in my yet to be finished wardrobe. I do have a small clothes pin that can work in a pinch. I was considering fish line…then it would be like those plastic strap things that sometimes come on woman’s clothing.
    Regardless of how I hang it…I love it.
    Sassy, flirty but in a youthful, more innocent way.

    Be sure to check out the other May Dresses over at the Alice and Camilla Blog.