Egg-straordinary!

Finally...finally!...I settled on a color for my office.  It's called Betsy Ross House Moss, and it's a light olive color.  I love it.  It felt so good to paint over all those sample colors!

Now my office is completely done, except for a few pictures I haven't hung.  So here it is:  first, my work station, which has a lovely view of the woods and the pond.  The two tables make an "L" and give me lots of space for both work and crafts.

The green is not as bright as it looks here, but you can see my 'craft corner' (binders, acrylic rubber stamps, paper punches, glitter, glue, blank cards, embroidery and embossing supplies, etc., etc.).

This is my knitting space.  The tall cabinet holds my yarn, and I've got supplies on both shelves of the little table, formerly an IKEA kitchen island.  My yarn winder is attached to the corner, and the chair - also from IKEA - is my favorite knitting spot.

Another craft corner view (again, the walls are not pea-green like they appear here...they're more olive and very muted):

This table is just to the left of my work station.  It holds my sewing machine and supplies, and beneath it I have my fabric organized by pattern.  The white cabinet holds a TON of patterned construction paper, and the structure on the wall, which is a bit hard to see here, holds my rubber stamps.

Finally, my favorite art - three pages from a 1920s children's book, each depicting a different insect (or arachnid):

LOVE!

Although we've been busy, it's been very peaceful here.

Still seeing lots of wildlife, like this barred owl.

The geese have returned to our pond, and they make a pretty picture on the water.

We stopped by the local farmer's market this weekend and picked up some fresh eggs.  I love the different colors!

Speaking of eggs, I was cutting invasive vines out of our berry bushes this weekend when I spotted an abandoned bird nest.  I knew it was abandoned because it contained one empty eggshell and one half-empty one with a deceased chick inside. 

I sterilized the nest with a bleach solution and attempted to boil out those egg fragments to clean them.  Boiling rotten eggs does not make a pleasant smell, and I'm afraid the dead-chick egg had to be tossed.  The other was able to be cleaned and placed back in the nest.  I am building a collection of bird nests and have them displayed on a table in our front living room.  That space isn't quite done, but I'll post a picture when it is.

I've been baking a lot.  This peach-blueberry pie was amazing.

I made challah for the first time, too.  It's an annoying dough...sweet egg bread is, for me, the most difficult to get a good rise out of.  After two rises, you spit the dough into two unequal parts - say, 1/3 and 2/3 - and braid them.  You then stack the braids and give it another rise.

To give it that dark finished look, it gets a very generous brushing with egg white and water.  Then, voila!

It reminds me again not to be afraid to tackle a baking project.  It's just one foot in front of the other to get to the finish line!  Full recipe and fantastic step-by-step directions can be found at Bakingdom.

Have a great week!