the life-changing magic of tidying...YUP!

Hello, fall (cue convenient Halloween cat)!

We've been busy busy busy here.  Todd hired excavators to do some much-needed work down by the pond, leveling out the ground, adding gravel, and seeding it for grass.  It sounds minor, but it was two days of work to get it exactly right.

Now it's ready for adirondack chairs and a big fire pit...perfect for fall! 

I've been busy too.  I like to downsize infrequently, but I was galvanized for action after reading Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.  I attacked my closets and filled 8 large garbage bags with clothes.  I divested myself of stacks and stacks of books.  The kitchen was emptied, and I donated countless cookie cutters, cake molds, and miscellaneous huh?s.  The real challenge was the craft room.

When you craft, people give you things.  And when you have a LOT of hobbies, you accumulate quite a bit of stuff.  Rubber stamps and paper punches that were never used.  Thick cardboard books for card making, still in the original plastic.  Cheesy religious stickers, bedazzled specialty paper.  Ugly acrylic yarn and stiff, unpleasant fabric.  Hundreds of plastic buttons and shiny ribbon.  I dragged all offenders into the open and assessed them with a critical eye.  Tabitha assisted from above while I sat on the floor and sorted. So helpful?

In the end, I donated bags and bags and bags.  Now, everything that remains has been carefully curated. Every bit of fabric, every skein of yarn, every piece of paper - chosen.  Since I got rid of over 300 rubber stamps, the ones left behind can actually be accessed easily and utilized...ditto the paper punches.  Every remaining yarn skein is knit-worthy.  After removing two large garbage bags full of fabric, what I have now is of good quality and ready to use in any project.  I have so much more room, and everything is so organized.  I LOVE IT!  

Relenting to logic, I frogged several knitting UFOs (unfinished objects) but found a great one to continue on with!

I've also shaved down my embroidery patterns, making space for what I really want to try.  Lots of practicing now!

I've also halved my vacation photo albums (8 albums...gone!) and bagged nearly every cookbook.  Less-than-soft sheets and towels, gone.  Unused table clothes and overused cloth napkins, gone.  Continuing the trend, I deleted most of my Facebook groups and tidied up my Friends list.  Without so much scrolling, Facebook now takes about 15 minutes of my day, tops!  All in all, it's been an incredibly busy - but productive - time!  Time for reflection, too.  Growing up poor, I never would've dreamed of having so much stuff.  I felt grateful for having had the opportunity to possess it, and happy that I was passing it along to someone who might need it.  

I haven't missed the continuing signs of fall outside.  Ignoring the 90 degree heat, I've observed an increasing number of geese overhead.

Although the garden is done in my mind, I do still go out to its edges sometimes.  Everything is finally going to seed.

Somewhere in that mad tangle is my little pumpkin patch.  I spotted my first one - the deeply-ridged pale orange Porcelain Doll!

I saw several tiny Jack-Be-Littles that are nearly ready for picking, too.  Hooray for pumpkins!  We've been out of butter...butter!...for an entire week, so I haven't had a chance to do any baking with our apples, but that will soon be remedied.  And, of course, the pumpkin baking will soon commence!

It's been hard to get into the spirit, though, with the unrelenting heat and high humidity.  This morning it was 72 degrees, but with 97% humidity.  Like walking into a sauna.  The cats are feeling it!

We are really, really looking forward to cooling temperatures.  October is my very favorite month (daily Halloween movies!  Fall baking!  Outdoor fires! Plaid!!), in part because it brings some relief from the relentless heat.  Phew!  Not long now.

Have a great week!

Political Animals

I was walking around the side of the house in the dark last night (a cat messily eating a mouse on your doorstep is a great incentive to find an alternative entrance) and I froze in place.  Something was moving stealthily through the dead leaves.  It was big...it was mean...and it sounded very, very hungry.  I whirled around, and, oh!  It was just a horse.

We've got horse farms across from us, catty-corner, and a few houses down, and they're frequently up by the fence line and therefore quite close.  It seems like they've been feeding more heavily in the fields lately, even through the night, so the fierce creature I heard was just pawing through the leaves to get to grass.  Phew!

Speaking of nighttime visitors, we still have Trey Snouty visiting quite frequently.  It's easy to see that he's been in some kind of tangle...besides the dragging leg and the shortened tail, his ears are chewed to ribbons.

We have another possum that's started coming around, too.  He's bolder, more robust, and Todd gave him a great misnomer: Snoot Gingrich.  Ha!

Besides trying to keep up with the growing crowd on the front porch, we've been frantically unloading storage units and hauling boxes around.  The barn looked full enough before...

...but is even more full now!

Thirty boxes of books and craft supplies were hauled upstairs to my office and I spent 3 full days in pajamas, digging and sorting and piling (with frequent trips to the barn for my regular work). What a job!  But it's finally done and everything (except for my paper cutters and rubber stamps, location TBD) is put away.

Fabric, stickers, felt, ink, glitter, adhesives, buttons, quilt supplies, yarn, ongoing projects, embroidery supplies, watercolors, colored pencils and paper, construction paper, embellishments, card stock...all tidily sorted, labeled, and put away. 

More work needs to be done in my office...a cabinet built for puzzles, a scary-looking gas wall heater removed, another bookcase added (opposite wall is just bookshelves!) but it feels SO much more peaceful and home-like up here. 

We also brought about 30 boxes of household goods in...baking supplies, pottery, wall art, odds and ends...so you can imagine how messy the downstairs is right now.  But it feels so good to see our things again, even though it's still incomplete (fireplace to be built, trim in dining room, curtains).

Progress!

Looking forward to getting this finished up over the next few days so that we can take a cue from Bosewichte and...

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!

Paper Puttering

It's a chilly, rainy Saturday, and the perfect day to put out that extra blog entry that I'd been thinking about.  I know I spend a lot of time talking about cooking, or knitting, or gardening, or birds/nature, but I have a lot of other hobbies.  One that I especially enjoy is card making.  I've been making silly cards since elementary school, and now I can really indulge myself because I finally have...a craft room.

It's changed quite a bit since this photo.  I now have a rug, and some window coverings, and a temporary cover for the blue chair.  This angle, too, leaves out a wall of rubber stamps, knitting cabinet, and craft paper supplies.  But you get the idea.

I love it.  

I'll include better and more complete photos when it's done, but here I basically have an L-shaped work station for my card-making and eBay work.  The side table has a sewing machine and all of my fabric is stored beneath.

I am addicted to paper cutters - absolutely addicted.  I bought these iron towel racks at IKEA for around $1.75 each, I believe, and Todd mounted them on the side of a large cabinet for easy access.

The cabinet itself (from IKEA's discount room, for missing doors) holds a row of binders, half of which contain organized acrylic rubber stamps (the rubber stamps without wood mounting) and the other half containing the gardening/decorating/project idea clippings that I've been keeping since I was 15.  I have labeled boxes for sewing, embossing, blank cards and books, inks, stampers, glues, glitters, paint/painting supplies and colored pencils, buttons, ribbons, chipboard, stickers...can I say that my husband has an incredibly organized mind and planned the layout, and basically everything else?  He's amazing! 

So I have these supplies, and now, when I feel inspired, everything is organized and at my fingertips. 

I wanted to show you "the evolution of an idea" when it comes to cards.  In this example, I used Groundhog's Day as an excuse to make a silly card for Todd.  Groundhog, groundhog, I thought.  What can you do with a groundhog?  I started thinking about how a groundhog might be fairly inconsequential for most of the year, but one day only, he had everyone's attention, and all the control.  It reminded me of that old He-Man cartoon, where the main character holds aloft his sword and intones, "I HAVE THE POWER!"  Boom!  An idea formed.

First, the groundhog.  I don't have a groundhog cutter, of course, and I'd be hopeless at trying to cut out the shape with scissors.  The great thing about paper cutters is that they can frequently be used for shapes other than the intended one.  I used an ornament cutter for the head, and an owl for the body.

See?  I just cut off the feet and ears and rounded the body a bit.  I used a hole punch for the eyes and ears.  The only thing I fashioned by scissors was the teeth, and let me tell you, that took longer than everything else put together.

I used the rounded curve of a spiral cutter to make the feet/legs and just trimmed them up with scissors.

I hand-cut a He-Man costume and hair.  It was simple and didn't take too long.  By the way, I sometimes make two cards so that I can give the better one to the recipient, which is why you see two groundhogs!

A He-Man groundhog must have a sword...

...and a sign denoting the special day.

Does it work?  It doesn't have to be perfect...it just has to be close enough so that the recipient "gets it".

I placed him on a card next to his two options, early spring or more winter.  The cloud, the snowflakes, and the sun were all cut with paper cutters.  I only had to manually cut out the sun rays.

I used an alphabet paper cutter to make the words...

...and another paper cutter to make this zig-zaggy outline.  The cutter made "the hole" and then I used scissors to cut around the hole, making a great shape for impact.  I glued white paper behind it and cut off the extra.

The front of the card...

The inside...

Now I could've - and should've - done something more dynamic with the background.  I ran out of time, though, and I was fairly happy with how it turned out.  Todd immediately recognized the He-Man connection and loved the card...success!

Sometimes I come up with ideas on my own, and sometimes I crib from Pinterest.  I saw a photo of a vintage Valentine card there and copied it completely for Todd's Valentine.  The card concept is a box of popcorn with the silly tagline:  "I'm gonna POP you a CORNY question...will you be my Valentine?"  I love silly, so I got to work.

First:  I wasn't about to hand-cut an infinite number of popcorn bits.  I have a cloud paper cutter, so I cut out the shapes and trimmed them a bit to look more popcorn-like.

They looked indistinct, white on white, so I decided to trace around the shapes with a black Sharpie.  Much better!  I had a pile of popcorn in no time.

I used my paper slicer to cut red stripes for my all-white rectangle of paper, used another paper cutter to make the background label, and stickers to make the word POPCORN.

Then I just glued the popcorn on, layer by layer...

I glued the completed box of popcorn onto a piece of pink construction paper and used glitter stickers for the impact words.  My own personal touch was adding "will you be my valentine?" on ribbon banners that I rubber stamped, cut out, and glued to the bottom of the popcorn box.

Here she is!

I am very pleased with how it came out!

Alas, my desk area usually looks like this or much worse after a card-making session:

Anyway, there you have it.  Whether you come up with a concept yourself or find inspiration elsewhere, I hope that you have fun being creative this week and do a little "paper puttering" of your own!