Eat Your Veggies (Part V)

Photo courtesy of Martha Stewart Living, May 2008

I think my garden is the best I've ever seen! I might be a little biased (and naive), but I can't believe how many beautiful vegetables I've been able to grow. It's probably beginner's luck, which will make me very sad when I try and recreate the same goodness next summer, but I'll definitely give it a whirl in 2010. Here's a picture of what I was able to glean just one day last week:

This is only a glimpse of what has been going on. Let's see . . . throughout the summer we've gotten 5 or 6 cucumbers, 30 something carrots, 3 or so bags of lettuce, 5 or so acorn squash, 2 watermelons, 5 or so tomatoes, gobs of cherry tomatoes, 2 beautiful green peppers, lots of green beans and 2 pumpkins that will be ready just in time for carving. It's been so fun!

The only things that haven't been particularly successful are the peppers. I have two green pepper plants, one yellow and one red. Out of all four plants we have only had 2 green peppers (which were beautiful!) and a yellow pepper-that hasn't turned color yet.

Next year I think we'll swap out the cucumbers for zucchini (since it's so yummy on the grill and I can use it in bread or cake), and I probably won't plant many carrots, if any. I don't have anything against carrots, but they have been hard to pull out of the ground And, it's kind of hard to plant them without planting thousands. What if I don't want thousands? What if I only want 10, can I have just 10? Okay, okay, I'll stop this little rant on carrots. I just won't plant them next year, that's all.

Things I have loved, though, are the tomatoes (especially the cherry tomatoes), the squash, the peppers (of the ones we've gotten), and the pumpkins. And, of course, I'm looking forward to seeing how the watermelons turn out too. They might make the list.

A New Bag

Wow. It's been awhile since I've been here on this blog. I swear I've been working on things, but maybe I just haven't completed much recently. I'm very excited about the most recent project. This one has been in my head for awhile, and it turned out just exactly as I wanted it to.

It's a new bag that is perfect for Fall . . .



I got the idea of the bag here. I've linked to her blog before - it's so inspirational for me. I love the style of the bag, and especially the fabric. Shortly after seeing it I went online and bought a yard of it - it's Heather Bailey's Pop Garden Rose Bouquet - hoping to make my own. The sad things is, I couldn't bring myself to pay $12 for the Amy Butler pattern. I'm so cheap it's embarrassing. So, instead of shelling out, you know, a whole $12 I found a free tutorial online for a bag that is similar in style and maybe a little more practical in terms of size.


The directions were a little wonky, especially when it came to the pleats and the pocket (which I never could really figure out and omitted completely), but overall it worked well.


The first time around I completely screwed up the handles, and I didn't realize it until I was done! So annoying! So, I did just about as much seam ripping as I did sewing on this bag.

Thankfully, I feel like it was worth it (I definitely debated for awhile before I went back in and fixed it).


Anyway, like I said, overall it worked well. So, I'll definitely be making more.

Marie, take note of the earrings I'm wearing. They're so cute, don't you think? Well, I do.

Rainy Sunday

We had a glorious Sunday last weekend. The kind where it rained all day long. I love those kinds of days in the middle of summer because I don't feel a bit of guilt about not being outside to enjoy the sunshine. Instead, Jesse and I just laid around the house and rested. We loved it.

The Saturday before I had gone thrift store shopping with my sister-in-law, and it was the really successful kind too! We both came home with a variety of different odds and ends. So good! We also came up with a quilt idea for her home and we searched high and low for fabrics to go in it. But, that's a different story. Hopefully I'll be able to post a completed quilt by the end of the year. That would be fun! But, in the middle of our shopping trip I picked up some t-shirts at the dollar store.

I've been in need of a few more good t-shirts to wear for lounging in the evenings and on weekends. So, I used my wonderful, rainy Sunday to put some designs on my new dollar store t-shirts. I used the same freezer paper technique that I have used here, here and here.

Here they are:

a shout out to the homeland

the bike I don't even own

and, a bird for good measure.

Such an easy and fun project. I highly recommend it.

Festivities

I've been thinking about this project for a little while. I've run across the idea on several blogs, and thought it was cute, so it's been on my list to create. It's perfect party decor that I can pull out for any casual party. Last week, I finished it just in time to use it for my mother-in-law's retirement party that I hosted at my home.

Here it is: a really long flag garland . . .






I was able to use fabrics that I already had on hand, which made this project cheap. Love that. I also made binding for the first time (using a tutorial here to figure out how to connect my strips together) for the "string". Hopefully I can put that knowledge to further use with a quilt down the road.

Someday when I have kids I think it would be fun to make a garland like this (although probably shorter as this one took me a lot more time that I expected) for each child. Wouldn't it be fun to bring it out each year to decorate for their birthdays? Seems like it could be a fun tradition.

All in the Family

I've been working on a new project in our living room over the last couple of weeks. Jesse and I were inspired by a Designed to Sell (love that show!) episode on HGTV where they needed to cover a large amount of a wall space on a budget. I include Jesse in the sentence above only because he happened to be sitting next to me and he actually responded when I commented on how much I liked the idea in the show, but I can't be sure he was nearly as "inspired" as I was. Just want to make sure the record is straight. He has a reputation to uphold after all.

For the last couple of years we have hung a collage frame that we received as a wedding gift and a couple of sconces above our couch in the living room. It's been fun for me to replace the pictures in the collage each year. I do this routine in January where I pick out all of my favorite pictures from the previous year and put them in the frame. It's kinda funny how something so simple (and free!) makes the space feel fresh. At least to me.


Anyway, the inspired idea was to replace the collage and sconces with a large compilation of frames. It's a simple idea, and I'm not the first person to do this obviously, but I must say the result is giving me a nice, easy and cheap solution for something new and large enough to cover my wall space.

I have to admit I was also itching to take down the collage and sconces because I had hung them too high in the first place. It had irritated me just enough each time I looked at it that now, 2 1/2 years later, I can't handle it anymore. I hear that hanging pictures too high is a common problem for people, so thankfully I don't feel alone in my mistake. But, it's annoying nonetheless.

I had several frames in storage, so I pulled those out and then made a quick trip to Goodwill to complete my set. We decided on painting the frames a very dark brown. Now that it's done I think it looks black, but oh well. Black will do too. I spray painted all of the frames and then added photo mattes that I had found pretty cheap at Hobby Lobby. I had to spray paint the mattes too because they didn't sell very many in plain white. That surprised me.

Anyway, here's the fun part (and pure genius if you ask me), I pulled a Martha Stewart trick out of the bag for this . . . I traced around each frame onto paper. Then, numbered the papers and laid out my frames on the dining room table in numerical order.


Then, I taped all of my papers to the wall to determine where I wanted each frame to hang. Once the papers were on the wall I was also able to measure out where each frames' hangy bobber was and mark the spot on each paper so that I would know exactly where to place my nail in order for my frames to hang straight.

Once the nails were in I just tore off my papers and hung my frames.

All in all, I'm happy with the way it turned out. I think I'll keep my annual January routine of switching out the pictures. Jesse did notice the other day that the compilation is a little heavy with my family . . . apparently, I can't help it, but I might have to work on that.

Spring Pillows

Well, I'm glad I showed you an update on my vegetable garden just the other day because we got a HUGE thunderstorm that rolled in at 3:30 AM last night that left my garden looking rather mangled. I think it will all spring back, but it is surely in no photogenic state! I do have a little ripe cucumber that looks like it will be ready to be picked in the next day or so. I'm very excited about that.

Here I go making an awkward transition from gardens to living rooms. I hope you'll stay with me. I've been making some small tweaks to my living room decor. Here's what our living room has looked like since we moved in 2.5 years ago.


I still love the blues, greens and browns. But, the rug was starting to get to me. I'm discovering that I'm the type of person that needs variety and needs it often. I kept feeling like the rug was hindering me from changing out the pillows, accessories, etc. because it was hard to coordinate with.

So, I guess a couple of months ago I just came to the conclusion that I would remove the rug altogether and maybe save my pennies and purchase a more neutral one for the living room. I picked out some fabrics online that coordinated with our room colors, but not necessarily the rug, that I used for pillow covers. I bought fabrics that we will use for spring/summer pillows and another set that we will use for fall. I'll just show you the spring/summer ones now. And, when I redecorate in the fall I'll show you the others.

I used a very simple tutorial for pillow covers - adding an extra 1/2 inch to each side to accommodate the "edging." I ended up having a few old pillows in the house that I could recover, so there was no need for pillow inserts. Here are the spring/summer pillows. The fabric is Amy Butler's Lime Tree Peony and Full Moon Polka Dot:



Here is the new room (minus a rug):


After Jesse got over the initial shock of a lack of rug in the living room (I happened to remove it one evening while he was away, which resulted in him waking me up at 3 AM when he got home to discuss it) and after he made fun of me for sewing 10 pillows covers in one week (which cluttered the living room and dining room tremendously for a long time) he seems to like the change too. Whew.

Eat Your Veggies (Part IV)

Photo courtesy of Martha Stewart Living, May 2008

Time for a veggie garden update. After A LOT of weeding last weekend here is what my garden looks like now. I was able to pick a green bean from the plant and eat it. It tasted a little like it needed to stay on the plant for another week or so. (Whatever that tastes like.) So I left the others there. Hopefully we can enjoy them next week with dinner.

The pumpkin is the plant near the front. It is huge! This is from just one pumpkin seed. I can't believe it. I was warned about the potential size from many people, but chose to ignore them and try it out for myself. Turns out they were right.

The beautiful flowers behind my garden are my neighbor's. She does a delightful job with those beauties. I'm so glad we get to enjoy them. In fact, she let me pick some of those white snowballs just this week to bring into the house. Yay!


Here's my first tomato! So far, so good.