Going Green

Everything surrounding me is so green right now. We have had buckets of rain, and milder temps so all our plants and flowers have really perked up. Even though I had promised myself to not buy any flowering plants this year, focusing on edibles instead, I just could not resist having just a few jewels to spice up my life. So I decided to fill some pots to sit on the front steps. And then that led to putting a few things in the flower bed next to the front walk. And that led to........and so on and so forth!! Oh well, I am addicted to flowers. Always have been, always will be. But I have refrained from doing any new planting beds. I am going to be a good girl and wait for my landscaping plans to be finished. Ok, exception for the dye garden. But that is over in the north 40 and is not included in the landscaping design. So here are a few pics of the brightness that is my front porch right now. Never mind the dirty shoes lying in the back of the photo. They are the down side of all the rain and muck we have been dealing with due to a bit too much rain.


These 2 pictures are out in an existing flower bed. The Oakleaf Hydrangeas were already planted when we moved in. I didn't think I would really like them that much. The snowball type hydrangeas are much more my speed. But once they started blooming I found them to be quite beautiful. The snowball type will be planted at some point but until then these will keep my appetite saited. The lily is one I planted last winter from really really cheap sale bulbs. I have quite a few up but this is the first one to come into bloom.

Now onto knitting. I have been busy. The buttercup sweater is well under way using Hempathy yarn. This yarn is a finer gauge blend of cotton and hemp. While knitting it does tend to split a little. This is due to it being 2 play and the fibers being too smooth to grab between the plys. But really it has been easy to knit with and is supposed to age wonderfully. The pattern has been a joy after that project I did. I am about 1/2 way done and I think it will end up being an awesome summer sweater when I am done. Of course I have not tried it on at all yet. Maybe today. I have to run a peice of yarn thru all the stitches and take it off its needle to do that which is why it has already been tried on a dozen times. But it would be foolish to keep going if something is out of kilter, right?? Anyway, here are a few pics of my green buttercup.

Now onto some rather sad news. I never in a million years thought I would ever have to say this. About this couple. Ever. But here goes. My daughter and son-in-law are in the process of getting a divorce. I think way too many deployments, to much time apart, ect have just finally did them in. I think she saw this coming for quite awhile and was why she was so adamant that she go back to school and get her nursing degree. The fact that she now finallyhas her degree is completely coincedental that all this is happening right now. They just bought a house in New Hampshire and went into that hoping they could make a new start and bring back the love that they used to share. But instead it got worse. Way worse. So she is now going to move back to North Carolina and work in a hospital that she did many of her clinical rotations in. She will be taking the girls. Son in law in no way could care for them with the job assignment he is starting right now. But they vow to stay friendly and get thru this with as little impact on the granddaughters as possible. The only good news out of all this is that we get to have the girls soon and keep them til school starts. We have long wished for them to be the age and the circumstances be right to come spend the summer with us. Just wish it had not been these circumstances. But they should be arriving in a few weeks and so many of my posts will be about them. And that does make me happy. If I can just put the rest out of my mind and temporarily forget that 2 more people are involved and they have their own pain to deal with.

FiFi Finally Fini!!

So here I am a week late with posting. I just didn't have that much to say. It was all about Fifi and she just would not get dry from her blocking in the damp rainy cool weather we had last week. But finally the sun broke thru the clouds, the temperatures climbed and my wonderful Fifi finally became camera ready. Well, except for a picture of the sweater actually on me. Cause that would mean I would have to stay out of the garden all day, shower and clean up and then get someone to snap a picture. But I promise, this sweater does look quite good on me, if I have to say so myself.


So on to the next project. In fact I have several in the immediate queue. Our local LYS recently had an anniversary sale. So I happily went on in to participate. I fully intended to buy something summery to knit since I feel like I am really going to enjoy wearing Fifi. But I just did not find a pattern ahead of time that I liked very much. Sure didn't want to make Fifi again anytime soon. So I ended up buying a bunch of Cascade 220 to make the Faerie Ring Cardigan. This is a free pattern on Ravelry and there will soon be a knit along starting for her. She is a quite beautiful cabled hooded coat/jacket that I will make great use of this next fall and winter. The color I ended up getting was not that exciting, but by default, cause it was one of the few colors they had 10 skeins of the same dye lot. But then I got home and was cruising Ravelry again and came across a nice summer top pattern that I really liked. And it was free. Alot better than the $6.50 I paid for the Fifi pattern that was so horribly written. So now I am in love with Buttercup. The yarn that is called for is Elizabeth Lavold Hempathy. I have long wanted to try using hemp. It is a great renewable fiber that is supposed to keep getting better with age. It has a long history of being a great useable fiber. But did you know that they can not even grow hemp in the US?? Cause it is the same plant as marijuana, except it does not have the chemicals that make it a hallucinagenic drug. But the silly US of A can not figure out how to have it be the important agricultural crop that it is(it has a trillion great useages) without messing up their ability to track the illegal growing of marijuana. Maybe they should just ease the stupid restrictions on marijuana?? Just a thought, not something I would march on Washington for, LOL!! But anyway, after that regression, back to the story. So I looked on line and found plenty of sources for Hempathy but at almost 8$ a ball I was not so sure I was interested. But luckily I found a vendor on ebay, that I have used and loved before, and she had it for $5.00 a ball. Sure, last years colors, but hey, I am always a step out of fashion anyway!! So hopefully I can start tonight. Hempathy is one of those great yarns that already comes in a useable ball!! Whoppee for me!!

The garden is going well. Once the rains finally slowed down and the soil warmed up. I now have in most of my green beans. 2 full rows of white half runner, 1 row of bush beans, 1 row of Christmas limas and soon to be 1/2 row of purple yard long beans for fun. I also have in 10 tomatos of various sorts. Most I started from seed myself and 2 I bought. My seedlings are a bit small so I chickened out and bought 2 from the nursery to get me some earlier tomatoes. There are 18 peppers. And the same goes for them. They were really small so I bought 6 different plants to give me a jump start on the season. Some folks buy all their transplants at the nursery but my gosh, good plants are now close to $5.00 a pop!! Next year my seedlings will be much better off when time to plant. I will be setting up a light stand and starting those babies way earlier in the year. I also have in 5 summer squashes, 4 winter squashes, 4 cucumbers, 8 different sweet melons, 4 brussel sprout plants and there are still a few things to get in the ground in the next few days. We are starting to harvest lettuce, radishes and herbs out of the herb bed. I keep intending to take a picture of the herb bed now that I got it mulched and it looks so pretty. Maybe next post, OK??

Guess I better get a move on. If I want to be able to knit tonight, I need to get my housework done and the rest of the yard work started. Dinner is leftovers.. And BTW-DH is going to be gone for the next 5 days!! So I am gloriously left to my own devices, wishes and desires. Sleep when I want, eat when I want, go where I want................I have at least one frivolous trip planned involving antiques!! See ya next time.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder

Yeah-like I don't know you all have long since forgotten me. But I have a reason. A good solid reason. Well, at least I think it is. The blame entirely falls on the shoulders of my picture hosting site. I have been using Nikon's MyPictureTown.com for some time now. I found the ease of loading pictures onto the blog was so much easier from there. But for way over a month the site has been giving me fits. So today I sat down and restored my computer to a date long before I remembered having the problem. That did nothing to fix my problem. I messed with some internet preference options. Again nothing. So I guess for now I will go back to using blogger to post pictures. Maybe it has gotten easier since I messed with it last.


The trip to Disney is long since over. It has been long enough to forget the bone gripping fatigue you get keeping up with an 8 & 9 year old on vacation in Florida. Long enough to forget the lack of sleep from constantly changing hotels(even tho some of those beds were to die for)!! Long enough to forget how big a fit a tired 9 year old can throw when she gets very very frustrated. But luckily, not to long ago to remember the joy in seeing their faces after almost a year, the excitement of hitting the beaches for the first time this season, the look of wonder in seeing Disney World and Cinderella's castle for the first time, the exhilaration of riding the big roller coasters with them and last but not least of all, the immense love we feel for these granddaughters of ours.


Now the Disney World experience is one most people should experience at least once in their lives. But for us, it will be once and only once. We were not enchanted overall, nor were the girls. Yes, they had a great time. But it wasn't the Disney experience that really did it for them. Plainly and clearly, they just love thrill rides. We could have easily gone to a good 6 Flags and been done with it. Maybe they were just not the right age. Maybe a little younger would have been the perfect time. They didn't care for the crowds that much but they were amazingly patient if they thought the long lines would lead to a heart stopping, jaw dropping, stomach churning joy ride. They never wanted to spend much time or money looking for souveniers and were pretty reasonable about snacks and meals. In contrast though, they loved all 3 beaches we decided to visit. We spent a day each at St Augustine, Daytona and Amelia Island. All 3 were very different experiences and all most enjoyable. Grandma just wishes the beach combing would have been a little bit better while we were there.

Since returning from Florida I have been quite busy with my gardening, knitting and even my quilting. Outside the weather is slowly warming. But at least every few days we get hit with torrential rains that want to flood out the garden. So I am still holding off on putting my tomato, pepper and squash plants in the ground. Someday soon we will turn the corner and start to dry out just a little. On the knitting needles is a cute little cotton sweater that has given me fits. For reals. The pattern is Fifi, found on Ravelry. It is a cropped length, cap sleeved, cabled little fitted tee that has a bit of sex appeal. Yes, even a granny wants a little bit of that. But the pattern is written so badly. At first I thought it was just me. But I promise, seriously, that this is not me. I took a lot of time to carefully go word by word thru the first half of the sweater. It is knit top down, raglan style and I knit all the way past the arm hole divides and into the lower bodice before I totally ripped it all out and started over. If you knit as the pattern reads your cables will not line up at all like the picture. And making sense of where the short rows should go is nearly impossible. And how the short rows are to be accomplished is not all that well thought out. So I decided to take what I learned from what I had tried to knit, look at the picture to get the cable placement right, readjust the short row idea and now I have a gorgeous little number to show off. I went with the pattern recommendation on the yarn and that is one thing that was right on the money. They used Rowan's Calmer. A bit pricey but hands down the best cotton I have ever worked with. I may never want to try anything else after being spoiled by this great fiber. Anyway, hopefully pictures of a finished object will appear next post. Which I intend to be next week......I want to be back on a regular posting schedule pictures or no pictures.

As far as the quilting goes, I have not so much been sewing, but organizing the studio again. I never really got everything unpacked and put away. I had yet to decide on or find bookcases or something to use as a cutting table. But I think that is finally all underway and I will post more on it as it progresses.

But alas, dinner is on the stove. The yard needs some weedeating now that it has slightly dried out from this morning's deluge. And I still have a repeat and a half to finish up with today's knitting quota. So I leave you now and hope to see you again in a week.....But before I go, just a few funnies....

The Girls Clowning Around

The Cows after the Storm

2 Days and Counting til Wonderland

Yep. It's finally almost time for our trip to Disneyworld. With our awesome granddaughters. But in the last week several things almost kept this from happening. One I fretted over quite a bit and one happening totally unbeknownst to me. At our end what happened was both a good thing just at an inconvenient time. Dearest husband has finally gotten a job. One that actually takes him out of the house 5 days a week for about 10 hrs a day. This is something I have been longing for for months now. To have my house to myself on a regular basis to do what I want without him being in the way. And the income ain't to bad either. But of course when the job starts a week before you are supposed to leave on vacation and that dearest husband forgets to discuss that with his boss during the interview. Well it makes for one nervous granny, I tell you. But finally on his first real day he does tell his boss and everything is fine. He does get to go. Which saves us a ton of money. The tickets we got to the DW parks was thru the military. His was free. A 5 day all inclusive, park hopper, water park, ect, ect, ect.... Free, Free, Free!! Ours are companion tickets for 5 days but does not include park hopping or the water parks. And he has to be with us for us to use them. No problem with that. We only had to pay $99.00 each. When it was possible he could not go I looked at having to buy new tickets and those same level tickets for only 3 days were well into the 3 hundreds. Each. But I would not have disappointed those girls so I would have bit the bullet and bought them. But alls well that ends well, right??

Then I got a phone call from dearest daughter. Seems oldest grandchild got bit by something a few weeks ago and it got pretty infected. She had to have it lanced, twice and go on very strong antibiotics. I think it is a good thing I did not know this as it was happening. Cause I have cared for many a child who ended up hospitalized for same said infections. And some even had surgery/surgeries before they could finally get over it. And it would have made me so nervous and anxious for her well being, let alone her being able to come with us. So again alls well that ends well. But I am mentally still doing a bit of breath holding. And I think it will be a very big sigh of relief when we finally go thru those Disney gates for the first time. When the rest of the family is oohing and aahing on Cinderells's castle, I will be mentally thanking God we made it there!!

Our weather has been very psycotic this last week. We would have a couple of days of nice spring weather and then a big rain storm, then very cool temps. This morning I woke to heavy frost all over the garden. But a nice warm up is in progress and a tour of the yard this morning shows all to still be well. These tulips are not in my yard but down the way by the church-to-be sign.

Everything is really greening up around here, despite the recurrent chill. The winter wheat down the way is almost neon green. Of course I never have my camera when I go by there. But our grass is growing like a weed. Maybe that is cause there are so many weeds in our grass. Ken managed to finally buy his riding lawnmower and got the grass cut for the first time. The man drives that thing like he is in the Indy 500. And he leaves behind alot of stripes when he goes around curves. I think I will just have to have him teach me to drive the darned thing so we get a nicer looking yard for the effort.

I finally have that finished object I promised last post. I have had it done for a few days but I could not get it blocked. Cause I had no idea where my blocking pins were. But today, while rummaging thru my sewing room I found them in a box. One which only luck put in my way to find. I would have never thought to look for blocking pins in a christmas box I had saved for future use. I was hoping to get this shawl to block out a little wider and a little shorter than it looked unblocked. But it does not seem like that is going to happen. I want to preserve the nice shape of the hexagons and stretching it won't maintain them that way. So I just stretched it a moderate amount and will hope for the best. I figure this is a show piece anyway, one that will rarely get worn. I might enter it in the fair, show it to people to let them see all the natural colors one can get and then let it hang around, draped over something so it can be admired. I will try to get some sort of picture of it on me soon, once it dries.

I am going to try to post while we are at Disney. The girls tend to be very photogenic and Disney makes for a great background. But it depends alot on how dog tired I am at the end of each day. So keep checking back. If I don't get to post while we are gone, I will sure have a doosey to post when I get back!!

Missed by Just this much...

Did you notice? I missed my Sunday deadline by just a tad. I had the best intentions but as always laziness just got in the way. I think it was due to the short return to winter we were exposed to yesterday. I just wanted to stay cuddled up and cozy with my quilting or knitting.

Not much has happened around here this last week. We had some lovely weather, some wet weather and then the chilly weather. Zat's OK, it is still spring. Summer will arrive soon enough. A few more things have popped into bloom. My Flying Dragon trees that are growing in the drainage ditch next to the property have sprung into flower. This tree is such an interesting one. It is a native citrus that will survive some very cold temperatures. It is often used as the graft host for commercial orange growers cause it is so hardy. It does have fruit that can, if you are so inclined, be used. Some suggest making a beverage out of them, much like lemonade. We will see on that one!! But it is a beautiful little tree with the longest thorns!! The flowers are white and smell nice, like a delicate orange.

On one of my little jaunts I noticed some violets growing in a ditch along side the road. Now these were not your typical tiny little purple ones, but big white and lavender ones. The flower is a bit bigger than my thumb nail, but still with the flower shape of a true violet, not a pansy. At first I thought maybe crazy person had planted them there many years ago. But then I started to notice them in other locations. Along with some grape hyacinths or muscari of the deepest purpley blue. So the next day, after a good soaking rain, I went and dug some up and brought them home. I am so hopeful that I can get them to grow as I do so love wildflowers and these are some great ones for early spring. But here is a couple of pics I took of the flowers that ended up on my table. Even if I can't get them to grow well at the house, I can always pick all I need along the wayside. Oh, and the white flower must be some kind of wild statice. I am not going to try to transplant any of that. It grows in wild abundance in the ditch up by the school.

We also had a windy day last week. That brought me another treasure of nature. Under a tall pine tree I found this delightful bird's nest that had blown down. It is a medium sized, twig and mud masterpeice. It seems to have a central "bowl" of mud surrounded by a layer of loosely woven bigger twigs. Among the twigs is some of that curly christmas ribbon. The ribbon is white but wouldn't that have been fun if it had been red or green!! Then inside the mud bowl,which by the way, is perfectly round, is a soft layer of dried grasses on which to cushion the eggs. This next was built on a small branch that included a pine cone which is now a permanant part of the nest, glued to the bottom by the mud. I am not sure if this nest ever got used cause there is no evidence of tiny feathers and such. It could have just been built and then blew down, poor birdies with all that hard work. But at least it still has a purpose, one to decorate my front porch. And it is doing it's job quite well. The other items in the picture are both forms of polypore, or shelf fungi. The brown one is probably velvet polypore and the white, which from the side looks like a perfect mushroom, is probably a cottage cheese polypore. Both were collected off the ground here on the property.

My projects are all coming along nicely. I may even have a finished object to show next week!! The shawl is just 17 units from completion. I have been managing to do about 4 a day so even with blocking I could have pictures by this time a week from now. The quilt blocks are being made at the rate of about 5 a week. Now that is slow but at least it is steady. And this without a dedicted sewing area. I sure hope at some point to step up the pace. This week for some reason, I picked up an old hand quilting project that really needed finishing. It is a quilt made from muslin and plaids. It was inspired by a long ago class taken with Roberta Horton who loves scrap quilts and uses tons of plaids. In fact she had a line of fabrics that were sold at LQS's for many years, may still be. I had 5 of the 35 blocks already quilted and this week I have managed to complete one more and am already working on the 2nd. I would love to finish this up sometime this summer and use it on the bed out in the guest quarters. The colors will be perfect and it will fit the double bed out there nicely.

It is less than 2 weeks til our trip to Disney. We are getting a bit excited thinking about seeing the granddaughters and getting to go to the beach, then on to wonderland!! We now have our hotel rooms bought and paid for, our tickets to the park, bought and paid for so all we have left to do is to make the trip!! I am not sure I will even be bringing any knitting with me to do in my spare time. Cause honestly? Do you really think we are going to have any spare time????

Great Expectations

Here I am again. For the third week in a row, I have made it here on Sunday evening. Now if I could just find a way to make my writing a bit more interesting.

Lately I have been feeling a bit expectant. No, I am not pregnant. Those days are so far behind me that I can barely remember them. No, my sense of expectation is all spring related. You see, the first time we saw this house, and the country side surrounding was last November. They had already had their killing frost and the landscape was all dead or dying. The previous owners had cleared away most of the vegetation to make things look better for prospective buyers like us. So now that spring has arrived, I walk around the property wondering what will come up next, where and when. Just like an expectant mother, I go shopping but can't buy much cause I don't know what is coming my way in the next few months. New parents have to buy the important things first, such as cribs, strollers and diapers. We have to buy trees for the orchard and equipment for working the garden. We leave the fun stuff at the store, for now, cause we just don't know what will suite our new babies til we see them. But slowly I am making some progress. I have put in and completely planted my herb/salad garden. I would love to have a few colorful fun things to pop in the middle but that will have to wait til I get some other things taken care of first. We have all our trees coming in this week, have muscadines planted and all the trellising materials in place. A whole long row of asparagus in is and peas are growing on their supports. So I just have to wait and let those labor pains progress and before I know it I can sit back and enjoy getting to know my new garden/baby.

Both my projects have made slow progress this week. The shawl is close to 3/4 done. The quilt has several more blocks made. But the good news is that I am finally making some headway on designing and organizing my sewing room. For my birthday I ordered shelving for the closet. I ordered them on line so they would be delivered right to the door. This company also offered more sizing options that any I could have bought at a big box store. They came in on Thursday while I was out shopping. That was perfect cause Friday was my birthday and I could get them put together that afternoon. I took these pics but it is hard to really see. A wide angle lens would have come in handy for that. It only took a few hours to get them all put together and loaded with stuff. To bad there are still boxes all over the sewing room!! And tons of empty space at the top of the closet. So I am going to need to order the extensions to take these shelves up another 24 inches. I will need a stepstool to get things up and down but I can always put stuff up there I rarely need so no problem. It will probably be a few more months before I do order the rest cause it sure was not a cheap way to do a closet!! Now I just need to figure out the very best cutting and sewing tables.

Now just a couple of cute pics of the kitties. Wouldn't want to bore you all with to many of these in a row. Don't you just love the idea of Lexi having a reference guide for her birding. Kind of like a menu at a restaurant!!

Slow But Steady Progress

See, I am making a sincere effort to blog more regularly. The drawback is that none of my projects make enough progress in just one week to justify breaking out the camera. Just taking the pictures is not even the issue. With that comes finding the interface cable, downloading, sorting, open photo editing software, import, edit, tag, name and put in appropriate folders. But don't get me wrong, I love digital photography. Compare it to buying film, loading it in the camera, taking all the pics with caution to not waste film, figure out how to take 24-36 pics with the same speed of film, remember to take film out, take to be developed, remember to go back and pick them up, see 2/3 of them be wasted after all!! Yeah-give me digital any day.

Progress is being made on the shawl. I have passed the 2/3 done mark and should be done in 2 to 3 weeks. For awhile I thought I might run out of some of my colors but after rummaging around in the back bedroom I found some more of colors close enough to fit right in. I should be able to complete it with only a couple of colors being skimpy toward the end. No thought yet on what my next knitting project might be.

The quilt is also slowly making its way. I have 14 blocks now done. The plans to make it all red and blue on a neutral back ground went by the wayside today. I picked up what I had done and had that sense of not wanting to work on it any more. I thought about why that might be and came up with the notion that I am totally sick of red and blue!! Even if they were civil war reds and blues, they were just a bit boring. So out came the rest of my civil war prints and I am going to be so much happier including the whole kit and kaboodle. Actually this ends up solving several issues. The fabric I have will go much further and when I need to buy more(which I will) I will have alot more to pick from.

The weather has been quite a bit nicer a bit more regularly now. Although this weekend we did have a generous amount of rain. My lettuce, radishes and peas are all coming up well. The peas will have to be ferociously weeded here soon. I put them into the garden right after it was rototilled and only thought I got out all the grass!! So this week I will try to start getting that bed cleaned up a bit so the peas don't have to much competition out there.

I am loving my bird feeders being right out side my bedroom window. So is Lexi!! The bird population here is a bit different than in Oklahoma and I am constantly trying to use my bird identification book to get them all sorted out. So far some of the new birds(to me) are the dark eyed Junko, Carolina Chickadees and Eastern Bluebirds. In Oklahoma I could not get the birds to eat from the feeders unless they were yards away from the window. Here the feeders are less than 1 yard away and the birds waiting for their turn to eat often perch within inches of the glass. Of course Lexi goes into heavy stalking mode and jumps at the window when they are that close.

Another advantage of having acreage to roam is that I am much more tolerant of weeds. Who is going to try and have a perfect lawn with so much to care for. So now I am learning to enjoy the beauty that comes with those weeds. Hope you all enjoy them thru these pics. And see you all next week.

What A Difference A Week Makes

I know, suprise, suprise, I am posting after only 1 week!! I am really trying to develop a new routine and making blogging a little bit more of a priority..

In just one week our weather went from freezing, with a dusting of snow to almost 80 degrees for the last 3 days. That allowed me to get outside, alot. I managed to get peas planted in the main garden and to make a salad border to my herb bed. I put in scallions(2 types), lettuce(several mixes of leaf lettuces), radishes and carrots. Everything got watered in and now we are awaiting a week of predicted rain and more seasonable temps. It will be a bit longer before I start planting the intermediate season stuff like beets, more carrots and spinach. And I need to buy some seed starting mix to get all my warm weather crops going in the mini greenhouse I have set up on the front porch.

When I went outside this morning I was greeted by some pretties, brought into bloom by the milder temperatures. First would be my 1 and only daffodil. I put in 2 bags, 30 bulbs each, of naturalizing daffs. They got put in the ground a little late and in a hurry. But so far almost all of them have sent up leaves and I will have a few more bloom before the season ends. But daffs will multiply readily and in the next few years I should have a beautiful driveway lined with yellow nodding heads in the spring.

Then I noticed that I had gorgeous white blossoms all over the bush right by my driveway. Yesterday the buds were all still tight with no sign of color. I think that my brother/sister in law told me this was a shrub magnolia but I could be wrong. But it looks a lot like the magnolia on the other side of the house. And I am confident about that ones identity. And to be sure I walked around the house to look at the leaves on that one to see if it indeed matched and it was in bloom also. It is a bit taller and it's blooms are a dark purple. I never used to be a magnolia fan but I think I am now!!

Now some pictures of my furniture finds. I think I mentioned the display coffee table last week. I ordered this off Ebay hoping to get a decent peice of furniture. Boy was I happy when this arrived at our door. It is all solid oak with tempered glass. It is very well made, all by hand and should last me forever. The seller never even charged me shipping and it arrived in a huge wooden box that he built around the table so it would arrive safely. I will probably be ordering a end table later on. The quilts in the table are some older ones I bought years ago on ebay, before everyone caught on, and things were still bargains. BTW-there are baskets under the table. They fit perfectly and allow me to store my knitting projects right where they are easy to get to.

My next furniture find was a godsend. I was sewing at my dining room table. It was too high and hurting my neck. I had hoped to find a small portable sewing table online, but the ones I found were going to be about $150.00 with shipping. Well, this week on my shopping day, I stopped into an antique store in Fayetteville, looking to see if they still had a ceramic peice I had passed over several months ago. Of course it was gone but this little table caught my eye. It was marked as "antique sewing table" for $125.00. I did think this was a decent peice and the price was probably worth it. But I wasn't willing to shell out that much right then. So I stopped by and talked to the owner, telling him how I was intrigued by the table, but really couldn't afford it at that time. I was not trying to talk him down, really I wasn't!! But he started scratching on his notepad and said "$75.00" And without even hesitating I said "SOLD" And it came home with me..It is solid mahogany with a metal bar on the bottom that holds the legs in place. You lift the bar up slightly to fold up the legs which is what makes it portable. Very very nifty. Wish they still made them like this. Now mine is a bit crooked over all, but still very usable and now is holding the machine in the following pictures. I used it to sew a few blocks last night and it is just the perfect height.

I have been plugging away on the swirl shawl but don't have any new sweaters in the works. The quilt is still slowing making progress also, but alas I need more fabric. So I ordered some today and will probably have to order some more.

My kitties have developed a new daily habit. They found that for most of the mid day, the sun shines into our bathroom right into the soaking tub. So they started taking sun baths together. It was so sweet to see them all warm and snuggled up so I threw in a big feather comforter to make it even nicer. They love it!!

And Miss Daisy can't be left out. Although it is a bit harder to get pics of her!!