I’ve Been Mousing Around……

   

I’ve been busy making mouse pincushions from fabrics I acquired at a yard sale a couple of years ago. I am trying different designs and materials. I got the pattern online and here it is if you are interested.

               Mouse Pincushion Pattern

They are quick and fun to make. Most of the eyeballs are made from a broken necklace I got at another yard sale. I just color the center with a permanent marker. The ears are black felt. Some I like and others…not so much….but it’s been fun trying different methods. My next experiment will be giving them a little collar or some bling.

Here are some close ups of the animal print one. His nose is a little too hairy! The tails  and whiskers are black cotton twine of some sort….not a big fan of this type though….I need to find something else to use. Here’s  one without whiskers….kind of looks nekked! I like the lines in the fabric though. The little guy to his left is kind of cute. The fabric is a leaf pattern…..well take a closer look….. It’s such a soft fabric and I love the leaf detail. When you are not able to cinch the fabric together at the bummie, you can stitch a round piece in there, like I did here. Actually….most ALL of them I had to do this with!

I also do not have the whiskers the way I like them…still working on the prototype! Here are a bunch of them sniffing out some of my fabric pieces! The red one was an experiment with brass eyes….again, broken jewelry, and the one on the far left has that cotton black string for eyes. I made him last year.The blue plaid one has beads down his back and I absolutely hate the look of it but will probably give it to a little one….they won’t mind a bit!! Here’s the animal print above, with pins stuck all through him…ouch! I also am crocheting some purses…..this one is for a little 10 year old girl. My friend’s daughter…… Front and back.

I am working on an afghan too….same one for 2 years now! It’s big! I am sewing a lap blanket out of scrap material and am making more purses. I plan on going to some of the local craft fairs starting up around here and hopefully getting some more ideas on crafts for the holidays! What fun things are you all making >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>???

Do tell!!!!

I Got An Award!!!

                       

  Hey girls….I got an award!! It’s called the Gorgeous Blogger Award and it was given to me by my good friend Dawn from C&G Design …….Check her out….she has a wonderful blog filled with crafting and family and gardening and she is a master at all of them! Thanks Dawn….it is much appreciated! What I am supposed to do is list 6 things about myself and then pass this award on to 6 other people. Here are 6 things about myself.

1. I am deathly afraid of lunar moths and can go into a frenzy pretty quickly if I don’t get away from them….crazy I know.  Especially if one happens to fly into my car…. I have to stop and get out!

2. I absolutely love, love, love, Christmas! I always have and probably always will. I love everything about it. I think it is the one time of year that everyone seems to be generous and giving and loving and full of humanity. I just wish it lasted all year. I try to soak it all up during the season!

3. I lost my first child when I was 22 years old and 5 1/2 months pregnant. I found out I had an incompetent cervix as a result of my mom taking a drug to prevent HER from having miscarriages. It was very hard and some day I will meet  my little girl Dahlia in heaven. As a result of finding this out, I was able to have two healthy children after that. They gave me a purse string stitch, with each pregnancy and then took it out before I gave birth.

4. I’m a sugar addict! I love candy and just about any kind. I am especially addicted to fire balls. I always have a dish full of them in my house. I keep them in my purse and the cars. I think it was all that penny candy as a kid that got me started!

5. I was in a gun powder explosion when I was in my early twenties. I was at a party and we had all been drinking. One of the tenants loaded his own shotgun shells. There was a bag of gunpowder under a table, unbeknownst to all of us there. A cigarette ash fell onto it and boom! I was in the hospital for 10 days, along with two other friends, and out of work for months. An FBI agent visited me in hospital, asking questions about the explosion.

6. My all time favorite song in the world is called “Don’t Play That Song For Me” by Aretha Franklin. Here is an old video of her doing it….. It gets me going like nothing else!

Ok….I guess that’s 6! Now…..I need to list 6 people that I want to give this award to…..so here goes!!

1. DownEast Doing Stuff

2. Note Songs

3. Smart Mouth Broad

4. Wrestling With Retirement

5. My Little Cottage In The Making

6. Kitschen Pink

Thanks Dawn!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :):)

Love that song…..

   I am still having problems getting to some of your blogs but will be addressing that soon. We have been busy lately and I plan on catching you up with some of the crafts I have been working on….so darned cute…some of them. I am making mouse pincushions and crocheting some purses for friends and children for xmas. My niece sent me an email the other day from Ft. Lauderdale. She’s a great girl and I am always thrilled to hear from her by email or phone because we don’t get a chance to see each other that often. In the email was a version of that old song Sara Smile, originally done by Hall and Oats in a duo. I’ve always loved that song….haven’t you? In this version, it is sung by a guy named Jimmy Wayne and my GOD does he blow me away with his version!!! Sooooo bluesy and quite close to Hall and Oats in range as well. I tend to like the beginning better but he really rocks on his version of Sara Smile…..check it out…….

What do you think? This song was in my head all day after this…….

Be back soon with craft photos……………………………………..hopefully before Halloween!!

Taking Our Furry Friends Trick or Treating…

   Hello all….I just wanted to let some of you know I am having trouble getting to your blogs….Far Side and others. We have Mozilla Firefox and some of your blogs won’t let me in with that. I try internet explorer and that won’t load up!%$#@ Hubby has been real busy so I have not bothered him too much about it. I just wanted you to know I have tried!! Drives me crazy but I will get there. It’s been a little nuts over here anyway but wanted to pop in and say thanks for all your comments about my last post….so darned touching! Oh…did I mention I can’t leave comments on MINE either!?? I see some of you did a bit of research too….that’s so cool. I loved it!

  Hey….is it wrong to take our animals out trick or treating? Think about it……

 

And another……………

Hope your furry pals have a wonderful Halloween….

    OUR BABY GUARDING THE PUMPKINS AND TOMATOES.

The Missing Photo…..

   For any of you that follow my blog, you know that my dad was a musician. He died in 1993 of cancer. My mom died 5 years later in 1998. While cleaning out my parents home, each of us got a few things we wanted as keepsakes. This was before scrapbooking and digital photos entered my families lives. So…some photographs got taken here and there and basically scattered between the four of us, ending up in our prospective attics and shoeboxes…etc. Pictures that should have stayed together got separated.

   I have a nephew named Adam who looks an awful lot like my dad did when he was young. Adam plays guitar and does that very well. He married a Greek girl named Carey from North Carolina who also plays guitar and sings like a bird. The two of them moved to Nashville 12 years ago to try and make a name for themselves. They are both talented song writers as well. After a few years of being struggling musicians, they are finally getting a break it would seem. They have their own production studio and some of the songs they have written over the years are beginning to be picked up. MTV has started using some of them and the residuals of those songs are beginning to come in, albeit small. Every once in a while I go to their MySpace site to check on what’s happening in their lives musically. While there recently, I came across one of those missing photos I was talking about….of my dad. I wondered how Adam got that. I happened to be at my daughters a while back and on the desk top of her computer, was that photograph! How’d you get that?? She got it from Adam who got it from my brother and so on.

   It is a photo of my dad playing guitar during WWII at a music show put on for the boys over in Italy. I just love it and boy doesn’t my nephew Adam look like him! So…I just went to Adam’s site and copied it!!! Now I finally have it!! How simple was that….but do you think I could figure all that out back then??? Oh my God it takes me forever to get these things done. Here’s the photo…. That’s my dad playing his 1937 Epiphone. That guitar ended up with my nephew Adam and my brother had it refurbished. Here is a photo of Adam playing it today……

I saw this and it freaked me out!! What a strange feeling came over me! It was meant to be that he inherit this old guitar from my dad and keep the music alive through it. Gives me goose bumps. It makes me think of the Dan Fogelberg song, Leader Of The Band.

My brother Arthur used to play this song and one day he played it just for my dad. It was a moment I will never forget. When he sang about the music running through his veins I just lost it. I looked over at my dad and he had tears in his eyes. God I miss him and my mom every day. I feel grateful we have musicians in the family that keep that magic alive today. Music is such a universal thing isn’t it? It can transport us back to a different time in our lives….it can make us cry at the drop of a hat….or laugh and dance…it’s a wonderful thing that binds us all together.

  My nephew Adam and his wife Carey got mentioned recently on CNN by a man that reviews music. We were all very excited about this! Adam produces some up and coming musicians that folks are starting to take notice of. After reviewing two of them in this interview with CNN, he mentions A and C and showcases my absolute FAVORITE song they wrote called BACKSEAT!! Yay!! I am in LOVE with that song and can’t seem to get enough of it! I have been telling people that forever!! Here’s the link to the interview….the Backseat part is at the end…

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/showbiz/2009/10/06/dcl.grumbine.country.cnn   Hopefully this will come through……..

  

  Do any of you play music? Did your parents too? What a gift my folks gave my brothers and I that will always be with me…….

 

The Harvest Of 2009

Thought I would share some of the pictures of our garden harvest. One Sunday, a few weeks ago, we had my son and daughter and my friend and mother in law Alice and father in law Woody and brother and sister in law over for a dinner. We all contributed to the dinner and it was delicious. I tried to cook some recipes that included garden veggies. We had baked ham, roasted garden veggies, pasta salad, potato salad, cole slaw, and homemade carrot cake for dessert. My son made the cream cheese frosting. The kids cleaned out my garden for me. This is them above sitting at the picnic table after doing that. We all had fun and it was a gorgeous day!                Eating raw carrots above.

             Alice checking it all out!

            Some of the harvest.

    It always my favorite part…letting everyone take home a big bag of goodies!

 

        Carissa playing carrot head!

        Relaxing after eating too many raw carrots and it was HOT that day.

      Even Obie was pooped after a long day of fun in the sun!! I crocheted the blanket that is over him a long time ago and the one under him was made by my Aunt Olive years ago. I took them off his bed the other day to wash them and didn’t put them right back on for a few days. He missed them! I brought them in to make his bed and he dove right in on them….rolling and rolling and sniffing away. He hides his head in the folds….it’s so damned cute! Look at that short little spotted leg hanging out! How can you not love that? ………………………………………

   So it was a good harvest but without tomatoes this year. As most of you know, I was hit with the blight. I have many new ideas for next year for my garden because of the massive amounts of copper beetles that came in. I also want to grow more newer types of squash and will be looking for disease resistant seeds and plants. I won’t be planting next year until I absolutely know the frosts are no longer!! That was a pain in the next to have to plant twice this year!…It gets a teensy weensy bit expensive! So….how did the rest of you do? Did you hit pay dirt?

Part 4 of Redo…..

   Ok….ok….you are probably getting sick of this by now! I will wrap it up today without all the trivial details! My brother in law Joe and my husband put together the new stand and put it into place with the new 46” on top….a man’s dream! I could hear the ouuu’s and ah’s from the kitchen! You would have thought there was a playboy bunny walking in front of them! Honestly! Men and their electronics! Us women have our things too….I know! Into the room and ready to wire it up. And then the moment came…. Sorry for the dark photos and you really can’t see the stand that well.     This was put in place even before we got the furniture in there! Joe and hubby sat in kitchen chairs in the middle of the room watching the new Samsung! My hubby kept whooping….and yeehaing! He was happy! Eventually, we got a couch and a loveseat and a recliner delivered from Bob’s Discount Furniture in South Portland. The couch would not fit through the living room door and had to go back. The loveseat stayed for a week before we realized THAT was not going to work either. A really LONG story short, we ended up with two Olive colored recliners…..his and mine. We added a small chair, a beautiful end table, and matching étagère that we got a fabulous deal on at Mardin’s Furniture store in Lewiston. They were overstocks and no damage to any of the furniture! The savings was phenomenal! We got lucky. After three!….yes three!!…sets of curtains…brought home and hung up and taken back….we ended up with grommet top curtains with polished nickel rods and the curtains are off white. A new lamp was added and a new desk and a new bed for Obie under the end table….he loves it. Here are the photos….

I know…they are dark….bear with me…..

I really should have lightened these….. And the new desk …… better lighting at least! The final rods and curtains! Some day maybe blinds…. My chair and end table and new lamp AND a doily hand crocheted by Alice/GeeGee….my wonderful friend and mother in law!

New little tub chair with pillow. Étagère next to it and close ups of Étagère…

New area rug just a few days ago… Close up of rug…..I love it! New clock….cherry and black background but you can’t see that can you?! New overhead light which is much nicer in person with filigree around the edge.  Obie’s new sage and cream designer bed scrunched under the end table! And some small close ups… Different angle of desk and tv… That’s it!!!! It is now just our own little tv/media room that is just as comfy cozy as can be. We haven’t had a chance to decorate the walls yet…over the big tv and on the walls but that will come. Right now we are taking a break and saying “Ahhhhh”….Sorry the photos were so dark and some got blurry but you get the idea. Quite a change huh? We are thrilled with it and glad to be rid of the “old room”. My son came in and sat down and said…. “Mom…I feel like I am in a hotel lobby.” I am not sure if that is good or bad??? I am hoping good! Ok Sheila…..I didn’t make you wait too long for the finale did I??? No No Nanette!! You all are sweethearts….to write what you have written….warms my heart….thanks.