Misc. musings

Good morning!  How are things at your house?  We are doing well.  We have been busy doing our regular things and working on organizing my sewing room and making room for Ed to have a space of his own.  (Yes that means I am sharing part of my sewing room.)  For far too long my sewing room has been the catch-all room.  And I could never find anything, so I was always having to dig through my fabric and craft supplies, which makes a mess.  When we are finished, I am going to have my fabric all sorted and in order.  One of these days I will put them in colorways too, but for now nice and neatly folded according to fabric content is my plan.  I will post some photos when it is finished.  I have "before" pictures but I am too embarrassed to show everyone! 


Yesterday I baked bread and made pizza.   The girls each got a blob of dough to make something too.  They made their own little loaf in a pie tart pan. 

Here they are with their creations.   Sally was saying "B R E A D"  lol!

Sally's bread close-up.

Audrey's close-up.  Hers looks like I big clam doesn't it?

My bread before going into the oven. 

The pizza coming out of the oven.

And the following photos are what happened when the girls got ahold of the camera while Mom and Dad were upstairs working on the sewing room.  No wonder my batteries are always dead when I go to use my camera!

Sally in her dress up dress dancing.

More dancing.

Audrey dancing.

Toby napping on the loveseat. 

Duke

Audrey and Duke\

The remaining scar from Duke's accident.

Sally and Toby.

Audrey and Toby, (who isn't looking too happy with the photo shoot.)

Sally trying to avoid being licked by Duke.

Kitty and Tiger

Close-up of Kitty and Tiger.  Audrey was given Kitty at the hospital when she was born.   So Kitty is going on 10 years old.  She used to be pure white with a bright pink ribbon.  Tiger was given to Sally on her 1st birthday and is 6 years old.   They have to sleep with these every night.

And of course here is Kitty again.

Silly Duke sleeping with his head smashed up against the chair.

Here he is again.  The reason I took this photo is because he was snoring so loudly we had to turn up the TV.  LOL

And that is all I have to share with you today.   Hope your day is blessed and productive!

Ready for a good laugh?

I don't know if everyone who reads my blog knows about my children's ages.  Both my husband and I were married before and have children from those marriages.  I have two sons that are 31 and 29.  My husband who is 17 years my senior has two sons and a daughter who are all in their late 30's early 40's.  Then God saw fit to give us our two girls after my sons had grown up and left home.  So our poor girls have "old" parents.  Matter of fact people in town always ask us if they are our grandkids.  Which really makes our girls indignant!  lol!

I said all of that to tell  you the funny story.  Since we are not spring chickens so to speak, we have a tendency to forget things once in awhile.  Like where we put something.  We take fish oil and other vitamins that are supposed to help our memory.  So it is a family joke that when we forget something someone will ask if we took our fish oil that day.  : )

Here are some photos of pictures our girls drew for us some time ago.  They decided the best place to display them was on either side of our bed.

This is the picture that Audrey drew for me, and it is on my side of the bed on the wall.

This is the picture that Sally drew for Ed and it is on his side of the bed.  (I think I will put them in frames.)

The other day I was in the kitchen working and Audrey comes in there and starts talking to me.  Out of the clear blue she says this:  You know the pictures we drew for you and Dad by your bed?  I said yes.  She says well good thing we made those for you.  I waited for her to elaborate.  She says, that way when your fish oils wears off you will still know which side of the bed you are supposed to sleep on .  LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That is what happens when you have old parents I guess.  We laugh about this every night when we go to bed!

Our new Andalusian hens are laying

We got our first tiny Blue Andalusain egg the other day.  It went from being tiny and round to the small nicely shaped egg in a few days.  Pullet eggs are so cute! 

The two brown eggs are normal sized eggs.  To the left you can see the tiny round first egg of one of our Blue Andalusian hen.  Now we have a couple more hens laying the white egg.  These are from the new Blue Andalusian hens that hatched out 4.5 months ago. We are back in production with the eggs.  We are getting 12-17 eggs a day and that number will go up as the new ones get to laying regularly.

This is  a picture of a flour sack towel that I embroidered a design on and then attempted to crocket a border on the bottom.  Does it look like a Valentine day project?  I have a friend who loves pink so much her kitchen is done in pinks.  I think she would like something like this.  : )

Keeping busy and productive

This is a picture of my turkey deep fryer kettle.  Guess what is in it?  Mixed dry beans that have been soaking.  Did you know if you soak your beans for 12-24hrs it makes them more digestable? 

The family helped me sort through 5 different dry beans.  We put baby lima, red kidney, pinto, black turtle, tiny white beans and black eyed peas in this mix.

I took them out of the kettle and rinsed them in the colander a little at a time.

Then I put them in the jars with a half teaspoon salt in each jar.

Loaded up both canners.  Boy I love those canners!  I can do 21 qts. at one time with these two.  I ended up with 28 qts as I had enough to do one more small canner load.

There we have 28 qts. of dried beans all cooked and ready for some instant meals!  The last 7 qts. that I canned I added some chili powder, cumin, and onion powder in addition to the salt in those.  Makes them kind of a chili bean flavor.  I can open a couple of jars, add some browned ground beef to it and some homemade tomato sauce and diced tomatoes and garlic and there is supper!  Add a pan of corn bread and I have instant dinner.  Well that is what we call "fast food" around our place anyway.  : )

Next thing to do is making jams and jellies from all those berries and fruit I put in the freezer last summer.

Happy 2010!

So here we are starting another new year.  It seems to me as soon as Christmas is over I start getting seed catalogs in the mail and I begin thinking of my next garden.  Browsing through the catalogs makes me look forward to Spring, the smell of  fresh tilled soil and what I will grow in my garden.  What variety of green beans, carrots, cabbage will I plant this year?

Ed said his top priority now is building the greenhouse asap.  I will be able to start my plants in there instead of letting them take over the kitchen.  We are aslo contemplating which veggies will grow year round for us.  Lettuce, radishes, green onions, chard, kale, broccoli for sure.  Ed wants to try and experiement with a cherry tomato plant too.  There would be a nice salad when ever we wanted for supper.  Plus some fresh greens and a little broccoli.  Having salad fixings all winter would be wonderful!  Of course I will have some herbs out there too.  I love cooking with fresh herbs.

I keep telling myself to quit thinking about gardening and enjoy my time for sewing and other needlecrafts!  I have so many things I would like to sew and embroider.  I will be doing some embroidery block of the month  this year.  I will be sure to post pictures as I get them finished.

 I made the two quilts for my girls for Christmas this year, and now that they have them on their beds, I can post a picture of them.  : )

This is a picture of Audrey's quilt. The next photo is of the back of her quilt.  It has been hand tied as I don't do machine quilting and didn't have time to have it quilted by someone else.

I should take a close up of the fabric.  It is different dogs.

This is Sally's quilt.  They both have some of the same blocks in them, but look different due to the sashing between the blocks.  Also the backs are different.

The back of Sally's is penguins.

This is Duke and Hercules sharing Dukes blanket.  Seems like the cat has the better part of it.  The cats have adapted quite well to Duke being in the house.  Toby still doesn't want much to do with him, but he doesn't have such a hissy fit when Duke tries to sniff him anymore.    : )