making, reading, gardening!!!

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Perhaps it's a stretch to call it gardening quite yet, but we have been busy preparing, and lots of dreaming. Several days now we have been blessed with some outdoor hours, enjoying the feeling of that nice cool dirt in our hands. And today I just couldn't help myself, I planted some spinach seed. Not sure if it's a little too early, but I really don't care!

In addition to a great stack of books from the library (I told Jason I needed to run in for just a minute or two to grab a couple books, came out with more than ten, but really it only took me about 2 minutes. This little library is really pleasing me lately..) we are reading this fun new Tiptoes Lightly story. It is an Easter tale, which I gave to the girls on the first day of spring since Easter Sunday comes at the end of the book, I thought we could slowly enjoy it up until then.

Please just ignore the fact that I don't seem to be working on the little quilt lately. In my defense, I am at the point of putting the layers together and basting and the big table is always covered with the girls projects, a good excuse to procrastinate I guess... And also we really needed new potholders. And by new I mean I really needed to cover up our old potholders, so I stitched new covers for them. Much prettier now!

I also added a new color to my granny square project, this nice light aqua. I think I like it very much. I did however also take some colors out of the afghan, wasn't feeling they were quite right, so my stack of squares is still growing somewhat slowly.

And here is a nice spring feeling picture that Chloe drew. I'm not sure when she did it, the girls do almost all their drawings in blank sketchbooks (cause 100's and 100's of loose drawings in the house does not seem like it would work out so well) but once a cat puked on one of the notebooks so we had to tear out a bunch of the pages, trim off the cat puke part (sorry, gross I know) and I came across this in the stack of pictures the other day. I just love all the detail she includes in her drawings, and there is always a story to go along with them, and she never seems to forget those stories.

Thanks to all of you lovely ladies who always share such inspiration, including sweet Ginny with her Yarn Along, crafty clever Julia and her Sewing Bee, and wonderful Melanie for her super great emails and long distance sewing companionship!

We may not have much spring color outside yet, but we are trying to create it inside as best we can!


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beautiful (snowy!) morning

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This is what we woke up to on Sunday morning...

It had started snowing the evening before...

Saturday we had spent the entire day outside, enjoying the sunshine, working on a new garden space...

Sunny early spring days always need to be taken advantage of here, because you never know when there could be a brief return to winter...

I really enjoyed the light growing stronger through the trees on this cold and quiet early spring morning!

It kept snowing most of the day, the clouds doing their best to chase that sun away. Nice and cozy, a good day for handwork, and books, and pancakes...

Hope your weekend was beautiful too!!!


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this moment ~ happiness with grandpa

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He told the story of how his mom (my Grandma Anne) taught him to play checkers, more than 50 years ago. He gave Chessa all kinds of pointers, they must have played at least 5 games in a row.

Days were filled with lots of game playing, some nice walks, and lots of story time. Lots and lots of story time. After the first nights bedtime story Chloe says to Jason and I, "I just love how grandpa reads a story!" With a happy sigh.

And then after 3 days we had to say goodbye, and I don't think anything at all ever hurts so much...


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this moment ~ farm friends

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~ inspired by Amanda Soule ~


I bet most of you will recognize where it was that we were last week...

I know this is supposed to be just one photo...

but there were baby goats! I could have posted 20 more...


Feeling grateful for...
the friendship of those great farm folks...
my daddy on his way to visit... (it's been a long, long time!)
the very last days of winter!


Blessings to all!


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~ Yarn Along ~

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Once again joining Ginny's Yarn Along...

Chloe especially loves the cover of this Wendell Berry book, she says she can't stop looking at it. I especially love what he has to say...

"For a long time now we have understood ourselves as traveling toward some sort of industrial paradise, some new Eden conceived and constructed entirely by human ingenuity. And we have thought ourselves free to use and abuse nature in any way that might further this enterprise. Now we face overwhelming evidence that we are not smart enough to recover Eden by assault, and that nature does not tolerate or excuse our abuses. If, in spite of the evidence against us, we are finding it hard to relinquish our old ambition, we are also seeing more clearly every day how that ambition has reduced and enslaved us. We see how everything - the whole world - is belittled by the idea that all creation is moving or ought to move toward an end that some body, some human body, has thought up. To be free of that end and that ambition would be a delightful and precious thing. Once free of it, we might again go about our work and our lives with a seriousness and pleasure denied to us when we merely submit to a fate already determined by gigantic politics, economics, and technology." - Wendell Berry

A little stack of books. Winter Cottage obviously needs to be finished up this week, because then it is on to a new season! A season of growing, gardens, so much goodness!
We got our copy of Four Season Harvest at least 10 or 12 years ago, a wise purchase seeing as how most have our gardens have been at altitudes between 7000-8000 feet. The book is worn, pages are loose, and in the resource section there is a very apparent lack of "www" or any mention of websites. Neat.

No knitting happening at the moment, I seem to be focusing on crochet and sewing.

I think I am doing better with the colorfulness of my granny squares. A brighter yellow and orange added, and I will definitely be including lots of that turquoise!
This afghan could likely be a year long project, possibly longer. I am taking it slow.. will it be done in time to keep us warm next winter, or will it be a cozy project to keep me occupied...

I still have more book post ideas on my mind. Up next, I think, will be some of my favorite Waldorf kindergarten resources. Sometimes I hesitate to mention something I will post, since there is always a chance I will take a while to get to it, but I already started making my list and taking some pictures, so hopefully soon...


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random thoughts...

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Accompanied by random photos. I have really been slacking with the camera lately. So I just pulled some pics from iPhoto, taken in the last couple months.

Too bad we didn't have the camera the other day when we saw that mama cow with her baby who had clearly just been born. Baby all wet, afterbirth still hanging from mama cow! Or, I should say, too bad we didn't know we had the camera with us.

We had a few winter days that were warm enough for t-shirts and wide open windows. Though mostly it was freezing. Though also it sure wasn't a very snowy winter. I think our snow was stolen by all of you out east.

And speaking of stealing, Chloe has been reading (but not in this picture) The Borrowers by Mary Norton. It is about little people who live beneath a house and "borrow" belongings from the family above. But as Chloe points out, they aren't really borrowing, they are stealing, cause they don't give anything back. She really hopes we don't have borrowers living under our house.

I'm sure I have mentioned before, the girls often spend hours of their day drawing. Usually with their beeswax crayons and colored pencils, sometimes with chalks.

Really messy chalk!

Lots of their play lately has been a strange combination of "castle" and Little House on the Prairie.

With more and more outside time as spring approaches. Hooray!



Remember, these are just random photos, I don't really have anything to say about them...

But the other random thoughts...

Seeds. My mind is full of thoughts of seeds. And the garden too of course, but that is still buried beneath snow, so, seeds, seeds, seeds.

We probably don't get much more than 90 days between our frost free dates. Yikes, challenging.

Tonight after dinner and doing the dishes I almost started making dinner again, for tomorrow night. We will be in town tomorrow and on days like that I really like to plan ahead and have dinner already prepared and waiting at home.

But I just baked cookies instead. Oats, whole wheat pastry flour, coconut oil, maple syrup. And a few walnuts and raisins.

We are having a kind of busy week. We have had a kind of busy winter! Usually in the winter we are in town only a couple times a month, this year it has been at least once a week. Kinda don't like that.

We live in between a small town and a tinier town. And we have been visiting both libraries. It kind of concerns me, cause that's a lot of books to keep straight, we're lucky we haven't ended up with any big late fees.

Books. Gosh I love books.

Lets hope for more book posts soon!

So, care to share any random thoughts??


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~ Sewing Bee ~

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Remember how excited I was about Julia's Sewing Bee? And then there was that incident, which I don't really like to mention anymore, (called the flu) and my poor little quilt sat neglected for much too long.

This past week I finally got to bring my squares back out. I had previously arranged them in satisfactory order, and carefully stacked them so that I would still know their order, but when I picked them up the other day I could not at all recall what I had intended to do with them! So I started over...

Here they are, squares sewed into pairs, and shortly after I got them sewn into their horizontal rows. I thought I was going to get a lot of sewing done today, but instead I got a lot of cooking and baking done and just a little bit of sewing.

I will always gladly take any small sewing moments I can get!


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~ Yarn Along ~

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Happy to be once again joining Ginny for her Yarn Along...

Resisting posting belated valentines photos, since it is finally March, but still want to show you this little red gnome I had made to greet the girls that morning. There was a matching heart too. I had always wanted to make one of these gnomes, pattern from dear Tonya. So cute, I think I will be making more.

This book was sitting out, Chloe must have been reading it. I have several vintage fairy tale books from long before we even had children. This is a collection of Hans Christian Anderson.

Really neat illustrations.

I wonder if Chloe was reading Little Tiny. (Thumbeline.) I remember loving this story when I was a child, but I have written here before about Chloe's sensitivity to certain stories. The last time we read this one together, which was more than a year ago, she burst into tears at the end and threw herself into my lap. Poor thing. She said she never wanted to read it again, but I have recently seen her taking a peek at it.

Another neat vintage book found at the antique shop in town today. It's an early 60's copy in such great condition, and full of enough stories to keep our avid reader occupied for at least a little while.

More wonderful illustrations.

And here are some of those granny squares I mentioned. I have finally started our afghan, so very excited! It's somehow not looking colorful enough at the moment, but I have more colors that I will be adding. I think I have 17 squares done, based on Chessa's counting. (That girl loves to count!) But I made that many squares without weaving in any of my ends, and so on Sunday instead of making more squares I had to sit and weave in all those little ends of yarn. I sure won't be doing that again, I will try to be disciplined enough to weave in my ends as I go!

It is getting late, but I think there may be time for at least one square before bedtime!


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