(Mostly) Homemade Halloween Costume

My first attempt at making a costume or even a piece of clothing. Amie chose the fabrics for the cape and the skirt and patiently tried it on at several stages. I sewed it together on my machine, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying, but mostly laughing. If there was a prize for the crookedest hem… But …

Riot for Austerity – Month 12

We finished our 12th month, we made it around the year! I’ll list this month’s consumption first and then I’ll discuss the yearly average. Gasoline. 7.4 gallons pp =18 % of the US National Average Yearly average: 24.8% I just saw that I never calculated DH’s miles on public transportation (shuttle). I’ll start adding those …

Teaching Children To Draw: Amie is in It!

It’s finally here, the book! At the beginning of 2008 I got an email from Marjorie Wilson. She and her husband, Brent, are the authors of the seminal Teaching Children to Draw, published in 1982. Marjorie wrote that they were putting together the second edition. She was doing research on the net when she found …

Independence Days – Week 10

Plant. Nothing: our winter beds are full. We did improve the bedding. Harvest. I didn’t plant any Fall vegetables, so I have few plants left in the garden: kale, chard, parsley. The peas and the beans are giving up in the seesaw of warm/cold, but I managed to harvest the last few. Harvested the three …

Independence Days, Week 9

Nothing much of anything happened this week: I’m a bit out of whack with DH gone, and I’ve also started working on the novel again (again!), while it snows. We had our first frost and our first snow, and the garden is in full Winter mode now. Plant. Planted pak choi. That will be it …

Grandmothers’ Quilts

I am very fortunate to have handmade items in my home. Many of them are Amie’s, of course, most of which I’ve already shown here. There are also  those made by strangers and mostly presented to us as gifts, a lot from India. The ones I want to show you here are two quilts made …

Your Average Sunday Afternoon

It’s coming down hard: thick globs of melting snow. The wood stove is giving off enough heat to dispel any gloom: it’s merely cozy, as long as I don’t need to go out there. Which I did have to, earlier on. One of the rain barrels was overflowing, and not through the overflow tube. In …