Knock Knock....

 

Wanna come out and play?

More like, Wanna come out and see what I haven't eaten yet?

I'm sorry I've been so long gone again but, geesh, I'm just not keeping up these days.

For those who asked, yes, the new baby arrived safely but contrary to best laid plans. (DIL was past her due date so they scheduled her for a c-section but complications arose and she ended up having an emergency c-section prior to the scheduled date.)

Baby Myla Lynne arrived in style (during a tornado warning) but both mom and baby are doing well.

And, yes, Gigi duty went fine and dandy...but, yikes, was I tired LOL.

By now most of you know that each summer I generally do a post about the summer's flowers.

This is this year's.

Because I was too lazy to make it into a couple, separate, posts, be forewarned that there a LOT of photos.

{The cream separator came from our family's farm}

{The first hibiscus to bloom}

{White Admiral Butterfly on hydrangeas}

{One of my favorite places to be: on my bench on my back porch}

{The view from said bench....}

It has been a good year for the "volunteer" plants (ones that just seed themselves from prior years and manage to grow in the bricks of my patio.) Amazing given how extremely dry it has been.

{All of the plants under the tub are "volunteers"}

{Even a volunteer phlox!}

{Morning glories and echinacea}

These plain-Jane white petunias are actually "firefly petunias"... 

At night, without any props or lights, they become magically lit as though by little fireflies:

{Word to the wise: Do not put these somewhere where one has to navigate stairs in the dark in order to see their magic.  Just saying....}

{No flowers here...just a peek looking into the cornzebo with a little "light magic" of its own.}

{A very rare (for Nod - and Wisconsin generally) "stray" Spicebush Swallowtail butterfly playing amongst the echinacea.}

{Not flowers either, and not-so-rare, trash pandas on the bridge. Yes, I was tempted.}

{Sun setting on the tasseling corn after a night of cat yoga with Mia.

There are days life is so very sweet.}

Hope you all are keeping well.

Pieces of January...

 

Yes, I know it's February...but I'm still picking up pieces of January (and, actually, several other months if truth be told.)

This winter - this year so far - has been bumpy. Extreme cold, frozen plans...and pieces that just fell apart. Most days, "Plan A" never stood a chance, so I moved on to Plan B, and, right about now, I think I'm pretty firmly entrenched in Plan D.

I'm far too far behind to make a pretense of catching up, so I'm just jumping in here and sharing some of my "puzzle pieces" from the past month and hoping things start to fit together at some point.

I am not entirely certain what happened the first few weeks of the month. I know what didn't happen (like getting Christmas put away...Lauren, I'm sure, is loath to have a twin like me) so we're going to skip that part, k?

But mid-month I remember both what I did and did not do, so we'll start with that.

The past several years I've spent mid-January at Cathy Stephan's (Red Barn Rugs') rug hooking workshop. For various reasons, this year's January workshop was cancelled. Instead, Cathy and a couple other hooky friends from the January group joined me at the lake for a few days of hooking.

Our friend, Marilyn Becker, who passed away the end of October, had been part of our January workshop group so we decided it would be a fitting opportunity to celebrate her, her friendship, and her amazing hooking artistry.

It was snowy and cold, but we enjoyed the few days we had together.

We took turns making meals, some hooked more than others (ahem!), we watched a few movies and, one day, we ventured out to do a bit of antiquing/junking.

A few of the things that caught my eye:

{Only one of the above items followed me home....}

And what about the hooking projects?

Well, yeah, I was a bit preoccupied with trying to remember how to be a hostess so failed quite miserably not only in that department but also in getting photos of the projects being worked on by the others. 

Here are the few I managed to get:

Marilyn ("Bad" Marilyn...not "Good" Marilyn who we were celebrating) was working

on a piece based on a photo she had taken of a Guatemalan woman and her child. She has already redone the woman's skirt at least twice and plans on redoing it again with totally different wool. She is also going to re-do her face. (Like Good Marilyn, Bad Marilyn is a fine-cut hooker, meaning she hooks with wool strips the width of dental floss.)

Below is the actual photo from which she is working:

Cathy, ever the over-achiever, was working on several things at once. This is the only one I got a photo of:

This rug is HUGE. It is shown below with my 20-lb cat for size reference.

(I believe she said the rug's name is "Hazel" and measures 48" x 60"??)

I tried to convince her to leave the rug for Rajah and me, but she declined.

Unfortunately, I did not get any photos of our friend, Kim's, rug. :-(

I'd like to leave the following part out, but I know there is at least one person out there who would be asking what I worked on.

It's little, it's pathetic...and I got pathetically little accomplished on it, but here ya go MD:

Each of us were also gifted a rug/mat that had been hooked by Good Marilyn.

This is the one I received:

I stayed on a day and a half after everyone left to clean things up, pack things up, etc. (i.e., to catch up on sleep??)

The end of the month? Well, I remember most of that as well - the good, the bad and the ugly.

First the good:  The night after I got home from the lake, I was drawn outside by a lightening of the sky.  Some of the strangest Northern Lights I've witnessed - not so much colorful as BRIGHT - especially against the white of the snow.

There are no streetlights (or any kind of lights) out where I am and I had no porch or yard lights on, yet it was so clear it seemed like early evening. The photo info is shown below. It was 9:59 p.m.

Then there was the bad:

I know many of you were inundated with snow and we, thankfully, escaped that...but we were plunged into bitter, bitter, cold. -30° actual temps with -50° windchills...and guess who came home to heating issues, AGAIN???!

Thankfully, it was in the shop, not the house but, in many ways, it was just as bad since the shop has an in-floor heating system and if it stops working, the entire system and floor can be ruined if it gets cold enough...and it certainly was cold "enough."

On top of that good news, I was unable to even get into the shop because the door had frozen shut.

I finally managed to break in after 2 days so I could get the heating company out in...only to be told that the company that manufactured the heating system had gone out of business, so replacement parts were no longer available.

Seriously??!! If you recall, I just replaced that entire system shortly after my husband passed away so, less than two years ago.

GAH!

They did manage to get it working again, but they had to bypass the auto-shut off function so should it stop working again and drop below freezing, it's done and gone.

Did I say "GAH!"?

And then the ugly:

I came down with a bad case of the flu.

Let's just leave it at that.

I'm on the mend but certainly haven't kicked it completely.

And there you have it...my January in bits and pieces. There's more, actually, but this is more than enough for now, I think.

*****

Oh...and one last thing for the person who asked....

{pssst....and soon there will be two....💗}

One for the Crow...

...one to die, one to grow.

Just an old gardening rhyme with lots of variations:

"Four seeds in a row, one for the rook, one for the crow, one to die, and one to grow."

"Four seeds in a row, one for the rook, one for the crow, one will wither and one will grow."

"One for the blackbird, one for the crow, one for the cutworm, and one to grow."

"One for the mouse, one for the crow, one to rot, one to grow."

"One for the wind and one for the crow, one to die and one to grow."

...and so many more one could write a book of nothing but these rhymes.

Anyway...that has little to do with this post.

The season to sow is long past. Sometimes I feel like I went to sleep sometime in April and woke up and it was the end of October.

 

Somehow there is less than one week until Halloween.

I've not gotten a fraction of the things done that I had hoped to (including blogposts), but I have gotten some of my Halloween up and a few (small) projects crossed off my list. 

Wow...have I veered off topic. 

Back to "One for the Crow"....

In addition to an old and prolific gardening rhyme, it's the name of this design by With Thy Needle & Thread.

I stitched these designs several years ago but was disappointed in the linen I used. It was the called-for 40 ct "Legacy" from Picture this Plus," but my pieces did not look like the model photos. 

I distressed the linen a bit after I completed the stitching, but they still were pale and sickly.  (These photos make them look closer to the models but they aren't really.)

However, after extended stays at both the Isle of Misfits and Castaways and The Isle of the Unfinished, they finally made it into these little pinkeeps.

Two littles off the list....

Now back to my other distractions.