remember that book...?

I'm the manager of a bookstore/cafe during the day and often get asked the following questions: 1) Can you recommend a good book for me to read?, 2) What are you reading now?, 3)Do you read a lot?, and 4)Do you sell lottery tickets here? (The last one gets asked more than you'd believe.)

Anyhow, by the nature of my job, I come in contact with more books than anyone could ever read or even remember seeing. I read fairly regularly and usually have a book or two (or three) I'm in the middle of. I am not, however, good at remembering all the books I have read. So I decided to make a list of the books I have read (so far) in 2011. Of course, I didn't officially start keeping track until March, so I may have already forgotten a book or two.

This isn't for really any purpose other than just my personal knowledge of what I've read this year. I don't have any book goals or a certain number of books that I'm aiming for, I just wanted to see what types of books I usually read.

I'd say by looking at the list below, if you know me, these titles seem like things I'd read. If you have any interest in seeing my progress, I've included a "Book" tab at the top of the blog. I'll continue to update books I read on that page. Also, I'll include some of my favorite craft and cooking books I've come across lately.
So....

Books I've Read in 2011 (as of July 27th):

1- The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of a Donner Party Bride- Daniel James Brown
2- The Coast of Maine – Louise Rich Dickinson
3- The Orchard: A Memoir – Adele Crockett Robertson
4- From Off Island – Dionis Coffin Riggs
5- How Did You Get This Number – Sloane Crosley
6- The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family – Jim Minick
7- The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love – Kristin Kimball
8- Mary: A Flesh and Blood Biography of the Virgin Mary – Lesley Hazleton
9- Hay Fever: How Chasing a Dream on a Vermont Farm Changed My Life – Angela Miller
10- Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide – Brett McCracken
11- Spencer’s Mountain – Earl Hamner (reread)
12- Olive Kitteridge – Elizabeth Strout
13- Amish Peace: Simple Wisdom for a Complicated World –Suzanna Woods Fisher
14- Growing A Farmer –Kurt Timmermeister
15- The Salt House – Cynthia Huntington
16- Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World – Mark Frauenfelder
17- Mirror Mirror- Gregory Maguire
18- We Took To the Woods – Louise Rich Dickinson
19- That Summer on Catalpa Street – Louise Pliss
20- Adventures With Hal – Gladys Baker Bond
21- Lemon Jelly Cake- Madeline Babcock Smith

garden destruction

Before we bought our house in 2009, we had a vegetable garden for a few years at my parents house.  Their house is situated near farmland and isn't fenced in at all.  We grew a variety of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, melon, eggplant, peas, beans, and other edibles in the garden and had a pretty good success rate.  We'd harvest pounds and pounds of tomatoes during our twice weekly visits during the growing season. 

When we were looking for a house, we had a lot in mind for our backyard.  The major thing was a fairly decent area for a garden.  Our house had a nice size backyard for our area, but it was on a slope.  We set to making raised beds and bought in nice blend of soil and made sure everything was healthy.

Our first growing season (2010), was off to a good start.  Our tomatoes shot up and grew tall and prolific.  

Then, one day we noticed the leaves started to curl up and wilt.  The next day they took a yellow and brown appearance.  The flowers stopped blooming and no more fruit was produced.  We picked maybe 8 tomatoes from those plants before they died off completely.  What was the cause of this?  Blight? Wilt?  

We took a leaf sample and went to our local nursery to talk to the experts.  While they couldn't say for sure, they did ask us if we had any Black Walnut trees close to our property.  We did.  Our neighbors have two Black Walnut trees which are maybe 7 feet from where our tomatoes were.  Evidently, these trees have a chemical called juglone that can be toxic to certain plants, especially tomatoes.  There wasn't much that could be done at that point as we were told you'd need to plant the tomatoes 25 feet away from the trees and even that might not work.  

Despite all this tomato devastation,  we planted a new round this summer.  We love the idea of growing fresh vegetables right outside our door and decided to plant them in a bed even further away from the Black Walnut tree.  Everything was going well until a few weeks again, we noticed the "Walnut Wilt" reappearing.  We didn't panic, we could still get some fruit off the plants if they succumbed again to juglone.  

However, we didn't plan on animals attacking our tomatoes constantly.   The other day, I walked out to check our garden and found this:

This tomato was about the size of two golf ball and we were eagerly awaiting the day to pick it.  But something else got to it first.

So we decided we needed to fence the bed in.  We had some chicken wire left over from a previous project so we used that.  The holes we a little bigger than we wanted, but we figured it would still keep out the critters eying up our produce.  

We were feeling good about this until the following morning:

Obviously we were dealing with a smaller animal or a bird.  We have a family of chipmunks that live in our neighbors yard (or ours it seems), so I leaning towards chipmunks.  (They dig holes all over our flower beds and we can't seem to get rid of them.)  We have since bought new chicken wire with incredibly tiny holes, so nothing can possibly get in through the holes.  So far, so good (fingers crossed).  However, we did witness a hungry squirrel running around the fenced in bed trying to figure a way to get up.  Luckily, he got frustrated and jumped around frantically before running his usual exercise course along our fence and taking off to another yard.  

If only critters and Black Walnut trees attacking our tomatoes were the only gardening problem we have.  

On Friday morning, after Kinsey got back from his morning run, he checked on our garden and everything was fine.  Less than 40 minutes later, I went out to water before we left for work and was met with complete pepper massacre:

In all, our two tallest and most flowered pepper plants were snapped in half, two more were pulled straight up from the ground, and the remaining six were fallen over and trampled on.  We have no idea what happened.  A little chipmunk (our usual garden suspect) couldn't have done this massive work.  A squirrel doesn't seem likely either.  A rabid raccoon?  A skunk?  A bear? (We haven't seen any of these in our yard ever.  I doubt the bear, but there have been bear sightings in the boro we live in about 5 times in the last 18 months.)

So we're down to 8 peppers still in the ground (we started with 13 at the beginning).  I'm not sure how damaged these remaining ones are, but hopefully we get a pepper or two.  This bed will obviously be fenced in immediately.  

the campfire...in felt!

You may remember me gushing about this book on this post.

After completing two additional african violets, I finally made my way to the campfire.  Who doesn't love a good campfire?  They really go hand in hand with the summer season.  Here is the finished result:

First, I sewed the three logs.  Each log has hand embroidered "knots" for a more realistic appearance.




Surprisingly, these went pretty fast.  I enjoyed free embroidering the bark lines and was surprised by how much they resembled logs after being sewn up and stuffed.  Quite frankly, I could've stopped there.   (I do have plans in my head of doing an original tree stump in the near future!)

Here's the three finished logs all sewn and stuffed.

Next, came the final piece, the flame.  I opted for standard fire colors of bright yellow, orange, and red.  The flame is actually three separate pieces with three different colors per piece.  

Here's a close up of the flame.  Each felt piece is blanket stitched around the edges and together.  I used red thread for all the colors instead of matching the felt for a little added detail.  Crazy, I know.

Here's a shot from above, showing the three sections sewn together.  The directions have you gluing the three complete flame sections together and then sewing the edges together.  I found the glue to be rather messy and well, my fabric glue was rock hard.  So I skipped this step for the most part.  Instead of gluing, I just used some trusty sewing pins and pinned the three finished flame pieces together and stitched the edges to join everything.  I found this to work great.  

Another view of the three sides.

Overall, I really love this project.  It's easy (I found it a lot easier and faster to finish then the african violets...although, I did make 3 of the violets in a fairly short amount of time, so I may have just really liked the change!)

All that's missing is the s'mores! (Which actually there is a project for them in the book too!)  This would be fun to put in a fireplace you don't use or in a corner of a room.  Maybe even outside for a little non working fire pit for a summer gathering.

backyard garden projects

Last week, we decided to make another flower bed in our backyard.  This is the first tiny step in what we hope to be a massive backyard renovation.  Two major things we'd like to do include:

1-  Build a new patio.  Either by putting stone pavers over our existing concrete one or removing (which I assume would be very time consuming and not to mention rather backbreaking!) the concrete and laying flagstone in a free form pattern. 

Here's our current patio...

 I really like these pictures of what the flagstone could look like. 

2- building a shed.  The shed we have now is a small plastic one and isn't really too practical for storing garden tools, containers, and really anything other than our bicycles.  Ideally, we'd like to building on the very back of the yard in the far right hand side of the picture below.

Which brings us to our current project of the new flower bed.  We already have a small bed along the left side of our yard, so we decided to put this one on the right side along the rail fence.  We eventually want to make the bed a lot bigger and more in a half circle shape.  Possibly even with a bird bath in the middle once the ground is level.  But for now, we opted for a simple rectangle to get things started. 

First, we started by making shovel indents in the grass where the bed would be.  

Next, came over turning all the grass clumps and digging through and removing all the various objects we find in our yard....glass pieces, huge rocks, marbles, broken pottery, plastic lions, and the usual things. 

Once the soil was nice and clean of debris, I planted the new flowers I got from Kinsey's mother that morning.  

More plants, including my new favorite: Lamb's Ear (front center)

Rose Campion

Columbine (one of my new favorites)

These are not in our yard, but Kinsey's parents.  I love the circular shape inside the flowers and this dark color.  We plan on getting some in these color for our yard soon.

"Moonless Night" daylilies, which are supposed to have a dark maroon and black flower.  

Here's Kinsey giving the new transplants a nice long drink. 

Here's the finished bed after putting some leaf mulch around the plants.  (The green at the close right side by the post is daffodils.  They bloom along every post by this fence in the early spring.)

early may flower garden

Here's some spring pictures from our flower garden we took recently.  About this time every year, I always wish I could take the next four months off and do nothing but gardening (and crafting of course!).  Maybe someday.

Nice mix of colors on this tulip.

I love the shape and color of this tulip.  We have two of these in our flower bed and they always are the last tulips to bloom.

Ants crawling on the peony blooms.  As alarming as this can look, it's actually a good sign.  It means the flower is nice and healthy.

 Here's two poppy heads getting ready to bloom.  I won't lie - last year I pulled all the poppies out except one because I thought they were weeds.  I definitely learned from that mistake!  Poppies are some of my favorite flowers, so I was pretty disappointed after learning this.  Can't wait to actually see them bloom this year.

I'm not fully sure what kind of flowers these are.  Although I'm pretty sure they're a type of bluebell.

Another favorite tulip.

No idea what kind of plant this is.  I actually thought it was just a weed, but it has such pretty blooms all over and is about 20 inches tall.

Here's our very first ever blossom on our Betsy Ross lilac bush.  We got this from a friend when we moved into our house in the fall of 2009.  It was just a stick when we got it and then just had green leaves last year, and now it looks like an actually lilac bush!

 This sedum I got from the local nursery at the end of the season last year on sale.  I wasn't sure how it would transplant at the time, but it's really growing now.

And perhaps maybe, one of the most anticipated things of the spring garden...our strawberry plants!  This one is getting so close!  Hopefully we can get to it before the rabbits, or squirrels, or birds, or chipmunks, or any other critters that come into our yard!

living room in with the new and out with the old (table, that is)

We're in the process of rearranging our living room (more on that later!) and needed a new end table for one side of the Klobo (our Ikea loveseat, incase you have no idea what we're talking about...see this post for our re-do of the Klobo slipcover.)

We decided to visit one of our favorite local vintage housewares stores to see what they had to offer. 

We found this little side table with really nice detail.

Here's a close up of the detailing.  

We purchased it for the mere price of $22.  The table itself was painted a really light pink color which didn't quite fit too well in our living room.  So we knew we'd have to paint it.  I was leaning towards a super bright color, but didn't want to overpower the orange wall which it would be in front of.  So I looked around at what leftover paint we had and found a sample color we got for the kitchen.  (Which didn't quite look as we thought it would in that room.  It's actually still on a patch of the wall...we're still figuring out what color we want.  Another work in progress.)  Anyway, the color is called Carolina Inn Club Aqua and is a blue/green color.  

Here's a process shot.  I'm still deciding in this picture if I like the color or not for the table.  

In the end, we ended up really pleased with the overall table and color.   It adds just enough color to not be overwhelming and fits in to the colors of the room well.  Actually the color is pretty close to our lining set of curtains.  

Here's looking down.

I don't think I've talked about our new lamps we got a few months ago, but here's a close up.  They're by Thomas O'Brein for Target.  I love the crackled glass circle shape of the lamps.  I've been looking for lamps similar to these for a while, but never found anything really affordable.  I actually saw a very, very similar style of lamp, only blue glass, in a recent issue of County Living magazine for over $300!  Needless to say, these were much, much less than that!

One of the major things we wanted in end tables were a shelf or drawer to put things on/in.  Often drawers can seem a bit heavy, so this shelf is really nice and open.  The side detail is really interesting here, too.  Just big enough to hold things in place, but not too boxy.  

This is the hot mess that used to be our living room.  Actually it usually wasn't such a mess.  We were in the process of moving things around when I took this quick shot.  The table to the right of the Klobo is the one we replaced.  I love the table (Kinsey actually made this table in high school!), but it's destination in life isn't to be used as a side table.  It's much too big and as you can see, it was often used as a dumping ground for mail and other non important things when we came in the door.  This picture looks so crazy now that we rearranged everything.  (More on that soon!)