Starting Seeds...

One of my favorite things about spring and summer is gardening. I recently started a few herbs - chives, oregano, basil, lavender, and spearmint. The past two years, I've started all my seeds in our kitchen in our apartment. As you can imagine, this could be quite messy. So it was great to be able to be outside and not worry about getting dirt on the floor or on our kitchen table. I picked up one of those plastic domed "greenhouse" that are available everywhere now to give a try. I usually use the small peat pots, but was tired of how fast they would get mold on. The greenhouse I got has 4 different cell packs, each with 9 seed spots. I planted the oregano, basil, lavender, and spearmint in this. So far, so good. It makes watering easy. I bottom water so I don't distrubing the seed, so I just pour some in the bottom of the tray and have the plants soak it up. The chives I planted in these newspaper pots I made. My mother gave me a small kit that makes pots for starting seeds without tape or glue, just newpaper.


Here's my seed starting set up.



I've never tried lavender before. I thought it would be good to try growing and that I could dry the flowers to use in the soaps I started to make. However, I found out that new lavender plants don't get flowers until the second year. So I'll have a little bit of a wait.



Here's 4 out of my 5 herbs all planted and ready to grow.

Trees....

I was going through some of the ever growing collection of photos I have on my computer, and came across some great close up pictures of trees. I actually forgot about almost all of these. We're pretty bad at actually going and getting them printed off, so they just kind of grow into massive folders on our computer. These made me want to find a few minutes this coming weekend to print them out.

The first one was taken in the fall in the town where we live. I love the ivy climbing up the bark.



This one was taken also taken at the same time and around the same area.


This one I believe was taken our on of our camping trips in Shenandoah Valley National Park.


And this one was taken by a creek close to where we live.

Our new cards....

Yesterday, two little boxes arrived from Moo with our new business cards in. I ordered 200 of the mini cards and love them! I like how you can customize the image on the back of every card if you'd like. I kept it pretty simple and just chose two different images of my art/fabric collages for the back. Here's what the backs look like:



Here's the front of the card. I was a little unsure about how the orange would look for the background, but it turned out to be really nice. I choose one of my new fabric/embroidery girl series for the front.





Just in time for spring crafts show!

A little bit from our past weekend....

This past Monday (in case you didn't know by now, our "weekend" is Monday and Tuesday!) we took a trip to the Baltimore Ikea. We went not really having any big purchases in mind, just a few small items and maybe just to look around. We've both been really liking one chair in particular the past couple of trips to Ikea. The "Poang" model. This chair has been around for a while and at first neither of us were really crazy about it. It just looked, well sort of uncomfortable. One day, we sat in it and realized we were wrong. Very wrong actually. It's quite comfortable and actually has a nice shape. So we ended up finally buying one. We opted for the straight black one and hope to make our own slipcover for it. An extra $89 for a green cover didn't seem like a bargain when this one was just $28. I didn't have a chance to take a picture of ours (it's rather dark right now) but here's the one from the Ikea website. Ours is just like this one, except our wood finish is more brown.



This past Christmas, Kinsey's parents gave us a really nice down comforter. We hadn't used it yet, because we haven't had a chance to make a proper duvet cover for it. We found two really nice covers for only $12 each. One is a light blue with circles, and the other is a green and white pattern. This one is on our bed now:





Kinsey's bread of the week was Challah. Here's a before and after shot. This was my favorite bread to date that he's made!





So good!

New Series Debut....and Bread

I'll be listing my first in my new series of embroidered wall art today. Here's a look at my first finished one:




And a close up of some embroidery stitching:



I'm really excited about these. Like I said before, the new designs were inspired by an old collage I did years ago. I'll have to try and track that artwork down and take a photo to share. I really like the idea of capturing a person in nature. I'm tending to focus on the same type of silhouette for the girls-windswept hair, angular shoulders, thin waist, and an A-line skirt/dress. I enjoy being able to play around with different fabric prints and textures and then incorporating embroidery stitches in random places throughout. I really like the layered look of the ones I've been doing in the past few days.....however this first one isn't too layered. Hopefully, I'll have the other ones up and listed soon....mabe tomorrow morning when the light is right!


Yesterday, Kinsey continued his new pursuit in the art of bread making. This time he decided to make french baguettes. The final results were wonderful!

Here are the mini loaves on our pizza peel getting readying for their trip in the oven.




The warm, soft, delicious inside of the bread. I think I ate most of a loaf myself when they first came out....they were smaller loaves though!



A small pile of amazing baguettes....and a half eaten one!

A snowy day baking bread...and crafting.

Yesterday, it began snowing (again) in the afternoon. The previous night Kinsey got the sudden urge to bake bread, so the snowy afternoon provided the perfect setting to try out a loaf. After much time spent rising, and resting, and kneading, and resting, and rising, and finally baking.....this was the final product.


Here's a picture of the nice cross section.



Mmmmmmm.....The bread went great with my corn/tomato/black bean soup I made.

So, today was, much to our delight another snow day. Unlike before, the snow kept falling for most of the day. Until about 4 or so, which left just enough daylight to shovel out the car and sidewalk. I measured just about a foot of snow. This of course is on TOP of the 18.5 inches we had just on Saturday. This morning was a very productive day for me as far as crafting goes. I'm in the process of working on some very new (and possibly some of my favorite things ever!) designs. I got about 3 done and just love them. I'm not ready to quite share them yet....maybe I'll post a picture soon! They're really unlike things I've done before. However, they were inspired by a painting/collage I did for my high school art show when I was senior. I've been playing around with this for a while and finally reached a really good point. That's all I can really say about it now.
Anyway, I'm exhausted from shoveling snow again, but here's a few pictures from today's snow storm.


This was what it looked like when we woke up in the morning....and actually what it looked like for most of the day! Can you believe it? More snow?


Here we go again...


Kinsey wanted to see who deep the almost 30 inches of combined snowfall was.


I was peer pressured in following of course. Here's me just taking a break and relaxing in the mound of white around me. These all were of course after we did all our shoveling!

Snowy Saturday

We got our first real snow storm in quite a few years this weekend. This is how we awoke today. Our car was barely visible! The snow starting the night before, but we were at work. We had to clean off a good number of inches from our car at 9pm, so this was just from about 9:30pm to around 10am!






We only have one snow shovel. Realizing that this snow would be way too much work (and take twice as long!), I remembered I thought there might be an extra shovel in the shed left by the people who lived here before us. So I shoveled a path out to the shed to take a look and found not just one, but two snow shovels! (A little beaten, but nonetheless they proved to be quite useful!) As you can see, the snow was to my knees. Luckily, it was still pretty light and fluffy, so shoveling wasn't too much hard work.



Here's our fence in the backyard with all the snow piled up.



This is a shot of our snow covered backyard. You can see our birdfeeder poking out a little and the black railing along the steps in the center of our yard. Other than that, it's just snow.


The snow piled on top of our little shed. Talk about a lot of snow!



I measured about 18 and a half inches. This was taken at the edge of our back porch. Could possibly be more, but 18.5 is definitely a lot of snow!