homesteading, Seasons

Spring, she is a Comin’

 

It’s been raining and gray, but there are buds starting to swell on the clematis and the cherry tree, and Cliff Mass says winter will be over in a month. The sarcococca the front yard is blooming, the hellebore might be thinking about it, and the rhubarb is trying again to put up a stalk after the last two have been snowed on and frozen. Gotta love the stubbornness of plants. So it seemed like a good time to sort through the seed box, throw out things “packed for 2007” and count what I have from last year (an unopened …

Caitlyn, parenting

Learning by Doing

In the week or so before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I received a flurry of messages about making the day one of service, a “day on, not a day off.” Not many of the service projects, though, seemed appropriate for kindergartners. When we have P-Patch work parties, Caitlyn comes, but her actions there are more Caitlyn-staying-out-of-the-way (ie, climbing on large dirt piles or digging randomly in an open plot) than Caitlyn-doing-community-projects. It’s possible she’ll learn about the importance of participation and community involvement by watching me do it, but I think there’s benefit to her being more hands-on sometimes. …

family, Seasons

Reviving a Tradition

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My grandfather loves his sweets. One of the best things about staying with my grandparents for an evening when I was in elementary school (ok, and later, too) was that I always knew there would be dessert after dinner. Dessert was a rare treat at home, but Grandma always had something, even if it was only a bowl of fruit or a scoop of ice cream. I can’t quite remember a time before the candy. I think Grandpa started making it after their house was finished (or what passed for finished – to this day, I don’t think my grandparents …

quilts

Quilt Along Update

 

Ok. Now I know. When doing a project with pre-cut fabrics, make sure all the pieces are from the same manufacturer. In my quilt along fabrics, the purple strips from Island Batik are about an eighth of an inch wider than the cream strips from Timeless Treasures. Since this would throw off the corner alignments when it comes time to do the piecing, I’m trimming them down as I go. Hopefully this works. And in the future, I’ll stick to one manufacturer at a time since this fiddly stuff is the sort of thing buying pre-cut fabric is supposed to …