Undiscovered Toy
Boy – I sure am looking forward to being off work for a while after today. It is like the entire rest of my life gets put on hold!!
Along those lines, I got a new TOY (YAY!) but have not yet had time to use it (SAD!) and probably wont for another week and a half (DOUBLE SAD).
My toy is a new serger – my first!
It was a gift from my aunt – she specifically wanted to get me something that I would splurge on if I had the money…but I didn’t. It is SO exciting – I can’t wait to use it! I have been trying to watch the how-to videos that come with it but keep falling asleep because I am always sleep deprived when working (who am i? i would have NEVER done something like that 10 years ago. then again, 10 years ago I never thought I would be a largely stay at home mom blogging at all, let alone about my excitement around a sewing machine ?!). I am looking forward to some fun projects and ideas in the next couple of weeks!
YAY!
Weekly Photo Challenge: Lines
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Here is my contribution for the Daily Post’s Weekly Photo Challenge: Lines. I took a little liberty in thinking of this as “circular” lines.
This was a Christmas tree which I stood inside and spun while capturing. Hope you like it!
The babies are rearing their heads!
I planted bok choi and radish seeds in my garden about 1 week ago, and have some super cool baby sprouts coming up! I love going to the garden every day when I come home to see how they have grown!
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| Radish – growing so fast! |
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| Baby bok choi |
Last Friday I picked my FIRST harvest!! It was SO exciting!
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| My first harvest!! |
It was so much more than I thought!
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| We were able to pick enough greens to make 7 salads! |
The crazy thing is that 48 hours later, I had enough to pick for another 3 salads – I’m really loving this =)
I Heart Faces – Weekly Photo Challenge – WIND
Check out some other great entries!
What’s wrong with wild grass anyways?
I’ll write more on this later (after I do some research), but lately I am asking myself: what is wrong with wild grass? It has such pretty flowers! Why do we need to spray our lawn with weed killers? Why do we need to fertilize it?
These questions may all have perfectly good and sensible answers…and are probably common sense…but I often lack that valuable quality. At the moment my uneducated thoughts are: “why spray chemicals on my lawn just so that it will look homogenous? i like flowers, no matter what kind, and don’t really care if I have multiple different types of grass on my lawn – why be picky? Isn’t a weed just a grass or a flower by another name?”
as an example, this is a picture of some of the beautiful flowers now growing on my “wild” lawn. I love them!
Playful rice
The other day I made colored rice for R to play with in her play kitchen. Her teachers at school said she LOVES table games, and particularly loves their sandbox and table. So, I figured I would make this for her. It actually started off with making art with colored water at school. We tried it a home, and when we had left over water, I decided to through some rice in.
I later read that you should put vinegar in the water to slow its decay, but I of course didn’t do that. I just used water. This worked, but I did re-wash the rice in vinegar because it was starting to smell
Basically, you just make your colored water using regular old food coloring (or whatever you like) +/- vinegar.
Let them soak for some time, then rinse them and spread them out to dry. You can use old newspapers or worse comes to worse, paper towels like I did.) 
And that’s it! You are read to go with all your different colored rice!
Hope you have fun!
a GREAT kids book
L recently bought a book for R, which she LOVES! … and we do too!
Thought I would share:
There are many books out there that we like and enjoy…but from the first time we read this one, we have LOVED it! And within a couple readings, R has been trying to recite the words herself!
Cool weather garden plan
I didn’t get to finish this and put it up with my post the other day – so here is the final diagram of what I did with my cool weather bed.
This second picture is basically for the 4 planers I bought for herbs to keep near the kitchen.
Can’t wait!
The Cool weather bed is complete!
The bed is complete! The cool weather bed that is. I actually finished this earlier this week, but didn’t have a chance to write about it. I worked really hard to get this done by tomorrow since I will be working for the next two weeks with a highly unreliable schedule.
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| The final bed |
I ended up making a few more changes to my plan based on what I found at the Primex Garden center. The three changes I made are:
1) I took the sage and thyme out of the bed, and put them in a separate planter (see below). I did this mainly because I wanted to have my herbs near the kitchen so I could get to them quickly.
2) I planted radish seeds in the 2 square feet mentioned above
3) I planted bok cauliflower transplants, bok choi seeds and sweet pea seeds in the remaining 9 square feet (peas =2, bok choi 2, 6 cauliflower transplants in 5 sq ft)
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| Newly planted peas (top left seeds), bok choi (bottom right seeds) and cauliflower (lower left transplants) |
This was the first time I have ever planted seeds like this. I’m a little concerned that I may have put too much soil over the seeds. I’m not sure how you are supposed to adequately measure 1/4 or 1/2 inch of soil over a seed! At the end of planting everything when I did the peas, I realized I could just push the seed down the desired depth. Well…too little too late. For the others I removed soil, sprinkled the seeds (I couldn’t get myself to limit to a grid) and then covered them up with soil. I distinctly remember thinking “hmmm..this looks like the same amount of soil for the 1/4 inch depth and the 1.2 inch depth seeds). Hopefully I didn’t complete,y kill my chances of having vegetables grow!
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| Sage & Thyme removed, and radish seeds planted instead |
I bought several planters like these below to put on the deck outside the kitchen. I drilled new holes into them for better drainage – because they come with only one hole (go figure =) Drilling was easy – made myself proud!
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| I drilled extra drain holes into the planters before starting. |
Then I planted most of the herbs together as you see below
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| Thyme, sage, rosemary & garlic chives |
With a separate pot for the more aggressive species
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| The “hard to control herbs:” mint & oregano |
And yet another pot for more cilantro seeds.
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| Newly planted cilantro – I have one more empty planter to do another crop of this (can’t get enough cilantro!) |
Looking forward to the “fruits” or vegetables of my garden soon!
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| In their final resting place |
My new “baby”
I got a new lens this week: the Lensbaby Composer + the Sweet 35 optic to go with it. This is my first lensbaby – I felt like I wanted something fun to play with – particularly when it comes to depth of field. But I didn’t want to get into the complicated and expensive tilt shift lenses right now.
I had a little bit of time to experiment yesterday, and here are some of the results. It is definitely different shooting totally manually – both exposure and focus! Good practice!
ClayArtists.org Blog 