Crickets. . . What's good for the garden isn't so good for the blog!

Yeah, there's been a whole lot of NOTHING happening on this blog.  That is because there has been a whole lot of everything else happening in real life, so I thought I'd show you all a little of what took up some pretty major chunks of my time over the summer.

 This was our garden plot just after our final bit of planting.  We garden at a community garden, which I LOVE.

 A few weeks later. . .

  More water, more sunshine. . .

 And some of this in the mean time. . .

 And this is what our garden looked like just prior to harvest.

 For those of you who like to know what plants you're looking at.  The pictures above are all taken from the top right corner of this chart.

 We also grew onions in a raised bed on our parking strip, blueberries and herbs in our back yard, peas behind our shed, and lettuce in the flower beds at our house -  because we're crazy like that.

 All that time, effort, and water led to a lot of beautiful things like this. . .

 

and this. . . 

 and a lot of that lead to this. . .

 which lead to a lot of this. . .

 and some of this.

 Other parts of it lead to time spent making this. . .

 and huge messes in the kitchen. . .

 Which eventually lead to beautiful things like this. . .

and one of my favorite photos of the entire year!

It is a TON of work to grow your own food and then process and preserve it, but I am always so happy I've done it when it's all over - and of course eating delicious fresh veggies all summer long is a pretty good perk too!

I'm still working on getting all our veggies properly stored for the winter, along with prepping winter beds and planting winter crops.  Hopefully I'll be back soon with some of the furniture pieces I've finished recently, as well as other things that kept us busy over the summer. 
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This year I stuck to the basics, as it turns out my family doesn't really love fancy chutneys and jams - maybe when the boys are older.  Do you can?  What's your favorite food to preserve? 

Fairy Garden

John Henry recently became enamored with fairies.  I had seen some very cute fairy gardens and I asked him if he wanted to make one.  He was all for it!  We set out to do it without buying anything.

There was an old wooden planter in our yard that I had never planted anything in.  Every year this flower (I don't know what it is, anyone want to help me out?) grows on the edge of it, and that's it.  It was practically begging to be made into a fairy garden!

We also had a cedar bird house that had all ready lost its bird perch- it's as if the fairies were wandering around our yard leaving us hints!

We perched the house up high with a tiny terracotta planter, and then made a ladder from twigs and bailing wire from the garden up to the house.  John Henry put some nice soft straw in the house for the fairies to make their beds with!

I had some scrap Sunbrella fabric that we made a bunting and a flag out of it.  Sewing something that small is no easy task, it turned out a little rough, but then fairies like little things a little shabby chic, right?

John Henry painted all the rocks and and insisted that we make a sign to let them know that this was a place for them!

We used an old canning ring to make a sand box.  We had some colored floral sand and John Henry chose to fill it with pink, red, and yellow sand.

We made them a pond out of the lid of a cocoa tin.  It's John Henry's job to make sure it gets clean water every day.  We made the beach with crushed oyster shell.

We dug some creeping thyme up from another part of our yard, added some chicks and hens (John Henry's favorite plants.)  Some pine cones and a few other little decorations finished it out.  

John Henry and I are both enchanted!

Have you created a fairy garden?  Share the link in the comments!

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CSI Project's Kids' Summer Craft Week.   
Not Just a House Wife

Ladybug Release

OK, so between gardening, soccer, volunteering at my son's school and life, there hasn't been a lot of time for much furniture work.  I NEED to get this dresser out of my living room, though, so it's gotta happen SOON!

In the mean time, we have a big aphid problem on our roses, so today at the nursery we picked up the solution! 

Method to My Madness

If anyone were to see my craft/sewing room, they would be in a state of shock at the mess.  However, it's times like this, when I can 'throw together' a very special gift for a very special niece, that I'm grateful that I don't throw things away.  Dodged you this time, craft store.

Boston Love

In light of the rough week we've had in the US, a hard question. What do you normally do for someone going through extreme grief or pain? I always feel so helpless. If there's an address, I knit one of these hearts and mail them off. There are some Boston victims that will be getting one of these, from me, this week. </3

Give Away - My Memories and Free Printables!

A few weeks ago I was contacted by a company called My Memories.  They offer a digital scrapbooking software and wanted to know if I was interested in hosting a give away for their product.

At first I though, "Um, we don't do digital scrapbooking here.  Why would I want to host a give away for that?" and dismissed it.  Then I thought about it a little more.

Printables are all the rage right now.  They are all over Pinterest and Etsy.  I've got three framed in my house right now.  They are instant, personalized art, right?  But not everyone has mad Photoshop skillz. (right, Phoebe? - that's right, I'm ratting you out.)

I wondered how well My Memories Suite would work for making printables, so I said (well typed,) "sure, I'll try it out."

YOU GUYS!  It's awesome!  It's super easy to use, it comes with a pretty good library of shapes, frames, images, and buttons.  In addition to everything that comes with the software, there is a whole ton of images, kits, and crafts that you can purchase to use within the software.  I felt like the prices were very reasonable, and there is a wide range of styles.

So, I made you all a couple of printable so you could see how great it is.  Everything I used came free with the software.

Feel free to click, download, and print.

Cute, right?  And those three took me about 15 minutes each to create.

In addition for those Silhouette users out there, you can save your files as SVGs so you can use them to cut vinyl  too! 

I also am loving some of their "craftables".

Like these cute cupcake wrappers and toppers.  (Phoebe now has even more resources at her disposal to go over the top with her birthday parties!)

and one more thing I like about My Memories before we get to the give away. . .

You can send your printable (or photos or whatever) to them to be printed, either on photo paper, or as a wall cling, or on an iphone case or on a deck or cards or . . .

I totally need that right?

OK - so My Memories has offered a copy of their My Memories Suite Software to one of my readers.  It works on both Macs and PCs (you know I'm a Mac girl, so I can vouch.) Here's how to enter:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

 
In addition to that, they have offered AHR readers a really great coupon.




Enter the code STMMMS28172 at checkout and receive $10 off the purchase price (regularly $39.97) and a $10 credit to the My Memories Store (that's where you can get extra shapes, backgrounds, etc.)  Nice, right?  (I'm totally going to use it myself!)

That's it!  I'll announce the winner after the give away closes on the 25th at midnight.

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disclosure:  I received a free copy of My Memories Suite to try and review.  I also receive a commission on any copies of the software that are purchased using the above coupon code.  My opinions are 100% mine.   You know I'd never lead you all astray.  That wouldn't be cool at all.

Egg Birthday

My now 4 year old loves to hang out in the kitchen.  Inevitably, if there are eggs in view, he will pick one up, stare at it and daydream of throwing it at something.  He usually asks 'Mom, can I break this?  Can I throw this at something?'  I take a deep breath and gently take the egg out of his hands before he decides to answer his own question.

In response to his longing for egging someone/thing, we threw him an Egg Birthday Party. It involved breaking/smashing over 100 eggs.  We had a firing squad line-up of a select few egg producers.  An owl, a chick, a rooster (ok, this one just hatched from an egg), a penguin, and a hen.  There was also an alligator, but apparently that one needed saving for his bedroom decor.

We also had cascarones (confetti eggs).  The child guests were floored and delighted over the activities.

The buffet table included marshmallow eggs, chocolate eggs, deviled eggs, malted eggs and egg shaped sugar cookies. The cake donned a ninja, because that has everything to do with eggs, right?
We ended the party with a parrot pinata!

Happy Birthday to my E-walker!