The Crafty Crow is another new bloglines resident of mine. ‘Cause you know I was REALLY in need of more blogs to follow lol! I really enjoy the inspiration though even if some ideas get tucked away for a good while. They are there : ) And inspiration is overflowing here. What I love is that many of these ideas require very little planning. Take the pine cone owl. If you have pines in your yard this is as fast as a stroll out back and some glue. Great notebook page.

Or the colorful kitchen work. Most of us have milk, food coloring and dish soap on hand.

How about reducing your child’s art to make a lotto style game?

I could go on but you can probably read it all for yourself, can’t you? I will contain myself and let you go. Enjoy!

I have some projects wrapped up finally that I want to share but don’t have a camera today. What I do have is a toddler who is under the weather. I thought you might enjoy some fall inspiration from my new Bloglines residents in the meantime while we rock and whimper.

A Soft Place to Land has given me topiary envy.

Restyled Home. Oh my. Eye candy galore plus this reminder:

“Don’t take on so much…that you can’t enjoy life”

Wisdom amidst the beauty. My favorite.

It just gets better at Raised In Cotton. LOVE the tea candles in the zinc tub. More to follow on the container theme.

How about The Shabby Nest where they say:

“Ideas are like germs, they float around in the air, and all you gotta do is catch ’em.”

Amen to that. Try to catch a few to use around the house this weekend. : ) Maybe these clipboards for back to school.

I love this quote:

If we would have a true home, we must guard well our thoughts and actions. A single bitter word may disquiet the home for a whole day; but, like unexpected flowers which spring up along our path full of freshness, fragrance and beauty, so do kind words, gentle acts and sweet disposition make glad the home where peace and blessing dwell. No matter how humble the abode, if it be thus garnished with grace and sweetened by kindness and smiles, the heart will turn lovingly towards it from all the tumults of the world, and home, “be it ever so humble” will be the dearest spot under the sun.
~ Circa 1882.

Found it on The Homemaker’s Mentor where they dispense old time homemaking wisdom to members. You can check a sample lesson here.

Ok who is guilty? Find out here at Blissfully Domestic. Are your pictures up too high? Pillow or pattern overload? color phobic?

Bermuda Triangle?

Murphy’s Law?

Tell you what, it’s something. We could call this the summer of The Great Appliance Meltdown. Let’s see. I told you about the stove. The dishwasher. The microwave came before those. The van has been jumped on multiple occasions. Well this weekend the water heater started sputtering as we were leaving for church. After investigating, Allen discovered the propane tank was empty. That was sort of good bad news because it meant it wasn’t the boiler but the gas that was faulty. Somehow we fell through a crack in the summer delivery route and ran dry. That meant however that we are down to the “extra” (read ratty) fridge and cold water at the moment. Let me just say washing dishes by hand was more delightful with hot water. So were showers.

We are working hard to maintain our sense of humor. Some days we are more successful than others. I have one other motto which is that this is not a bad way to suffer. You have to be careful who you share mottoes like those with however or you run out of people to whine to. They tend to do things like repeat your mottoes back to you. Darn. Truly though as Christians we know we are to take up a cross. In the whole big picture these are itty bitty crosses compared to chemotherapy, car accidents, nuclear war, or POW camp. Granted they are itty bitty like an angry hornet at times – small but packing a punch.

So, it is that. Wish me well and I will be back to you soon if I promised a response or answer to a question. Aside from the aforementioned little disasters we had cabinets for Allen to repair and are refinishing a desk. Oh and that trim. While I may wish for summer to linger longer, time waits for no man so we toil while the sun shines here and hope for the best.

A picture thought for Monday – Alannah by the ocean, with no appliances in sight….

You probably figured out I get caught up on one or two blogs a day. Yesterday it was High Desert Home. I found myself nodding in agreement over and over.

From Simple Beauty at Home:

A home, no matter how simple, should be warm and inviting. There should be life and energy, laughter and fun, creativity and joy there. While there should be that peace that comes from order, it is dispiriting to think we need to maintain perfect order. My aim is to live simply enough that disorder or caring for too many things won’t tyrannize my peace of mind or pleasant rhythms or steal the hours away from my relationships

In streamlining one’s life and possessions, beauty and style are not being rejected. Rather, the “beauty of the few,” as Anne Morrow Lindbergh described it, is being embraced.

On work:

Work is good for me. It is good for my home. It is good for my family. And it does bring peace and rest and lightness of heart.

On routines:

A simple, but disciplined, daily routine is a nice scaffolding for keeping all of the work and activity of my days relaxed, pleasant, and orderly-enough. And since I tend toward overstimulation, distraction, and maybe even a bit of laziness, this is important for me. When I stray too far from my routines (these are not strict schedules), I increasingly seem to flounder in the areas that matter most– personal spirituality and life in community.

One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are few. – Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I just caught up on the Allsorts blog and was immediately taken with the Dollipops dolls. SO cute! I am not enjoying an abundance of free time so I have been filing ideas more than following up. Still, these are promising. There is a basic doll tutorial here but they are not the exact same dolls. Dollipops and others like them have an extra wood bead for the head which to me makes them ever so much nicer. The little dolls in the pouch here would make very nice tiny toys however.

these are from Sweet Imaginations

Felt Food has been a bit of an obsession of mine of late. I ran across some on a blog and then began the hunt. In the interest of having a frugal, handmade Christmas we are trying to find some crafty gifts that would actually be used. I think we hit the jackpot here! It seems to me that if you looked carefully at the images you could reproduce many of these (at least the 2D ones) minus a pattern. I will let you know if this is not the case. The girls and I are going to give this a whirl. Felt is cheap and forgiving. It doesn’t unravel so no seams are necessary.

Flickr Felt food group

felt eggs and oranges tutorial

a smorgasbord!

etsy felt food

a google search will turn up tons

Sold on the promise of instant clean and freshness I followed the advice of a certain gypsy woman and painted the kitchen trim, pantry door, and baseboards this week. WOW! she was right. Gave the whole room a boost. I think the proper way to do this is to scour the baseboards thoroughly first. We wiped them down but basically employed a technique I like to call “apply paint generously” instead.

The only downside is that the rest of the house trim looks needy now. We plan to just work around the downstairs this coming week. The taping was the putziest part of the whole job. It was very gratifying when finished! I could show you, except that I erased the iphoto application. Seriously. So much for “you can’t break a Mac”. They haven’t met me yet! I am special that way. Turns out our Time Machine application needed to have an outside drive or some such thing so we couldn’t set the cpu backwards a few days to recover it. Who knew. ‘Outside drive’ is what I do when I get in the car. You need to be WAY more specific when giving me technological instructions.

So anyway, we get to be the rare Mac owners to reformat apparently. Not this week though. This week we paint and dh has a full schedule. It will happen eventually. Meantime we press on. I do encourage you to consider your trim though if it is as banged up as mine was. That was a relatively easy fix that made a world of difference.

This is my husband’s idea of a good time. ; ) Actually he is preparing for the Pike’s Peak Marathon which basically entails running straight up the side of the mountain for 13 miles. To do this without dropping dead he is making this climb once a week. This picture is 5miles up. Straight up.

I have had my own vertical challenges this week. Indoors however. When was the last time you looked your ceiling fan eye to eye? Brace yourself if it has been a while. Ewwwwww is all I can say for the one in my kitchen. I took the globes off and soaked them. Huge improvement. (and they thought we had frosted glass….) I even took a picture in the same spirit with which they plunged the flag in the moon. Because hey, when you do something monumental like run 5 miles up a mountain or attempt a lunar walk or clean your ceiling fan – while it still attached to your ceiling – you want someone to KNOW lol!