I Like #273

 Welcome to another week of things to like! 

Lee Anna's prompt for this week is apples!  I grew up with lots of apple trees at my parents and they still have an orchard filled with fruit trees, many of which are apples.  I've talked to my mother several times this week and each time, she's been processing apples so the prompt is a timely one!

I have lots of fun apple-related memories, of making dried apples and apple sauce and apple butter and apple pie and apple crisp.  Peeling and coring and cutting out the worst of the worms, and the way your whole kitchen gets sticky when you're processing the fruit.  I really love having the (now remote) privilege of home grown fruit and hope my mom will set some aside for me. I think my favorite memory though might be when my mom sent me a care package during my first year of college and used apples as packing material inside the box!

The most exciting thing that happened this week is that my friend Brett and I went up to the Oklahoma Salt Plains to dig for hourglass selenite crystals.  It's part of a wildlife refuge and very soon lots of migrating birds will be coming including some pelicans!  The salt flats are really cool- the base layer is this brown iron-rich sandy mud, but there's this quick-forming thin layer of evaporative salt crystals that forms on top to make the undisturbed regions a bright white.  The selenite crystals are really cool, they seem to nucleate around sand, so most of the crystals have this wonderful hourglass structure.  They're very fragile but pretty easy to find and we had a really lovely time.

A few crafty updates this week too! Not so much things I did this week as things I realized I forgot to share that I discovered while cleaning out iphone pics this week. My neighbor Fernanda and her husband Paul recently had a little baby girl, so that of course meant a baby quilt.

And our choir director recently left our church and took a position at a new church so I made her a fun tote bag as a going away present.  I used some of my favorite star wars fabric and pulled out my embroidery machine to have some fun.

And we have started using three ring binders to corral our music at choir, so I made myself a delightful pencil case to keep in my binder.  It's so bright and colorful!

The pups had a good week too- they behaved themselves and got lots of snuggles.  It makes me giggle to see the way they sort of blend in to the sofa.

The dahlias are looking lovely, but unfortunately you can see some wretched disease has infected all the leaves.

I hope everyone is having a good week, and thanks to LeeAnna for keeping looking for the positive!

I Like #272

 Welcome to another week of things to like!

The weather has been nice this week, highs in the mid 80s and cooling off at night, so it's been more pleasant than usual here.  Of course for our friends in Florida and Puerto Rico it has been decidedly not nice at all; my friend Brett's parent's house in Fort Myers was severely damaged by hurricane Ian, but luckily they were not there.  I hope that people and their animals are safe.

 I read two good books this week, both by T. Kingfisher.  Previously I read and enjoyed her book The Hollow Places, this week I finished Swordheart (funny and delightful and adventury), and Nettle and Bone, both of which I really enjoyed. 

Lee Anna's prompt for this week was our favorite health and beauty product.  I don't really have any particular favorite health and beauty products, but I love my electric toothbrush.  I think my favorite thing is probably my gummy vitamins.  I know it sounds dumb, but I never did very well taking vitamins regularly until I found the gummy ones.  I just get the store brand but I love them.

The garden is doing well- it's very happy to have slightly cooler weather with warm days and cooler nights,  these are some dahlias and tomatoes I just got this morning

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I worked some on some quilts this weekend, but the most exciting crafty thing I did was finish my Black Flame Candle socks!  I have been working on these for what feels like ages and ages.  I think they turned out very well!

I'm also very excited because we've pulled out some of my favorite choral anthems to sing in our church choir.  This is a particular favorite of mine and we haven't sung it in many years.  Even so I was able to find the copy I had previously in the pile-  I can usually tell by the coffee stains and untidy notes inside.

And the pups are doing well.  Spooky is being a bit of a picky eater at the moment, but otherwise they're super snuggly!

I hope everyone is finding some good things in their week!  Click over to Lee Anna's for more things to like!

I Like #271

 Welcome to another week of things to like.

I liked the moving coverage of Queen Elizabeth's funeral and other services.  It was a somber occasion of course but the services and music were beautiful.  It was fun to recognize some music and hear some things that were new to me.

I like my pups.  They had a better week this week (knock on wood).

Spooky was helping me quilt again last night.

I like my garden of course!  I brought in two bunches of flowers this weekend, unfortunately they seemed to bring in a giant cloud of gnats I've been fighting all week.  No fun, but the flowers are still pretty.  It got hot here again this week (high 90s) so I'm back to daily watering in the garden.

I'm also very excited that one of my quilts sold this week, my piece Twining.  I've always loved this piece, dark from far away and colorful up close.  It's always great when something resonates with someone else so much!

Lee Anna's wonderful prompt for this week was to share a movie you watch over and over.  I love this one!  I have a few movies in my comfort pile that I watch over and over, but the one at the very top of the list has to be Clue.  It's absolutely hilarious.

I hope you're having a good week too!  Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

I Like #270

 Welcome to another week of things to like!

I love my flower garden.  It's not looking very pretty as a garden, but the weather has cooled just a tiny bit and some of the flowers are really starting to blossom nicely.

These orange/yellow/pink ones in particular are lovely.  I didn't really have any of them earlier in the season and there's a lot of variety in color even on the same plant!

I've still been struggling with the dogs this week, but they're doing ok and still as snuggly as ever.  Been going on more walks now that the temperatures are nicer.

I finished quilting my big quilt this weekend.  It's eleven feet long, and now I have to square it up and finish the edging so that I can get to the sculpting part.

Lee Anna's prompt for this week was to share other arts and crafts that we do!  I'm a sewer and quilter but I love all kinds of things, especially other fiber arts.  I especially love to knit, crochet, and do embroidery.  Someday I might take up spinning and weaving, but not any time soon! I also love to sing.  I'm not very good at it, but I love it and with practice (in my church choir), I've become a competent choral singer.  It gives me a lot of joy.

I hope you guys are finding some joy and creativity this week!  Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

I Like #269

Things to like this week!

Getting a chance to quilt some this week.  It's nice to make a little progress!  Right now my sewing machine is running well, I think it's really helping to have the rigged up clamp system to keep a lot of the weight off the table.

My dogs!  They've been a struggle this week, but I love them always.

My garden!  The plants aren't looking very healthy (the annual unavoidable leaf mold is back) but the flowers are still blooming.

I also really enjoyed this book I just finished called The Cartographers.  It's a nerdy, academic, slightly fantastic adventure.  Really fun.

LeeAnna's prompt for this week was favorite cloud formations, my favorite are the big white fluffy New Mexico clouds interspersed with the wispy think clouds.  But the most important part for me is the deep blue sky-  we don't have skies quite this blue in OK usually.

Click over to LeeAnna's for more things to like!

I Like #268

 Welcome to another week of things to like.  I got to spend this weekend with my sister and her husband and the kids which was fantastic.  I hadn't seen them in a while and was missing them.  It was miserably hot and humid in Dallas, but that's summer for you.

It was my nephew Alex's 9th birthday, and he wanted a Nerf themed party.  My sister and the family went to Sams to get tons of cardboard boxes to make forts out of for the Nerf capture the flag.  the kids had fun making and organizing the forts with lots of doors and flaps and windows.

Then my sister got small nerf guns and aprons for each kid so everyone would be on the same playing field (no massive nerf guns allowed), and we all decorated our aprons by dipping the nerf darts in paint and shooting them at the aprons!

She and Alex also made a nerf dart pinata.  Everyone had an absolute blast playing capture the flag and water balloons (it's August after all).  She really does the best backyard birthday parties ever.

We also saw wild (feral?) peacocks in the street-- apparently there's a population of them that just live loose in Flower Mound!  Don't worry, Becky was driving when I took the picture.

Other things to like this week include this lovely dahlia-  most of the dahlias are just limping along, but this bloom was pretty perfect.

The pups went with me to Dallas, and on the way back Blue decided he didn't want to stay in the way-back so he hopped over the seat.  He didn't try to crawl into my lab, just curled up on the backseat.  

I got to do a little sewing this week which was nice;  I added a casing around the brim of my outdoor hiking hat with a small piece of plastic tubing inside; the brim was really floppy and driving me bananas but I didn't want to buy a new hat because it otherwise fits very nicely.  Although TBH I can't imagine what prompted me to buy it in the most boring color possible.  

I also rigged up an impromptu system to hold up the weight of my quilt around my sewing machine.  It was just made up of things I had lying around and I expect there are improvements, but already it's helping a ton with the amount of thread breaks I'm having.  

LeeAnna's prompt this week was about what school supplies we looked forward to as a child and which ones we still love as an adult.  I for one just love school supplies in general.  Especially anything colored (highlighters/pens/markers) and fun notebooks.  I try to resist buying things unless I need them, but every year I let myself buy one new fun plastic folder.  I use these for my active courses at work, and reuse them semester after semester since they're pretty sturdy.  This year my new addition was the dinosaurs.

As a kid I loved school supplies too, although after fourth grade I don't remember specifically shopping for new ones (we were home schooled after that), although I'm sure we did.  What I really remember loving and coveting was a Trapper Keeper.  I was in elementary school in the Trapper Keeper heyday in the 80s (for anyone who doesn't know they were a sort of fancy binder), and I remember every year being sad that they weren't on the school supply list.  But then in about fourth grade my mom agreed to buy me one, and I was so excited.  I actually still have it in my studio.  It's in surprisingly good shape for being over 35 years old.  

What were your favorite school supplies?  Click on over to Lee Anna's for more things to like!