Friday, July 28, 2017

County Fair

We survived another county fair. This year we were treated to temps as high as 107!! Thankfully, with our daughter fully driving on her own now, I didn't have to spend much time in that nasty weather, but one or the other of us was up at the fair every day of it this year. I do have to say that we are very spoiled in comparison to many during county fair time. Since we live in the county that hosts our state's fair, we get to use their facilities for our county fair:) The main building we use for everything other than animals is air conditioned and rather large. We host as many activities in there as possible. However, our county fair is mainly just 4-Her's and the general public rarely gets involved. Since our county hosts the state fair, they don't put money into the county fair, that all comes from 4-H and donations. So there are no rides, concerts (unless you count karaoke night!!), fair food vendors or any of the things you may associate with a fair.

That's okay though, it really stays focused on the kids' work throughout the year. This year our daughter took in foods, arts and crafts, photos and did a speech for the first time at the fair. She also helped her friend during the horse show since her friend took 2 horses and needed someone to hold one and to help with tack. That was the 107 degree day and I was VERY happy that I didn't need to be there:)

Our daughter's main focus each year is art and photography. This year she got a purple for...
Spray Paint Art. At our last State Fair she found a guy doing spray paint art and bought a picture from him. His was way more detailed, but she wanted to see what she could do as well. This one was maybe her 6th or 7th try with it. She'll take this one to state fair in the open class art category.
And a black and white photo. She's been wanting to play with black and white for a while now. This photo was a last min idea she had based off an art picture she saw online. I love the 'LOVE' with the laces:) She will take this to state fair in the 4-H division.

She is 18 this year, and most 4-Her's stop once they graduate high school but she won't age out until next year, so she can join for one more year if she likes. I think she's decided that if her friend does, she will too. So we may have one more year of county fair before us, we will see:)

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Craft On - It's Finally Finished!!!

Linking with Nicole at Frontier Dreams and her Crafting On blog hop.

It has been a dark and stormy morning folks, and I wished that meant that we were actually getting some of the rain that is surrounding us, or that it was going to cool off some, but no. It only means that it is a really crappy day for taking pictures!! :) So these aren't going to be real great, but I didn't want to wait any longer to post my latest knitty finish...
Tried the first photo in the camper since it has lots of windows.
This is Tidal Sands Cowl by Anne Hanson. I knit it in Knit Picks's Stroll Tweed (65% Merino, 25% Nylon, 10% Donegal Tweed) in the Oyster Heather colorway. This yarn was so nice to knit with. It is super soft and I'm really loving the tweed aspect of it:)
Showing off the texture
The only real problem I had with this is that my cast on edge is a lot looser than my bind off edge. No one will notice that when I'm wearing it, but it's something that I want to work on in the future.
I really hate selfies, and I'm not real good at figuring out how to wear scarves and such, but since it was a 'cool' 85 degrees out (and that was at 9:00 am, we are heading for 102 today :-0 !!) I thought I'd try it on.

Now I'm off to scramble through my stash. I was thinking of working on my socks, but now I'm thinking I need to start a new project. We will see what I come up with!!

Monday, July 24, 2017

FNSI - Running Behind

Linking up with at Sunshine Quilting and her Friday Night Sew In party.

And yes, It's Monday now, but I did sew on Friday this time:) I just haven't had a chance to sit down at the computer since then to blog about it. It's county fair week for us, and this year our daughter needed to be at the fairgrounds every day. She didn't even enter that many things, and she doesn't do any animals (except for helping her friend with the horse show), it just worked out that way this year. More about the fair later this week..

As for my sewing, I worked on a market bag (from the book - Sewing to Sell by Virginia Lindsay) that I started last month, but made a mistake on it and didn't get it fixed until now...
The mistake was that those flowers should be facing up. I cut the fabric as directed, but it was printed in such a way that the flowers would have been sideways on the bag once finished. The pattern calls for you to measure a rectangle of fabric, fold it several times and then all you need to cut out is the handles. That means less sewing, but I don't think they meant for you to use a direction-ally printed fabric. So I needed to cut it out a different way, which required sewing along the bottom seam instead of having a fold there, but after that it worked just fine.
The lighting in my kitchen is bad, so the coloring is a bit off, but can you see the heart shaped mess in the pattern directions? Yeah, this one stretched my sewing abilities a bit, but ended up not being so bad. I had one point that I didn't quite understand what they were talking about, but once I figured that out, it was pretty easy.
And I love how it turned out. I didn't quite get the bottom of the bag in the picture, but it has a flat bottom that should work really well for a farmer's market bag!! I'm super excited to use it this weekend:)

Thursday, July 20, 2017

Officially Summer

Late last week I was sleeping in a bit and I still had a few min to stay in bed when a noise woke me. It was muffled as we have a window a/c unit in our bedroom, but it came again and again. At first I thought the wind must have picked up and we were getting gusts, but that didn't seem right after a few min, so I got up. I heard it a bit more clearly once I wasn't in my room and knew instantly what was going on...
This little guy got out of his pasture:) Actually it was him and a full grown bull, but the older bull got scared as soon as he saw me and ran around the other side of the pasture. This guy was really spooked too and his momma was all kinds of upset, so I decided to wake my daughter up and call the farmer that owns this little guy.
We thought we might be able to get the little one in before the farmer came, but his momma was following him close on the other side of the fencing and as they got closer to the open gate, we decided to wait fearing the momma would get out instead. We really didn't need more cows out and about.
Momma was staying close
We did help Mr. Yoder get the young one in and then he called a couple of his farm hands out to help with the older bull and to fix the fence (the breach was on the other side of his pasture - not sure how they found their way to our yard:).
Baby back with momma, he was hungry!! 
Mr. Yoder apologized, but I'm not sure a summer has gone by without us needing to get a hold of some farmer in the area letting them know about escaped cows, so I just told him it wouldn't be summer without cows in our yard!! :) Just part of living in the country.

Sunday, July 16, 2017

Weekend Stitching

I have been using some of these super hot days (100+ degrees out there!!!), to do a little stitching. First of all I finished stitching 'Summer' Wordplay from Brenda Gervias - With Thy Needle and Thread...
No, I didn't leave myself a whole lot of extra room on the fabric, I only have so much of this fabric left and I want to use it on the Autumn and Winter designs too. Not to worry though as I'm not framing these, they will be sewn into a flat fold with tabs so it can be hung on a wall. Like THIS ONE (last project on that blog post) and this will also be for my mother-in-law. Technically this is the 'August' Wordplay chart, but my mother-in-law wanted them seasonal rather than monthly so I made a minor change.

I've also been working on Tis the Season Sewing bag by Blackbird Designs....
This was a Ladies Prim Society chart from last year. It doesn't show in the chart picture above, but the border continues onto the back side of the bag with an alphabet and 'Merry Christmas, Happy New Year' written sideways. I'm thinking of making a bigger bag, having the words on the front as well, and probably changing the wording as I don't want this to be just a Christmas bag. The design looks a bit seasonal, but I don't think it screams 'CHRISTMAS', so I'm pretty sure I can make that work.

I also pulled out Spring Snapperland as it is so close to being done and I had wanted to finish is this past spring, but I still haven't put another stitch in it. I may have to force myself to work on it a bit. The only 'Snapperland' chart I've every finished is the Autumn one, and I love it. I would really like to get all of them done and framed soon!!

Well, I'm off to knit. I'm thinking there may be a knitted finish in my near future and I'm eager to see what it will look like off the needles!!

Hope you are having a very crafty weekend!!

Friday, July 14, 2017

Gracie

We met Gracie in the fall of 2001 when she came to be a part of our family. Our daughter was 2 1/2 years old and didn't have any siblings so we thought she would be a great addition to our family.
Our daughter at around 4 (Gracie would have been around 2)
She was bred to be a service dog and most of her siblings did get chosen to be just that, but Gracie had just a bit too much energy and loved to jump up on people. Otherwise though,
she was a really good and smart dog. She learned fast and was super protective of her human child.
This was taken a few weeks ago
She also got along with just about every other animal she had ever met. We added a puppy when she was around 4 and she became his 'momma'. She would even get curious with the cows and goats that we've had and bump noses with them. The cat in the above photo followed her around everywhere.

This was her last day, daughter wanted as many photos as possible
We thought we were going to have to put her down in December, but the vet did some acupuncture and chiropractic adjustments along with some pain meds that she stayed on until her last day, and that gave us several more months with us. It even allowed her to see her through her 16th birthday in March:)  

She went quietly and very quickly and we are very thankful for that. She just needed a little nudge to fall into her forever sleep.

And while my family is already trying to talk me into a new puppy (I'm not quite ready yet), our other dog, who usually only occasionally comes in to eat and rest if it's really windy outside, has been making himself at home inside a little more and a little more...
Spades was dumped out here and found us 2 1/2 years ago
He'll never completely be an indoor dog, but I'm secretly hoping he'll become enough of one to satisfy the family:) He doesn't need trained and is already a part of the family. Although some of the puppy pictures my hubby keeps showing me makes getting a puppy seem a bit tempting. We will see how I'm feeling about it in a few more weeks/months. I'll make sure to post pictures if we do get a new family member:) 

Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Craft On - Something Different

Linking with Nicole @ Frontier Dreams and Crafting On:)

We had such a nice family week last week with my hubby home. We mostly drove around truck shopping (not fun, but necessary), but we also went to a really nice fireworks display, used our new outdoor projector - that was a lot of fun, and the cows in the pasture behind us joined in too, and our daughter and I played lots of games.

But what I didn't do much of is knit. I worked on my Tidal Sands Cowl a little here and there, and I stitched a tiny bit, but that's about all...until yesterday. My sister-in-law (Marianne) sent me a link to a free crochet pattern to make kitchen scrubbies. They are meant to replace those sponges with one side sponge and one side that is scratchy. I only use those sponges occasionally, most often opting for dish cloths that I can wash and change out daily. But these are cute, looked easy to make and are washable, so I thought I'd give them a try....
Scrubby Side
Soft Side
And they were easy, though I made a couple small changes as I went. On the first one I used 'I Love Cotton' yarn with Yarn Bee 'Scrub-ology'. The pattern calls for Sugar and Cream cotton (which is coarser then what I used) and Red Heart Scrubby yarn (it was only available in 'sparkle' which I didn't like - but was scratchier than what I bought). The instructions said to make a rectangle 3 times as long as the 'sponge' was to be with the last 1/3 being a combination of the cotton and scrubby yarn. I started doing that, but I didn't feel like the scrubby section was rough enough, so I switched to just the scrubby yarn and did single crochet to make it tighter. That worked pretty good, though I think the 'I Love Cotton' yarn is too soft to wash dishes with (but it makes really nice bath wash clothes!!). So I made another one using the called for cotton which isn't scratchy, but it isn't as soft either, and I did the same thing with the scrubby yarn and I think it turned out perfect. I haven't used them yet, but I have a sink full of dishes to try them out on in a bit:) I'll let you know how it goes.

In all I probably spent close to 3 hours total making both of them and tweaking a bit here and there, and I'm pretty slow at these things. It was a really quick and easy project to make even if I don't end up liking them as well as wash cloths:)

Not I'm off to see what everyone else has been up to.