garage sale finds

These are my Friday finds:  
This comfy blue dress was $3.  The seller was also a teacher and we chatted a bit.  I was shopping with a teacher friend.  We all agreed on the need for comfy clothes.

I found a unopened hello kitty floor puzzle and a polar bear ABC game for $2 each.  Lou loves loves loves the polar bear game.  He's been playing it all day.  Bee was disappointed by the floor puzzle.  I think she was having one of those days though where everything would have disappointed her.  We had had a long night the night before staying out at a week night birthday party until after 8 pm.  It was well after 9 by the time she went to bed.  I thought it would be no big deal to do it once, but we have paid for it all day long!

I grabbed the mitten clips to make nursing covers and the first meals book was one I wanted when Bee was a baby, but never ended up getting it.  I grabbed it for a friend for $1.  I thumbed through it later and couldn't believe they suggested starting these first meals at 4 months.  I think the current trend is later right now.  I think that's one that goes back and forth though.

Also, not pictured are two bags of balls.  They are those balls in a ball play pit.  I am certain I can find something to do with those! 

Mary Mary quite contrary

Here's how my garden grows.

We lost a lot of time and work and seeds and plants with all the rain in April.  ALL.THAT. RAIN.  The roads to school were closed the roads to the nature center were closed, we missed a few days of work and school.  It was a mess.  I have a part of the garden that is still unusable.  That area  was flooded the longest and was covered in a green slime runoff from the street above the hill.  Over mother's day weekend, I replanted much with starts and will try seeds again next year.  Perhaps.  The green slime area will wait until it time to plant the pumpkins I guess.  Hopefully it will be better by then.  

Here is the goodness I do have going.   A few pepper plants, given to me by a friend who had them safely tucked away in her greenhouse during the rain mess.  Poor friend lost the roof of her house!  The greenhouse was unharmed though. 

Spinach.  Bee and Lou are eating it as quickly as the pesky rabbits.

Two rows of lettuce.  Two more rows waiting to sprout.

A few pea plants survived, they were planted early and either didn't survive the rain or were nibbled away.  We probably have 30 plants left, but intended to have 200!

The berries are coming!  Strawberries are anyway. 

The raspberries will be later in the summer, I think.  This is our first year to have them (new house) so we'll be surprised.  The blueberries I transplanted from the old house have survived, but are not fruiting this year.

Cucumber, squash, zucchini, I don't know, they all look alike. We have a few of each.

Eggplant. I'm the only one who loves this, so we don't have many.  Ok, only one and some little bug has already found it's tender leaves.

Tomatoes, a few varieties, mostly heirloom. I had picked out neat varieties and ordered seeds, but that didn't end up going so well for me.  Next year, I'll not worry about seeds and buy only starts.

Watermelon, cucumber, don't know which this is.  They all look the same.

Sweet potatoes. The bunnies seem to really love them.  Not sure that they are going to make it.  They aren't looking this great now.  It's hard because I can't see what's going on underground!

Watermelon, cantaloupe, it's whatever the other picture wasn't.    My detailed garden notebook had been tossed out the window at this point.

The two remaining tomatoes that I did start from seed.  Tiny guys, not going to do much...  I need to thin them out, but it breaks by heart to pull them.  I could probably get over it.

I bought extra tall cages this year.  These guys have a lot of growing to do!  I thought it would give them lofty goals. Think big, grow tall. 

shop local

I don't know much about the group that organizes this, but I like the idea.  I did research it just a tad, and think it probably OK for me to endorse. {You know how sometimes there is a decent idea but then the group that created it is not really one you'd like to endorse.... I don't think that's the case here}

So, the numbers are based on a month, but I did it in a week.  I don't know if all weeks will be like that. Here are the local shops I spent my time and money with this week:

Our local CSA farm family- it was time to sign up for another year, which means they've been in the CSA business exactly 1 year.

The local butcher shop (our meat CSA does not have hotdogs or deli meat) which has been family owned since 1983

This independentaly owned ink refill shop near us

Food co-op downtown- not sure if this counts, it's community member owned, so I guess it works 

A local sewing shop-  it's been in town and family owned since 1956- my machine is in for repairs!

What local shops can you support this week or month?

out to lunch dress- pattern testing

Jessica at Happy Together is giving away three copies of her new pattern, the Out to Lunch Dress. I got to test it out for you!  I loved it.  It's another great pattern from Jessica.  Her patterns are easy enough for a newer sewist, but have such possibilty for enhancement and adding your own touch making them anything but basic.  My favorite thing probably is that she gives you a number of options within her patterns.  

Here is an example.  Here is the Out to Lunch dress with a gathered skirt:

Here it is with a circle skirt.

Two great skirt options.

This dress of Bee's was made as her Easter dress.  The skirt is repourpsed curtain/bed skirt material and the top is what I made Lou's Easter pants out of.  I added some buttons to make it a touch nautical since Lou's shirt had an anchor embroidered on. 

Some of the other testers added other details.  Go over the Happy Together to see them (after you finish looking at the pictures here of pretty gal).

And my cute guy,who had to make an appearance.

Bee picked out the fabric for the second dress.  She flipped when she was mermaids for little girls.  Last season we found a mermaid fabric but it was a little grown up. 

 

She can't wear tank tops of sleeveless tops to school, so I had to make sure that a shirt underneath would work out. 

Goodness, when did she get an attitude?  She's standing in front of our strawberries and raspberries, not a berry in sight  (although this past weekend, we did have our first 'harvest.'

She also can't wear these flip flops to school, but any chance out of school and they are on her feet.

For your chance to win a copy of this pattern, head on over to Happy Together. She also has them for sale in her etsy shop.

You're invited

Lou's having a camp out birthday party.  You can come via From The Hive. A virtual camp out is probably way better than an actual one with 15 little boys and a yard full of mosquitoes. 

For the envelopes, I used the tops of medium sized paper bags.  Randomly, I had saved these tops of bags that I cut off to make something for preschool.  I'm not sure what I thought I would do with them, but I did find something. I sewed around the edges. The names of the friends on the front are supposed to look like wood.  They sort of do.  It always hard to choose who to invite, what groups, what kids.  I had him pick just a few boys from class and a few we play with, a few from his Sunday school class, one friend of Bee's, etc.  Summer birthdays let you do that, at least when they are 4 and won't remember to talk about it at school in the fall.

Anyway, I knew I wanted the invites to be tents that opened with the info inside.  To make my pattern, I drew out the front and then cut the other pieces i needed.  There was a lot of taping and cutting and re-taping.  When I got an appropriate pattern, I just traced it a bunch of times on construction paper.  I needed the invites to cost $0 since I have two other areas I knew where going to eat more of the party budget.  Everything for the invites I had on hand.  We will be hand delivering the invitations. 

I printed the inside info out on my computer.  I just made a triangle in Word and filled in the shape with a text box.   I found a free text online called 'wreckage' for the words "Camp Luke,"  and I'll be using it for some other things for the party. 

I've been scouring the web for ideas for the party.  There are some really neat ideas out there.  Here are a few I'm using as inspiration:

Boy's camp out party

Real Birthday parties

camp out party

rummaging

This weekend the kids and I went rummaging.  Hubby tried to get a turkey, so he missed out.  

Here are Bee's purchases.  She spent her $1.00 all in one spot.  50 cents for a doll that I'll throw in the next garage sale and 50 cents for a pretty cool bracelet kit.   She earned her money by doing chores.  I limit her spending to $1.00 though no matter how much she earned that week  (unless it's something cool!).  We've decided that Saturday chore payday works better than Sunday.

Lou spent only 50 cents.  He bought a tiger in a build-a-bear outfit. I won't usually buy stuffed animals at garage sales, but he really wanted the outfit for his bear.

I bought this battleship game for the kids.  It was marked at $2, but we only paid $1.  I had the kids walk up with the game and ask for a lower price.  No one can turn down two sweeties offering to pay with their own hard earned money.  The kids are pretending the games are their laptops.

Here are my purchases.  $1.75, big spender.  I bought a few yards of this loud flowered fabric.  I'm thinking pencil skirt.  The baggie of the wooden Easter pieces will be for a game for school.  I have plans for the bag of spoons.  I've been looking for a bag of spoons.  At this garage sale there were three gallon zip lock bags of spoons. 

I came right home and messed around with a few spoons.  This is what I'm working on:  plant markers.  Turns out it's trickier than I thought.

It's hard to get the letters deep enough to show up well.  I messed around with several and each spoon has been different.  I'll keep working on it.

Batman hat- finally done

The second lost post was about this batman hat. I finished up Lou's batman hat.  It's knitted in a long rectangle, folded in half and then blanket stitched straight down the sides. Easy stuff. Knitting just takes me longer, so it was a drawn out project.  That explains why I finished this hat in late April.  I probably started it in February, maybe January!

The straight lined top on a curved head makes the bat ears by itself.

Lou really likes it. 

The only not so basic thing about this hat is that it has eye holes.  If you roll down the band, you can use them.  Lou prefers not to use them. They are just buttonholes stitched in .

Here's the kicker though.  I don't know where I saw the idea.  It's one of those things that I saw somewhere and I thought, "interesting, but not for me."  Then I couldn't stop thinking about it.  I tried to google it and look through my history, but it's no where to be found.  It had a funny name and I just can't remember.  If you've seen it somewhere, help me out.  If not, I'm sure I'll come across it someday and then I can update.   

something fishy

Something fishy is going on with blogger.com. I seem to have lost my last two posts, after having even publishing them. It's weird. I wasn't able to log in for two days due to some maintenance issue.

One of the lost posts was about these hats. I'm not retyping the post, it may resurface at some point. At least it wasn't a long one! Anyway, this pattern is from Aesthetic Nest.