Nothing Much...

Nothing very exciting going on today-hubby is tearing up the floor in the bathroom he's redoing, and I've been trying to round up my sewing for the baby so that I can start dismantling my sewing room. I need to get it painted soon. It has a pretty little sleigh daybed that we will be taking to our oldest granddaughter in a few weeks. She is moving to a larger bedroom to make way for her new brother, so they are letting her pick out new bed linens for her birthday and we are providing the bed. We'll be turning my sewing room back into a bedroom when we put the house on the market in a couple of months. We have been looking at properties on the internet today-there are some interesting places, but of course you really have to see them in person so you can find out what's really wrong with them. (Or that seems to be the way things are going so far!)

I have finished the crib bumper pads-I was pleased with how they turned out:

I also took the little buttons off the diaper stacker yoke and put on an applique that I made.  The buttons were cute, but too tiny. I'll have to find some use for them in the nursery-I really like them!

Guess that's about all-enjoy your weekend!

Hear, Hear...

Welcome to my new followers and thanks so much for your comments-I love reading them and enjoy reading your blogs!

I have discovered the world of audio books, thanks to my daughter and I'm enjoying them so much! Don't get me wrong-in the evenings. I still love to curl up with a good book with actual pages, but while I'm sewing or doing housework, a good audiobook really passes the time. I am currently listening to The Lord of the Rings unabridged version narrated by Robert Inglis. We are big fans of J.R.R. Tolkien and have read the trilogy and The Hobbit through several times, but we enjoy listening to them. It's a five-hour car trip to see our grands (and their parents) and listening to a book has become our favorite way to travel. We also enjoy the Brother Cadfael books by Ellis Peters, and have also read them through, but enjoy listening to them in the car as well.

Our local library has a large collection of books on tape and CD and I have found many of my favorites there, but the books we intend to keep and listen to over again we download from Audible.com-a division of Amazon. Do any of you listen to audio books?

I 'm off now to finish the bumper pads for the crib today and will post pictures soon. I'm going on 4 hours of sleep today, so I hope not to do anything too ridiculous to them with my foggy brain! (I don't think I'll be experimenting with the dosage on my sleep meds again anytime soon. As we like to say out here-"If it ain't broke, don't fix it!") :-)

Home Improvement

Since we are hoping to sell our house later this year, home improvement projects are being tackled by my husband. (I can wield a mean paintbrush, but I'm not terribly handy otherwise.) We have a small bathroom off the kitchen that was the "cat's bathroom" for 18 years. (Dusty lived to the amazing age of 20.) We kept our kitty's litter box in there and no one else used that room unless there was no other choice! Anyway, we went to Home Depot this week and picked out tile for the vanity top and floor, and he put a new light fixture in. He's getting ready to tile around the sink today.  I'll post some before and after pictures when the room is finished-it's going to be a pretty little room I think.

I finished the crib skirt for the nursery this week and plan to get the bumper pads done this coming week. I'm making the cording trim for them today.

Crib Skirt

After I get the nursery bedding finished I'll start working again on this baby blanket that I've been crocheting. This is how it's supposed to look when it's finished:

Hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend!



Thank you everyone for your comments on my posts and welcome to my new followers!

Not much has been going on this week-we had a lot of wind this past weekend, which is pretty normal for springtime in West Texas. Unfortunately, it causes a lot of blowing dirt, especially since the wildfires last year destroyed all the grass and plants out on the plains around our area. The sky turns brown and the air gets gritty. Today is a beautiful day, though, and the winds brought cooler temperatures which is nice. We are supposed to get up to 90F later on this week. Spring seldom lasts long here-summer is our longest season, and it looks to be another hot, dry one. I'm really looking forward to moving to north central Texas where they have had lots of rain and everything is lovely and green! We've seen several properties that we are interested in, but haven't made any inquiries yet.

We have been making a list of all the things we need to fix around the house before we put it up for sale-funny you don't notice them until you start thinking about how other people are going to feel about seeing them. Mostly, it's cosmetic work-cleaning carpets and painting inside and out. My husband started the remodel of the our back half-bath. He installed an electrical outlet and put in a new light fixture. He is going to tile the floor and then we'll repaint.

I'm also trying to decide how to de-clutter to show the size of the rooms better. We are packrats and even though I have thrown out a lot of old stuff, what's left seems to multiply in the back of dark closets when I'm not looking!

I did get started on the sewing for the nursery. I made this diaper stacker-I wasn't sure about the combination of fabrics, but I think it looks alright.

I found these buttons earlier and tacked them on to see how they looked, but I think they may be too small.  I was thinking about putting an applique owl on the yoke instead. What do you think?

              I found these little appliques and thought they looked cute on white onesies:

I'm really looking forward to working on the rest of the things for little Ryan-can't wait until August!

Welcome and thank you to my new followers! We had a wonderful Easter weekend with our granddaughters and their mom and dad.  We took the girls to an Easter egg hunt Saturday at one of the churches. They had face painting, snowcones, and the giant inflatable slides and jumping pavillions as well as the egg hunt. We also made hot cross buns together-a first for all of us! They didn't turn out too badly:

Our girls are one of the great joys of our lives-we drive down to see them as often as we can, and hope to make a permanent move there later this year.  This is my husband and the two A's.

Pop and his girls

They will be getting a baby brother the last of August-we're all pretty excited about that-he will be our first grandson.  I'm going to be making the bedding for the nursery, and my daughter has picked out the fabrics-I can't wait to get started on it!

The owl fabric and blue geometric are for the bumper pad, diaper stacker and valance, and the paisley is for the crib skirt. 

Hope you all had a Happy Easter-now on into Spring!  (Except here in West Texas-where we are giving Spring a miss and going right on into Summer.)

Texas wildflowers

Welcome to my new followers!

Yesterday, we drove over to the Ft. Worth area to spend the weekend with our granddaughters Miss Priss who is 5 and Little Bit who is 3. (Oh, and their parents too!)  We are snuggled up this morning with them watching a Winnie-the-Poo DVD.  These times are so precious and I know they will go by all to quickly-we treasure every minute.

The drive yesterday was beautiful-this part of Texas has received a lot of rain this year, so everything is green and the wildflowers are everywhere:

Field of Texas bluebonnets © bombay2austin

                                           

Paintbrushes

                                                           

Evening Primrose

Coreopsis

                                  These blanketed fields and the sides of the highway yesterday.

Welcome to my new followers and Thank you!

We just returned last night from a weekend in New Mexico with my husband's mom. His dad passed away at the end of November last year, so we are trying to visit more frequently-especially now while we are still only 5 hours away. When we make our move to North Texas, it will be a 10 hour drive.

It was a nice, quiet weekend spent visiting. Mom and I made the rounds of the used bookstores while hubby did her taxes and worked on a few things around the house. We also had an evening of "42"-a domino game and eating way too much dessert with my sister-in-law and her family.

Las Cruces, New Mexico is the town where we were both born and raised-met and married there and Hubby went to University there. It used to be a sleepy little farming community in the Rio Grande river valley, but it has grown to be a fair sized city in the last few decades. It sits high on the Chihuahuan Desert in Southern New Mexico. New Mexico became part of the United States in 1912.
Being on the desert, it receives very little rain, and like much of the SouthWest United States, in now in a severe drought. In years of good rain, the desert becomes green and many wild flowers and flowering cacti can be seen. The river is completely dry now, but the river authority will be releasing water from the reservoirs north of the town this week, so it will once again look like the picture below. The water is used to irrigate the farm lands in the valley.

Las Cruces is also home to New Mexico State Universtiy where my husband went to school-I attended The University of New Mexico at a later time when we lived in the northern part of the state.

We saw these scenes every day of our lives while we lived there, but took them for granted as I guess it's easy to do when you see them all of the time. The beauty of the place always takes us by surprise when we visit. It's a different sort of beauty-rugged and stark, but very striking.



Organ Mountains

Rio Grande at Mesilla Valley Bosque State Park

Picacho Peak-now dormant volcano-with cotton ready to be harvested