By the time I got to work, the forest was full of melting snow dripping from the tree canopy and the newly blossomed trilliums were heavy with moisture.

 But then things turned around and we took advantage of the weekend’s nice weather and embarked on another front yard project.

We made some raised beds and the kids, still in their pajamas, were quick to get into the middle of the action.

Sairshe is the self-proclaimed “Queen of the Dirt Mountain.” Mike is getting tired of shoveling dirt.

We transplanted our blueberries that used to grow in the backyard.

The best part? We actually made money on this project. Here’s how it broke down:

Lumber was  $60 – $50 gift card = $10 cost. That’s pretty good but it gets better. Nice people 7 blocks away just happened to be giving away a pile of fill dirt from their garden that was just the amount we needed. Convenient, right? They were so happy someone took their pile o’ dirt that they paid Mike $20, giving us a $10 profit. If only all home improvement projects could turn out like that.

From afar our berries look like bare sticks but up close they are showing signs of spring.

I also cleaned up our strawberry patch and found this one eager blossom. Maybe we’ll have early berries this year?

After all that work we had plenty of time to lounge on the couch. For the record, I didn’t edit the baby’s eye color at all. Really.

Our chickens are all laying regularly again after their winter hiatus, a real sign that the days are getting longer. I love that their eggs are all different colors.

I’m enjoying the sun but not holding my breath that it’ll stick around quite yet. Who knows. Maybe it’ll snow again this week.

How’s your spring shaping up?

You can find my writing today at the EcoEtsy blog where I have a post up all about clover and eco-friendly lawn care. Fitting for St. Patty’s Day, don’t ya think?

In real life I’m hanging out with my 2 little Irish lasses, at least one of whom is sporting a new shamrock hair clip. I may be doing a little Irish jig in my living room and will certainly be wishing my grandma were still around to cook me a dinner of leg of lamb with mint sauce. I’ll likely drink a little Irish whiskey in honor of my grandpa.

Sláinte!

A few weeks ago, Sairshe and I dug up some old plants and prepared a little patch of dirt in front of our house to plant some peas. Somehow that little project turned into a much bigger one. Funny how those things happen.

We’ve been wanting to reduce the amount of grass that we have around our house. Did you know that watering a lawn can double your household water usage? It also takes a lot of time and energy to mow it. Some of our lawn has to go.

We also walk across our front lawn every day going from the house to the car since the walk around the car to the sidewalk is just too much sometimes. We’re a shortcut-loving family, what can I say? The little patch of dirt I exposed turned into a much larger one- a path across the front of our house. Here’s what things looked like before. The pretty flowers we planted last month notwithstanding, things are a little overgrown and messy. The mailbox is hard to get to and in the summer our water spigot is always buried under overgrown grass since we can’t mow right around it.

Mike spent an afternoon removing the grass and removing a couple inches of dirt. It was a lot of work! The Dig beer was an appropriate finish to that afternoon.

Then we laid weedcloth along the path since we don’t want grass and weeds popping up where they don’t belong. We anchored the weedcloth and defined the edges with some plastic landscape edging.

Carys Áine was the first to test out the new path. I think she approves!

Then came the heavy lifting, or shoveling. All four of us helped fill in the path with gravel.

Now when I get out of the car I have this pretty walkway to use to get to the house.

My favorite thing, though, is the area in the first photo. We extended the gravel to go around our mailbox and water spigot. No more overgrown corner of the yard. Our flower pots look pretty and I think our mailman appreciates it too.

We have enough gravel left over to put around our garden in the backyard and we plan on taking up some of the grass back there too. Since we put in the path, we’ve had nothing but rain so we still have to cut the excess weedcloth from around our path and we plan on putting some plants in between the path and the house. We also hope to further reduce our lawn by replacing some it with this eco-friendly alternative. Oh, and plant those peas that we set out to plant when all this started.

Do you have any yard projects in the works? Do you share my dream of a yard with more native plants and less lawn?

Sairshe was excited to use her new gardening gloves and Carys Áine was even got in on the action. It was so cute to see them working together.

Sairshe took her planting job very seriously. There was only one brief moment of yelling at her sister for crushing flowers in her little baby fist, though she didn’t mind when Carys Áine tried on her precious gloves.

But the biggest source of fun was the dirt pile Sairshe made in the middle of our lawn when I wasn’t looking.

The front of our house looks a million times prettier. Grandma Diane is visiting and helped pretty things up too.

When Mike came home, he pretended to not recognize our house and drove past twice while Sairshe watched out the window, laughing hysterically at how she had “tricked Daddy.”

Success.

I certainly didn’t intend to have such a long blogging hiatus but it happened anyway.  It  started with my summer from hell.  Soon after the lovely birthday party, summer camp started.  Lots went wrong- mostly database issues resulting in registration issues and unhappy parents mad at me- but also 3 staff members quitting in the 1st 2 weeks of camp for a variety of (mostly) understandable reasons and it all made me want to go home and not come back.

Oh, it wasn’t all bad.  In the end almost 1000 kids had a great time and my cool-on-the-outside-freaking-out-on-the-inside demeanor served me well and resulted in what everyone said was the best summer of camp ever.  Yay me.  In the midst of that, I had no energy left to write and once I stopped it was hard to start back up.  I’ve probably written 25 posts in my head but that does you no good.

Since I left you, my garden grew and grew and we canned a whole lot of delicious produce.  We planted giant sunflowers and now have so many seeds!

Buffy, Oolong and Wynonna grew up and started laying delicious eggs.   One hen tried to fake us out by laying 14 eggs in a secret spot before we found them!  Then last month, sadly and suddenly, Wynonna died mysteriously, and seemingly peacefully, overnight.  So we got 2 new hens- Matcha (an Americauna) and Brown Betty (a Welsummer) but they’re not laying yet and I don’t have any pictures of them yet.  Now Oolong is molting so she’s not laying either so we’re down to one laying hen.  For now.

After camp was over we took an fun, relaxing camping trip to Paradise Creek in the Gifford Pinchot Forest in Washington.  We relaxed and explored, ate smores,  hiked on a path to nowhere and admired the pretty colors of the volcanic rocks that were all along the creek.

I’ve  only really been knitting in the past couple of weeks but I have plenty of projects that will show up here in the next few weeks.  The same goes for spinning.

I renamed my business and moved everything over to a brand new shop and website.  The story of why will come soon.  I love my new name and logo and am gearing up for the busy shopping season.

That’s the quick and dirty lowdown.  I’ve got to start small.  It feels good to get some words out there and I’ll be a little more detailed in my next posts.

So far we’ve eaten broccoli from the garden and will have fava beans and snap peas soon. We’re also growing lettuce, garlic, leeks, a million onions, kale, spinach, kohlrabi, 3 types of tomatoes, purple string beans, 2 types of shelling beans, japanese eggplants, jalapeno peppers, gypsy peppers, carrots, 2 types of potatos, basil and a few other herbs. Whew, that’s a lot! I’m really excited about having so much fresh produce right in my backyard! We also have raspberry, strawberry and blueberry plants. We’ve been enjoying the strawberries for about a week now and I just ate my first ripe blueberry this morning. Delicious!

I’m getting ready for some fun craft shows and art fairs this summer and have been working on a new product. I have this french press cover listed in my shop and several more will be for sale soon. Mike and I tested it out and it definitely keeps coffee warm longer and it adds some style to a french press.

Like my other items for sale, it’s made from a recycled wool sweater. This one is actually a wool/angora blend so it has a little extra softness. I tried some different methods of closing it and finally settled on these beaded ties. They wrap around the buttons so it can be closed as snugly as you’d like. It makes the cover a little adjustable so it’ll fit different brands that may be slightly different sizes.

Etsy is having a “yart sale” today through Sunday. It’s like a yard sale, but with art. I have a whole section of specially discounted items and you can search for “yart” on etsy to see what other good deals are out there.

Sesame won’t eat strawberries if I offer them to her at mealtimes while she’s in her high chair, but when she could pick them herself, she tried to eat them all! Despite her face in the last picture, she really liked them and amazingly most of the mess managed to stay off of her clothes.

I made fabulous strawberry shortcakes for dessert tonight. I had some creme fraiche in the fridge so I mixed some brown sugar with it and used that instead of whipped cream. Add some fresh-from-the-oven biscuits and fresh-from-the-garden berries and it was a winner!

I’ve been knitting this mess for a while and I finally have all the pieces done. After knitting this a while back, I didn’t think I’d do it again but, well, a knitted toy is hard to resist. All these pieces will be this cute little crab (Ravelry)! That’s the body, 8 legs, 2 claws and 2 eye stalks that you’re looking at. It’s for baby Lucas, whose mother is Cindy, one of my best friends but they live all the way in El Salvador so I don’t see her often enough. I hope the little cutie likes it.

The pattern isn’t written too well and is quite fiddly, for lack of a better word, but I’ll share more about that later. Speaking of patterns, I’m going to write up my loose pattern for the soaker skirt since several have asked for it. Look for that soon! In other housekeeping news, I’m hoping to add some stuff to my shop soon. With all the birthday madness, and my job starting full time next week (eek!) I have been neglecting it a little.

When I was older, I was in 4-H and I had animals so I practically lived at our county fair. I accumulated boxes full of ribbons and my grandpa and uncle were embarassed every year when I made them drive me to the fair to pick up the boxes full of stuff that I had entered.

This is a long intro to explain to you how excited I was to see that Larissa started a State-Fair-Along! I entered some things in the Oregon State Fair for the 1st time last summer (I am not a native Oregonian) and was excited to win a blue ribbon for some cookies but was disappointed at the lack of competition in many of the categories, including knitting. So was Larissa. There are so many crafty people that aren’t entering things in their fairs! So fellow Americans, knit, sew, bake, make something to enter in your local fair this has started a summer. It will be fun!

I just made this skirt but it is not fair quality. It’s summertime-fun-in-the-sun quality and that’s all I was going for. Please forgive the wrinkles, the white fabric is linen and I have been wearing it all evening. I used some of the fabric previously seen here.
So, what will I be knitting for the state fair? After much deliberation, I have decided on this:It’s the ogee tunic from Knitting Nature. I’m using Knitpicks merino style in tide pool and I am already almost done with the 1st sleeve! Pretty exciting, huh? What could be more exciting than a partially finished sleeve? A package from my secret pal! I was so excited to get this in the mail! It’s 2 skeins of knitpicks laceweight merino and a pattern for a shawl. The blue yarn is Cascade Pastaza-wool and llama! I’ve been fondling this yarn for a while now and have been wanting some. How did you know, secret pal? The colors of both are gorgeous- just what I’d choose for myself. I also got some great chocolate and fabulous stitch markers so I don’t have to use those cheap plastic rings anymore. Thank you, thank you!

After knitting this pattern, I realize that the book’s directions are a bit sloppy. Every decrease is a k2tog and the finishing directions are lazy. The apple holder was to be knitted in 4 flat pieces and then sewn together. That seemed like too much work so I knit it in the round, added paired decreases to make it a little neater and modified it some. I used size 8 dpns and some yarn left over from this project.

I went to the craziest place yesterday! The Bins, aka the Goodwill Outlet. Yes, Goodwill has an outlet. I guess it’s all the stuff that hasn’t sold in the regular stores and is an inch away from the landfill. I’ve been hearing about the place from my friend Rosie a lot and finally decided to go see for myself.

It’s a warehouse filled with huge plastic bins. Fabric items and books are seperated from everything else but that’s as far as the organization goes. People dig through these huge bins looking for treasures and most things are sold for $1.29 a pound! It’s insane and a little disturbing. They have signs cautioning the shopper (aka bargain vulture) that there could be sharp objects in the bins. I spent a fair amount of time dreading the used syringe or dead rat I was sure I’d come accross in the next bin. I even saw some “professional” bins shoppers wearing gloves to sort through the stuff. I’m not exaggerating. This is how some people make money. With enough determination, there is some valuable stuff to be found and purchased for $1.29 per pound.

I came out feeling grimy and dirty and $9 dollars poorer. I got several sweaters I’m planning on felting, some linen fabric I’ll make into a skirt. a really cute, old apron and one of those woven grass mats people take to the beach. This is what I did with one section of the mat. With some hot glue and scissors, I transformed my old, ugly, plastic planter to the new, improved tiki planter!
It now holds mint and chamomile plants. Come join me for some sun tea later this summer!