Oh Yeah...

My plant labels and row dividers are old plastic mini-blinds. :)

Finally, My Greenhouse!

About 2 years ago my sweet mother-in-law Dixie bought me a greenhouse kit for my birthday. I was so excited! I've always wanted one. But, with homeschooling 5 kids, babysitting 2 more, and being immobilized by anemia, (not to mention, again, my inability to follow through with things), I didn't get around to setting it up till last month.
I picked a spot to the right of my little garden and ran a waterline from the garden spigot to the front left corner of where I wanted the greenhouse to be. I pulled weeds and dug up the big clumps of grass so that the greenhouse would be level and weed-free. Then I took a pic. My lovely daughter Abi is in there to give an idea of the size of things.











Then I opened the box and got a little overwhelmed. This thing was going to be bigger than I thought. Luckily I like building things and can read directions. Normally I don't read directions when I build things, then halfway through I'll wish I had, but I wasn't going to take any chances with this baby!










So up it went! It took me half a day to get the entire frame set up (for the love of God and the well being of your wrists, use a drill if you have one!). But then it started to rain, so I abandoned the thing for a week until the rain stopped. Then it took me another half of a day to get the polyethylene (?) sheet in place and secure it down.

















Then I set up the misting system. This didn't come wit the greenhouse kit, I had to go buy all the parts at Lowe's and figure out how to put it all together myself. Before you start thinking I'm really smart, you must know that this was SUPER easy! Not a lot of brain power was involved. First I screwed the timer onto the spigot, then screwed the hose onto the timer.

















Then I ran the hose up the left corner then horizontally along the 3 sides of the frame, and down again at the front right corner to lay in a coil under the shelf. I secured the hose to the frame with plastic zip ties. Again, easy.













The only hard part about this was to figure out what nozzle heads I wanted to use. A drip head would just run down the walls, so I found a mister head that would spray outwards to cover an area of about 2 feet and used the handy little hole puncher to punch holes where I wanted them, allowing for a few inches of spray overlap to make sure all the soil would get coverage. (This was all trial and error, it's a good thing the hole puncher came with plugs to plug up mistake holes!)
















Then I popped the mister heads into the holes, set the timer to spray every once in a while, and voila! I don't have to worry about my seedlings drying out!









The last part of this whole process was laying some sort of flooring. I wanted something that would drain water well and suppress weeds. Most of all though it had to be cheap. My ideal would have been putting the whole greenhouse on a brick foundation, but I didn't have the money for that kind of thing. My next idea was throwing down a layer of those pretty white round pebbles, but that would have been too expensive as well. So my last resort was using the box our new T.V. came in (thank you Grammie and Grumpy!), which worked great because I really didn't want our neighborhood tweakers to know we have a nice new T.V. So I put down a layer of cardboard, then a couple inches of bark mulch on top which was about $5 a bag, I used about 4 or 5 bags. I could have used homemade mulch with my chipper/shredder, but I didn't have it up and running yet, and I didn't have the time with our vacation decending upon us quickly and a wedding dress to finish! Eventually the cardboard will rot away, then I'll put down more mulch. I'll use the chipper then.

















So after a giant exhausted sigh, and warm fuzzy feeling of accomplishment, I was finally able to plant my seeds secure in the thought that they would stay warm and moist while I was away from them. The End! (Tune in next time for my exciting soil experiment! Well, exciting to me anyway!)

The Dress

Before

















Ok, so this one was a long time in coming! I had wanted to post the before pic as soon as we got the dress, then post updates on the makeover. But, well, you know how it goes. I'm not that good on following through on things.

Well, we got the dress at a thrift store soon after Bryan and Rachel were engaged and took the before pic. You can see that Augie the dog and Hope (Rachel's pet monkey) had to get in on the action. It's a two piece dress, a bustier-type bodice and ball gown skirt.

First I had to take in the bodice, Rachel being like a size 2 and all, then covered it in a champagne colored satin. Over that I put the $70/yard smokey green lace and ruched it up a bit. It nearly broke my heart to have to cut the stuff it was so beautiful! I had a difficult time adding the corset back to it. I couldn't find anything at JoAnn's to use for the loops and didn't know how to make them. So I used this black leather-like strip with grommet holes and sewed that onto the inside of each side of the opening, then threaded the ribbon through. It wasn't meant to be functional as in closing the back of the bodice tightly, hooks and snaps did that job, but it was just for decoration to give it the "corset" look. Then I added the off-the-shoulder sleeves.









For the skirt I again had to take in the waist several inches. Then I made 4 large panels out of the same champagne satin that was used on the bodice, making them several inches longer than the skirt so we could bunch it up all over. I laid these over the origional white skirt, and attached them to a waistband that hooked onto the waist of the white skirt. We bunched up the panels and tacked them into place.









Then I took 2 panels of the same beautiful lace that we had used for the bodice and put a panel on the front of the dress peeking out of the satin, and on the train in the back.









I think the whole thing turned out pretty well. The leather grommet strip in the back pulled off a bit and had to be held on with safety pins because someone pulled on it too tight. So I need to figure out a better way to do corset backs in the future. Rachel was a patient angel during the fittings, I couldn't have asked for a more good-natured bride! She turned out absolutely stunning at the wedding and actually could have pulled off the whole thing wearing a paper sack for as pretty as she was. All in all it was a good experience and I'm looking forward to making over some more wedding dresses! (Most of these pics I stole from Ginger, thank you!)

After










(Yes, that handsome pastor is my Beloved!)

Homemade Therapy Sessions

This is the time of year when cabin fever starts to set in for me. Yes, I live in California, but in the Northern part of it. It gets cold and wet here. I can spend days, weeks, even entire months nestled deep in my big green recliner next to the wood stove (our only source of heat), with a heating pad on my back, a blanket on my legs, and children piled on me as we read good books together. Which, in my opinion is one of the best parts of being a mother.

But occasionally, (like right at this moment, no kidding) the kids get kinda frisky. Jumping from couch to couch, screaming like banshees, and laughing hysterically because they put a purple wig on Augie the dog. Times like this are when I put on my boots and coat and try to sneak out of the house unnoticed. I rake up the compost pile, pull weeds, I sometimes even consider picking up dog poop (not that I actually do it, that's a kids job of course!). Anything so long as I'm out of the house for a while.

Inevitably the kids find me, because you know, someone needs to be tattled on every 5.7 minutes. Depending on the mood I'm in, I'll either send them back into the house so I can have a little more quiet time, or I'll give them plastic baggies and put them to work. And they're not allowed to give me any crap about it! (Yes that was intended.)

This actually works quite well for us. I'll come back in feeling much calmer, a little work and fresh air does a brain good. At this point I realize just how exercise depraved we are and I'll have the kids pick up all the garbage and shoes left out in the rain as well. When they're finished with the job they are always quite happy to settle down with me again in my big green recliner, warm chilly toes, and listen to a story.

Blood, Sweat, and...well...Curses

No power tools for this baby! Well, I intended to use them, but when I opened the garage door I was heartbroken to find that they were laying there lifeless and cold. **sniff** I'll be ok... someday.
In the meantime I'll have to build things manually, like this nesting box. The upside is that my arms will be perfectly toned from all the sawing and hammering! I am obviously not a carpenter, but I think I did a pretty darn good job on this thing, despite the fact that it has my blood streaked on it in several places.
You know what else is super cool? I didn't put out a penny to make it either! At Hubby's work they use a lot of wooden pallets. The nice man whose job it is to repair them gives Patrick huge boxes of the busted up, unusable ones for us to use as kindling in our wood stove. But occasionally there comes a board that is still intact, I've been saving them knowing they will be useful at some point. So when I realized that my chickens were laying their eggs in the mud, I decided to use the good boards to make a nesting box.
Voila! Happy chickens!

I'm An Auntie!!!

Isn't she beautiful!?!? Ava Marie Lord, daughter of Christina (my little sis) and Aaron. I've never been an Auntie before but I couldn't have picked a sweeter niece if I had tried!

Economical Wash?

You probably can't read the sign under the laundromat's name, but it's about 6 minutes of drying for a quarter. Just about long enough for the machine to get warmed up, and if you're not quick with the quarters, to cool off also. But alas, I had no choice. My dryer broke and the laundry was piling up. So I bit the bullet, called my sister for a ride (since my car had decided to die at the same time as the dryer), washed 5 loads of laundry at home (which didn't even make a dent in Mt. Washmore), then hauled it off to the laundromat to dry. Before leaving I gave the girls strict instructions to have the dishes done by time I got home, which, of course they had to do by hand since our dishwasher gave up the ghost, from which there is no coming back.
A couple days later the dryer repairman came, $180 to make our dryer functional. I tried to do the mental gymnastics to figure out how many loads I'd have to take to the Econo-Wash in order to equal the price to repair the dryer, but I hate math and I'm too lazy to waste brain power on the problem. I just figured that with 5 kids, and having to do 3 loads a day to keep up, I'd rather stay home to do laundry. Which was a good decision in the long run. It's now a couple weeks later and my car is still incapacitated, my sister just had her baby, and I'm stuck in my recliner with a back injury!
The cool thing is- I'm really not complaining! I don't mind all this at all. I could do without the pain, but I was able to see my niece (before I got hurt), I have daughters who are able to help do the housework and cook, and I have no choice but to sit still and catch up on schoolwork with the kids. So really, there's not much to gripe about. Even before I hurt my back I didn't really miss my car since I try to avoid going anywhere anyway. I think the older I get, the more I want to just stay home.