Under Construction

Trellis

I happened upon a library book called Making Bentwood Trellises, Arbors, Gates and Fences. I brought it home and next thing you know I'm clipping hopefully inconspicuous branches off our redwood tree and bending them into a very crooked, very amateur heart trellis.

Author Jim Long would probably be horrified at my construction and my top arch is definitely "too pointy" but that was an impressively fun project. I've already installed it, crookedly, in the front yard.

I certainly need to practice but if I get better at bending wood there's a privet bush/weed across the street with my name on it. Jim suggests that privet is good for bent wood trellises. (He didn't have anything to say about the suitability of redwood.)

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I've had project A.D.D. lately. Everything. Sounds. So. Fun! I'm super inspired about all sorts of work. But, when the kids are asleep and I have time to actually DO projects I've been just falling asleep myself. This is, as you might imagine, very frustrating. But at least I made a dorky trellis. Now to plant some vine seeds at the base.

Lunch sacks and chocolate

Cockrell and Hackett families don't keep reading. Unless you don't like surprises in which case go for it. Here's a photo of my leaves this afternoon.

Then Oscar and I did a little strategic raking.

And the weeping cherry tree.

Pretty, huh?

Anyway, the lunch sacks and chocolate.

Truffles (dark chocolate with toasted almonds and milk chocolate with cocoa) in wax paper wrapping

The truffles are day 6 of the lunch sack advent calendar Biscuit and I put together for our family friends.

Lots of dollar store trinkets, some food treats, ornaments and other odds and ends. Several bags have something for all the kids to share, some days are for one particular kid and other days are for mommy or daddy. The yarn closure is the key.

Today I got all 25 bags carefully stuffed into a shipping box and put in the mail to arrive by December 1!

I hope the anticipation and fun of having something each day will make up for the fact that lots of the gifts are sorta lame. Still, pretty fun to put together!

Thursday was brought to us by the letter C

Concrete

Cherry crop

"Oscar" (who's given name starts with C)

Cake/Churning/Creamery

First. A moment of silence for the beloved, dearly departed Lickety Split. Apparently he churned his last batch last week. This delicious Salted Butter Caramel ice cream. He was making some bad sounds last week.

Yesterday, with my dad's birthday cake on the line and the ice cream custard chilled in the fridge I pulled him out, said a little prayer, plugged him in and....nothing. So sad.

I thought the spirits might want my dad to have his banana split ice cream cake so I sprinted to the Thrift Store where the Lickety Split was uncovered in 2009 and, for $3, found this:

and proceeded to make the menfolk churn their own dang ice cream. Mr. H has plans to hook this baby up to an electric drill to save our arms.... By the time we got that churned it was too late for the ice cream cake to freeze up solid so I'll report back later on the cake. The more I think about it the more it sounds disgusting. We'll see.

White

The last day of of Color Week. White turned out to be surprisingly easy.

Lavender

There's a fine line between lavender and pink. Some purple snuck in too.

 

Pink

Pink was a lot easier than yellow for color week. Strange since daffodils are my favorite flower.

a hit of pink apple blossom

 

Yellow

More colors week. Granted, there are some greenish yellows and a lot of green around. Green is hard to avoid this time of year.

Green

Color week sounded like fun so I just spent 30 minutes in the yard trying to capture all the colors for the week. First up: GREEN. This was an easy one....

 

Sunshine

The sun finally came out! And my parents were here (apparently to spend two days working on our behalf, thanks, mom and dad) so we enjoyed the sunshine and turned the garden.

Under grandpa's tutelage Biscuit turned and hoed her corner of the garden bed (ultimately planted a zucchini and a cantaloupe)

We found many a worm.

And drank lemonade (not sideways). Our lemon tree has a few still hanging--hooray.

All in all a great day and the garden is about 1/3 planted. Which probably means it's time for a giant storm to kill my seeds. We'll see.

Ready for fairies

I loved this series of posts over at Kleas about fairy house construction. So when I found a terra cotta pot saucer on my porch (no idea where that came from) I knew a fairy house was in order.

First we gathered some nature (and a penny)

 

Then, with some assistance from me and Grandma, the fairy house and yard were assembled.

 

I think it would have looked better if we'd followed Kleas' instructions more closely but Biscuit has strong opinions on these sorts of things and I try not to interfere too much. This fairy will live in a teepee with a carefully thought out bed.

I did get to build the furniture with hot glue.

 

The "pond" is a sand dollar given to Biscuit by a neighbor after he learned she was collecting nature for a fairy house. So nice! We also found the peanut shell boat on his lawn.

 

Now I'm off to sprinkle a bit of glitter and move the leaf cover off the bark bed so when Biscuit wakes up she'll see that the fairies have visited.