small things forgotten

 

Having your first lemonade stand.

Pink

Summer Colours Week at Poppytalk, today is Pink. 

The dance of the dragonflies

Aren't dragonflies amazing little creatures?  The way they hover about, moving sideways and backwards, those big eyes and their brilliant coloring.  What a fascinating insect. I've been seeing a lot of dragonflies around lately and I love to just stop what I'm doing and watch them.   Did you know mosquitoes are their primary food source?  You gotta love anything that eats mosquitoes!

small things forgotten

Remembering how flowers in your hair can make you feel pretty.

Nature in Red

Oh my goodness, my lovely poppies are already done blooming.  It all goes by much too fast.  They lasted a little over a week and poof, they are done!  How can it be?






























I knew right away a poppy painting was in order.  I really liked how last years poppy painting turned out (pictured below) and wanted to do another one with the poppies in the same style.


 
I have to say, that I'm very glad to be finished with this painting.  It didn't come together very easy at first even though I knew how I wanted my poppies to look.  I think I was so afraid of ruining the painting, that I couldn't figure out what to do with it.  I eventually decided it didn't matter what happened and that's when things finally started to flow.  I need to remind myself to stop taking things so darn seriously and loosen up! (this is with art and life in general)  At the beginning this painting was putting furrows in my brow, but in the end,  it puts a smile on my face!   Yeah!

Sewing Basket Surprise

This morning I was looking through my sewing supplies trying to find a hook-and-eye.  I only needed the hook part for my skirt that I was repairing.  I've never bought  this type of closure, but I knew I had to have it some where in all of my thrift store/garage sale sewing supplies.  I looked in a few places, but no luck.  I  then remembered I had my grandma's old sewing basket and figured there had to be one in there.  I found what I was looking for right away, but then something else caught my eye.  I saw lying there in the sewing basket, a little white envelope that said, Great Grandma on it.



I recognized my moms writing on it immediately and I felt a little excited.  It was hard to tell if the envelope had been opened or not, it was sealed shut a little bit, maybe from time? but it opened very easy.  Inside was a little Thank You card.



Now, my family has never been good at writing thank you cards and I don't remember ever having to write thank you cards, but before I even opened it, I knew it was from me and sure enough, there on the inside was my little kid handwriting!  I think it is so funny that I put my last name's initial on it!  Was this just in case she wasn't sure which Tammy it was?



I was just so tickled to find this.  The funny thing is, I've looked through this sewing basket many times before and for some strange reason I had never seen that little envelope and then to add to it all, I ended up finding a 2nd Thank You card.  This time it was from my cousin, and he too was thanking her for money.  His card had the date on it which was May 1979.  So I would have been 7 1/2 years old when I wrote that card.  Doesn't $4 seem like a lot for then?

I called my mom to tell her about what I found and she said my Great Grandma would keep all of her cards in their envelopes and would store them in all sorts of  places.   My Great Grandma loved to sew, especially embroider.    I'm lucky to have some of her pillowcases and hanker chiefs that she embroidered, along with some blankets she quilted and also crocheted.  What better place to find a long lost thank you card from me then in her sewing basket?!

A refreshing inspiration

Oh my gosh is it HOT here!  Today we are supposed to top out at 100 degrees.  Not your normal June temperatures.  We skipped spring here and went straight to the summer heat.  My poor garden is just shriveling up.  I've been drinking lots of iced tea and iced water with lemon and mint, but I'm starting to feel like I just need to go spray my self down with the garden hose!



The other day when the temperatures were more normal, like 80 degrees, I went to lay Amelia down for her nap.  While lying there with her, I was in that in between state that comes between sleep and being  awake,  and I had an image of doing a painting of a refreshing summer drink with some lemon and mint in it.  As soon as I got up from laying Amelia down, I went to the computer and looked at some blogs quick and saw on Design * Sponge, here, the exact image that was in my mind, even the same glass that we have.  I took it as a sign that I should do this painting.
So I picked some mint from my garden and happened to have a lemon and made a nice iced water with mint and lemon.  I then sipped my inspiration and got started right away on my painting.  Here's the results:



I hope everyone who is experiencing this heat wave is finding ways to keep cool.

Croquet anyone?

I love croquet!  Growing up, it was one of my favorite summer past times, that and jarts, not the rounded ones they have now, but the pointy metal ones that they no longer make.  (no one in our family was ever injured by them, but we do have a dent in the house from a crazy thrower and I remember a friend throwing it through our tent!)  I'm lucky enough to have an old set that I got a few years back for my birthday from some friends, they had bought them at a yard sale  years ago, but didn't use them and my husband expressed how much I really wanted them and what they meant to me and now I'm as happy as can be with my own set of jarts!

It seems that hardly a day went by where we didn't play at least one game of croquet.  The neighbor kids would usually join us.  My mom was always the one to beat! It's fun to think back to those summer days of being a kid.  I remember red being my favorite color to be.  I think mostly because if you were red you got to go first.  My mom usually preferred yellow.  I went through phases though, where I remember wanting to be only black,  and then for awhile orange, but never the green.  It was a darker green and no one ever seemed to want to be that color.  If it would have been a lime green, it definitely would have been my favorite.

Last year we got a really old croquet set from my sister-in-law.  It looks like it was well used and is missing some of the hoops, but is still in good working condition.

I'm really looking forward to playing all these summer games with the kids as they are getting older.  I think we'll wait to play the jarts with them until they are  a bit older?  Instead we've been playing badminton, which is another favorite of mine.  A friend invited us to play bocce ball recently and that's a game that I've only played once or twice and haven't gotten into, but maybe.



I was watching the kids play around with the croquet set the other day and that was the inspiration for this painting.  I wasn't sure what color ball/mallet I was going to go with and when the piece was finished I realized that I had went with red.  I don't even remember thinking about.  I guess red is still my favorite!