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!