Get Your Mitts On These Mitts

But first, a self portrait. I like how the sun is all hazy over the tall grasses. Too bad you can't see the GIANT dead spot in the neighbor's yard, left by their mosquito farm/blow-up pool.

Look at the freaky green color my eyes are. I was watching for a blue jay.

Ah, the quintessential toe shot.
Here are the aforementioned mitts.



So, I finally photographed all the new mitts in stock. *sigh* It just takes so long to list them on Etsy. Here are some pics:

Garden Update, Part Two

It seems I take a garden photo in the middle of each month, so here's July's.
The bees, people, the BEES! Honeybees have finally arrived and are just bonkers over the dill, the cosmos and the sunflowers. There are at least 3 different bee types, plus big ol' bumblebees. They are peaceful, and don't bother me when I stand watching their work. But, I don't want to chance it, so I linger only long enough to check for ripe corn and to collect cosmos and cornflower seeds for Squaresville Seed packets. Coming soon to a market near you!


Goldfinches appeared in the yard this week, snacking on the cup plants and sunflowers. This, sadly, is the best shot I could get. But, so pretty and yellow!






Here is Brave Little Cardinal with its eyes closed. Look at those tufty little tufts of tuft! It looks like an old man.









The baby cardinals are about 2 weeks old at this point. Far as I could tell, they hatched on July 4th.

The babies have since left the nest and have moved on to other yards, guarded by Mom and Dad. It has been suggested that next year I get a web cam to watch them hatch and grow and go from monstrous alien blobs to fuzzy little peepers.


*sigh* Back to sewing bags. I'll have more bags than you can shake a stick at at the next Tower Grove Farmers' Market. Plus, coasters and rad oven mitts! July 26th-mark it on your calendars!

Six Out of One Hundred? Nay...

This is copied from another blog, but it involved books, so...
Supposedly these are 100 books everyone should read.
The statistic is that most adults have read only 6 titles on this list. Cretins! Peasants!


1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read. (I'm including any books I've started but haven't finished.)
3) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)"

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (well, I read the first one)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (Have read most of it while bored in church)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ( Read a TON of him in college)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (Started it, hated it)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma- Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (Probably won't, as it is a "popular" novel)
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (One of my faves)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility- Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold ( Another favorite)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (en francais)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding (Don't judge me! It was fun!)
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (en francais) (yes, I read it in French AND English!)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ( I keep hearing this is good...)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (Shouldn't this be included in #14?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


Only 52? I have issues with some of these choices, though. Where is the Wally Lamb? The T. Coreghassan Boyle? (horribly misspelled) How about Rabbit, Run?

Coming Up!

Squaresville Goods will be at the Tower Grove Farmers' Market July 26th. Please hope for a mild morning with no rain!

Also, we have a spiffy new site for CraftaNostra. Check it out August 9th.

Strangefolk? Hells yes! Autumn is at it again, and has us for 2 days this year! Like she doesn't have enough to do, what with kids and fixing errant websites!

So, back to sewing....

Quilts You Can Know

These are the baby quilts I currently have for sale. They are about 40" square, I think. Each one is $130, and if you would like to purchase or find out more details/photos, just comment or email me!
My favorite is obviously the skull one :)

Quilts I Have Known

I'm trying something different with this blog setup. Here are all the quilts I've made that I have pics of. They aren't for sale, as they are already sold. But you can commission one....next year!

We have a lot of records.
I still love orange and pink and zinnias.
Ancient Dresden plate blocks from Grandma and 1" squares from Cat's yard sale-ing.
Don't remember why I look so pissed off...I may have been just squinting or thinking, "Here's your goddamned quilt, asshole!"

Craft Mafia Event

Tomorrow evening, the St. Louis Craft Mafia will be in effect at "Let Them Eat Art" in lovely Maplewood, MO. We'll have our booths set up in Citizens Park, which I believe is near Citizens Bank....
Times are from 6 to 11 pm. There will be all sorts of cool entertainment, music, and hopefully meat on a stick.
Or, you can just look for our awesome new banner, created by moi!

Babies

Laurene noticed there were three baby cardinals, not the two I had thought.
Here is a surprisingly decent picture of them, awaiting food.
Their nest is hard to get to on the ground, and is above my head. There's a huge astilbe in front of it, and I am certain there are millions of spiders to block my way. So, I have to take pictures through a window.


Here are my scores at the antique mall yesterday:




Now, back to messing with my website!

How To Waste Time

Where we grew up, we didn't get cable. It would have cost too much to have it wired in from "town". So, I miss out on many, many 80's video references due to my parents' tightwadness.

That is where YouTube steps in to school me about videos by David Bowie (referenced in Flight of the Conchords), Duran Duran, Kate Bush and yes, Star Blazers, which my brother and I were complete raving lunatics about.

This video explains all my terrible dance moves, even though I've never seen it before today and I haven't worn knickers since 1985.
Now, I do add what I remember from belly dancing class as well as some inspiration from Sassy Girl, who was a frequent patron of Mod Night back during my Drink My Face Off On A Wednesday Night And Make Your Roommate Call In Sick For You Days.

Yes, I did that and I'm only mildly ashamed. Don't judge me!

Independence Day

Remember these? The baby corn grown in cardboard boxes?


Well this is what those little sprouts turned into:


Yesterday, I declared my independence from bland store-bought corn. Corn loses its sweetness as soon as it is picked, so imagine how tasty grocery store corn COULD be if you ate it a few hours after it was picked!
I'll tell you how tasty it was: mind-blowingly good. And to think I grew it from a seed!

Also yesterday, the cardinal eggs hatched, and we are now the proud landlords of two baby cardinals! They look like grey blobs until a parent bird shows up, then you can see their little yellow beaks and mouths.

So, here's celebrating homegrown corn! Soon, it will be tomatoes and squash and peppers and onions and chamomile tea. That's right, I'm growing chamomile and harvesting the blossoms for tea.

Maybe next year will see the start of Squaresville Seeds!