Container gardening

I am always going to Lowe's and browsing the plants. I just love plants. Then I see one that I love and I want to take it home with me and plant it. At our last house, this resulted in strange looking garden.  I finally figured out that you have to plan a garden, and it won't look good if you plant plants one at a time. But I still like to buy them one at a time. So: container gardening!

Place your pots at different heights. Put some on the ground, some on tables or plant stands. Hang some on a shepherds hook, or from a tree, or a hook on an overhang. Have a tall plant, such as my honeysuckle growing on a trellis.

Don't go too wild with your colors. I am gradually collecting green pots in all different colors. Choose what colors you want your flowers to be, and stay within that range of colors. I like interesting leaves. That's why I picked this parsley shrub on the left, and whatever that yellow plant and purple plant are below. I'm sure one of you can tell me what those are.  

These plant stands came from a yard sale! They are much sturdier than the ones I paid full price for.

My favorite plants are ones that smell good. I have gardenias in another part of my yard. I wanted to plant honeysuckle all over that little hill you can see in the background above, but I read how it would spread out and take over everything, so I decided to keep it contained in a pot. It still tries to get out, but I beat it back. It didn't grow any flowers this first year, but I am hopeful for next year. Mint also smells good. We have some in the pot below the hummingbird feeder. It's good to put in tea and lemonade. 

A great spot for coffee in the morning!

How I spun my own yarn. Sheepishly.

A while back, I read a book, Sheepish, about two women who moved out of the city and started a sheep farm. They sheared the sheep, and they decided to learn how to card it and spin it in to wool. Obviously, I like to make stuff. So I decided I wanted to card wool and  spin it to make my own yarn.

An example of roving

I looked into it, and I found that the carding tools were too expensive for this little project. But you can buy wool that is already carded and dyed, called roving.

You don't need a spinning wheel, although there are still people making and selling those. I found a drop spindle on etsy for six dollars, and that was fine for my little project. Now you can find them as low as $2 plus shipping, or you can make your own pretty easily, I'm sure.

Most of the time when I do projects, it's in order to save money. But this project I did just because I wanted to. It is definitely cheaper to buy yarn already made. Unless you have a sheep and you plan to make a whole lot of yarn. If you have a sheep, you could probably get rid of your lawnmower. And if the apocalypse happens, then you will be the only one still wearing a sweater.

I went to Wool Over Your Eyes, the yarn shop in downtown Greenville, and they didn't  carry roving, but the owner was very helpful and knew where I could get some. And she has tons of beautiful yarn. I could really spend a lot of money there if spending money was the sort of thing that I did. She directed me to the lady of Mericiful Hearts Farm who sells roving at the farmer's market and I found her at the Indie Craft Parade last year.  I picked out a bit of roving that was dyed all different shades of green. She really did a beautiful job with it.

I love a good lumpy yarn. So that was the look I was going for, thank you very much.

 

I made three hanks of yarn about this size. I didn't exactly follow directions. You're supposed to kind of stretch the roving out, but that was taking a long time, so I went with the string cheese approach. I pulled a small piece off about the right size and twisted that up. It went much faster for me. Some people will twist two strands together to make it stronger, but mine was already pretty thick. And lumpy. How I like it.

I made this short little buttoned scarf.

Ta da!

And now whenever it comes up in conversation that I made something, my mom tells people "And she made her own yarn!" That's a little embarrassing, Mom. :)

Other things that I have a desire to make even though I could buy them for a perfectly reasonable price: cheese, butter, candles, rugs, sweaters, pillows, skirts, and a secret passageway.

Did you ever make anything that more reasonable people would just buy?

Glass Etching

My cousin is getting married and last weekend we went to her wedding shower. They had some great decorating ideas.

Those are mints!

I was pretty excited about one of the presents I got her. I got her a Pyrex dish, and I used glass etching to put her name on the side. Glass etching is a chemical that eats away at the glass to create a foggy surface. I liked it so much, I decided to make one for myself using a dish I already had. You just put on the letter stickers and mark out the edge with tape. Use something like a fork to press the tape and the stickers down so you get a smooth edge.

Wear gloves, go outside (because of the smell), and liberally apply glass etching cream with a cheap foam brush that you will throw away. I used this kind. I think it was about $6. Kind of expensive for a little bottle.

The directions say to leave it on for one minute. But I found that to be completely inefficient. Fifteen minutes is just about right. Rinse it off with warm water. Throw your sink away because you just poured acid in there. Gross. If you have a ceramic sink, you probably aren't supposed to pour armour etch in there. 

I was almost out of armour etch when I made my dish, so it didn't go on as thickly as I would have liked. There are a few bald spots, but I'm still happy.

The Best Tomato Plant

Meet my little garden. Our yard isn't too big, so we just have this small garden. Didn't my husband do a nice job with those bricks? We have tomatoes, lettuce, and three kinds of peppers. You see my lettuce in the middle going to seed. Only two of the lettuce plants got big enough to pick. The others were always small until they started growing UP and getting flowers, which means they have "gone to seed" (growing seeds) and won't taste as good. I've harvested one small green pepper, and two jalapeno peppers. We've picked about eight tomatoes so far from four tomato plants. Three had been partially eaten before we got to them. The others have unsightly cracks.

We've never had good luck with gardens.

But we have one grape tomato plant. An amazing grape tomato plant. It's the tall one on the left. It's about my height. It has given us so many tomatoes! And they have not been eaten by bugs or animals at all. Look at these big bunches! They are like grapes! All season long, we have been getting more and more.

It's called the Tami G Hybrid tomato. You should write that down and find it for your garden next year.

Here's all my beautiful grape tomatoes alongside my ugly, split tomatoes.

Those are from just one grape tomato plant.

Have you had any really great plants in your garden?

Yard sale finds and tips

You never know what you will find at yard sales. I often find absolutely nothing. It helps to keep a list of things to look out for. When I see a Pinterest project I want to do that involves using an old ______, and I don't have one, I put it on my list, and I review my list before shopping. We try to plan ahead for things that we need. We hardly ever run out and buy stuff. When I want something, I put it on my list, and wait to find it at a yard sale. And also, of course, I find awesome stuff that I never planned to buy, but it's a good deal, so I do.

Planning Your Route
I wait until Friday afternoon and pull up the list of garage sales on Craigslist. My Craigslist serves a large area, so I search for listings that include the name of my town. I pull up all the listings in separate tabs.  I glance at the descriptions for each sale, and sometimes I can tell that they don't have anything that I want and I close that tab. Sometimes people put prices in the listing, and this is often a bad sign that people think too highly of their junk and won't come down on the price. If people only put the name of their neighborhood and not their address, I close that tab, because I don't want to spend extra time finding it. I copy and paste all the remaining addresses into google maps. Then I pick the area with the largest concentration of yard sales. I close the other ones and arrange the route. I narrow it down to eight or ten sales.

Don't Get Distracted
You always see signs for other yard sales that aren't on your route. I don't follow these signs unless I can see an actual yard sale. People don't remember to take these signs down, so you don't know if it's current unless it has the date on it. And you don't know how long that road is. Unless you do know. You don't want to go miles out of the way following an elusive sign.

 Get a Good Deal
 For me, I want to get at least a 90% discount off of what I would pay in a store. Sometimes people are having a yard sale because they need money, but most people just want to get rid of stuff. So don't be afraid to make an offer, and then a counter offer. And walk away if it's too high.

This is one of my favorite bargains. I got this last summer. It was the last yard sale I was going to that day. I saw it was good, solid wood and I asked how much he wanted for it. He told me to make an offer. "Well, I only have six dollars in my wallet..." He just wanted to get rid of it, so I got it for what remained in my wallet. And it's so functional! Someday I might paint it or stain it and put new handles on it, but it's fine for now.

Here's what I found on Saturday: $2 shoes.

Fifty cents: grabby kids toy. When I haggled this down from $1, they told me that this was a fundraiser yard sale to send a girls volleyball team to Colorado. For some reason, this cause does not really speak to my heart, and I did not feel compelled to give more than fifty cents to it.

 I've been looking for some things to decorate with above my kitchen cabinets, and I found three things for that today. Right now, I have baskets and chargers up there, but I want some different things.                                                                       

$2.50 metal frog leaf thing

Fifty cents: ugly vase to paint

Then I went to a thrift shop I like. The only one I've ever seen that really has good prices. And I got this fleur-de-lis for $4.

Here they are with the vase painted and on the cabinets. The top of the cabinets is two inches lower than the edge you can see, so many of my things up there are sitting on boxes. I cut a slit in a wheat thins box to make a plate holder for that froggy leaf.

What is the best deal you've ever gotten at a yard sale?

Some favorite yard sale finds

One of my favorite things to do is find great stuff at yard sales. So I thought I'd share a couple of things that I have found.

First are these frames. I don't remember exactly what I paid for them. But I remember it was more than I would usually pay. I think about $3 each. I splurged.

They were a tired-looking brass when I found them. So I painted them green to match the chairs. I could put some fabric in the frames. Or maybe even pictures. (What a weird thing to do). But I think I like them like this.

I also got this coffee table at a yard sale. It's a little fancier than my usual style, but I like it. They were asking $25, so I offered $20. They accepted the offer so quickly that I almost asked if they would take $15.





I'm planning to hit some yard sales tomorrow. I've made a list of things I'm looking for so I can do some projects I've seen on Pinterest. I'm looking for old sheets for this rag rug, a small cabinet for this little kitchen for my future adopted baby girl, throw pillows for this project, and plates for this treat stand. That's not my whole list, though. I'll let you know what I find.

What's your favorite yard sale find?

How not to make old shirts look new

So, I have this old t-shirt that I kind of like. It's got that little lacy part at the top which is sort of nice. But the color has faded to this grey/green/beige/khaki non color. It's so boring. I have some old RIT dye in the closet, so let's see what I can do with it.

Some fabrics won't dye, but the tag says 100% cotton. So there won't be any problems.  Since it's so faded, I'm going to try to dye it without using the color remover first. This will probably save time. I have a dark red dye left over from some other project, so let's see how that looks.

Oh.

Purple.

I'm not big on purple. This isn't horrible. But it kind of is. I will use the color remover to make it a sort of white color and then I'll try it again.

Here it is after the RIT color remover. That's strange how the lacy part didn't bleach. Did the tag lie about being cotton? No matter. I'll use the red dye again, and since it's such a dark red, I'll add some orange dye to it, to make it a little brighter.

So. That's not the color I was going for. I think I have a new shirt to wear while I'm painting. I might have tried again, but the red dye bottle was leaking and I threw it away. I almost had a carpet disaster! This shirt has now been four colors anyway, and I am no longer interested in it.

I should have left it purple.

DIY fail.

But you should still try dyeing your clothes. This is a great option for solid color clothes that are actually cotton. Try it on faded clothes, boring clothes, or something you got bleach on.

You can also dye wood. I'll tell you about my kids' train tracks some time.

Have you dyed anything? How did it go for you?