We Have A Winner!!!

We have a winner of my give-away - pulled from Gramma's witch hat was Kathryn from KV Creative Designs!! She will be receiving a package of artful goodies and a Halloween treat!! That was fun - I will have to do another soon! I love giving, it just makes me feel warm and fuzzy all over.....don't you?? :) Have a blessed day, my sweet friends!! Marji

Drawing Today!!!

Today is the day for drawing a lucky winner for my give-away and this afternoon I will get my pea-in-a-pod granddaughter Morgan Grace to pull a name from Gramma's witch hat - good luck to all of you and I will let you know the winner either later tonight or early tomorrow morning - depends on the day I have and how exhausted I am when I crawl in the door - LOL!! Have a beautiful day, my friends!!! Blessings and batwings, Marji

This Crazy Life - I LOVE it!!

Wow, it has been a long time since I blogged here! I have missed you all but I actually have a good excuse! With the help of my beautiful children and loving husband, I have realized a dream I have had for 35 years - a brick and mortar SHOP!!! We have spent the last two months getting it ready and we opened last Saturday - the first week has gone very well! We have so much fun, it is not like "work" at all!!! We have a blog for the shop, as well, so go check us out here!!

Been trying to catch up, visited several of your blogs, lots going on but I want to tell you about a new friend at More Than Heirlooms - Myrna has also gotten courageous and opened an Etsy shop and is having a give-away to celebrate! Go on over and add your name to the pot for a beautiful altered mirror and check out her new shop - I already purchased something there - so sweet!!

Everyone is having such fun give-aways, I think I need to celebrate the opening of our shop, too, with a give-away of my own! I have been putting together some beautiful collections of altered art starts I call Artitudes - fabulous bits and pieces to get the creative juices going - and I will give away one of these filled with exciting goodies on October 7th. You all know the routine :) - comment on this post and I will toss your name in my witches hat - become a follower, let me know that, too, and your name goes in again - put a link to my give-away on your blog, another toss in the old magic hat!! The winner will also receive a cute little something for Halloween, a treat, no tricks, I promise!!

If you are looking for ADORABLE gifts for babies, please go see my sweet friend Lynn at Lynns Lovelies - she has an incredible talent for crochet and she makes the SWEETEST little hats and booties, among other goodies! These days, you cannot find real quality baby gifts unless you shop at Nieman Marcus - shop instead with someone who cares and it shows!

Have a fine day, my sweet friends, I love all of you and I look forward to having a wee bit more time to blog - I do still work 8 - noon for my husband and then noon - 6pm at the shop but there is always the wee hours of the morn, with the slowing waking birds.......my favorite time of the day!!!

Blessings and birdsong, Marji

Free Images & Fun!!

Good morning and happy Saturday, my friends!! Oh, how I have missed you all and I have so missed blogging.......good news is I am going to half days at work which will free up my afternoons for FUN things, like blogging, and checking in on all of you, and creating.......lunches with my girls, Mom and Mom-in-law........thrifting, junking and flea-ing (is that a WORD??)......painting, decorating, cooking......can we tell I am EXCITED???? Three more weeks of full-time, then .........FREEDOM!!!!

So today I have to show you the GORGEOUS pin-cushion my littlest grand-daughter, Morgan Grace, and I made with the FABULOUS tutorial I got from the beautiful and talented Dawn of The Feathered Nest!!! We had such fun, and the bits are so special, too. The Limoges ladies boot I used was my precious grandmother's as was the fabulous cotton quilt fabric from her stash. The vintage seam binding I found on a Round Rock trip to the Antiques Festival in October - if you haven't been, dears........GO!! Marburger Farm in Round Rock, Texas - every April and October - if you don't find it there, it ain't to be had!! Morgan and I added some vintage styled pins, and voila!! One thing I did to make it more stable, since it is tall and narrow, I added some craft sand in the bottom of the shoe to keep it from tipping over every time you pulled a pin!!!

There are also some adorable images for your use - these are BOYS from the Civil War era - yep, BOYS!! In dresses.......you see, my GREAT-Grandmother (who was born in 1876 and lived to be 107!!) told me all about this......boys wore dresses when they were little fellas, then graduated to short pants (like the older brother in the one photo), THEN went into the longer pants of the older boys and men.. That's your history lesson for the day :) Anyway, they are so sweet I wanted to share them with you!! Enjoy!!

Have a wonderful weekend, sweet friends, and hug your loved ones!! Every day is a precious gift from the Lord and I read a quote the other day....wish I wrote down who said it......"yes, what you do today IS important......remember, you are using a day of your LIFE to DO it!!"

Blessings, laughs, hugs and love, Marji

Whew!!!

Got the kids moved into new apartments so I made them some planters for the patios.....had so much fun.......love to make these!!! I have a special haven in the garden where I can putter about and create lovely planters and such, it is so soothing and calm out there. I make moss rocks for my beds and herb garden, too, and I will have to do a tutorial on that for ya'll, because they are EXPENSIVE to buy!! There is a family joke about moss rocks....when DH and I were making the first herb garden I decided I needed some large rocks covered in moss for the beds.......we went to a materials yard where DH practically fainted at the idea of spending 150.00 on ROCKS (thought I had rocks in my head, truth to tell) but he bought them and it has been a joke around here ever since. Every time I decide I want something that is in the least bit off the wall, the kids spout "Uh oh, Mom is buying moss rocks again!" I DID learn how to make my own, as I was pretty certain he was NEVER gonna BUY them again......sigh!!!! It is 104 every day so it has been a challenge just to get the energy to think, however........LOL.....South Texas in the summer.....like up north in the winter.......we'll be getting cabin fever by August 1st at this rate!!!

I bought some fabulous tutorials from Dawn over at The Feathered Nest - my grandbabies are coming to craft with me and I wanted to have a pictorial view of what we were doing - these are just perfect and the kids can understand and feel like they made something "all by themselves" ( well, almost!!) -a little help from Gramma never hurt anyone!!! I am going to help the littlest one make a pincushion for her Mama - that will be a lot of fun!!

I have been cleaning and sorting in my studio this past week and I have found some cool papers and such that I even forgot I had.....how fun is THAT....so I will get some scanned and share - it's almost like Christmas around here when I finally get through the spring rush and rediscover my studio and my stash!!!

Well, gotta get back to it - can't have those little ones in there like it is now - wouldn't FIND them till Christmas!!!!

Have a fabulous day, my friends!!

Blessings, Marji

Bittersweet Day

Hello, dear friends, I have missed you. I know it has been a very long time between posts but there are reasons which I will tell you. Just after Mother's Day, we found out that my father had end stage esophageal cancer and would not be with us very much longer. I spent several days in a daze.....what could I do, was there anything to be done?? There was not, and my father chose to stay at home and spend his last days out of the hospital and doing what he could do. Me, being me, decided that I needed to put my energy and helplessness to work - so I tried an art quilt, an undertaking that both challenged me and soothed my aching heart - I know the pictures are not in the right order but you get the big picture - I put my heart into this, the first art quilt I have ever done. My father did not live to Father's Day - he passed away last Saturday - but he got the quilt, and he got the love and the message, and for that I am eternally grateful.

This is what I said about the quilt in my letter:

This art quilt is the first fabric collage I have ever made – I have done paper collages but never tried with fabric. I wanted this to embody all those wonderful years growing up in Maine. The colors are of the sea – there is music and the line is, of course, from Joan Baez – there are bits of mermaid’s tears, shaped like hearts, and there are Tom and I, in awesome photos taken by you. The whale tail is in remembrance of the baby whale that was beached, and you organized a party of college kids to pour the sea water over her until she could be pulled out to where her anxious mother was waiting for her. Tom and I watched that with awe, and it instilled in me a love for all things great and small in the natural world, most especially by the ocean. Tucked into the heart are some herbs I grew – there’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance, and Provence lavender for your beloved and my ancestral France. The snippets of old lace and trim are from the grandmothers – pieces of old linens I had from both grandmothers that I have saved over the years. The driftwood piece to hang it from was beachcombed by me on the coast of Maine. The beach roses were blooming when I found it – the scent haunts me and pulls me – no one really understands that longing, but I am OK with that.

My father was a complex man, and our relationship was on and off because of his re-marriage to a woman who wanted to pretend my brother and I did not exist - but we did, and we are what we are today because of the way we were raised, including the early years with a man who saw life and the world a little differently than most - a professor, a writer, a music man, a beatnik, a rebel, a State Legislator, a photographer, and mostly, my father.

I love you, Daddy - I will miss you deeply for the rest of my life. Till we meet on the other side, Happy Father's Day, Daddy, and rest peacefully. Love, Marji

Happy Mother's Day!!

Happy Mother's Day to all of you lovely, beautiful Moms out there in blogland!! I will be back, blogging regularly, soon.....spring is winding down....sort of.......:) Have a very lovely week!!

Blessings,
Marji

Whirlwind

Oh, my goodness - where has the time gone?? We have had just a CRAZY time here - our little town, yes, this little tiny burg is the town that started the Swine Flu freak out in the US. The school that had the first US cases is across the street from our nursery - they closed all the schools here and in neighboring towns - all the parks are closed - all the outdoor gatherings have been cancelled - it is just crazy! Meanwhile, we are busier than bees with spring, all my grandkids are home because of no school, the grocery store is packed unless you go in the middle of the night or early morning (that is when I have been going), and we are all taking Vitamin C and NAC and washing our hands fifty times a day!!!! So I just wanted to check in with everyone - hope you are all well and that this goes away soon so we can get back to normal kind of crazy here!!!

Blessings to you and good health,
Marji

Seed Packet Fun

Oh, good morning, my friends!! So sorry I have not been blogging the last couple of days......I think everyone decided Spring is finally here and came to the nursery this week!! Whew!!!

I have been visiting some of your blogs in my minutes here and there, however, and I have so much fun doing that!! There are wonderful things being shared and here are a few - Dawn, at The Feathered Nest, found some ADORABLE cabinet photo babies so check them out; Tami, at Aunt Mimi's Creations, posted some LUSCIOUS fruit lithos, and Yvette, at The Charm House, has a beautiful tribute for Mother's Day to make! Visit them all and share in the sharing!! I LOVE this!!!!

Let's share some more - here are the seed packets I promised and yes, I am still going to do a tutorial for making these beauties into ornaments - hopefully this weekend. In preparation for that, I thought I would post these scans - in order to make the ornaments I took each set of two and went to my Jasc Photo Shop and did the four per page landscape, which gave me eight packets just the right size for the ornaments.

If you notice, there are two seed packets (candytuft and sweet peas) that are in the red, white and blue theme. One year for the 4th of July, I made placecards for everyone's seat using those two. What I did was printed them on cardstock, glued two together, right sides out (of course-LOL), with a small wooden skewer inside to make it like a little sign. I then made small double point banners with white paper, put the names on the banners, and glued them at the bottoms where it says Burt's. I made the banners furl a little at each side. I then took small terracotta planter pots, planted an herb in each and stuck the little "signs" in each one, placed them around the table, and voila!!! It was so much fun, the table looked and smelled great, and everyone got a little something to take home!! The kids especially got excited to know they had their own little plant!! You could use flowers or ferns (love ferns) or sedums, little grasses or sweet alyssum, or that wonderful Diamond Frost!!!! You don't have to wait for Independence Day, either! It would be fun, using all the packets, for a garden party or ladies tea!!

I hear rain.......what a pleasant sound.....what a blessing!!! Have a very lovely day, my sweet friends, and remember, be still sometimes, and know!!!

Blessings,
Marji

Pansies...that's for thoughts...

Oh, I escaped from work for a little bit - the guys went to play golf last week so I get a few hours off now.....love it!

Thought I would take a little while to sort through some goodies and look what I found!! I LOVE old calendars (couldn't you tell???) and most especially ones with flowers AND birds!! So here is a fabulous 1898 Pansy calendar with an adorable bluebird!! Thought maybe you could use bits of this in a nice piece of art :) - so charming!!

I am waiting for my darling youngest daughter to come bring me lunch - yes, I actually get lunch today, too!!! What a day!! And there she comes - oh, with something that smells good!!! Love you guys!! Have a lovely day, my friends!!!

Blessings and birdsong,
Marji

Kreativ Blogger - I am honored!!

My very sweet new friend Lynn, of Lynn's Lovelies, has presented me with this award, and I am speechless!! (Well, almost!!) What I am is honored and filled with gratitude for this lovely blogging community we have!! Now I am to name seven things that I love so here goes:

1. My Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, whose resurrection we celebrated yesterday.

2. My beautiful spouse, given to me by my Lord, as my soul-mate and help-mate.

3. My wonderful children, grandchildren and all our family, and all of my wonderful and worldwide friends.

4. My ocean, my sea, my wonderful beach roses, the smells and sights and sand between my toes.

5. My music, all kinds, all flavors, all venues, they each have whispers and shouts.

6. My poetry - I love reading it and writing it - it soothes the soul.

7. My garden - all the flowers and plants and rocks and antiques and benches and trellises - the birds and the bunnies and the kitties - the textures and colors and scents.

And now I would like to pass this wonderful award on to some other worthy bloggers I like!! Blessings to all!!!

Dawn - The Feathered Nest

Erin - House of Turquoise

Becky - Wing and A Prayer

Beth - Barn Owl Studio

Tami - Aunt Mimi's Creations

Dale - Sea Dream Studio

Lynn - Sea Angels



Have a lovely and peaceful evening, my sweet friends!! And thank you again, Lynn, for your thoughtful kindness!!

Blessings,
Marji

He Is Risen....Indeed!!

Thank you, Lord, for a glorious day in which to celebrate our Salvation by your innocent blood and the promise of God, our Father, that because you live, we, too, shall live!!

We had a lovely Easter with all the family and then my fabulous hubby went out into our yard and brought me in those gorgeous yellow roses he grew - we had a mimosa together and celebrated life!!!

I hope you all had a wonderful Easter, as well, and I leave you with a prayer for a safe and healthy day!!

Blessings to you all,
Marji

Bunny Thoughts

A couple of Easter bunnies to make your day!! Been a crazy week - just wanted to say hello and wish you all a very Happy Easter!!! Be safe and enjoy!!

Blessings and bunnies,
Marji

Restful Recipes

Good morning, sweet friends!! We made it through, all the plants are safe, thanks be to God!!! We are tired but we are grateful!!!

Now I can get back to some of these other good things I had to put off - like these recipes for sleep pillows and sachets!! First, let me tell you a few things about sleep pillows that you may not know. It does not actually have to be a pillow. it can be a sachet that hangs on a door knob or bedpost, as it does not have to be under your pillow to work. That being said, you can make them in sachet form for say, a baby's room, for soothing sleep without worry about a pillow in a crib. Or hang on in the guest room, or simply because some people are uncomfortable with anything under their pillow (you remember the Princess and the Pea!!). They can be made as a flat pillow, and I do not still have my pictures of some that I made, but I did them with various cotton fabrics, including vintage ticking and vintage pillow case fabric or old linen, and dressed them up with simple laces and ribbons.

Marji's Sleep Pillow

1 cup sweet woodruff
1/2 cup lavender flowers
1 cup hops flowers
1/2 cup pinhead orris root tossed with 1/2 teaspoon
oil of lavender

Flower-Mint Sleep Mix

2 cups rose petals
2 cups spearmint (Mint the Best)
1 tablespoon ground cloves
1 tablespoon pinhead orris root


Headache Pillow

2 parts lavender
1 part lemon thyme
1 part lemon verbena
1 part sweet woodruff
a pinch of rosemary


Geranium Pillow

4 parts rose scented geranium leaves
1 part lavender
1 part hops
1 or 2 drops rose geranium oil on a small piece of
cotton wool

Baby's Gentle Sleep Pillow

2 parts lavender flowers or rose petals
1 part sweet woodruff


I hope you have fun experimenting with these!! Aromatherapy is a very old practice and I am glad to see that we are coming back to it. No self-respecting Victorian lady would lay down without a frilly little pillow filled with lavender or rose petals!! Sweet dreams, my special friends, and restful thoughts of spring!!!

Blessings,
Marji

Well, my sweet friends.......I did not get ANY of the good things I meant to post done yesterday - not only is it spring in the nursery business, but we are now expecting a FREEZE tonight - in April!!! Last time that happened was like 1912 - so we are frantically bringing plants inside to prepare and worked all day yesterday - but I will leave you with this gorgeous (ahem....1912) calendar for your artwork! Aren't they lovely? And see the lady with the muffler - I need one of those - in April, in South Texas......who knew??? Have a WARM and lovely day, blessed friends!

Blessings and blankets,
Marji

Seed Packet Ornaments Part 1

Here are some of the ornaments I made, wow, back in 2004, with the seed packets! It has been cloudy so the pictures are not as good as I had hoped, but I am going to try to do a free tutorial on making these and so I will take more photos with the sun shining!! These were fun to make, and I hung them on a three foot white feather tree, with eggs and dried florals, and had it on my sideboard for spring and Easter! I put aqua paper grass around the base and put more eggs there. I had a picture of it but my computer crashed several years ago and I lost the pictures I had saved there....so sad. But lessons learned!!

It promises to be a crazy Saturday over at the nursery so I am off - and tonight is my hubby's birthday party - so I will post tomorrow, more goodies, hopefully the herbal recipes, and the tutorial!! Have a lovely Saturday, my friends, and listen to the birds singing!!

Blessings and bird song,
Marji

Our Awesome God!!

You know, after I took those pictures yesterday, I really got to thinking about beauty, and art, and creation........and as I stood looking at the above pictured pink and white double petunia, I realised that we come from the Great Creator, the One Artist, and I was still, and knew.

It never ceases to amaze me, being in this business of growing plants, living things, how a tiny, rather ugly, nondescript seed can become the most beautiful flower. How, no matter what we can create, be it art, or music, no matter how beautiful it is, it pales in comparison to a simple flower or the song of a tiny sparrow that only He can create. Does this intimidate me and keep me from even attempting art? Quite the contrary, it gives me courage to continually get creative, and have fun doing so, and not take myself too seriously, because I know that my talents come from my heavenly Father, and He gave us the natural beauty for inspiration!

Thank you, lovely friends, because He gave us each other, as well, and as we go about the busyness of daily living, we give each other nurture, conversation and inspiration, and I am grateful for it all. Have a most lovely and blessed day!

Blessings in abundance,
Marji

New Friends & Baby Plants

Look at the pretty baby!! That is a tiny little pink polka dot plant amongst a sea of tiny white ones - both my favorites!!
This is a bunch of new babies we propagated from a cool hanging basket!!
This is the new Proven Winners oxalis called Charmed Wine.....indeed!!! Totally awesome shade plant!!
These are my COOL geraniums in all kinds of PINKS.....mmmmmmm!!!
And, of course, my Diamond Frost - wish I could send you all a sample!!!!

What a day, my friends!! It was SOOOOO windy here (40 mph) that my computer went down FIVE times at work!! Drove me nuts. Then, I find out that my printer, scanner went down too!! A Charlie Brown ARRRGGG to that!! But, my sweet, computer geek nephew saved the day and fixed all so I will be able to scan more sweet pix for you!! Thank you, Jake-man!!

I went ot visit Dawn's site (The Feathered Nest) at lunch and saw she had also posted some images of seed packets and was I ever surprised (we MUST be soul sisters) as I have the same kind of seed packets and actually used them to make some ornaments several years back - I will take some pix tomorrow to show you and if I can figure it all out, I will post a free tutorial this weekend for you to do the same. They are very cool for spring and Easter decorating!!

I have to say thank you to all who have visited me, you are all such sweet people and I am so happy to meet you all! I love this blogging thing because I have met such wonderful people!! You all inspire me to do so much more than I could ever have done alone! Thank you and Bless you!!

Until tomorrow, dear friends, have a very lovely evening!

Blessings, Marji