A quiet and thankful day

Thanksgiving was actually pretty relaxing. With out guests coming we woke up a bit later and enjoyed a nice breakfast. My husband cooked a duck dinner with scalloped potatoes and yummy carrots. Meanwhile we worked a little bit on straightening up the house (for our impending teenage birthday party with BOYS!). I put the clear glaze on the ceramic Christmas ornaments we made and finally had to clear my crafts off the table so we could enjoy our Thanksgiving dinner. I didn't even set up the table with a fabric table cloth (sigh) but it was simpler with kids just to enjoy dinner. My youngest was disappointed with the duck and complained and sulked a bit. She suddenly became a big turkey fan. But we loved it!

Friday morning was breakfast in bed for our teenager. Later that morning found me taking my daughter to the mall with her friend. I must be insane! I really try to avoid the mall whenever I can and Friday of all days to go! But the girls really had fun and I survived well enough. The first two items purchased never had their security tags removed. So since I was carrying them I basically beeped every alarm in the mall. Suddenly on the other side of the mall I realized that it was me. How embarrassing!

We were back for my business meeting with friends. We are in the process of setting up a local "store" and are just beginning our business plan. Everything is working well at this point with a few rough bumps along the way. But its a learning process!

They left close to 5pm. The plan was to head to the movies after dinner and cake but my husband kind of derailed that by making "fresh" pasta for our lasagna. He had a package of lasagna noodles from the store so I'm not sure the reasoning on this. In any case it was a rather stressful and frenzied rush out the door without cake. I am amazed at how much I dislike a change in plans sometimes. The handmade pasta under other circumstances would have been delightful but I just couldn't enjoy it. Well 60 seconds is not how long I intended to spend eating dinner.

Thanksgiving

I have had a wonderful few weekends with activities for myself. My husband took over watching all the girls while I was off having fun. On Nov. 10th I took a PMC (precious metal clay) class at Sharon Arts in Peterborough, NH. It was a full day class and was quite fun. The clay is quite precious though and very expensive but it did give me some motivations to pursue working on a small scale with my ceramics. I made 3 pendants -- two for myself and one for my youngest. She was reluctant to let me out of her sight and I promised her a special gift.

Last weekend I spent with my Children's writers group at Whispering Pines in Rhode Island on a writers retreat. It has been quite some time since I focussed my attention on writing and it was a relaxing and quiet weekend. The girls missed me and I think my husband did too. They were busy painting glaze on ceramic ornaments for our tree this year.

We will be having a quiet Thanksgiving this year with just our own family. Hopefully it won't be too quiet here! We have a birthday to celebrate on Friday too!


These are two Etsy treasuries that I would like to share.

Busy, busy ... as a bee

This fall has found us pretty busy and we had put off taking the honey off the hives. We leave a lot of honey for the bees but have to compact the hives by removing the supers (top thinner boxes) so the bees can manage to keep the hive warm enough all winter. The poor things have to generate a lot of heat to keep warm. But cold weather is not good for honey harvesting because it doesn't flow and the extraction process is slow and frustrating. The cold weather did allow us to do this on our porch with out the bees around though.




My chore for the week will be bottling the honey and getting the wax ready for candle making.




Speaking about busy....Wow, things have really picked up in my Etsy shop this past week. I sold all my pottery rooster recipe/card holders! I will be making more of these as time allows and may have some ready in time for Christmas too.



Obviously everyone is busy getting ready for the holidays now. I am spending a lot of time working on my custom orders and trying to fit in some new things for the shop too. I finished up this cute pair of owls as a custom order.



And I finished up this adorable little baby penguin.



Another sweet bird treasury on Etsy to share...

Fresh Hatching

Fresh from the kiln ... are these little pottery chickens. These are pretty much all singles and each are painted with their own unique colors. I will be adding these to my etsy shop gradually within the next two weeks.





I also wanted to share my lucky find of vintage lily of the valley flowers. I can't believe that I was able to get each bundle for 75 cents. I have seen them online for nearly $5 each. Of course I couldn't help getting much too many but I hope I can finish up some nice wedding birds with these.



Tonight we enjoyed our Halloween tricking and treating too. We carved our own home grown pumpkins!



And these are my "little" monsters and a friend.

The eve of Halloween

This has been the weekend for kids birthday and Halloween parties. The rainy day has us indoors and catching up on a few things (and watching the leaves fall outside in the wind). The hot water heater leak all over the basement floor was not a fun clean up and we finally moved a dehumidifier in there.

Another Etsy treasury to share...

Bird's nests

I have never been interested in planning for Christmas until after Thanksgiving. My only exception to that rule is that we start working out the details on our own homemade holiday cards towards the middle of November. I have always hated seeing Christmas stuff even before Halloween is over.

This year though I realized that if I want to sell any Christmas things in my shop I am going to have to get an earlier start. And so I have been thinking on this a little and came up with these little bird's nests on tiny clothespin clips for the tree. The majority of our own tree decorations are birds though we include all the special vintage ornaments that we have treasured over the years. Last year's tree falling disaster really destroyed quite a few of our ornaments so I am determined to make a few more this year.

So here is my first set of ornaments for the holidays which I am selling in my shop...



Our school canoe trip which I chaperoned was a lot of fun. The wind was crazy though and made the canoing a little difficult. I can't include the pictures though because there were so many school children in them. But I think the kids learned a lot and had fun too.

Enjoying the colors

The trees outside are so beautiful this year. Every time I look outside I am stunned at the colors. Even rainy days look bright and warm.



I am off to chaperone a school canoe trip this morning. It should be a fun and wet day! We should have fun exploring the river banks and discovering all sorts of interesting things.

I finished up on these two birds yesterday. It was supposed to be my day to run errands but the hot water heater had leaked all over the basement floor so I was "hostage" to my home again -- waiting for a plumber that might or might not show up. Luckily he did and its all fixed now -- just a bit of a mess for me to clean up.





And finally I wanted to share this cute little treasury on etsy that includes my little bird by wildlifer78.



Another wedding treasury called "Going to the Chapel" by beadgaldesigns includes a pair of my wedding birds.