A Very Sweet Kind of Valentines Day

I'm just wondering how many people buy Valentine's Day presents that say THIS on the bottom of the box??

Lol lol lol

I thought that was so absolutely funny!!! Steve and I decided to buy each other a Valentine's Day present. We needed a new mattress for our bed. Vodeeohdodo! (In honor of Shirley Williams who passed away last week).

We decided that our memory foam mattress was going on 8 years and could probably stand an upgrade. It was getting a little too soft and too saggy.  So we decided to pick up another 12 inch thick memory foam mattress, this time made by Nectar. The reviews were good and we decided this would be our gift to each other. This sucker is really heavy!!!  A king size in the box weighs 90 lb. We had to use the dolly cart to get it into the house and up the steps to the bedroom.

Once we got the old mattress lifted up and off the bed and hauled out into the dining room, then we were able to open up this one. The very explicit instructions also came with a little cutting device, similar to a letter opener. It's to make sure you don't cut into the mattress when cutting off the plastic. This thing is shrink wrapped and compressed into a wrapped up tube. I made a video of us unboxing it:

It worked out wonderfully and our other mattress got a new home with someone who really needed one. It is better than filling up a landfill. A single mom who works hard at two jobs needed an upgrade. She lives nearby and we even hauled it over to her house for her on our flat trailer. She was quite grateful, and we were happy to pass it on.

Also on Valentine's Day, my darling Steveio surprised me with some beautiful flowers and a heartfelt message in a thoughtful card. I love the pussywillows in the top as accents.

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What would be a more fitting thing to do on Valentine's Day then attend an event called "Stitches of Love"??

I belong to the Oconto County HCE Homemakers, HCE stands for Home and Community Education. It is a division of the UW Extension Office from the University of Wisconsin. It's origins were a rural gathering of farmer's wives who meet regularly. They share educational skills, tidbits of hints and helpful information, homemaking and gardening skills, recipes and usually a nice lunch. I have belonged to them since 1997 when we lived out in the country on the river.  We get together on a monthly basis, but also we gather with a larger group from other areas as well. 

Two or three times a year we have a gathering called "Stitches of Love". We create fleece tied charity blankets that are given to hospice and cancer patients. We also sew book bags for a program called BooksR4U. This program supplies small rural schools that maybe don't have a lot of funding with extra educational materials for the children. They are given these book bags that are chock full of things like their own very own set of 2 hardcovered reading books, coloring books, notebooks, crayons, rulers, pencils etc. The little schools that are short on funding really appreciate when we bring these in to their students. It's a lot of fun making these and all of the materials are donated.

I bring a sewing machine and work on the book bags. Usually there are three or four other ladies that sew with me, but their main driver lady from their district had a medical emergency and couldn't come. So I was the only one with a sewing machine this time, kept busy working on the book bags.

The ladies spread out, putting groups of two tables together and work on double layers of fleece fabric. They cut slits into the edges all of the way around into tabs that are then slowly and carefully tied into knots.

There's a lot of chitter chatter and laughter going on, while we work on the fleece blankets or cut out fabric for more of the book bags. We take a break for lunch... someone makes a pot of soup, and everyone brings a sandwich cut in half.  We put all the sandwiches on a platter and we all take different ones than what we brought.  Someone also brings desserts and we have coffee and tea. 

There is always something to keep everyone busy.

I managed to get eight fabric book bags completed before lunch time. I hope the children that get these enjoy the treats inside and read their books over and over again.  Some of the rural schools up on the reservation land say some of these kids never owned a book of their very own until they get these from our program. They get to take the books home and they are able to get 2 new books for each child every year.  This is in addition to all of the other supplies that are included too. 

Most of the blankets have one side that is brightly colored printed fleece and the other side is usually a coordinating solid color. This one is so cute with the kitty cats scattered all over the front of it.

On my way home, I dropped off some little Valentine's treats to our kids and grandkids. Who wouldn't love a chocolate brownie adorned with a great big Reese's peanut butter heart and little jelly beans? 

With the leftover frosting I made a special treat for my darling Steve. He likes the leftover frosting spread between graham crackers. It was a fond memory of a childhood treat when he was little. His mom would make them for him and his siblings as a snack. On top of each graham cracker sandwich I stuck in extra jelly bean with a dab of frosting!

So that was how we spent our wonderful Valentine's Day together. And the big bed with it's new mattress in place is going to be a wonderful treat to sleep on each night.

Vodeeohdodo!

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We finished painting the living room and the dining room as I mentioned in my last blog. I still had some trim paint left over so I decided to give a fresh coat to all of our kitchen cabinet doors.  

The first step is that Steve needs to remove every single door handle and drawer pull so I can neatly roll a new layer of fresh paint over the top surface of the doors.

 

I was not about to paint inside and around every cabinet. Just painting the front surface of the doors where the grimy little handprints land. That's what happens when grandchildren and a certain husband who don't use the handles and drawer pulls. They shut cabinets and drawers with the flat palm of the hand, usually wet or full of food!   LOL  When you have white cabinets, this is kind of a yearly event!

After they dry,

then Steve puts all of the

handles and pulls back on.

I did manage to pick up two little sample jars of two different colors of a soft sage or mossy green color. I chose a lighter tone and a darker tone. I want to get rid of the same beige mauve color that was in the dining room and living room. It's also in our kitchen and the upper portion in our master bathroom.  

So I painted both samples onto this extra hunk of wood and set it up above the beadboard in the kitchen. I think the darker looks better. I was worried the lighter might be too light.

I also set it over on top of the wine cabinet by the coffee bar. I think the darker color harmonizes quite well with the counter-tops. So the winner is the darker color called Mossy Meadow.

During the next few days I will work on one little portion of a wall at a time. Everything will require two coats and some taping off around the cabinetry. But it will be nice to brighten it up and get a fresh color there. Kind of like we're doing spring cleaning before spring has sprung?

But amazingly, all of our snow is melted with this warm weather the last few days. There were a few flakes floating down today but everything on the ground has now melted away. This is so absolutely unusual for February in Wisconsin!

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On the quilting side, I have been working on this really bright fun multi-colored quilt. I think I'm going to call it something like Summertime Picnic in America or something like that or Picnic in July? It has such fun colors. These are fabrics from The Pioneer Woman series.

I put together 20 large blocks and actually I did 21 by accident. So there's one left over. Then I flip-flopped and switched around and arranged the blocks on my bed until I made sure there were absolutely no two pieces touching that were of the same fabric.

I think it's going to be a really cute quilt, and it will go up for sale later in my Etsy store. So keep tuned in to my blog to see when it is completed if you are interested.

Once I got the quilt all laid out, then I had to mark each 16" section with a number and a letter so I knew the order in which they needed to be joined together. 1a, 1b, 1c, and then 2a, 2b, 2c etc.

Then I take them back down to my sewing desk in the She Shed and work on my cute little antique Singer Featherweight machine. I put together all of the blocks into rows. Then I join the rows into one large quilt top. I will go around with a couple border pieces to set it off with an accent color and make it into a queen size quilt.

See my helper???

Well, that's about it now on my blog today. Just as I was finishing this up the mailman came with a big box for me????

One of my wonderful blog readers by the name of Linda, (you know who you are!) sent this beautiful box full of very interesting historic quilting and needlework books. What a delightful thing to read by the fireplace in the evenings as we finish out the rest of winter and wait for spring.

On a health update,

our family member is doing as well as can be expected, 

and we are doing what we can to help. 

An "A-Door-able" Project and Stitches of Love for HCE Homemakers

So what are these goofy people up to today? Steveio and Karen went off on a journey right before supper to pick up something else for their farmhouse.  What the heck are they up to now?

We sure are silly!

What did we get? 

Well, it's a door! 

For an adorable project.

Steve was looking on Marketplace and happened to see this old vintage wooden door. It exactly matches the ones that are already in our house. It just so happens, when the bedrooms were reconfigured to add a master bath, the door in the new opening leading from the living room to our bedroom is a modern one. Not vintage. It's actually a hollow core cheap door that just isn't very nice. Steve says every time he looks at it, he hates it. So he's been keeping his eye out to look for a matching vintage door of the same era and style of our house. 

And he finally found one!  And it's the RIGHT size!  Located just a few houses down from our younger daughter's rural home, we buzzed out to get it right away.

It's going to need a little work. Some sanding and fresh paint. We will put our really cool vintage door knob on it and remove the brass one that's there. He managed to bargain with the guy and got it for only $20.

It's straight and not warped and not cracked. So in the next couple days we will get it sanded down and I will get out my handy dandy paintbrush. Soon it will be hanging up in it's glory and be "A-Door-able". We will post the cheap modern hollow core door on Marketplace for someone else to buy.

While we were picking up the door, I happened to look down and see my first wooly caterpillar of the season. Look how wide the band is on his belly! You know what that means? A long snowy hard winter.

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Today was a pretty busy day for me. I got up early and got my sewing machine packed up and ready to go. I belong to an organization that's offered through the University of Wisconsin Extension division called HCE, which stands for Home and Community Education. It's nickname is called the "Homemakers".  Kind of like 4H for old ladies!  LOL

It originally started as a group of rural farm women who would gather together once a month to share a lesson or do a volunteer task and share a meal and share friendship and companionship. I was invited to belong back in 1997 by my neighbor Charlotte when we lived out on the river.  I took a hiatus when we moved away to Chilton, but now renewed my membership when we moved back to Oconto. 

Today was "Stitches of Love". Once a year, we donate book bags (120 of them!) to some impoverished school districts in the North. Some of these are on the Native American reservation land. They are for the Head Start children and some of the upper grades. In these book bags we include much needed school supplies. Everybody gets a new notebook, pencils, erasers, ruler, glue sticks, crayons and then one reading book and one coloring book geared towards their age. Then throughout the year we knit up a stash of desperately needed mittens, hats and slippers. These are tucked into each bag as well. We get donations of fabric and it's our job to sew up 120 book bags! Just like this:

We also get a grant for a large purchase of quality fleece material. The ladies spend a lot of time stretching it out on large tables and cutting all of the little slits around the edges. They sit around the tables and tie hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of these knots.  The fleece blankets are given to people in our community who are in hospice and need a little bit of comfort. Each one is tagged with a little tag from the HCE group and they are given free of charge to people who really need them.

We are able to secure the use of the Brazeau Town Hall for the day, free of charge. They have plenty of room for us to do our work. The ladies gather the tables into groups and start laying out the sheets of colorful fleece fabrics and coordinate colors for contrasting tops and bottoms.

Other ladies, including myself,

 line up our sewing machines and

 get to work sewing the book bags!

It is a room full of joyful camaraderie, with the spirit of giving and helping being the loving force behind our nimble fingers and the whirring stitches on our sewing machines.

The fleece blanket tying ladies are all sitting around the tables, reminiscent of an old fashioned quilting bee. Of course, these tied quilts or blankets go a lot faster than traditional quilting. But we are doing it for charity and we are truly blessed that we get help with the purchase of the expensive good quality fabric needed to make these tied blankets.  There is a lot of fun, chitter chatter, and laughter. 

I stitched away on my machine 

in the morning 

and made up a whole stack of book bags. 

We made a pretty good dent in what is needed, and there are some in our stash of materials already assembled from gals who couldn't make it. They took the fabric home in advance and created them on their own time.

While we were doing this, one of our leaders of the group, Joy, was working on her special chili that she makes for us for lunch. Other ladies brought in some desserts and we had a fine meal for our lunch break.

Once we were done, we packed away all of our supplies and sewing machines. The fabric turned into now tied blankets needs to have a little personalized tag hand sewn onto each one. Here are 10 of them going home with my neighbor Charlotte, so she can take care of this batch and get them ready to be used as needed.

It's like each one is a special hug to the recipient from all of us who wish to donate our time and efforts to create these items.

Oh, once a year we also have a Cultural Arts Competition of items within our district. We held that in July with a nice outdoor picnic at Joy's farm. It's kind of like a big ole 4-H county fair for old ladies! I had entered five items in our local chapter and three of them were considered good enough to go to the state judging that occurred in September. The director from our County had attended the state event, which is from all of the counties around Wisconsin. She brought our items back from the main State-Wide judging. 

I was quite pleased to see that my coffee cup quilt took a first place, and my socks also took a first place! Then my woven woolen rug took a second place. That is an honor!

 It was nice to be recognized for the cultural arts that I am able to produce in my little home studio.  Now these three items can be placed in my Etsy shop for sale:

https://kareninthewoods.etsy.com/

It's time to wrap up this blog.  Maybe the next one will be another campground review, or maybe a post of the newest quilt I am working on, or maybe a big trenching project we did in our backyard?  I guess you will just have to tune in to see! 

Beadboard Doors - HCE - and Chandelier Facelift

I think my National Folk Farmhouse Kitchen is done?

Now that all of the ends of the cabinets are covered with the beadboard panels, there was a little bit left.  From the remaining sheet of beadboard, Steve was able to cut out five more smaller panels. He had to really carefully plan the cuts, so the beadboard pattern would be equally balanced and centered on each side where it sets into the door. These were then glued to each cabinet door of the island, using contact cement. 

He utilized my rolling pin to help make sure that each piece of beadboard was firmly pressed down onto the door panel.

Once they were in place, he went around the edges with a bead of caulk to finish in the joint all around.  After the caulk was dry, I gave each of the cabinet doors two coats of paint. I was very pleased with the final result. It looks like they were originally made that way with beadboard.

The first thing this morning, before he even had his second cup of coffee, Steve got the doors all mounted back onto the island. He made sure they were level and each one shut perfectly and was correctly lined up.

These two smaller ones were just regular cabinet doors on each side of the island stove. A while back, we added pull out Rev-A-Shelf kits to make one a trash bin and the other one a recycling bin.

This is the back side of the island that faces the sink.

I'm really glad we did this. It was a lot of work. I wasn't sure if I wanted a white kitchen, because this was Steve's idea.  But now it looks so bright and cheery, I smile when I walk into the room. 

My Oh My, 

this really dressed up our 

National Folk Farmhouse Kitchen!  

I also repotted a couple clumps of ivy that I had rooting in water. I found the perfect shade of red flower pots in our newest store in Oconto, a Dollar Tree. So for a dollar apiece I got these pretty little flower pots that look so nice in the window over the kitchen sink.

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Tuesday was pretty busy for me. Since we've moved back to Oconto, I rejoined with my HCE Homemakers group. HCE stands for Home and Community Education. I jokingly say it's kind of like 4-H for Old Farm ladies! LOL

Various times throughout the year we meet with other HCE groups from around the county and work on volunteer projects. We call it "Stitches of Love". 

The two main projects we worked on this time were making fleece tied blankets that go to cancer chemo patients and other hospice related recipients. Also we sew little fabric book bags for a program called Books R4U that gives four-year-old Head Start children in our county story books, coloring books, crayons, pencils etc and a nice little fabric book bag to keep them in.

The day was filled with laughter and fun, and especially a nice feeling because we were doing something for someone else. Donors furnish us with the funds for the nicer quality fleece fabric as well as donations and sponsors for the supplies and fabric for the book bags. It's so nice to be back with my familiar ladies again. I had been a member of this group for 13 years before we moved away in 2012.

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We spent the rest of the evening assisting a family member in the hospital. It was a long evening and we didn't get home until after 11 p.m. Prayers are still greatly appreciated!

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This afternoon I had a little project of my own to work on. While Steve is still finishing up some of the electrical ceiling boxes with the new wiring, I felt it was time to give a little face-lift to the beautiful crystal chandelier that hangs in our bathroom. Today was the day, because he was going to be putting it back up soon. So if I was going to do anything to it, I better get my own butt in gear.

The chandelier is beautiful, and it's actually newer, but it is made to look old. I did not care for the aged distressed look on the surface of the metal. So my plan was to dress it up with a spray can of chrome metallic paint.

Before I started removing any of the crystals, I took very close photographs of which ones were located from which little hole in what part of the light fixture. There are six different configurations and shapes of crystals... some had three beads above the main crystal and other ones only had one bead above the main crystal. The crystals were three different shapes and three different sizes as well. I wanted to be sure that I was going to put it back together the same way that it came apart.

(wow... those crystals were dirty!)

There were 25 various strands hanging from the framework, and if you count even each little crystal bead of each strand, that means that there were 75 individual crystals in total. I didn't want to mess anything up.

My plan was to remove the crystals and then paint the frameworks silver. Everything else in our bathroom is silver and chrome. The legs on the clawfoot tub, the faucets on the sink, the other light fixture over the sink and the metal trim on the shower are all silver.

One hint I learned long ago, is that after you remove any of the glass shades (or crystals in this case), cover up the light sockets with pieces of tin foil crumpled up around them to make sure that none of the spray paint gets down inside of the light socket.

It didn't take me long to spritz spritz spritz and I had it covered from all directions with silver paint. I did that work down in the basement, away from anything that could get overspray on it.

While that was drying, I was able to clean all of the crystals in a vinegar and water solution and rinse them off after a little soak in Dawn dish soap as well. They came out gleaming, and I wiped each one to a pretty glistening finish.

The other part of the face-lift that I performed was on these 4 yellowish plastic faux candle sleeves that go over the sockets. They were an interesting vintagey looking color, but they were more yellow than what all of the trim in the bathroom. So out came my little paintbrush and dip-dab-dip-dab I had them all spruced up as well. Now they will harmonize a little better and look good against the silvery light fixture and glittery crystals.

Steve was working hard to finish installing the last few ceiling fixture boxes so the lights could be securely attached in proper fashion according to code. Of course, the old wiring was just two old wires stuck through the plaster ceiling. That is all non-functioning and safely removed.

Once the main chandelier fixture frame was dry, I carefully put back each little strand of crystals. Following my photographs from earlier, I was able to put everything back in place. Each little strand of crystals is attached by a thin fine keyring type circular metal band. They're very fine and tiny and you cannot pull too hard or they would bend out of shape. Soon the fixture was back together and Steve was on standby, anxiously waiting for me to hand it to him. As I held the chandelier up from below, he was up on the ladder above doing the proper connections. Soon it was back to its former glory, but with a nice face lift of glittering silver instead of the rusty and vintage distressed frame of before.

I think it made a nice improvement and looks much more feminine and elegant for my master bathroom!

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We are due for more snow again tonight. It started to snow right before supper. We made up a nice hot supper of chicken vegetable soup and crackers. Perfect for a snowy evening. It is even sticking to the windows. 

It's starting to get blustery and blowing and really coming down out there. They said only a few inches, but we will see what is what by morning.

Time now to settle in while he watches an old western or two, and I am going to sew on my quilt...  or soak in my tub and gaze up at my face-lifted chandelier!