Library books

Doodle stitching is a fun book about creating your own art for your stitching projects.  Saw a newer version at a book store in Kelowna!

Dropped Threads 3 - Beyond the small circle is a compilation of essays from Canadian women about personal discoveries they have made in their lives.  A good read!

The English Patient is a novel about love and war and how complicated the dance can be always balancing what you need and want in juxtaposition to the needs and wants of those in your immediate circle and how the past of each person affects the whole. I would like to watch the movie now and compare the stories!!

Here if you need me is a story about a woman who lost her husband (police officer) early in her married life and her experience of widowhood and her choice to fulfill his dream of becoming a chaplain to a search and rescue team.  She is always drawn to discover what use she can be to the people she encounters in the course of "working" to discover that love is the common thread.  A good read!

One Native Life details a wide variety of life experiences that Richard has come to view as blessings in his life.  A very good read!


In the skin of a Lion depicts life in the 1930s of the people who were instrumental in the building of many of the infrastructure projects in cities in large cities of Canada. A good read!


Therese

Music in the Park - Whitemud Drive

This is our first time at the Music in the Park for this year.  It started last week.  It was threatening rain tonight but we decided to go anyway.  We needed to drop off books at the library and renew our membership.  It is Seniors week so we were able to renew for half price  $10!  This band is blue grass band from Edmonton.  They were happy it did not rain!!

Therese

Library books & book club

 This is a bit of a funky book in that everything is so illustrative, colourful and full of metaphors and so on!!  It may be that is just her style. It was a good read but just a bit more challenging that an easy reading book.  Black people in the city is the theme!!

 My Book Club partners and I are reading this Iyanla Vanzant book which is written in a ``Book of days`` format.  We are currently on Day 17 - boundaries.  It was very enlightening for me to realize that boundaries are established as you individuate and define yourself and make choices about who you are.  This library book which I picked up weeks ago by Beverly Engel talks about boundaries and fit very well into the information I gleaned from our book club discussion.  I am meeting regularly via SKYPE with my two friends from Ontario who were part of our book club in Ontario.

Therese

Library books - crafty

I found this book very interesting and loved that there were lessons inside to create a little art quilt with interesting techniques and special considerations for using art techniques in the project.  Will be looking out to buy this one or another very similar for playing with art quilts.


This book was totally fun as well and had some art quilting in the back.  I have made a few notes on what I want to remember: art quilts to practice techniques (111), seminole strip (103), equilateral triangles (104), half square triangle strip & curved lines (105), zigzag panel, quartered rectangles, collage elements & prairie points (107), assymetrical log cabin (111), Quick piecing half square triangles (113), QP quarter square triangle units (114), QP flying geese (115), QP Diamond in a square (115), Bindings (118), colour blocks (stack & whack), tilted pinwheel, tilted star (88-91).

This greeting card book had some neat ideas that I would like to try so I have made some notes:  Embroidery (95), envelopes (99), needlework (167), pen and ink (182), resist (205), serendipity (215), sewing (216-17), watercolour (263-5) wire (271) and woodcut (272).  I found some cute wood cuts at a garage sale on the weekend so I may give that one a try  soon!

These two were so full of instructions on creating some little projects I decided to put them here so I can find them again when I get to the place where I have time to play a bit with stitching and crochet!


This one has some simple cross stitch that only need a few colours so I thought I would see about taking a shot at making some motifs for my other projects with those instructions.   I have taken photos of the designs.  

Donna`s book has a lot of really cute designs to stitch that might be appropriate for making motifs for other projects.  Here is a list of those I was interested in for future reference:  butterfly (34), borders (39), blossoms (50), pansy (51), spools (63), hearts (63), apple (77), seasons (84-5), houses (84-95) and letters (124).

 Helen`s book has a lot of large projects but many of the smaller elements could easily be made up as motifs so I have noted a few:  seed packets (24-5  35-6), flowers (31-3), medallions (55-7), herbs (74-7), borders (86-7), seasons 88-91), insects (100-1), apples (105), fruit (108-11), garden alphabet (120-1).  That garden alphabet is very cute and they are all in squares so very suitable to create motifs!!
Therese

Richard's reno is coming along nicely!

 Richard's reno is coming along nicely!!  The popcorn ceiling is gone, the patching and mudding has been done and some of it has been primed.  He only has a few lights left to put in and that will also be done.  The closet will be next to finish up with drywall and mudding.  The kitchen is almost ready for cabinets!!  There is some electrical to finish up before that can happen.  It looks wonderful so far and I expect things will go fairly quickly once he has had the final inspections done.  The fun part of choosing flooring, wall colours, etc will come after that.       Therese

Trip to Calgary!

 Kale knows how to spell his name with large and small letters and also Mina, Mom and Dad!!  He was very carefully writing them up and down on the sticky strips and you can see them on the wall in the quilt picture below.  Good job, Kale!

We visited the kids this week to drop off the tomato plants I started for Suzanne.  Richard decided this year that with the schedule he has for this summer it would be too hard to keep it growing so he bowed out on a tomato plant.

 It was a beautiful day and the kids enjoyed playing in the backyard!!  They are always busy! Mina did a good job of preparing some special little gifts/cards for her Brownie leaders as that is coming to a close this coming weekend.  Good job, Mina.

 Suzanne made this beautiful quilt for Mina!!  Love it!!  Circles, none the less!!  Beautiful heart stitching all the way around them and then a beautiful free motion quote on the back side.  It is a duvet cover which can be used by itself in the summer and with a quilt inside for winter.  Mina and Suzanne tye dyed the outside fabric!!
Great job, Suzanne!!

There are bathroom renovations going on at their house!!  Things are lining up and hopefully by the end of June the project will be finished and they can enjoy their summer!!

Therese

Transplants are in!

 I have been rooting some coleus in water on the window sill of the kitchen window since we got home from Winnipeg for the front flower bed.  They were very well rooted and upon reading on the internet how to go about putting them into the flower bed most people did not recommend water propagation because the roots are more brittle and don't take quite so easily to being transplanted.  That must be what happened to the last bunch that I had propagated.  They all died!!  So anyway, I just thought I had nothing to lose to put them out and we shall see how it goes.  I will keep them well watered and hopefully they will all take and I will be able to take cuttings again in the fall.  I had five different varieties last fall which I was really looking forward to having in the front this summer.  Lesson learned!!

 I started some Sunshine squashes for the garden when I got home from Winnipeg and they have grown very well.  They are ready for the garden.  I got the seeds from Mom.  These are the ones she grows for "pumpkins" because they are so beautifully orange inside.  Hopefully, there will be enough for both of us this year.  They are going into my community garden plot.

I transplanted my tomatoes to my square foot gardens this week.  They have grown so much since I put them into individual pots and are all looking very good.  I have put the indeterminate ones on the outside and hope to keep the suckers from growing.  Madeleine found this to be very beneficial to the yield of her tomatoes last year.  I have Kron Prince and Visitation Valley.  The determinate ones - Bush Beefsteak and Tribe's Tobique I have put on the other side of the mesh.  They should require less staking and sucker removal.  We shall see!!  I have to stay ahead of the watering this year and hopefully having the squares on the ground will be better for moisture retention.

Most of my garden is up.  It took the beans until this week.  Apparently, they really need the heat to get started and it has been the better part of a week with good day time and night time temperatures.  I am really glad they came up.  We really enjoy them in the summer.

I had lots of extra tomatoes this year.  I have Peggy three, five or six to Maria when she was here, six for Suzanne and 3 for her friend.  I sold about a dozen and half on Kijiji.  They were not as quick to go as last year but I think because of the early warm temperatures lots of people had bought them early.  Hopefully, they kept them covered or inside til this week because it was very close to freezing several nights a couple of weeks ago.

So there are no longer plants to cart in and out!!  The houseplants will regain their place in the front window.

Therese

Canoe news!

We have been considering our plans for canoeing this summer!  We bought some foam blocks for the canoe last week and tried them out on the car the other day. They are not sufficient for properly securing the canoe to the car so we will have to find a roof rack before we can carry the canoe up there.   We can still use the trailer like we did last year. We shall see!  A work in progress.
We bought PFDs for ourselves as well.  We had ones that came with the canoe last year which worked reasonably well but our new ones fit us much better and are in colours that we like!!!  Lots of pockets too!!  

We bought new paddles as well which are much better sized for us so now we have a few spares.  They will make paddling easier and more effective!!  We bought a dry bag as well for securing what we need to keep dry in the canoe.  A precaution but dry clothes are really nice to have if you can dumped in the lake.
We have also bought a Canoeing Alberta book which will help us decide where we want to go this year.  

Brian has been working on refinishing the canoe seats this winter.  The cane let go last year so Brian ordered some tan webbing to refinish them after watching several You Tube videos of a variety of ways of doing it.  He dug out all the cane along with the glue that held them in.  Next, he steamed and bent some small wood slats of cherry to fit in the slot.  Once they were in place he filled the slot with waterproof glue to create a solid seat.  Finally, he applied several coats of marine varnish.  Then it was a process of stapling the webbing into place and weaving the others across to create a woven seat.  They are looking really good.  I expect they will be just fine and will last us as long as we will be using the canoe.

Therese

New shoes!

I have a new pair of shoes!!   I have been looking for leather walking shoes in second hand stores for quite a while with no luck!!  We looked at several places in the city and found the very best selection at The Sole Experience on Whyte Avenue!!  I wore them out of the store and they are just what I wanted.  Looking forward to a summer of walking in something more stylish than runners!!

Therese

Maria's CAVA show

 We headed to the city to attend Maria's CAVA show last week.  This is one of the murals they have on the outside of the building.  Pretty cool in that the art is a mosaic of squares that were obviously painted by different people.  I expect they were given the squares with the subject lightly put on with pencil lines and they painted as they saw fit.  The colour coordinate reasonably well so they may have been working with the same paint pots! I love the look!!
You can check out her website here to see her work and the shows she has coming up.
http://mariasieben.weebly.com/

The CAVA gallery has changed quite a bit since last year.  They have a new team in charge. I know that there has been quite a few changes in other aspects of the organization as well.  The executive director is a young woman from New Brunswick. There were several artists' work on display and Maria was quite happy with how the show went up and the display of her pieces.  It is always a bit like a family reunion when we go!!  We had supper at Bulgogi house with Sylvia before the show!!

Therese

Library books

Both of these books are stories of aboriginal people dealing with the challenges of their lives.
Indian Horse I brought in for a book club in Red Deer but the book did not arrive in time for me to read it before the book club evening.

Therese

Gardening with Paula

I went and helped Paula with some gardening on the weekend!  We put in a lot of beans.  I used the seeder for several of the rows which makes quick work of the process but getting the rows really straight was a bit of a challenge at first.  Those were the beans for drying!  The others were beans for eating fresh.  In all about 12 different varieties.  She is part of a seed exchange so these were all very interesting beans with cool names and awesome colours too!!  Will have to see what they look like and taste like later this year!!
Therese

Flowers in the perennial bed!!

My yellow day lilies are blooming very nicely and have grown to be a few plants now!

The flowers are blooming in the perennial garden!! The pink flowers are from a ground cover with silvery looking leaves.  Will have to look up what it is.

 The iris on the left is a very large one that I got at a garage sale last year.  Not sure if it will have more than one stem this year.  It has grown significantly since last year. The other iris is what I got last fall and had no idea what colour they were going to be.

 The tigerlilies from Brian's Mom are blooming as well.  There are quite a few more coming.

The yellow siberian iris is beautiful and a surprise.  It was included in the mix in that bunch of irises I got. There is another one that has yet to bloom.
Some very short day lilies that are yellow and so nicely defined.
I love them!!
Therese