Fourth of July Crafts Part Deux

Oh my gosh, we were just watching the documentary "Gasland", have you seen it??? So very unsettling and upsetting! I had no idea the amount of drilling for natural gas that has gone on across our country and the consequences of it. SCARY!

I'm so sorry, I can't seem to get it together to participate in Rednesday and Vintage Thingie Thursday this week (with hubby off for summer vacation). I will peek in, I couldn't not peek in teehee! And I'll hope to rejoin you guys soon.

Right now hubby is napping (nothing like reading a good book and dozing off, dreamily, huh?!) and I'm trying to think up an idea for my Fourth of July cards ... I know, I know, ever the procrastinator!

Fourth of July Crafts found via Whip Up

Fourth of July Garland

Fourth of July Garland from maggie makes

Stars and Stripes Wreath

Stars and Stripes Wreath from Alisa Burke

Liberty Pinwheel Brooch

Liberty Pinwheel Brooch from Betz White

Fourth of July Crafts

If there were 48 or 72 hours in each day, the rest of this week ... I'd make all of these darling 4th of July crafts!

All found via The Crafty Crow

Fourth of July Bunting

Fourth of July Bunting from the long thread, tutorial on Alpha Mom

Starspangled Pinspinners

Starspangled Pinspinners by Jenny B Harris of Allsorts

Flag Garland

Flag Garland Tutorial from Saltwater Kids

Rag Balls for Independence Day

Rag Balls for Independence Day from The Magic Onions

Monday blog love

EDITED TO ADD: I've added my Monday Blog Love links now, please scroll down beyond the text to see them.


Sorry ... Monday Blog Love is going to be delayed a bit ... cue in Alice Cooper ... because ... School's out for Summer!

Hubby's off for summer vacation for two months WAHOO! So I may be a little slower than usual on my posting. Thank you all so much for your sweet comments, I'm so sorry to be so tardy in replying to your comments. I promise I will get back to you in a little bit.

Saturday we went to a Retirement Party and Sunday we went to the Santa Monica Airport Flea Market. Today we're going out to lunch and to see Toy Story 3.

I hope you're enjoying all the exciting stuff going on in blogland right now too. If you're like me, you still haven't finished visiting all of the participants in Where Bloggers Create (at My Desert Cottage) or The Mad Tea Party (at A Fanciful Twist) ... so much fun and inspiration out there!

OH! We ate our first home grown tomato yesterday ... a small Roma ... I will have to report back on the name of it ... so SCRUMPTIOUS! yum yum yum. Plants are getting sadder and sadder looking ... I'm just praying that they continue to bear fruit, and all the little green tomatoes ripen.

Wishing you a Happy Monday and I'll be back after a bit with Monday Blog Love.

13 bees
a clock without hands
all over print
baZar
Beau a la louche
bliss in a teacup
Cakes in the city
Chicken Dinner Candybar
Color Stripes
Crafty Bird
Cuillere a absinthe
Demure Folk
Diary of a Vintage Girl
Eleonore Bridge
enhabiten
Hugs across the universe
frecklewonder
La Ferme de Sourrou
Octobre Rose
Pocketfulla Posy
strawberry lemonade
Sunflares Plethora
sweet jessie
Tambouille
Tea with the Vintage Baroness
the blog without a name
Thrift Candy
un ange passe
wish wish wish
Yard Sale Bloodbath
yumyum
zazie vintage

Me and my big ideas ...

(Hubby doesn't feel good and went to bed at 6:30, poor sweetie. So I'm footloose and fancy free on Friday night to tell you about the um, insanity, known as Sally and Her Big Ideas teehee!)

Ay yi yi.

I always have to have the Grand Plan. Simple just doesn't do it for me. And I make myself nuts.

I want to be the magical fairy godmother for my nieces - I wanted to be this for them even when my brother was alive but it's like a gazillion times more since he passed away. And then my mother passed away. Ever since I've felt the responsibility to take both their places for the girls, on top of being my usual obsessive compulsive, weaver of dreams, Auntie self.

One of my life beliefs ... life is short, make every day special.

So anyway ... my Everest of a plan this time was I wanted to send them a "Party in a Box", along with the books I bought them. I wanted to make them party hats and a garland and include these really good chocolate chips I found at Whole Foods recently, Dagoba Organic Choco Drops, SO YUMMY! And I wanted to print out a chocolate chip cookie recipe for them and wrap it up all nice.

Thank heavens I realized that I had better wrap the books I got for them first, in case I ran out of time. (Somewhere inside my silly brain, lurks a brain with sense.)

I'm all about the presentation ... it has to be FUN too! I had been thinking about using my roll of craft paper and making some tags about recycling. My poor nieces, they always get a message from their old flower child Auntie, along with their presents.

I'm not quite sure how the inspiration came together but the jumping off point was a package of Martha Stewart "Occasion" ribbons. I noticed it had a Happy Birthday ribbon and a Congratulations ribbon, exactly what I needed and the colors were perfect to go with the craft paper.

And then ... serendipity! It came to me that the Whole Foods paper bags would go perfectly with the Martha Stewart ribbons.

(I'm sure there are some of you out there guffawing and rolling on the floor over my use of grocery bags for wrapping paper, saying Sally's gone round the bend this time!)

So I wrapped their books in the recycled grocery bags, used the MS ribbons, made them woven hearts (out of scrapbook paper that I've had for YEARS, just sitting there and this was it's moment to finally shine LOL) and I also made some bookmarks. VOILA!

Except ... I ran out of time for the Grand Plan. The Party in a Box. WAH!

But I got the package to the Post Office in time and I really had fun doing all the wrapping. So that's that, for the time being. I'm thinking maybe I'll adapt the party in the box for when my niece goes away to college and dorm life in September.

Where does the time go?!

(Here's a little something to look at ... a Holly Hobbie lunchbox
I picked up at a yard sale last year and a Holly Hobbie doll
I picked up at the Long Beach Swap Meet this past weekend.)

ARGH! I was hoping to post photos of my mom for her birthday yesterday (would have been her 89th - she passed away in 1996) and also join in Vintage Thingies Thursday but I just plumb ran out of time.

I'm racing around like a chicken with my head cut off over here, trying to get my niece's 18th birthday present together, which has to go out in the mail tomorrow - and not having much success. And I just found out that that my other niece got her Masters Degree, which my muddled middle aged brain forgot. YIKES.

So, Auntie has been thrown into overdrive and I'm not a fast worker. WAH!

I may go quiet until Monday ... please know I'm thinking of you and missing you all and wishing you a lovely weekend!

Watkins Almanac Farm Hints REDnesday

(Please visit Sue at It's A Very Cherry World for info on Rednesday!)

We went to the Long Beach Swap Meet on Sunday morning. One of these days I want to get there early! We went out to breakfast first, so we didn't get there until 10:30 and the crowd had already begun to swell and the sun beat down on us. I've yet to see the entire show, each time the heat and the crowds get to me and I just want to go home after an hour or so.

I had quite a lengthy list of things I wanted but found none of them - probably just as well for my pocket book, huh?!

One of the things I did come home with was this Watkins Almanac Farm Hints Booklet from 1947 ... I was on the lookout for Red items for Rednesday and red was at bare a minimum too. This grabbed my eye with the cute little girls and I thought, EUREKA and (at the time) thought the illustrations would be fun for today.

But now ... I have Buyer's Remorse bwahahhahhahahha! Now that the heat of the moment has passed, I'm less than impressed.

What have you bought in the heat of the moment that made you wonder what on earth were you thinking when you got home???

I'm including the June and July forecasts - the graphics on the tables are about as fun as it gets. The ads aren't even amusing. Woe is me. So sorry to inflict this upon you teehee!

(hang in there ... there's extra special super duper cuteness after this Almanac bit!)


Okay ... moving on to the good stuff ... this will make it all worthwhile, I promise!

Yesterday I received my order from darling Stephanie of Old World Primitives. Stephanie is the best of the best at Etsy ... uber talented, sweet as can be and ultra professional.

(Apologies to Stephanie ... these were taken with my iPhone, my digital
camera is so old that my iPhone takes better close up photos than it does. WAH!
Hopefully you have now forgiven me for the less than exciting Farm Hints Almanac
and maybe there will even be points awarded for the patriotic papers teehee!)

Better yet, here are Stephanie's much nicer photographs ...

(Stephanie will accept custom orders - I asked her to make a patriotic doggie for me.)

Aren't they the cutest?! They are even cuter in person!
Stephanie's blog, Old World Primitives
Stephanie's Etsy shop, Old World Primitives

Happy REDnesday to everyone!

Monday blog love & other hobble gobble

("Award Free Blog" graphic courtesy of Musings of a Sea Witch)

Happy Monday to everyone!

I just want to take a moment here to say that I'm going to go Award and Tag Free here. Thank you to everyone who thought of me and sweetly gave me an award! I so appreciate your noticing me and being so kind to me.

I'm introverted, shiver at the prospect of talking about myself, prefer to blend in with the woodwork and I, oh so reluctantly (kicking and screaming teehee!) participated so that I would feel "a part of", rather than an outsider.

I always begged off on choosing others to pass the awards on to, feeling immense discomfort at the thought of choosing blog pals over other blog pals ... that is until the number was sufficiently large enough to encompass a group of bloggers who I feel closest to.

With huge trepidation, I did this and I guess my KARMA was laughing at me. The luke warm response really hurt. Here I was doing something I didn't want to do in the first place and I guess no one else wanted to either.

Or was it ME? I went down that road and threw a pity party for myself one day, complete with a one-girl band and the singing of "Nobody likes me, everybody hates me". Sad Sack Sally Day.

Pish posh! Enough of that! WHEW!

So henceforward thank you very much for thinking of me, but no thanks. Okie dokie artichokie?


Ay yi yi! I meant to post photos of my dad and my brother yesterday for Father's Day. Middle aged brain meltdown. I found these two this morning - I never thought my brother looked like my dad at all, but there is such a striking resemblance in these two photos as little boys. My father would grow up to have black hair, my brothers would remain blonde ... both with piercing "if looks could kill" blue eyes.

(my dad as a little boy - he's now 91)

(my brother as a toddler - he passed away in 1995)

We took my Dad and his girlfriend out to dinner at our favorite neighborhood Italian restaurant. I hope everyone had a wonderful Father's Day yesterday!

A Big Mouthful
A Cottage In The Woods
appears no different from a galloping horse
Carol Egbert
everything vintage
Happy doll
Holiday Frivolities by JoAnn
Honning og flora
Kids napping, I'm scrapping
Les Zigouis
lili scratchy
My Goodness
My Heart's Ease
Ninotchka Beavers
Over the Top Studios
Particules
The Rustic Victorian
What Happens Next

Wearing my sleuthing cap

I had so much fun after my previous post for Rednesday and Vintage Thingie Thursday! Thursday evening I googled and found that my family genealogy (for my mother's mother's side of the family) is on the internet. Whoa. Wow!

I have a copy of the genealogy that a family member compiled and published in the 1932, so I already knew it's contents and the family lines but it was such a weird feeling to see one's own family on multiple genealogical sites.

I kind of thought of my family, well, as my own teehee! I was forgetting that we go back a long way in this country and there are many many branches of my family, reaching out through the years.

So that was really exciting to think that someone had entered all of our info online and the thought that there could possibly be updates since 1932.

And then I found that the same relative, who had written and published our genealogy, had also written a book about her growing up years in a town in Illinois. AND ... it was online for me to read!!!

Be still my beating heart.

I read a little ... virtually flipping page after page online ... found some charming photos and mentions of a few family members ... now I had real words, descriptions of my ancestors.

AND!!! I googled the title of her book and I found a copy to buy from a used book dealer.

Can you see me? Doing the happy dance over here!

Of course I snatched it up and I am now on Mail Carrier Alert, status HIGH ... book was mailed yesterday, MEDIA MAIL (slower than molasses post!), mail box stalking to begin in a week (I figure that's the earliest it could ever arrive, owing to a postal miracle!).

All my happiness is due to this lovely young lady, who in the later years of her life, took pen to paper ...



Happy Sunday to everyone!

And don't forget to check out the party at My Desert Cottage and visit all the places Where Bloggers Create! Hundreds of bloggers signed up to participate. Enjoy!

Vintage Photo Album REDnesday & VTT

This week I'm sharing the same entry with both REDnesday and Vintage Thingie Thursday. Hope you will join in the fun!

(Please visit Suzanne at Colorado Lady for info re Vintage Thingie Thursday)

(Please visit Sue at It's A Very Cherry World for Rednesday fun and info.)

I am sharing a (red!) vintage photo album this Rednesday and Vintage Thingie Thursday. It is from my mother's side of the family. It has a charming inscription and some photos have names and dates. I'm hoping to solve all the mysteries contained inside.

This is the inscription inside. It reads:
Grand Ma Smith's
Giving her daughter
to her great granddaughter
(then my grandmother's name)
(I didn't white out the original, that's a scanned copy)

I am guessing/hoping that this is Grand Ma Smith???
I am so very lost. I have a genealogy but I think Grand
Ma Smith is an off shoot that's not included . WAH!
Fingers crossed that the boxes of things I brought home
from my parents will reveal everyone's identities!
I am posting the photos in the order they
were in the photo album.

The following two portraits appear to be
photos of the couple above in later years.

The two baby photos are pictures of my
grandmother's Aunt Luella at 8 months old.

My grandmother's father, Robert.
(My grandmother is pictured in my
banner on the far left hand side.)

My grandmother's Aunt Luella.

My grandmother's father, Robert and
his sister, Luella in 1874 or 1875.

My grandmother's father, Robert
and his sister, Luella.

Aunt Luella.

There are first names for this lovely group,
but I don't know who they are related to???
The young lady on the right, seems to have
a family resemblance to my grandmother.
I wonder if it could be her mother???
Oh! This is so much fun!

Happy Rednesday and Vintage Thingie Thursday Everyone!

Calling all tomato growers & Monday Blog Love

ACK! sniffle sniffle SOB!

We planted six tomato plants in pots and they have been thriving and looking gorgeous, and lo and behold, little tiny fruit has begun to appear.

But now, three of the six are looking poorly. WAH! They have some yellowing and blackening leaves and also curling of leaves.

Do you know what's wrong with my precious tomatoes??? I'm a brand new tomato mommy and I'm so sad and lost.





Bird Nests and Paper
Bobby Socks Quilt Company
Emmelines
Holiday Frivolities by JoAnn
Joey's Dream Garden
La Minute Papillon
Lanetz Living Vintage Sewing Patterns
Les surprises de Fifi Mandirac
Make Do and Mend
My Heart's Ease
Nicely Done
olivelse
on va voir si
Paper Bird
Retro and Ruby
Rose Miniscule
The Queen of Re
tous les jour dimanche
Valita's Fresh Folds
Vert Cerise

Thank you Elizabeth!

Oh my! What an amazing and wonderful place the internet is!

Darling Elizabeth of Creative Breathing, sent me the most charming little Blue Bird (along with her beloved furry best friend!) because she was inspired by my post about being a Blue Bird. Can you imagine??? Something I did was inspiring?! Wow!

My Blue Bird post.
Elizabeth's post about my Blue Bird post.
Elizabeth's blog, Creative Breathing.

It doesn't stop there either.

And, Elizabeth also made the most charming tag to go with my dollie and doggie, that includes some of the photos from my post.

I'm going to name her Debbie, after my best childhood friend. Little did Elizabeth know that Debbie had a white poodle when we were little named Tiggy, so Debbie and Tiggy they will be.

This is just the dearest gift and the cutest thing ever. Thank you Elizabeth for such a charming reminder of my youth and for your friendship and kindness in thinking of me!