Craft Time

When my mom and sisters came over for a Girl's Weekend last week, I put them all to work.  We wanted to have a weekend of "crafting, sleeping, eating and hanging out at the pool."  We managed all except the very last!

Mom brought her sewing machine and gave us an early morning lesson [while still in our PJ's]:

We [re]learned how to thread the machine.  It had been... oh probably about 15 years since I'd used a sewing machine.

It wasn't long before this [leftover wedding prop]

 Became this:

Shout out to Kelly, who was the model for all the photos, and did quite a bit of the stitching and sewing herself.  Photos of the pillows in action... coming soon!

There's a first time for everything

Well, I managed 29 years, 6 months and 5 days of life without ever mowing a lawn.  Thanks to having an older brother, I never had to do yard work growing up.  I unloaded the dishwasher plenty of times, but never had to mow the lawn or take out the trash.  Those were boy chores.  I couldn't avoid the trash once I started renting an apartment after college, but the lawn mower?  That I still managed to escape, thanks to getting married and hanging on to my boys-do-the-yard-work card.

But then, Mark went and had to have knee surgery.  And two and a half weeks later, we were becoming those people on our street.  The ones who don't mow their grass.  So I did what any girl who has never even turned on a lawn mower would do  Made my husband take pictures of me and the lawn mower.

And then, I mowed the lawn.  Front and back.  Dare I say it was almost fun?  I concentrated super hard on making the straight lines and realized it was a lot like vacuuming.  And i love vacuuming!  I told Mark I thought it was pretty fun and said he'd check back with me in August, when it's 109 degrees outside.  To which I flashed my boys-do-the-yard-work card and went back inside.

Hey, I CAN do yardwork!

This weekend, I volunteered to help Mark out in the yard, since he has the gimp knee and all that jazz.  We've always assumed without actually saying it that he gets to "decorate" the outside of the house, and I get to do the inside.  So he does all the yard work.  He had just started to lay mulch in the front flower beds the morning before that fateful soccer injury, so that project has been on hold for a couple weeks.  Since he has surgery this week, we decided to finish it up this weekend before he was really out of commission.  I don't have a picture of the garden work we did, but I'll take one later today and add it.  We got about 85% of the garden finished before we ran out of weed mat (I have no idea what this stuff is actually called? Fabric that you lay under the mulch to prevent weeds from growing in the garden.  Mark claims it will last 25 years!).  So we still have a hole of un-mulched garden, but perhaps we will finish that up today? 

Yesterday evening, Mark decided he would chop down this bush/tree thing in our front yard, since it wasn't all that attractive and was growing with pretty reckless abandon.  It took all of thirty minutes before the bush/tree was nothing but a pile of brush laying on the sidewalk!  I helped supervise and photograph this project ;)