Bad family photos and barking in the rain.

Okay so I missed a greater number of weeks than I would normally between posts. It's been a busy couple of weeks though, with Christmas, New Years, family outings, winter illnesses, basement renos and what not. All of these are poor reasons for not blogging though, I must confess that. They're not even really reasons...more just excuses.  so here's a bit of an update on most of what I have been busy with.

1. Creating another awful Christmas card. Last year we decided to start a tradition of sending out horribly distasteful Christmas cards. This year's is pretty bad: 

2. The Christmas tree went up. The Christmas tree came back down.

3. Working on our basement. I'm not going to post any pictures of that in this post though. I will blog about that when it's complete, but so far we have a great storage room, and the new laundry/bathroom facility down there. 

4. I found this great drawer unit for $8. I plan on covering each drawer with either printed book pages, or vintage floral paper. Then I will use it in my near future crafting corner which will be in our new basement. I will post the finished results probably not too long from now. 

5. I redid the front entrance way to our house by building in a built-in coat/boot/seat area: 

6. I made Olive a raincoat. I made it out of part of a shower curtain. Our new shower stall in our new bathroom, is only half as wide as the curtain, so I cut the curtain and reused the other half to make this new coat for Olive. I tried to find some patterns online but I didn't really like any of them, so I started measuring my dog and ended up creating my own pattern. 

Olive hated having to be measured every 5 minutes. As soon as she saw me with the partially completed coat, she'd make a dash to the basement or under a chair. But eventually it was completed.. Here is the final result:

Busy Busy Busy Bee!

I'm learning how to can food this year. So far I have canned 7 small and 3 large jars of tomatoes and 2 large jars of pickles. I've also done the freezer bag method... I've got about 8 bags of frozen tomatoes, 6 bags of frozen beets and maybe another 8 bags of frozen beans. YUM!! And I still have another grocery bag full of tomatoes to can!
This is my first year doing this  so my recipes are very basic. so If you know of any great canning recipes send them my way...you can do so in the comment section below...I'd love to know what other's are canning!

I did not can that bottle of Amarula... If I knew how to do that...

I though canning would be more difficult but it's actually quite simple. I started off boiling my filled jars and then realized what the heck?! I have a pressure cooker! so I did a bunch in the pressure cooker which took a fraction of the time.
 Here's a funny situation that canning has gotten me into though: I decided that instead of canning in small jars, why don't I use the larger jars?  so I went out and bought a box of larger mason jars, cooked and peeled my tomatoes, and proceeded to place them into my pressure cooker... the jars were taller than my pressure cooker, ugh!
I had to go on a scavenger hunt throughout the city to find a large (and cheap) enough pot to  hold my jars and allow for a 2 inch cover of water. I finally found a canner in Walmart, the only one left.

I have also been doing some gardening. The soil in my area is the most amazing soil ever...it literally feels like potting soil so adding gardens is so easy to do. I don't know if I changed the gardens too much since my last post, but today I expanded the garden along the fence line. The way it was designed was soo......blaah. it looked like a narrow gutter running along the fence. I prefer to have some dimension to my gardens so I I made it deeper, and added some flow to the edge. Next year I hope to get more of a variety of perennials

Thrift finds:

 This brooch I found at a flea market. The owner said it belonged to her husbands mother...or was it grandmother..I'm pretty sure it was grandmother. Anyways, none of her kids wanted it...so I bought it for a twoonie! I love it! I think I'm going to become a brooch kind of girl

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This is a great mixing bowl complete with handle and pouring spout. great colour too!              

Sneak Peak Crafty stuff:

My dog keeps chewing up my pin cushion. I always come home to see that my cocker spaniel has become a pin cushion spaniel and I have to spend some time pulling pins out of her long furry ears. So I made myself a pin cushion and gave Olive the Blue pumpkin tomato thing that used to hold my pins. It also hold my measuring tape and other small notions.

FUN!

Here is a sneak peak at my quilt: 

Far from finished.