My little cottage in the roses

I thought I'd share a picture of my little cottage in the roses. Since my husband's illness there has been absolutely no money for landscaping. And when we bought our little cottage, the backyard consisted of a pool a small patch of lawn and a whole lot of weeds! I so wanted a pretty garden of my own, so I did a bit of research, and then volunteered to prune anyone's roses that would let me. I saved the pruned rose clippings and would bring them home and put them in the ground. With a little patience, my little rose collection quickly grew to over 400 bushes! (Yes, we still have the pool and we still have the weeds... ) This is truly near zero cost landscaping.

This little path eventually would like to be a brick or cobblestone I think...

Happy Saturday!

Hearlding Spring!

After a very long winter, the Spring flowers are such a welcome.

Today I'm sharing a few pictures from my garden.





All of God's creation proclaims the glory of the Lord!

Completed Dollhouse

Okay, so I've had this house completed for about 2 weeks, with the intention of posting pictures here. :) Sometimes I wonder where the hours in my days go.
Of course with the new school year, and homeschooling, we are all still adjusting to the new schedule and routine of our days, which in an of itself is a challenge :).

Somehow, the older my boys get, the harder it is to find time to do "projects"... That said, I suspect that this will be the very last dollhouse I make for a long, long time! :) It was a fun house to make however... I did enjoy it. Hope you enjoy the tour!

The sun was streaming in one morning and I thought it was pretty the effect it made on the dollhouse...

Blessedness~
Linda

Linking up to White Wednesday at Faded Charm :)

How I Spent My Summer...

Wow, I can't believe that summer is nearly over! Seems like just yesterday we were celebrating our last days of school and here we are next week getting ready to start school up again! But it was a great summer, however brief it seems now. We spent a lot of time together as a family, swimming, fishing, playing, working. We got to spend precious time with family and friends from long ago and in between all that, I worked on this.

A Barbie doll house.

I'm happy to say that this is almost completed. I've got a little more work to do on the interior and I have to finish up the exterior trim work. This house ended up taking me a little more time than they normally take to build. Partly because of the "demands" of summer, and partly because I did a little more to this house than I normally do to the houses. Scrolling fretwork, fretwork and more fretwork! Every house I build I try to make unique from all the others. And since I've decided that this is more than likely the very last house I will build of this size, I wanted to go all out. What do you think?

This is the dining room.


The living room and the front entry door.


The kitchen.



Another view of the kitchen. I made a little refrigerator that sits in there next to the sink, but the paint is drying today on it, so it is not in the photos. I also have a little valance that matches the sink.

The tiny Bath

A white bedroom with a pretty "french door" that opens up to Barbie's balcony.




And another little bedroom.




Hope you enjoyed the tour... I'll have the exterior photos up soon!

Blessedness~
Linda

I'm linking up with Get your Craft on Thursday, White Wednesday and Show and Tell Friday! Thank you ladies!!

Barbie's New Home Update

I thought I'd share a few more pictures of the dollhouse in process today. With summer activities, it's a little harder to find the time to work on the house, but I'm making progress... steady but slow :)


This is the living room ceiling. I had a better picture, but for some reason this morning my computer doesn't want to cooperate, so I'm not able to upload it. Hmm... maybe it's too early. Come to think of it, it very well could be that it's just too early for me and not the computer after all... ! :)



A "Hotpoint" range for Barbie, complete with a wire baking rack inside :).
I remember as a child we had an old Hotpoint electric range circa about 1926 or so. It didn't look like this. Ours had the tall cabriole legs. When my folks remodeled the very outdated kitchen, they moved the range out on the covered deck we had so that we could use it to play "house". A LOT of mud pies were cooked in that oven! When my folks sold the house 20 years later, they left the range. I wish that I'd been able to keep it. But I'm not sure what I would have done with it at college :). I've never run across another one quite like the one we had, although I see picture online of ones similar to ours.

I'll be putting the finishing touches on the little sink and refrigerator today. And then the downstairs level of the house should be completed. I have three rooms to complete on the top floor a few doors to hang and the exterior to finish up as well.

Blessedness,
Linda

Refreshment on a Hot summer day!

Summer it seems is officially here! Hot weather is not unusual for our part of our state. Most years in fact the hot temps begin as early as April and continue on through September... day after day we enjoy nothing but blue sunny skies! This year our spring was exceptionally cool and it actually rained all the way through May. June was blue skies, and very mild temps... again very unusual for our part of the state. But then July rolled around and with it, the extreme triple digit temps that are so typical here. Thankfully we don't have the humidity that many of you experience, but still, triple digits is still triple digits, and that is just HOT!!

I thought I'd share a few pictures today that are cool and refreshing!
These were actually taken by my brother who was visiting from out of state this past May. This is Burney Falls. Burney is a small quaint mountain town very near where we live, here in beautiful N. California.



Ah... I feel cooler already!!

Blessedness~
Linda

Happy Independence Day Weekend!!

Good morning and Happy 4th of July weekend to all! I hope you all are enjoying a fun filled, sun soaked, gorgeous holiday weekend. I'm so very thankful for those who have sacrificially fought so that we can enjoy the freedoms that we do.
I wanted to take a minute to share with you about a giveaway happening over at SaraNorris' blogsite. For those that aren't familiar with Sara and her blog, Sara is a lover of heirloom sewing and she does the MOST beautiful work! She recently created two new children's patterns for heirloom clothing. And you can see and read all about it on her blog here
Hope you all can hop over and say hello to Sara and see her new exquisite designs!
Great job Sara!

Happy 4th everyone!!

Blessedness--
Linda