Changing things up

Posted on November 22, 2016 by Patti_is_knittinginflashes

For several years these cards from IKEA were displayed in a long vertical frame on a narrow wall.

But I wanted to change out the pictures for some note cards by Woody Jackson.

I didn’t want to damage the cards by taping them directly to the underside of the mat so I made picture/photo corners from some old envelopes.

I just cut off the corners at an angle and slipped them over the corners of the note cards. Then I taped those corners to the back of the mat.

Voila! No damage to the cards if I ever decide to use them.

Now the frame fits nicely above the doorway going from the kitchen into the hall/dining room/foyer area.

Creative cookies

Posted on February 27, 2015 by Patti_is_knittinginflashes

While at our daughter’s house, we baked cookies for Valentine’s Day. Because of the mishap on Friday evening and E’s not feeling well on Saturday, we waited until Sunday, February 15, to bake and decorate cookies. Mom and Dad were expected home on Monday so the cookies were a day fresher.

We used half of the recipe of Royal icing as we didn’t have a lot of cookies to decorate.

Red, pink, and white icing and red colored sugar.

I found these little squeeze bottles for the icing so the twins would have more control over their decorating.

I spread most of the cookies with a solid color and the twins decorated the tops.

You can never have too much icing.

For some reason the pink icing got a little too thin and was running everywhere.

When we finished up with all the cookies, we decorated animal crackers.

The uninvited guest

Posted on July 11, 2014 by Patti_is_knittinginflashes

Mr. Aitch and I had an unwlecomed and uninvited guest swoop into our house Wednesday night.

A bird.

A sparrow to be exact.

He (or she) was sitting on my front door decoration when Mr. Aitch went out on the front porch. As soon as the door opened, the sparrow made a beeline into our house. The bird flew into the family room and perched atop the entertainment center as Mr. Aitch and I figured out how to remove him/her without causing a major ruckus.

We don’t have a big fishing net like my parents used to remove similar unwelcome and uninvited guests in their house. The only fishing net we have is for aquariums and it just wasn’t big enough for the job.

While this brief discussion went on, the sparrow flew back and forth between the family room and kitchen taking in the view from atop the refrigerator then the entertainment center.

Our plan was to open the door from the kitchen to the garage (which is right beside the refrigerator), turn on the garage light, open the garage door, and turn out all the lights in the house and hope that the bird would “go to the light”.

And it worked.

The only presents the sparrow left for us were a few feathers.

I took my fake-nest-and-flowers-in-a-basket decoration off the front door temporarily so we don’t have any more unwelcome and uninvited guests.

June update

Posted on June 22, 2014 by Patti_is_knittinginflashes

Between repairing nine window screens, doctor appointments, hospital tests, a visiting grandchild, a flooded basement, work, and life in general, I finished a couple of things. Nothing knitting related but still creative or challenging.

In a previous post I showed you some pictures of our front porch. I don’t know if you noticed the screen on the bay window. Probably not. Well, it was torn at the bottom. An over zealous power washer was, um, over zealous and several screens were damaged. We don’t take the screens out of our windows in the winter so twenty year-old fiberglass mesh screens are fragile.

I learned how to replace window screens. YouTube is wonderful. I could pick all the components locals except for the plunger pins that hold the screen into the window frame. I found a place on-line and ordered enough to replace all of them in our windows should the need arise. Good thing I did as I ended up having to replace some in our other windows before the job was finished.