Hello pipsqueaks!

Hope your weekend was pleasant. I heard from some of you in Finland, Saskatoon, Austria and a few glad hollows in the USA over the weekend and the news sounds similar here and there: A lovely weekend, fine weather indeed, cool nights and busy fingers with knitting and stitching and so forth. I also heard it through the grapevine that there’s been a jam, jelly and canning revolution. I won’t pretend to be the Pied Piper when it comes to the revival of domestic arts but I’m proud of every lady who did a bit of canning this week past! Way to put up some tasty goods for the winter ahead!

I spent the weekend tending my neglected yard as well as clipping grapes!

The first batch of concords is cut and the scent of purple is wafting out of the kitchen as I type this. I’m tempted to do a quick batch of jelly though it’s 11:11PM here (make a wish)…it wil be one or the other:

concocting jelly or writing letters to friends while laying in my nightie in bed.

Truly a tough call. The grapes are hard to deny but so is my stationary.

The rest of the weekend was spent tiding up a disaster of a home, fighting with the laundry pile, walking and running the dogs in the hills and across town, baking, harvesting veggies from le jardin as well as reading a bit and catching up on long overdue correspondence. Boring. I know. I am, rather admittedly, a serious homebody. I love catching up with time in the sanctuary of my home and gardens; in the quiet of my living room with a book and a red leather couch.

I had some tasty and tremendously fresh meals that revolved, for the most part, around blazing red garden tomatoes and newly baked loaves of whole wheat bread.

I cut new flowers for every vase in the house and surrounded myself with them while I feasted on my gardeny bits and pieces at the kitchen table.

I snaggled up a new house plant when I ran out for groceries and I started a new avocado pit in a canning jar. I’ve never grown a successful avocado but I have a good feeling about this little guy. He’s over in the laundry room on a shelf by the back door but I can hear him humming from here. He’s singing all about ascorbic acid and the like — a sure sign he’s planning on a sprout (I’m praying for a cotelydon or two).

And lastly, my most sincere apologies for not listing new work in the Etsy shop today! I became distracted when I strolled out to the studio and 6 hours later I walked out with this in my hands:

Built of sterling silver and 14 carat gold from scratch. All components, excluding the chain and clasp, were sawed and forged by my hands. The pendant is a shadowbox that features a landscape of a freshly ploughed field (complete with linear perspective), a suspended golden moon and a person, strolling in the distance. With fall coming on strong in Idaho and with so many of our North American farmers counting their yield — bringing in the bounty, myself included, on a very small scale — I was inclined to make a Landscape of thanksgiving today.