What a Zoo!

These will make your tail wag!

Look at these cute dog prints I found at Michael’s.  I put them in inexpensive clip frames, and voila! bathroom art.  They are by Ken Bailey, an artist from Washington.  You can see more of his art at www.kenbailey.com. 

A golden retriever always adds class

What is it with me and animal art?  I love it!  It all started with a print of chickens.  The original was painted by an acquaintance of my mother’s, a lady named Elsa Lockert, who ran a gallery and frame shop in Ashland City, Tennessee some thirty years ago.

We have a lot of windows and not a lot of walls, so we put artwork up above.

Close-up of the originals

Over the years, the kitchen barnyard increased by two more chicken prints, bought at art shows, and a chicken painting my daughter bought from a street artist in London’s Hyde Park.   All this fowl artwork is set off by chicken wire wallpaper, which I love for its whimsical graphic punch. 

I have two more fabulous chickens, painted by a friend, in my dining room. One of these is painted on the seat of a chair.   

The dining room also houses two bucolic sheep prints, both of which were done by an Iowa artist, Connie Bieber.  Looking at her peaceful sheep makes me want to be a shepherd!  Aren't these beautiful?

Both sheep prints have been cropped here to straighten
 them up.  I had to angle the  frames to reduce glare from the glass.

The collection of advertising signs in our family room also adds to the critter count with a Crow’s rooster, a Pilch DeKalb chicken, a Finck's pig, and a Red Goose Shoes goose.

Then there are the jointed wooden animals.  Two chickens (natch!), two frogs, a cat, and a zebra.

On the landing window sill

This pretty much rounds out the menagerie for now.  But I’m always on the lookout!

Uncle John's Attic

Our Uncle John died last year and his house sold last month. Today I began unwrapping and washing some of the treasures from his house.

While, in fact, hardly anything actually came out of the attic, there was a treasure trove squirreled away in cupboards and cabinets.  Uncle John was a 91-year-old bachelor who lived in the family home, so many of the items actually belonged to the husband's grandparents.  Be watching for the opening of my Etsy store, sweetposydreams.

Apple Picking Time

The weather cooled off just in time for an almost perfect Sunday at the orchard.  We filled up our bags with Akanes, Galas, and Jonamacs, and maybe a few Braeburns and IdaReds that weren't quite ripe yet!

Next up: yum-o fresh apple cake!

Simple Pleasures

On this Labor Day weekend, I'm reminded that often the best things are the simple ones.  Being with family, a brat from the grill, and simple, old-fashioned cakes.

I've had a hankering for this pound cake for a couple of weeks, so I decided to make it for this weekend.  It's an old recipe from my mother, called simply "Wonderful Pound Cake."  Which it is!

Wonderful Pound Cake

2/3 cup butter or margarine, softened
1 1/4 cup sugar
1 teaspoon grated lemon peel (can omit)
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2/3 cup milk
2 1/4 cup sifted flour
1 1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
3 eggs




Preheat oven to 300 degrees.


Stir the butter or margarine to soften.  Gradually add sugar and cream together until light and fluffy.  (Beat about 3 minutes on medium speed.)  Add lemon peel, if used, and lemon juice.  Add milk and mix enough to break up creamed mixture.


Sift together flour, salt, and baking powder.  Add dry ingredients to creamed mixture and mix until smooth (about 2 minutes on low speed).  Scrape down at least once.


Add eggs, 1 at a time, beating 1 minute after each (low speed).  Beat additional 1 minute at the end.  Scrape down sides and bottom of bowl.


Bake in greased and floured 9 1/2 x 5 1/4 x 2 3/4 loaf pan at 300 degrees for 1 hour and 20 minutes.

And because a little chocolate never hurts, I also made this easy chocolate pudding cake!


Happy Labor Day!


Printable recipe for pound cake

Posy Tote

This tote bag has been a long time in coming.  I started it about a year ago.  Last fall, I accidentally left it behind on a visit to Tennessee.  By the time I got it back on my next visit, I had moved on to other projects.  And let’s face it, knitting stockinette in the round can get pretty dull.  And this was a LOT of stockinette in the round! 

Before felting

I picked it back up recently, and I’m glad I did.  I’ve made some smaller felted totes, but this one is roomy enough for lots of yarn or shopping.

After felting

This was the first project I’ve felted in our high efficiency washing machine.  Don’t know if it was the size of the bag or the high-tech washer, but this came out with more wrinkles than I’m used to, and even a few felted lumps.  I am now on the look-out for a second, secondhand old-fashioned machine with a real agitator and non-locking lid.  Yep, I’m just a two-washer kind of girl. 

The husband says the wrinkles give the bag character.  Could it be because he’s only a one-washer kind of guy?

Toil and Trouble, Cauldron Bubble: Lessons in sweater felting

Knitted flowers

Sweater felting – sounds like fun.  I wanted to put felted flowers on a tote bag I was making.  I’ve only ever knit or needle felted flowers, and only felted things I’ve knitted myself.  But the prospect of buying several different colored skeins of wool for just a few flowers seemed expensive and, hey, felting sweaters sounds cheap and fun.  I read a helpful tutorial on Aunt Peaches’ blog, and figured I was good to go. 

Step one: Get some inexpensive 100% wool sweaters at the thrifts.  Easy.

Step two: Prep for the wash.  I had a little pang when I first began cutting up the sweaters.  Cutting off the ribbing and seams was like inflicting a wound, especially on a funky hand-knitted (in China) cat sweater.  I really was torn over that one, but it was too big for me, and Alfie would have wept little doggie tears to see me endorsing cats.  Easy. 

Step three: Shrink the sweaters in the washing machine.  Now that sounds like the easy part, but . . . .  Let’s just say that buying a high efficiency (read, low water and no agitator) washing machine sounded good last spring when the old washer pooped out.  I’d read the horror stories about felting in HE machines, but I had fair success felting the tote bag, so it would work, right?  After several washes, not so’s you’d notice.  Frustrating.

Step four: Take the sweaters to the laundromat for a spin in a machine with an agitator.  A little shrinking, especially the blue Eddie Bauer sweater.  Easy.

Step five: Drag the lobster pot out of the attic and boil the sweaters for an hour or so.  Stir periodically with a long bamboo spoon and keep adding boiling water from the tea kettle.  The red funky cat sweater faded to a rosy pink, and some shrinkage did occur.  Hot.  Tiring.  Messy.

Step six: Wash several more times in the HE washer and dry several times on hot.  Finally – Success!

Overall, the resulting flowers make this a fun project, but if I added up the cost of water, electricity, natural gas, and sanity, it might have been just as cheap to buy the wool and knit the flowers.  

But as Bette Davis said, “The key to life is accepting challenges.  Once someone stops doing this, he’s dead.”

Still kickin'.

Free Wheeling

Despite the name of this blog, Sweet Posy Dreams, it is not generally about the kind of dreams I have when I’m sleeping.  But last night, I had the most interesting dream, a twist on a frequent dream scenario (for me).

Whenever my life is spinning out of control – even if I don’t know it – or I feel that I am losing my grip in some way, I have a dream like this:

I’m driving down a winding road and lose control of my car, veering off the road.  Sometimes the brakes don’t work, but usually I lose control of the car because I am going too, too fast.  I usually wake up before the crash, but sometimes I just wind up stuck in a muddy field.  Depressing, isn’t it?

Last night:

I was riding a unicycle on an expressway.  (Try and picture this.  By the way, my dream unicycle looked like what a dark blue Vespa would look like if it were a unicycle.)  There were two semi-trucks ahead of me, so I decided to go around them.  (I must be a very strong pedal-er!)  Just as I started around the semi directly in front of me, it swerved over to pass the truck ahead of it.  I was forced off the road (pedaling all the time!) onto a heavily graveled shoulder.  I went over the shoulder, into the grass, and was heading for a wooded area.  “Curtains,” I thought, but no!  Just as I got to the edge of the woods, I executed a swanky curve maneuver and came to a clean, safe stop.  Just like that, I held my own against two tractor-trailer trucks and lived to tell the tale with nary a scratch!  Just me and my unicycle.

I think this is a propitious sign!  But I'm not buying a unicycle.  Yet.

Fields of Gold

What a glorious day!  Alfie and I had a fabulous time at the local prairie forest preserve with the three B’s – birds, butterflies, and bees. 

(Ok, and frogs, but I only like frogs at a distance!  I have an unreasonable and out-of-control fear of frogs.  It’s not so much a fear of frogs, as a fear of stepping on frogs.  (Or toads.)  Here's why:  As teenagers, my brother and I were playing volleyball in our yard.  I was foolishly wearing thin-soled slippers.  Coming down from what was no doubt a tremendous spike, I landed square on a toad.  I felt it squish under my thin-soled slipper.  Ewww.  My brother, being a brother, held the toad up by its back toes and let blood drip out of the its mouth.  Ever since, well you can imagine. )

Anyway, today the frogs stayed in or near the ponds and Alfie and I enjoyed the late summer hum and buzz.

More pictures from the prairie.

O rose, thou art sick!

When our daughter was in kindergarten, she memorized the William Blake poem “The Sick Rose.”

O rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
 Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

Ok, I know, this is a strange and slightly macabre poem to have a kindergartner memorize.  Nevertheless . . .

I thought of this poem today when I was pruning our wild rose bush.  It leads a tough life near a walnut tree in a shady area between our house and the neighbors.  Being on the property line, it’s in a kind of no-man’s land.  The poor thing gets overrun by wild grape vine and Virginia creeper, too, on occasion.

The rose didn’t bloom this summer, and it developed some kind of wasting disease.

But today I got inspired to clean it up.  I pulled off the grapevine and weeded away all the little tree sprouts at its base.  I pruned.  And I pruned.  There were a lot of dead canes, but as a show of rose pluckiness, also a little shoot coming up in the middle of the bush.

So, o rose, thou art sick, but not dead yet!

How hard can it be?

It started with a small leak.  There is a tiny bathroom in what used to be a tiny apartment on the second floor of our house.  After we reclaimed the apartment and turned it into an office/den, the tiny bathroom became the guys’ bathroom.  Then one day we noticed a water stain on the ceiling in the butler’s pantry down below.  Uh oh.  

One thing led to another as things do in an old house.  Now we can see into the bathroom from below.  So convenient when I want to call up that dinner is ready!

After much time and lots and lots of thought, my husband gutted the entire tiny bathroom.  “If only we could switch the location of the shower and the toilet,” I said.  Can’t be done, the joists run the wrong way, we were told.  Finally, a nice man who works in the Lowes plumbing department asked, “Why can’t you drop the ceiling below and run the pipes under the joists?”  Light bulb!  That’s what led to this.

A total reconfiguration and all new pipes – including moving the vent stack.  Who knew such things are possible?  And it’s only money, right?  (Our plumbers like us a lot.)  We’re still only partway through this latest adventure in home remodeling.  Today my husband is putting in new joists and a subfloor and plotting his next move.

Will keep you updated.

Crazy for Hats

Hats!  This summer I began knitting hats.  I have knitted six hats so far.  I gave two away before I took pictures.  I can't wait for the weather to turn cool so I can wear these.  I can always wear them when walking Alfie this fall and winter because he doesn't care if I look silly!

Hello!

Hello and welcome to my blog.  


I'm a Tennessee girl who transplanted to the Midwest and never left.  I married a Midwesterner and my children are (gasp!) born and bred flatlanders.  I live in Illinois amid the corn and soybean fields.  Do I miss the Tennessee hills?  You bet.  Do I miss the Tennessee heat and humidity?  Not at all.  


I am a freelance writer and editor.  In addition, over the years I've also played at being a college instructor, a realtor, and a communications consultant.  But now "The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things."  I recently lost my main client, a large corporate consulting firm, so I have some free time -- the time to finally answer that age-old question: What do I want to be when I grow up?  Did I mention that I'm well past the "grown-up" age limit?  Still, it's never too late to reinvent and rediscover.


Come join me on my journey!