Blog Vacation

  There will be no posting to this blog in February. Check back in March.

A Study In Blue

Even though we do not have snow on the ground and the sun is shining brightly, the outside thermometer reads 8 degrees and there is a brisk breeze. Not a day to take my camera and look for outdoor photos. Instead, I will share some indoor items.
The first thing you would notice as you enter my condo is that I like blue. Yes, indeed, it is my favorite color. Though I seem to be gravitating more to purples, pinks, and reds in my wardrobe, blue definitely dominates my home décor.

 I especially like looking up from reading and seeing the light shining thru this vase I bought at Alley Cat Antiques in Leesburg, Indiana.
The swirly stripes are white (not discernable from the photo) and create an interesting pattern.
                                              
I do most of my browsing in antique stores and consignment shops these days. Many Northern Indiana antique stores have very few real antiques. They tend to have collectibles and decorative items. The little square-shaped glassware was $2 and labeled “shaker”.
I wondered a shaker for what? The “holes” on the top are pretty large. I bought it thinking I might put flowers in it. Then it hit me; aha, that metal top probably was a floral frog to hold up and arrange blooms. A search on ebay confirmed that. A couple was retiring and selling off the inventory of their floral shop. There was a blue “vase” just like mine being auctioned.

This cute miniature cream and sugar set I received as a Christmas present after telling my husband about seeing it in a Dallas store.
It complements nicely this lidded jar from a consignment shop in Warsaw.

This Dick Lehman vase was more of a splurge. He has such interesting techniques. You can read more at his web page. He displays and sells at the Old Bag Factory in Goshen, Indiana. I used some of my money from working election board for this treat.

I received these Blue Danube salt and pepper shakers from my sister over 40 years ago. I just looked on replacement china websites to see availability. These were not available currently so I don’t know the value, but plenty of other pieces in this pattern are for sale.

I really liked this tissue box cover in a Berlin, Ohio store. It is a fun town in the middle of Amish country. Don’t miss Heinis Cheese Chalet where you can sample all kinds of cheese.

I’ll finish with my counted cross-stitch picture stitched by yours truly. A big time investment, but I do love it.

For so patiently looking at my blue items, I will reward you with an easy recipe from Better Homes and Gardens January issue. I had some red grapes that had been in the refrigerator a few weeks. They had mostly fallen off the stems. Fixed them this way and served with chicken sandwich, and they were tasty. The magazine suggests serving them at a party along with cheese and nuts.

Balsamic Vinegar Grapes
Place a bunch of grapes on a foil-lined baking pan. Splash with about a tablespoon of balsamic or sherry vinegar. Pop under a preheated broiler for 8 to 10 minutes.
Happy eating.

The Beauty of Wood

My post about the Moravian stool is now the 3rd most-viewed of my blogs. Woodworkers see the variety and beauty of the different species. My husband started turning mini-goblets out of different wood species to display. It is fascinating.

Though my husband enjoys using hand tools, he has done projects with his lathe and power tools. I am uninformed about woodworking techniques, but I am the happy recipient of many of the end-products.
Several years ago he and some friends harvested mesquite on a friend’s ranch in Texas. Hubby tried his hand at woodcarving on these bookends. He built himself toolboxes.

Sometimes a “junky” piece of wood hides character. With the hand of the wood turner, something beautiful emerges.

Sort of how God can take our weaknesses and flaws when we submit to Him and creates people who demonstrate His glory and power.
Many items are small, but there have been pieces of furniture, too.
      

      
The most ambitious pieces were the desk and the hutch.
  
A great advantage to custom-made furniture is that you select interesting grain to feature such as the drawer fronts of the cherry hutch.

My husband’s most recent experiment has been to take the silhouettes of pottery pieces found in archaeology throughout the Middle East and make them in wood. The shapes are beautiful no matter the medium.

 

I am lucky  to have such a talented and creative spouse.

Promised Land Book

The past few days I have been in my retirement village library adding the over-sized books to the Library Thing data base. One book that intrigued me was Promised Land with text by Abba Eban and beautiful watercolors by Gordon Wetmore. Eban comes across as an apologist for the existence of modern-day Israel, denouncing the debasement of the land by the Arabs and Turks and lauding the reclamation by the Jewish people. He defends Israel’s actions as survival basics and puts down the Palestinians. You can pretty much skip the text unless you want a lesson in one-sided public relations. The book is available for as little as 99 cents to over a hundred dollars. Corollary to the saying in real estate of “location, location, location”, bibliophiles would say “condition, condition, condition”. The library copy is the 1978 edition without book jacket, but in pretty good condition.

For me, the value is the illustrations. Having recently sorted my photos, many of the sites in the book were of places I had seen two decades ago but fresh in my memory. I had never heard of Mr. Wetmore, but apparently he was a renowned portrait artist. A Christian, he approached the land wanting to capture the “traditional” Israel. He had no political goals. The water colors were done 1976-1978 but purposely exclude items with a modern look, except for the sketches of Jewish soldiers. He truly has portrayed the golden aura of limestone buildings and the variety of people in Jerusalem.

My favorite one is the plant because it reminds me of my stay at the Institute of Holy Land Studies on Mount Zion. Though we were there to do library consultation, I was invited to go on the walking tours and fieldtrips taken by the students. I carried a canteen of water, especially on the walks, as it was still quite warm even though it was September. I rarely finished the water, however, so each time I returned to my living quarters I poured the remaining liquid on a plant near our room. This bedraggled plant sat on the top of a low brick dividing wall between the rooftop rooms and a small clothes line. After one week, it perked up; by the time we left after almost a month, the plant was thriving and its succulent type of leaves were plump and full of color. I often wondered if it made it until the rainy season.


If you have ever been in Israel, these pictures will surely evoke memories. I present them without permission of reproduction to promote the book. Please do not use them for profit without getting permission from the publisher.

Bad Attitude

I am afraid this is one of those days when I wanted to turn my daily life bowl upside down and start over. Not only was I ungrateful, but I deemed the contents unacceptable.

 

I needed to do my weekly grocery shopping. With list in hand, I entered my usual store. Bakery, produce, meat all looked normal; but when I rounded the corner to get the apple juice, there were maybe 10 people in that aisle filling the “juice section” with loaves of bread, bagels, etc. Whoa. The bread was at the opposite end of the store previously. I couldn’t get through with my cart, and when I squeezed my cartless self down the aisle, there were no prices on any of the bread products. When I asked where the juice might be, I was told aisle 5 maybe. Well, it was aisle 2, the next aisle over. Everything went downhill from then on. The whole layout is being rearranged, and since they are only mid-way thru the process, it was chaos. The canned fruit now sat between shaving supplies and hair shampoo with no other food items in the whole aisle. Even the milk had been moved down two doors from its usual refrigerated case. The man in the meat department told me it would be another week before everything was in its new “final” position, and then they would have maps. Since I write out my shopping list in the order of the layout, it took me twice as long to find things. There were a few customers who laughed it off, but most of us traversed the aisles in a crabby mood. Why were they making these changes?

 

I saw a lady from my church in the meat aisle, and I told her to expect a bad experience. I just could not see any reason to rearrange everything. About 3 years ago they changed things because they did a major remodeling; that made sense. My acquaintance said she thinks they are trying to spruce things up before the new Meijers opens this spring. Ah. She may be right. Afraid of the competition. Hopefully, all of the disgruntled customers will learn the new layout and forget the horrible few weeks before there is another store to explore.

 

I never did find a few things, and since I needed to get home with the bread to make lunch so my husband could attend a meeting, I will buy them at Walmart when I go there tomorrow afternoon for some non-food items. I can’t imagine the changes in this store will be worth the aggravation; I may shop somewhere else next week. In the short term, they are losing some of my business. Have you  gone through this with your grocery stores? One of the employees off-handedly said they plan to do this every few years. Yikes!

 

Sorting and Organizing Photos

 

I have spent the last few days trying to organize my photos. Over a decade ago my husband started buying me some lovely photo albums, one or two every few years, from a camera and photo supply store in Garland, Texas. About 2 years ago, as I walked thru the local Kohl’s here in Warsaw, I discovered this type of album is still manufactured. You can see it on Amazon. Kohl’s had it on sale for half-price so I bought one. I really like these albums because not only do they look classy, but they come in so many colors that I have few duplicate colors. This made it easier for me to grab an album off of the shelf because I remembered sometimes which color held the London trip, for example. That won’t be true anymore though.

Though there is a memo line next to the pockets, I never filled that in as I couldn’t quite decide how I wanted to arrange the photos. My photos are all marked on the back so I have the pertinent information, but of course you couldn’t see that unless you removed the photo. I had started placing the photos of foreign trips in different albums than US trips, and had toyed with the idea of doing separate albums for family reunions and the updated photos sent by relatives of their growing children. I ended up taking the easy way out; they are now chronological. This did require pulling all of the photos from the albums because I had filled in blank pockets with miscellaneous photos around home and church events when a trip did not completely fill the album. These fillers were not chronological. I still have the problem of not wanting to break up trip photos and put in different albums so not quite filling up the album. Not sure yet what I will put in the empty pockets. Maybe, my husband’s woodworking projects. Those wouldn’t need to be chronological.

 

 One good thing about sorting thru the piles again was that I found dozens to cull. It was easier to eye them critically when the emotional attachments to the trip or event had faded away. Now as I get ready to interfile those I decided not to include in the album but store in my photo box, I will try to discard some of those in the box as well.

I really want to get prints of the trips from the past two years. I like looking at them on my computer, but I still have one foot in the old ways of albums. I had kept this organizing and sorting project for winter months; now the albums are ready for recording the memos. I finally made my decision re how to arrange them. I am not into scrapbooking much so old-fashioned albums will allow me to peruse my photos and enjoy the memories.

 

How do you store and organize your photos? Chronologically or topically? On-line only or in the cloud on something like Picasa? Sure saves space to do it that way. In scrapbooks or albums? I certainly hope they aren’t chaotic piles thrown into a shoebox; but if so, there is nothing like a cold wintery day to get started in sorting them into piles, etc. I’m glad I finally did.

A Thought From Sarah Young

For Christmas I received a copy of Sarah Young's Jesus Calling devotional book. Here is a snippet from today.

 

“It is impossible to praise or thank me [Jesus] too much. As it is written, I inhabit the praises of My people. Sometimes your praise is a spontaneous overflow of Joy, in response to radiant beauty or rich blessings. At other times your praise is more disciplined and measured—an act of your will.”

 

After 6 decades, I agree that there are the easier times of thanksgiving and harder times. No matter which kind fill my bowl, I need to do more praising and thanksgiving to God.

Moravian Stool

 

It is winter now, and in northern Indiana that means wearing boots in snow and slush. My husband was looking for a woodworking project so I mentioned that it would be nice to have a small stool near the coat closet where I could sit to put on my boots and take them off. He chose this lightweight Moravian stool featured in Popular Woodworking December 2012 issue.

 

According to the article author Christopher Schwarz, he designed this pattern after stools seen at Old Salem, North Carolina. These stools are well-used throughout the historical village. They can also be found in rural Europe, especially eastern Bavaria close to the origin of the Moravians in the Czech Republic.

 

For you woodworkers here are some interesting features: tapered octagons for the legs, sliding dovetails, compound leg splays, and wedged-through tenons. Because of the cross-grain construction, it is common to have the seat develop a split, which does not affect the utility or integrity at all. Because my husband used mesquite wood, we are curious as to whether our stool will follow the historic precedent. Mesquite has different properties from the poplar suggested in this article.

 

To learn more about Moravians in the United States, visit Old Salem's web site.