Etsy Earth Day

It is such a beautiful day in Austin to be celebrating Earth Day. Here are some of my favorite recycled/upcycled, Earth Day themed items from the Etsy Austin Street Team. For more Etsy Austin goodness, type in teametsyaustin in the Etsy search bar.

Pigsey Art

Christine Terrell of adaptive reUse


Glint Gear

I've Been Blogged!

http://craftymishmash.blogspot.com/

Beth from Crafty Mishmash and The Snuggle Herd posted an interview with me on her blog. Check it out!

Easter Weekend Recap

I just want to say that Austin Handmade is doing a wonderful job with their market. Even with the sketchy weather we had plenty of foot traffic. I'm sure we would have had even more if the sun had decided to make an appearance. Here are a few shots of my booth.

Lug standing guard under the table where it is safe

I also spent the weekend with some of my new plants. I'm going to try my hand at a small vegetable garden. We'll see how that goes since I can still only plant in pots and planters because the backyard is still in a state of limbo.

I have several tomato plants, some different varieties of peppers, some herbs and squash. I wanted watermelon but there is no way I can grow that with the eminent digging up of the backyard. We live on a hill with the house midway down so when it rains all the dirt runs down toward the house and makes it hard to grow anything in the backyard. We are going to add terraces and put the dirt near the house back at the top of the hill with plenty of drainage and retaining walls. Still trying to figure out how to do this and still leave Penelope plenty of room and a path for playing frisbee. I'm already designing the layout of my planter boxes and where I want the hammock.

Austin Handmade Market

The market is going on this Saturday, April 11th from 12 pm-6 pm at 507 West Mary Street (next to the Soup Peddler.) The weather should hold during the day and give everyone a great head start on shopping for Mother's Day and Father's Day. I didn't attend the last one but I heard it was a great event and everyone had lots of fun. Come out and see my new designs!

Some Fun Easter Facts & Family Tradition

I figured I'd celebrate Good Friday and the upcoming Easter Sunday with a few fun facts I've collected along with a little peek into my own family traditions.

A Pysanka is a Ukrainian Easter egg, decorated using a wax-resist (batik) method. The word comes from the verb pysaty, "to write", as the designs are not painted on, but written with beeswax. (from wikipedia). This image is of the world's largest pysanka. It was erected in Vegreville, Alberta in 1974, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Norway has to have my favorite Easter tradition. In Norway, in addition to staying in mountain cabins, cross-country skiing, and painting eggs, a contemporary tradition is to read or watch murder mysteries at Easter. All the major television channels run crime and detective stories, magazine stories where the readers can try to figure out "whodunnit", and new detective novels are scheduled for publishing before Easter. Even the milk cartons are altered for a couple of weeks. Each Easter a new short mystery story is printed on their sides. I couldn't find the origin on this tradition. One can only speculate.

Easter candy facts:

• Easter is the second top-selling confectionery holiday behind only Halloween.
• 88 percent of adults carry on the Easter tradition of creating Easter baskets for their kids.
• 76 percent of people eat the ears on chocolate bunnies first.
• Red jelly beans are kids’ favorite.
• According to the Guinness Book of World Records the largest Easter chocolate egg ever made was just over 25 feet high and made of chocolate and marshmallow. The egg weighed 8,968 lbs. and was supported by an internal steel frame.

My own family tradition was pretty normal. We went out the day before Easter and picked wildflowers, usually on my family's farm, to make Easter nests. We would all pick a spot near the house and build our nests out of the flowers. Then that evening the older grandchildren would decorate eggs after the younger ones had gone to bed. We would wake up extra early to go to the annual Easter breakfast at my grandmother's church. I still crave that wonderful food every spring. We would get hurried along to the cars so we wouldn't peek into the Easter nests before we we got back from church. The older kids would skip Sunday School and head back to the farm to hide the eggs. Before we had the house out at the farm, we would do all of this at my grandparent's house in town.
Anyway, the aunts would head to the kitchen and finish up the Easter meal. Sometimes we barbecued, sometimes we had a ham. We always had "sweet rice" and my grandfather's green beans. Everyone would go outside for the egg hunt and the kids would finally get to look in our nests. It was always filled with lots of candy, at least one giant chocolate bunny and all the rest of the Easter prerequisites. The eggs we hunted were always the real thing—hard boiled and decorated with dyes. We were so excited to go look for them, though none of us ate hard boiled eggs. After we compared baskets and figured out who found the most we turned the eggs over to our mothers so they could work their magic on them. We might not eat plain hard boiled eggs but we all stuffed ourselves on the deviled eggs. I loved it when the dye worked it's way through the shell and died the egg itself.
My aunts would always go through all the eggs before peeling them and select the two prettiest eggs to take to my grandmother's aunt later that day. She was elderly and rarely left her house at that point so after the meal, we would pack up some leftovers and the winning eggs and go visit. Aunt Babe had a knick knack shelf in her dining area where she kept all the eggs we brought over the years. Some were old enough you could shake them and hear the powdered residue of it's contents still inside. Luckily, I don't think any were ever accidentally broken. The smell would have been much worse in her small house than it was out at the farm when we would finally come across those few eggs that had been forgotten outside in the hot Texas spring weather.

I always wished that the youngest of our cousins had been able to experience that time in our family history. After our grandfather passed away so many of our traditions died out and the younger ones were too small to remember any of them. We all celebrate separately now, with a watered down version of how it used to be. It is bittersweet. I am thankful every year when I am reminded of my childhood and a little sad that those days are gone.

Shop Austin

Just got an unexpected phone call from the lovely Anne Marie Beard of The Lone Star Ladies. I'll be a last minute edition to The Lone Star Ladies Present: Shop Austin. It is going on Saturday, April 18th from 11 until 5 p.m. So check out the website and Hope to see you there! I'll be there with some of my new designs.