Mountain Musings

Tis the Season...For Walnuts!

Isn't this a beautiful country lane? I travel this driveway each week to our down-the-road-a-bit neighbor's house to pick up raw milk...some for drinking and some for Hannah's soap.During the last few weeks, this is the scene that's greeted me as I drive up...lots of walnuts have fallen from the trees on the left onto our friends' driveway and all along the sides. Sometimes the driveway has been so full of walnuts that it's hard to drive through them all.

After asking if we could gather the walnuts to use for Granny's stain for her baskets, we've been gathering walnuts each week....in fact, three huge boxes full of walnuts!

Here's where some of them are now....drying on our picnic table:  The next step is cracking them open and putting them in a bucket of boiling water to help bring the walnut stain out more freely: We are waiting for this stain to be ready for dipping baskets. Granny recently received a custom order for 3 large baskets to be ready just before Thanksgiving. Here she is having a grand time making the first basket: In this next picture, Granny has woven quite a bit of the basket with the colors specified by the customer...brown, orange, and green: Now comes the binding around the top, and Sarah helps Granny since the basket is a big one and the weavers are extra long. This project has taken quite a bit of material to make, and much labor was involved: Sometimes even though all the measurements are correct when the basket is laid out, the size tends to grow a bit as the basket gets woven. Normally, this isn't a problem since all of Granny's baskets are unique and different in their own special way. That's the beauty of a handmade item.

In this case, however, the customer wanted the three baskets to fit specifically into three shelves in a piece of furniture, and they had to be the exact measurements.

After re-measuring, we found out the basket was just too big for the customer's purpose. So...once the walnut stain is ready, Granny will dip this basket and put it in her Etsy shop for sale. If you think you might be interested in a large colorful basket, keep an eye out in the next two weeks for that listing on Etsy.

In the meantime, she's made another one for the customer -- almost identical except smaller, and this time the measurements were right! Now....two more to go to have this order complete!

~Deb

Busy, Busy October!

Hello, faithful blog readers! Yes, we're still here even though the blogging has been sparse this month.

The craft show started the month off with a bang; then our guests were here, fall gardening and the planting of 38 blueberry bushes (what was I thinking??), building on Jonathan's house, the never-ending farmers' market...we've been busy, but not so much on the computer this month, huh?

There are a slew of posts backed up...lots of pictures on my camera that was lost and finally found....oh, I just have tons of excuses, don't I? :)

Anyway, stay tuned for a couple of posts this week and more to follow after the NCFIC conference.

And...has your October been busy, too?

~Deb

Dayton Days ~ 2014

October has proven to be a very busy month so far with a craft show, entertaining guests this past weekend, and another guest arriving this coming weekend.

We started off the month heading to Dayton...loading up and unpacking all of Granny's baskets and Hannah's soaps and setting up our booth for the fall festival.

And then loading up again at the end of the show and unpacking once we returned home--a craft show is a lot of work!

The day was chilly but beautiful...a good forecast for a fall craft show. We have learned that chilly weather gets folks more in a buying mood for Christmas gifts than warmer craft shows. Here we are after setting up the tent and arranging the wares before the customers arrive: And here are grandmother and granddaughter together in front of Granny's basket display. I know Hannah will treasure these memories:As you can see below, we decorate the tables with quilts, display fall magazines in baskets, arrange taller baskets with fall flowers, and even place salt and pepper shakers in smaller baskets to give folks ideas and to draw customers' attention to the booth:Hannah sold lots of soap and had many return customers this year:I was able to take a quick break and walk down the street to take this photo of the tents and crowds. I wish I could fully experience Dayton Days and visit other vendors, but manning a booth makes it almost impossible: This little red cabinet below was located in the vendor space next door to us, and I kept eyeing it. I could envision many uses for it...including displaying Hannah's soaps at the next show.

The sign on it says, "Repurpose Me, Repaint Me, Re-love Me." Alas, the price tag was a drawback, so I left it there, even though I loved it!:All in all, the show was productive, and we enjoyed ourselves.

Thank you especially to those anonymous blog readers who came up and introduced themselves to us. That was fun to meet new people and learn that they have read the blog for awhile. Hi, Joanna! :)

And it was fun to see old friends who stopped by, too! Thank you all!

~Deb

First Hymn Sing at Jonathan's Future Home

Tom and "the kids" were over at the new construction site recently and recorded the first hymn sing in Jonathan's future home. Jonathan said he hopes it's the first of many that will take place in the years to come. I thought this would be a good time to post their song as today's Sunday hymn.

Here's an impromptu version of Come Thou Fount by Jonathan, Sarah, and Hannah recorded in Jonathan's future living room:

The house is coming along but not under roof yet, as the trusses were delayed in arriving. House building is slow going sometimes, but work has definitely come a long way since ground was broken!

In other hymn news...

My friend, Carol, stopped by for an overnight visit on her way from Texas to Pennsylvania. Since she's been a long-time lover of hymns and given many hymnology talks over the years, she asked if she could speak to a group of friends I might invite over to learn more about hymns and to sing!

Here are some of our guests we enjoyed hosting. I was very encouraged that my friend Kim came for the evening with her girls to participate: Carol treated us all to a very informative evening learning about hymn writers, hymn trivia and history, and finishing with a hymn sing. Here she is teaching the etymology of the word doxology: Below: our family singing...thankfully, Jonathan was able to join us after getting home late from working on his house. Since we don't own a piano, we brought out an old keyboard for Carol to use for accompanying the singing:  As part of the evening, we enjoyed hearing Carol's list of her 50 top hymns. If you're interested, over on Tim Challies' blog, you'll find his choices of the 10 Greatest Hymns of all time with commenters chiming in on their top favorites.

Do you have a favorite? I'm partial to Come Thou Fount which you heard at the beginning of this post and also There is a Fountain. Thank you, Carol, for such a delightful and informative session. Here's a photo of the two of us that will go in our guest book as a record of her visit: ~Deb

**Stay tuned for our next post...Dayton Days Craft Festival from this past weekend

Just a Little Southern Talk!

Yesterday Granny and I traveled back from South Carolina and arrived home here in the Valley, just in time to sit down to a wonderful meal the girls had prepared to welcome us home. Aahh...home again. Nice.

We took a planned detour on the way back and stopped by our hometown of South Boston, and I visited my long-time friend, Carolyn, who had invited me to stop by for dessert, a tour of her yard to see her 75 - 80 gorgeous fall mums surrounding her home, and some front porch "Southern talking." Right up my alley, for sure!

Here's Carolyn standing in front of her lovely home which was vividly decorated for fall: Oh my, the mums were beautiful! This is just a portion of her side yard: And here's a different angle showing lots of mums about ready to burst into full bloom:The side yard next to the driveway was full of mums and pumpkins, too!After the tour...Carolyn prepared some hot wassail for us...so fallish!: And she baked a cake! How beautiful...and oh, my, how delicious! Doesn't this look good enough to be on the cover of Southern Living magazine? So we took our hot wassail and fall-themed chocolate cake and headed to the front porch to chat: Thank you so much, Carolyn, for such a fun afternoon of "Southern talking!" Friendship is indeed a blessing!  Now...excuse me while I go outside and plant some yellow mums and raid Hannah's pumpkin patch for some bright orange color to add to our yard!

 ~Deb