Thursday, June 24, 2010

ABC's, 1,2,3's and Zzzzzz's

We've been having some pretty severe weather out here on the prairie the last couple of days and it finally took its toll on the power lines. There's been heavy rain, flooding, and even some tornado's a little north of us and in the process we had 10 down power lines and no power for two days. Lucky for us they got everything fixed early last evening, but its amazing the things you miss when you don't have the luxury of power.

As for us, we're lucky enough to have generators to run if we need them, but the one we use for our house is smaller since we have a smaller house and you have to choose which appliance you want to run the most or else it bogs down the generator pretty bad. So it's either the stove, the water heater, the air conditioning, microwave and so on.  At night we shut them off because they're not needed while we're asleep and when there's no sounds and no lights, its a little disturbing for this town girl. I like the gentle whir of my fan, and the glow of the alarm and oven clocks. I'm don't like pitch black and absolutely no sounds but the crickets outside. I'm a light sleeper and when I can hear all sorts of things outside it makes for a long night! Call me crazy, but I guess that I'm just not a 100% country girl after all.

Here are a few things we're doing around the house now.


As a child we had an alphabet book that I loved to read! Each letter had a picture that was embroidered, appliqued, or painted on the page. My favorite was the letter "S" because you could tie up the shoe laces. I decided that I wanted to pass the same experience on to my kids to so they can enjoy learning their letters.
I did some looking around for an alphabet that I could embroider and came across two choices here. I chose the more old fashioned set rather than the cartoon set because a lot of the pictures are things that our children will be able to relate to out here on the ranch.
Also, as a side note, I was trying to be the green lady and put a picture on the front and back of a page, but as I was trying to trace the picture onto the muslin, I kept getting the two pictures mixed up because you could see both designs through the paper. I ended up putting just one picture on each page and it's working great so far.


Now on the our 1,2,3's. Hazel is really into her numbers right now so I ordered this book, "1 is One" by Tasha Tudor.  She has beautiful art and the pages rhyme so it makes it a little more catchy for Hazel to listen to.



I could resist showing you our very first ripe strawberry! YUM-O! There was enough ripe berries for each of us to enjoy one. I'm looking forward to more!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I clicked on the link...did you just print the letters off? I love this idea, however, I don't know how to embroider.

Jaimi_C said...

Jennifer,

Glad that you like the it! All I did was click on the letter that I wanted and then at the bottom of the description it says "Download PDF file." Click on that and it'll pull a full size picture in Adobe. Just print it off and do it for each letter. Its a long process and takes a lot of paper but it'll be worth it!

If you're interested in learning how to embroider, I would start with the book, "Mary Thomas's Dictionary of Embroidery Stitches" by Mary Thomas. And I also use the site, Sharon B's on the sidebar of my blog for ideas, and here is the link to her illustrated stitch dictionary. All the different stitches you can dream of.

http://inaminuteago.com/stitchindex.html

Good Luck!

Jaimi

Anonymous said...

Thank you!

Gumbo Lily said...

Great stitching, Jaimi! The embroidered ABC is going to be a family treasure.

Jody