It’s Spring!!  Here, in Northern Ca. we ‘re experiencing the full tempestuous effects of Springtime.;  blue skies & billowy white clouds with temperatures approaching 70,   giving way to gray-sky windy days with temperatures in the 50′s, punctuated by rain storms-   and back and forth the weather shifts like the moods of a young child. Today with Daylight Savings Time,  I gain an hour of daylight to work in the garden, which is great because there is so much to be done to clean-up after winter & get ready for planting new flowers for summer.

Today the sun is out and the temperature is perfect for working in the garden~ 63`. Pascal and I took a  long walk to Heather Farms this morning,  past fields filled with mustard flowers blowing in the light breeze. The air was filled with sounds of geese squawking and as we followed the path around the curve, we came to the spot of commotion. The pond was filled with geese & ducks, as was the small beach. They all seemed to be out this morning, like us, enjoying the beautiful weather.

My plan was to come home after our walk, write a blog post and  get to work embroidering my new dress so that hopefully Pascal & I could go out at the end of the day & work in the garden. A good plan, it sounds easy enough~  And it would be if my eyes weren’t constantly returning to the window, to the sunlight outside, to the flowers blowing in the breeze and the birds collecting twigs to build nests. Suddenly it becomes so difficult to be inside working!!

Reluctantly I avert my eyes from the window reminding myself that with Spring comes Easter, now just a few weeks away, soon to be followed by summer. Then I feel excitement about implementing my new smocking and embroidery ideas for the coming season. Right now my shop is filled with hand smocked dresses that are  hand embroidered  with bunnies, chicks, ducks, lambs and of course lots of flowers,  making them perfect for Spring and Easter . Here are my two most recent additions:

In addition to the smocked & embroidered dresses, I thought it would be a great idea to embroider infant, onepiece bodysuits. I now have two of them in my Etsy shop, website, and 1,000Markets shop. Like the dresses, these are ooak. They are not only perfect for spring, but perfect for Easter as well, with 2 bunnies on one,  and a little yellow chick on the other~

I am excited for you to see all of the cute  handsmocked & embroidered clothes for little girls that I have in my 3 shops; Etsy, Rabbit Whiskers, & 1,000 Markets.

Spring dominates my notecard sets, as well. There are an abundance of cards with beautiful photos of spring flowers of all kinds as well as scenes of spring, such as the mustard flower field that I passed on my walk this morning. For anyone who loves spring & spring-related items, my shops are a must see! I hope you will enjoy browsing !

And now I’ve gotten excited to get to work on my latest dress. I’m going to put a spring scene on it~ perhaps the garden that I can’t yet plant outside! This dress is going to be a size 2 and it’s on purple & white gingham! Come peek in my shop in about a week- a week 1/2, and you should  see a brand new addition displayed!

Happy Spring to you!!!

Today, stormy- heavy winds and lots of rain~ perfect for staying in and working! After working on knitting a baby sweater and making and listing notecards for two months I finally feel ready to return to making dresses! I never intended to be away from sewing for so long, but I always seem to underestimate how much time something’s going to take. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. If I knew before starting how long  a project was going to take,  maybe I’d never start!

I’m not complaining. It wasn’t a bad two months. I have loved knitting for as long as I can remember. I find it very relaxing and enjoyed it even more because I was knitting it for my grandson, who’s birth will be sometime this week! 

The notecards are a much newer project for me, as I began creating them just this past year.  I love photography and I love making the cards. It was very easy to spend that much time working on them. The hard part was pulling myself away~  but I love making hand- smocked & embroidered dresses, too, so it’s time to go back to dress-making,  but before I do, I’d love to give you a glimpse of a few of the photos you’ll find on the notecards I’ve completed.

I added a fourth collection of notecard sets that I’m excited to introduce. It’s titled, “This n That”and is simply an assortment of four photographic cards, tied together by theme, color, or in an obscure way. The photo above is from one of the cards in that new set. It is a photo of the artwork from the front of one of my handsmocked & embroidered dresses. It occurred to me that the scenes on my dress fronts would create very unique & fun notecards, and I’m pleased with the results.

Below are five more photos that appear on some of the cards just made. Each set is ooak and consists of a combination of 4 photographic blank cards. This represents just a small fraction of what you’ll find on Rabbit Whisker notecards.

I hope you will come and enjoy looking through the different sets. A few of the sets have pictures of Pascal, some of which you may have seen in previous blog posts~

The wind outside is blowing sheets of rain against my windows, it’s steady beating reminding me that I still have lots of work to do, LOTS-  (no underestimating time here.) I’d like to be able to tell you a bit about the new dress,  but at this point, all that I know is that it’s going to be a size1. My next step is to go to the trunk where I store my fabric, and choose whichever appeals the most to me to be working on right now. Once my selection is made I’m hoping for an onslaught of design ideas. Other than knowing the size I’m going to make, the dress will be as much a surprise to me as it will be to you~  Hopefully by the next time I write I’ll be able to post a picture of a finished dress- or at least pictures of an, ” almost-finished dress- ” (if I’ve underestimated my time again!)

In my last post I wrote that sometime in the near future I planned on adding a note card section to both my website and my etsy shop. And so I am!!!  I have been working on note cards until 1:00 A.M. for the past few weeks and I think I’m finally ready to list them in my shops!

In the past, every time I’ve posted flower photos in my blog people always comment on how much they like them. Now you’ll actually have the opportunity to buy them and own them yourself or give them as gifts to somebody special! Many of the photos are pictures of flowers,  but there will also be  photos of——– well, it’s a surprise! You’ll just have to come see!. I think they turned out great and I’m very excited for you to come see for yourself.

This has been such a fun project. I’ve  loved making the cards!!  (I always knew I would~)  They should be up in my shops in a day or two, so come by and take a look- I think you’ll like what you see-!

Pascal has been alternating back and forth the past two weeks between being absolutely delighted to go out walking, and pouting, to be inside, lying around while I ‘ve been busy working on the dress I finished this past week-end.

He has so many funny quirks; many of them centering around food. Besides the fact that generally, Pascal could care less about food, he has a genetic liver disease called copper toxicosis. This is very serious because it means for dogs that have it, that their livers can’t process copper. If left untreated, the copper builds up in their systems until it becomes fatal. I was so lucky to have caught it in its early stages, and he is fine, but it means that besides having to take a lot of medications, his diet has to be very strict to make sure that he consumes as little copper as possible. To make matters worse, the most essential element in controlling this disease is zinc. Zinc comes in large tablets which I have to crush and mix into his food- but only after first giving him a pepcid a half hr. before – otherwise, the zinc upsets his stomach so much that the minute he swallows it, it all comes back up. Anyway, I mention this only because having to mix zinc into his dinner makes it even more important that he eat. I have to do my best to disguise the zinc-   and it’s been a real challenge. He does well with chicken, so every night he gets cooked chicken with crushed zinc, disguised with chicken gravy and shredded cheese, in a bowl along with his dog food. There are those nights, (few,) where he actually is hungry and will go right up to his dish and eat-  and then there are most nights where I just cross my fingers and hold my breath, hoping that after he runs through his “quirky routine, he will eat. It’s absolutely essential to his life that he have the zinc. We had another one of “those” nights last night, so I thought I’d give you a little glimpse of the quirky routine he puts us both through ~

Pascal and I eat with our backs to each other, his dish being about 6′ away from where I sit at the table. This gives me the advantage of being able to see his reflection in the window.  With Pascal watching, I set my plate on the table, go to his placemat on the floor and put his dish down, saying something like, “Ummm- looks good!”  I get a “ya right!” look in exchange and instead of going to his dish he comes and sits at my feet, staring at me.  I immediately show him the baked potato on my plate which is both my dinner and also my source of bribery. “Go eat your dinner and you can have some potato,” I tell him,  to which he feigns his best blank stare that I’m supposed to interpret as meaning he’s clueless as to what I’m saying. Only I know better! So I start eating my potato, but only after first scooping out a generous portion of the inside to save for after he eats his dinner. Still right next to me, he lies down and stares at his dish, as if carefully weighing the pros and cons of eating his dinner. After mentioning the bribe a few more times, I pretend to ignore him, while at the same time, sending mental telepathy saying, “Go eat, go eat!”  Finally after what seems like forever, but really isn’t more than 5 minutes,  he gets up and walks very slowly towards his dish- but then he stops about 2 feet away and stares at it again- like he’s expecting something to jump out at him. Still watching in the window to see what he’s going to do, I just hold my breath and think, Come on, keep going~  And he does! He actually goes right up to his dish, but he stops again and looks at it. Then I hear him take a bite, followed by a few more. I am so relieved. We’ve made it through another night, I think, and start reading my magazine to the pleasant sound of his slow eating in the background. But a few minutes later, he’s sitting by my side looking up at me as if to say, O.k- I ate! I’m ready for my potato! I look down at him and say, “You’re done? Already? That was awfully fast! He keeps staring at me like he’s very pleased with himself, but I’m on to him-” Let’s go check your dish,” I say. He follows me with his eyes as I walk over to his dish, knowing exactly what I was going to find. “You aren’t finished! All you ate was your chicken. You need to eat the dog food and the cottage cheese, too. You’d better go back and finish if you want your potato! I say, “Here. I’ll fix it for you,” and take a spoon and scrape it into two neat little mounds again. I bring the spoon into the kitchen and when I return he’s happily munching away at the rest of his dinner! I quickly walk past him so as not to disrupt his eating, and return to the table and my magazine.

After several minutes I hear the tag on his collar clinking and he comes running over to me. This time when I look down at him I know he’s finished- he’s wearing the last telltale blob of cottage cheese on top of his nose!  And he knows when he looks up at me and sees me smiling, that I know he’s eaten- we both know we’ve made it one more night. He gets his potato! But wow that was hard work!!

My very favorite thing to do when I’m not making my dresses is one that meets with much more approval from Pascal than when I sew, and that is gardening! I adore gardening and Pascal loves to be my “little helper” by keeping me company while I do the work! I few days ago I went around the side of the house, intending on pulling out the tall array of weeds that had moved in over the winter, and was greeted by these beautiful iris!! There is a huge clump of them over there and for most of the year I forget about them because they’re not in bloom, but when I saw them a few days ago, they were so breath-taking, I had to run back to the house to get my camera!——–Which brings me to one last thing, and that is, I enjoy taking photos so much, especially photos of flowers, and I also love writing. I’ve always dreamed about making cards, and I’ve been seriously thinking about combining my love of flowers, photography and writing, and creating some small, (4 or 5/pack,) gift packs of photographic blank notecards, with perhaps a sentence or two below the photo. So don’t be surprised if one day in the near future you see added to the handmade dresses in my etsy shop, and in my website, a new section of note cards for sale!