Friday Favorite: Handmade
Over the years I have discovered the joy in honoring those whose work I will never match – and learning to love that I don’t have to. When I find them, I buy mosaics made my artists with a better eye for design and color than I have. I serve potatoes in an exquisite purple bowl thrown by a potter from my hometown in Iowa. I keep flowers on the kitchen table in an indestructible water jug made by a main I met is Asheville, NC, fired in a kiln powered by methane gas from a landfill. I brew tea in a mustard yellow pot that I picked up dring one of my best days I spent in Japan. I’m drawn to all of these things for their beauty and utility of course, but it’s also the people who made them – and the stories behind them – that make the difference to me.
Robyn Griggs Lawrence (The Wabi-Sabi House: The Japanese Art of Imperfect Beauty)
Whenever possible, I like to purchase items made by hand by someone here in the USA. Being a small business owner myself, I see this as important. I know the care and detail that goes into each item, though we don’t make something tangible, we still put our heart and soul into our product. Handmade items just have something about them, a soul of sorts. Just this week I bought this beautiful hand coffee mill made by the Red Rooster Trading Company.
Mr Chiots and I are coffee lovers and freshly ground coffee is so much better. When we travel we have always ground coffee beforehand to take with us. Now we can take this beauty along for the ride. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect with this mill, for only $60 it’s a bargain since it’s handmade. When we ground a small batch of coffee we were pleasantly surprised, it can grind the coffee finer and more evenly than our pricey burr grinder. We’re espresso drinkers, so the fineness and evenness of the grind is very important to brew the perfect shot of espresso.
It’s so nice that it may even trump our other mill. Happily I add this to my list of growing items in the house that are made with love by someone with a name, including my salt & pepper mills from Tea & Gold, and a few lovely wooden kitchen utensils that rest in my lovely handmade crock from the local Moorefield Pottery.
Any great handmade items in your house? Any great small businesses to recommend?
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Daffodils for Charlotte
I promised my friend Charlotte a parade of daffodils. She works at Peaceful Valley Farm Supply (aka Grow Organic) and she has a blog called Daffodil Planter (now you can see why she was asking to see my daffodils). Here’s a parade of daffodils that have been blooming in my garden over the past month.
The daffodils in my garden range in color from the brightest yellow you can get to the palest yellow that almost looks white. I have big ones and small ones, tall ones and squat ones. I never was much a fan of the bright yellow ones, but then I discovered that they came in all shapes, sizes and colors that weren’t quite so obnoxious.
I don’t know the varieties of the daffodils pictured below, a few were here when we arrived, others were purchased in a bag labeled “daffodils” at the store. This small buttery yellow double narcissus I purchased the first fall we lived here, but I have long since lost the information on what variety they were. I think they’re ‘White Lion’ but I’m not positive.
This past fall I added ‘Small Talk’ and ‘Little Gem’ to the front lawn. They only grow 4-6 inches tall and are so perfect blooming just above the grass. They’re so tiny and intriguing and perfect mixed with crocuses and muscari.
Last fall I also added bluebells and tiny narcissus along the pathway through the maple grove in the back of the garden. These beautiful ‘Minnow’ narcissus are really love. They have multiple tiny multi colored blossoms that float above each stem. They’re so dainty and beautiful, it’s hard to believe their so rugged.
I wish I had planted more daffodils in my garden over the years, they’re such hardy bulbs, multiplying with ease and never bothered by burrowing pests or foraging deer like tulips are. Once you bury a bulb in the garden you’re pretty much guaranteed that it will come back year after year in increasing numbers.
Do you like daffodils? Any blooming in your garden?
If you’re looking for a good prices and a great selection of daffodils and narcissus bulbs head on over to Van Engelen.
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Chicken, Duck, Goose
I buy chicken and duck* eggs at the farmers market all the time, in fact we eat about a dozen duck eggs each month and about 2 dozen chicken eggs each week. A lot of eggs, I know, that’s why I’m so excited to have chickens someday. Until then I’m happy getting them from Martha’s Farm, the chickens run happily outside and are fed a diet of organic GMO-free grains purchased from a local farmer. The eggs are fantastic! Yesterday, when I was at Local Roots in Wooster, OH I reached into the egg cooler and spotted goose eggs. WOW.
I grabbed two and nestled them in the skein of alpaca yarn I was buying (my mom’s making me a nice new winter hat). The cashier and I were talking about how the farmer couldn’t figure out what to put the eggs in for people to take them home. She offered some newspaper, but I had my hat and gloves since it was a chilly 28 when I left the house that morning. One giant egg was nestled into each glove which were then stuffed into my hat.
They made it home without a scratch. Each one weighed in at almost 8 oz, that’s almost 4 chicken eggs. Now that’s a bargain for 60 cents!
I’m an adventurous eater so I can’t wait to try these, I was told at the market that they make a wonderfully rich scrambled eggs. I’ve never met an egg I didn’t like and these will most likely be no different. It certainly will be interested to see what they’re like, I’ll have to do some reading on popular cooking methods. I certainly hope they have more next time I’m there!
Have you ever had a goose egg, ostrich, or any other egg besides a chicken egg?
*The duck eggs I buy are used for custard and ice cream since they have big thick yolks and thinner whites than chicken eggs, this results is a creamier custard.
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Taking Root
Some of you may have been around in the fall of 2010 when I talked about the boxwood cuttings I got from a friend’s home. I have no idea what kind of boxwood it is, but it’s a big beautiful shrub that thrives despite his neglect. Since it does so well in his garden, I figured it would be prefect for mine as well since we are in the same climate. Three years ago I took a dozen or so cuttings and stuck them in a pot that was overwintered behind the garage. Last summer I planted 2 of them flanking the stairs that lead to our front porch.
These box seem to be fairly slow growing, so I can only imagine how old the ones I took cuttings from are because they’re HUGE. No doubt they spent last summer taking root and this year they’ll really start putting off some top growth. They are about three times as big as they were when I first cut them.
If we end up moving, these little box will be potted up and taken with me. There’s simply too much history to leave them behind. There are also other plants that will go with me and some from which cutting will be taken this spring/summer in preparation for a possible move. All of my hydrangeas will move with me, my collection is now up to about 20 different varieties. Some will go by cuttings because they’re too large to dig up and take. Others are small enough that they can be dug up. I love starting plants with cuttings, it’s a great way to inexpensively propagate plants you already have in your garden and a great way to get starts from friends.
Do you like to propagate your own plants from cuttings?
If you’re not sure how to propagate plants with stem cuttings here’s a post I wrote a few years ago about it. Start with something easy like catmint and soon you’ll be off trying to propagate all kinds of plants.
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A Facelift for the Cottage
Last summer, painting the shutters, doors, and foundation of the house was on the to-do list. Then we purchased the lot next door and spent our time getting a new edible garden space ready instead. As a result, the painting never got finished but we enjoyed a lot of great homegrown vegetables.
Since we have had such warm weather here in NE Ohio this past week and the soil is still too wet to work, we decided to get a jump on painting in order to mark a few more items off the “to-do” list. Off came the shutters, down came a few doors, and we were off.
We found this fantastic little sprayer that hooks up to an air compressor. It uses pint jars for the paint. That way you can use a few different colors, or in our case, primer and paint. Simply close up the jar when you’re not using it. It’s called the Critter Paint Sprayer and I can’t recommend it highly enough. It turned a job that would have taken me hours with a paintbrush into minutes. It’s also made to be repaired and comes with a parts list for each part, I can certainly appreciate that!
Our current shutters were painted green by me the first year we moved in (10 years ago). They were starting to look a little dated, not to mention they were faded and shabby looking. I settled on black as my color of choice for the shutter/doors a few years ago figuring it would be a classic look with our tan siding.
The foundation was also given a fresh coat of paint. I’ve always read that using a dark color on the foundation anchors the house to the garden. After one coat of paint I stood back and was amazed, it’s completely true. Not to mention, the plants and flowers look fantastic up against the dark background. I think the green was competing with the plants all along.
The exterior doors on the house were also in need of a fresh coat of paint, most of them were peeling and they were getting quite faded as well. Most of our exterior doors aren’t covered with porches and thus they take quite a beating. After a fresh coat of paint and some new knobs I couldn’t believe how nice they looked.
The weather has once again turned too cold to paint, so I turned my attention to scraping the loose paint on the exterior door trim. Not a fun chore, but a necessary chore. I’m all about getting the job done right, even if I don’t plan on being here forever. We inherited a lot of “good enough” jobs when we purchased this place and I’d never want to pass any of those along to someone else. (if you don’t have one of these painter’s tool in your toolbox I’d highly recommend getting one, I love it and use mine all the time and not just for painting).
There are still four more doors that still need a coat of paint (I know we have lots of exterior doors), when the weather wArms that will be the first thing to get finished so it can officially be crossed off the list. In the mean time, we will be replacing all the porch posts as a few of them are completely rotten. It’s a good thing they’re not structural! We’ll be going with square posts painted in white with a little bit of trim detail.
Overall, things are shaping up nicely. It’s nice to see the house getting whipped back into shape. We’ve spent so much time focusing on the gardens the last couple years that the house has been slightly neglected. My neighbor even stopped by the other day to tell me how much she liked what we’ve done. If I had to pick a favorite house color it wouldn’t be tan, but you live with what you’ve got. I’m more of a cedar shake, dark bluish gray, or a crisp white when it comes to the color I most like to see on a house.
What’s your favorite house color?
If you’ve got a lot of painting to do – invest in these tools. For not much money you’ll save yourself tons of time and a lot of hassle!
